Betsy and the Emperor

by Anne Whitehead

  Bathurst no doubt took solace from the thought that Lowe’s regular reams of correspondence were coming to an end with his governorship (but if so, he would find himself mistaken). The Secretary of State had many other pressing colonial concerns. Securing Upper and Lower Canada was an enormous worry, and so was the expense occurring in New South Wales. In that colony, John Thomas Bigge, the Trinidad chief justice he had commissioned, was concluding his exhaustive enquiry into ‘all the laws, regulations and usage of the settlements’. Bathurst had already appointed Sir Thomas Brisbane, another Scottish military man, as the new governor of New South Wales, to succeed Lachlan Macquarie, whose expenditure on public buildings seemed to be out of control.

  It was at the end of 1821 that Betsy Balcombe made the acquaintance of the dashing former Indian army officer Edward Abell, whom she had almost certainly met, albeit briefly, four years earlier when his ship had called at St Helena on its homeward voyage from Madras in October 1817. No record survives as to how they encountered each other in Devon, but it is not difficult to imagine a scenario, as Abell’s family home was in the village of Alphington, just over eight miles from Chudleigh. At the time, Edward was actually living in St Gregory’s parish in London, but must have come home to visit his ageing parents. He may have met Betsy at one of Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt’s celebrations for the Plymouth and Dartmoor Railroad or through mutual friends.

  Dame Mabel Brookes wrote that Edward Abell was ‘a relative of the Nevill family, and reputed to be an extremely handsome man-about-town’, and this she had ‘learned from the late Lord William Nevill’.15 The Nevills, the Earls of Abergavenny, were members of the aristocracy in an unbroken line back to early medieval times, with their family seat at Eridge Castle in Kent. Tyrwhitt would have known the 2nd Earl through Parliament.16

  Edward Abell was some eleven years older than Betsy, probably born in 1791.17 Other than the reputed connection with the Nevills, he came from a modest and respectable family settled at Alphington. His father, Francis Abell, was a tanner who had done well and expanded his business, enabling him to give his sons a good education and for himself to retire and add the gentlemanly ‘Esquire’ to his name. His first wife, mother of three children, had died; his second wife died without issue; and Edward was the youngest of three surviving sons by the third wife, Mary Stock.18

  Edward’s eldest full brother, William, owned a sugar plantation in Jamaica, worked by slaves, and had married an English girl the previous year. (He had sent a young mixed-race girl ‘reputed’ to be his daughter to be raised by his elderly parents at Alphington.) The other brother, Charles, an officer in His Majesty’s 83rd Regiment of Foot, was stationed in Ceylon and leased a tea plantation in Colombo.19 Edward himself was more footloose, but had profited in India from his proficiency at gambling and from various other exploits. He was adventurous, dangerous, unreliable and alert for his own advantage. He was exactly the sort of man Betsy should have avoided—but just the sort whom Napoleon would have predicted was likely to attract her. The appearance of a stylish cad is almost mandatory in any story about the Regency or Georgian era, and Betsy Balcombe had found hers.

  In 1810, when Edward Abell would have been aged nineteen, he sought to join the service of the East India Company as a cadet. The application papers show that he was nominated by an East India Company director, Robert Thornton, and was recommended by his half-brother Frank Abell of Colchester, his father’s eldest son by his first wife.20 Edward wrote in a firm hand that his education was ‘principally at Exeter, Classical and Mathematical’, and that the profession of his father was ‘A private gentleman’. He was accepted for the coveted position of cadet in the military service of the Company, and on 2 March 1811 sailed for Madras on the Princess Amelia, along with other cadets and the usual collection of soldiers, civil servants and their wives. They went in convoy as protection against French attacks. On the Marchioness of Exeter, sailing in tandem with them, was the Reverend Richard Boys, bound for St Helena, so the whole convoy must have called at the island. Young Abell may even have glimpsed a tomboyish child called Betsy scrambling about the rocks.

