Raffles

by Victoria Glendinning

  This is the most likely scenario. However, it has been posited that Olivia and Captain Jack met and had their affair on this 1792 voyage, after his marriage. The Rose in 1792 called in at the Irish port of Youghal, and Olivia could have joined the ship there. If this version is right, Olivia’s Harriet was born shortly before she married Dr Fancourt; and Harriet’s age as given on her memorial in Ashburton Church has to be wrong. But who knows – and it doesn’t really matter. The swiftness with which Olivia married was normal. Young women risked the voyage out to find husbands among the British bachelors and widowers rattling around in the settlements. These gentlemen, unless they had come to an understanding with a local woman in ways described by Captain Williamson, were equally keen, and there was no point delaying. Everyone understood what the mutual needs and expectations were. Olivia needed to be married. Let’s hope she liked Joseph Fancourt.

  Olivia’s daughter Harriet was not disowned by her father, even though she did not bear his name. According to Mrs Hawkins-Dempster, she was educated in Scotland. Old George Dempster certainly knew her when she was in her teens, finding her ‘a virtuous girl with a tender and feeling heart and no small share of good sense.’

  Captain Jack’s wife died, and he shot off to London to secure a new command – and to see Olivia Fancourt, back in England without her husband after five years’ marriage. She was living in lodgings in Golden Square. We know this because in December 1798 she had her servant Mary Goring arrested and sent to trial at the Old Bailey on a charge of stealing ‘four muslin neck handkerchiefs, value 3s (shillings), two muslin pocket handkerchiefs, value 12d (pence), and a wooden pen case, value 4d, the property of Jacob Cassivilaun [sic] Fancourt Esq.’ (A married woman’s property belonged legally to her husband.) A petticoat and a pillow-case came into the story. After a query about whether Mrs