  The armies of the three ‘presidencies’ of the East India Company (Madras, Calcutta and Bombay) had been formed for no other reason than to protect the Company’s trade interests. India was divided into a number of kingdoms or states ruled by local princes or warlords. Some had already become vassals of the Company and received privileges in return, but if other rulers presumed to resist the foreigners taking riches from their state, the Company’s military units attacked them. Some wars continued for years with much bloodshed on both sides.

  At Fort St George, the Madras headquarters, Abell was given the junior rank of ensign and appointed to the 7th Regiment of the Madras Native Infantry.21 As was standard, all the soldiers were Indian, commanded by Indian officers but with British officers above them in the hierarchy. Abell would have been attached to a lieutenant or captain to learn how to wage war and gain territory and riches for the East India Company and win some plunder for himself.

  He was soon thrown into battle, in skirmishes against the Pindaris from central India, among the forces of the powerful Hindu Maratha Empire, but their artillery was outdated and the British had been victorious in the previous war against them. Abell was soon hardened by the deaths of enemy warriors and his own comrades, and inured to the squabbling over spoils that followed a battle. Looting after a victory was an approved Company activity—an incentive for the soldiers, a larger benefit for the officers—but the Company was widely hated for the practice.

  Between campaigns, Abell learned he could accumulate further wealth through trading on the side and through gambling. Nor would it have taken him long to discover, as did most officers, that many Indian women were beautiful and sensuous, and they could be taken as mistresses, or sometimes as wives. His particular cronies, especially for card nights, gambling with other officers, were James Patterson, a military surgeon in the Company’s service, and an older officer, Colonel Francis Torrens, who had been in India for over forty years and had surrendered to its available vices; he had no doubt risen in rank to colonel through the assistance of his distinguished younger brother, Major-General Henry Torrens, who between 1812 and 1814 was aide-de-camp to the Prince Regent.22 However, it is remarkable that the junior officer Edward Abell was hobnobbing at this level and suggests that he had connections and social skills.

  The final, decisive conflict with the Marathas—giving the East India Company control of most of the subcontinent—did not take place until the Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817–18. But long before that, in the autumn of 1814, Abell and the 1st Battalion of the 7th Native Infantry, along with the 1st Battalion of the 6th, had joined other Company forces to undertake a massive invasion of Nepal.

  There was no provocation for the invasion, only the pretext that British irregular forces which had already entered the country needed the support of the Company army. But this was a ploy. In the ruthless view of the East India Company, its commerce had to be protected at all costs. The Gurkhas of Nepal (or ‘Nypaul’ as the British then spelled it) had encroached on the Company’s own potential trade routes to China and Tibet through the northern provinces.

  Rather than an initial explicit invasion with its own army, the Company gave tacit permission to two irregular fighting forces to enter Nepal. The first were the warriors of William Fraser, a wild Scot from Inverness, whose official position was with the Company army, as political agent to Major-General Sir Rollo Gillespie. But Fraser was a law unto himself; he had been in India since 1802 as assistant to the Resident in Delhi, spoke several languages and had built up his own band of warriors for mercenary expeditions. His men were joined by an irregular army, called Skinner’s Horse, led by Fraser’s comrade-in-arms James Skinner, son of a Scottish officer and a Rajput princess, to lead the foray against the Gurkhas. Because of his Indian heritage, Skinner had been excluded from becoming an officer of the Company army and had for years fought inste
ad with its enemy, the Marathas. Skinner had raised his own private cavalry, a distinctive band with their yellow tunics, black shields and scarlet turbans.23

  But the flamboyant William Fraser had arrived in India twelve years earlier for a particular reason. Like his four brothers, who followed him to the subcontinent, his intention was to restore the Fraser family fortune. The Frasers, like most late-eighteenth-century landowners in the Scottish highlands, had suffered from the economic depression that continued for decades after the 1746 Battle of Culloden. Few tenants could afford to pay rents and the Frasers were hard pressed to pay workers to tend their land and stock. The boys’ father, Edward Satchwell Fraser, had bought into a cotton plantation in Guyana, along with a neighbour, seeing it as an investment for his sons. But with cheap imported cotton from India, prices collapsed, and Edward Fraser needed to mortgage the family estate against it. They were badly in debt, their estate at risk.

  But between William’s good intentions and the reality a shadow had fallen: the seductive lure of India. An impressive bearded character, he pruned his moustaches like a Rajput prince and acquired a ‘harem of Indian wives’ by whom he fathered several children. While he held various administrative positions with the East India Company, he had soon, unlike his British colleagues, learned to read ancient Sanskrit texts and developed a love of Persian poetry. However, his main passions were for hunting, riding and fighting with his own private band of warriors. (He was said to have killed some eighty tigers, hunting them on foot, and a number of lions, which helps explain the absence of lions in India today.)24 According to the author William Dalrymple, fascinated by this man to whom he had a family connection, Fraser remains ‘a strange enigmatic figure—misanthropic, antisocial and difficult to fathom—part severe Highland warrior, part Brahminized philosopher, part Conradian madman’.25

  The East India Company found unofficial and irregular fighting forces such as Fraser’s and Skinner’s most useful. As Gillespie’s political agent, Fraser’s challenging brief was to recruit sturdy Nepalese Gurkhas to harass the supply lines of their own people. That he succeeded in recruiting a large number is testament to his language skills and powers of persuasion.26 The intrepid Fraser became legendary among the Company troops and somehow, at this time, Edward Abell met him.

  Abell was a minor player in the war as a second lieutenant in the 1st Battalion of the 7th Native Infantry, part of Gillespie’s forces. One of four British columns, their task was to strike mid-west Nepal at Dehra Dun, attempting to divide the kingdom. In one of the first battles of the Anglo-Nepalese War, some 3000 British troops laid siege to Kalanga Fort. Gillespie led a rash assault against the strongly fortified position while his men held back; he was killed, along with nine officers and 62 men, followed in the second assault by twenty officers and 649 men.27 The 600 Nepalese within the garrison held out for over a month. The war ended with the Treaty of Sugauli on 4 March 1816. A British colonial administrator, Sir Charles Metcalfe, remarked of the conflict: ‘In this war, dreadful to say, we have had numbers on our side, and skill and bravery on the side of the enemy.’28 As part of the treaty, two Gurkha regiments were formed and taken into the permanent British army service.29

  Towards the end of the war, William Fraser’s elder brother, James Baillie Fraser, arrived in Nepal. The two brothers took off together, officially to report on conditions in the Himalayan states, exhilarated to be together on the arduous trek. William needed to return to Delhi, but James continued on, riding and walking to the sources of the Jumna and Ganges rivers, sketching the dramatic landscape he passed through, for ‘the Devil of Drawing’ had taken hold of him. Later, in Scotland, he reworked the sketches into a series of superb aquatints, ‘Views of the Himalas’, and published a book about his travels.30

  On 23 December 1816, Abell unexpectedly resigned from the Company army, still at the rank of second lieutenant. This was an unusual decision for an officer in good standing, for it meant he would have to finance his own accommodation and ship’s passage back to England, an expense of hundreds of pounds. It usually only occurred when an officer had chosen to become a merchant or found another activity profitable enough, or attractions sufficient, to make worthwhile his staying on independently. From December 1816 to May 1817, Abell’s activities are unaccounted for. One can only speculate that he may have taken up private trading or professional gambling, or that he had an Indian wife or mistress—or several. It is also not impossible that his resignation from the East India Company meant that he had become an officer in Fraser and Skinner’s now merged private army based at Delhi. If so, his timing was poor, with the Nepal war just having ended, but he may have engaged in some of their mercenary expeditions.

  But some event changed his mind about staying on, for Abell departed from India as a private gentleman in May 1817, his ship the Woodford calling at St Helena on the way home.31 However, India drew him back; there must have been some great attraction. By late 1818 he was resident again in Madras, having been appointed civil agent for the British colony of Ceylon to the Madras Presidency, an apparently honorary position obtained with the help of his brother Charles in Colombo. The position was endorsed by Colonial Under-Secretary Henry Goulburn and the East India Company, although his travel and accommodation were at his own expense and the Company stipulated: ‘it being understood that Mr Abell will quit Madras whenever he shall cease to hold the said office’.32 The work could not have been onerous as he was listed in the Madras Year Book for the next two years as a British resident, with ‘Occupation: None’.33

  On 5 August 1820, his gambling friend Francis Torrens died in Madras at the age of 72, perhaps of cholera, which was rife. He had enjoyed an unbroken residence in India of 51 years and had only recently been promoted (surely on retirement) to the rank of lieutenant-general in the 18th Native Infantry.34

  That particular misfortune was followed a year later by the abrupt removal of another of Abell’s regular companions. In October 1821, the military surgeon James Patterson was charged with the crime of forgery. He was tried in Madras before two judges and a jury and found guilty. Using chemicals, he had expunged the signature of a deceased officer and substituted his own on a promissory note for a considerable sum. The sentencing judge particularly rebuked the ‘bad example and influence’ of Patterson’s crime, ‘committed by a British subject and by a person of your understanding, education and profession . . . upon the low and uninformed classes of the Natives’. It was an additional aggravation ‘that this crime was committed by some chemical process by a person in the medical line, whose profession furnishes (to one viciously inclined) such easy modes and materials for doing mischief’. He said that Patterson was fortunate, because if found guilty of the crime of forgery in the United Kingdom, he would have forfeited his life. ‘The sentence of the Court is that, you James Patterson, for the crime aforesaid, be transported to New South Wales during the term of fourteen years.’35

  Patterson delayed his departure by brazenly launching his own legal action, claiming that the late Lieutenant-General Francis Torrens had died owing him a large sum of money. As the executors of his will, Torrens’s younger brothers were greatly perturbed. They suspected that their brother’s promissory note to Patterson had also been forged. Colonel Robert Torrens wrote a 53-page letter from India to General Sir Henry Torrens, by then adjutant-general to the British Forces at the Horse Guards in London (the army equivalent of the Admiralty), explaining the circumstances as he understood them: ‘You may depend upon it he will lose no opportunity of tormenting the expectations of this Estate by keeping the business in a state of agitation if it is merely to make believe his innocence. He is now about 45 years of age, so that if he is not pardoned, for which God forbid, he will be at the expiration of his term of 14 years, sixty. I trust however before that age he may have made his peace and gone to heaven . . . This very day however I believe he embarks for Calcutta on his way to Botany Bay, and I hope we have now done with this Chemical Hero!’36

&n
bsp; It was after these events that Edward Abell came home to England and to Devon to visit his parents. There he met the pretty Betsy Balcombe.

  The romance between Betsy and Abell developed rapidly, no doubt far too rapidly for the senior Balcombes to feel comfortable. Balcombe may have been taken in at first by Abell’s apparent charm and reputed connection with the Nevills; but he himself had spent much time in India as a youth, both at Calcutta and Madras, and had observed the wild lifestyles of some of the East India Company army officers—gambling, hookah, nautch girls and prostitutes. There must have been something in Abell’s manner that made Balcombe begin to think he was of that kind. He and his wife Jane were bound to take the view that this adventurer, with no distinction and an unreliable access to money, was not the sort of husband they had imagined for their beautiful younger daughter. After all, Betsy had been admired by every officer on St Helena, she could have wed Major Oliver Fehrzen, a military hero, and for years she had been the favourite of Napoleon Bonaparte, former ruler of half the world! It is probable that they tried to talk her out of continuing to see Abell; they may even have forbidden the couple to continue to meet.

  Then came the news: Betsy was expecting a child.

  No record survives of how her parents reacted, but much as they may have disliked Abell, everything had now changed. They would have determined that he had to wed their daughter, otherwise her life was ruined. She would never be able to show her face in society again. Did Balcombe confront Abell—as right-thinking fathers did in Jane Austen’s novels—and tell him that unless he did the honourable thing, he would expose him for the scoundrel that he was?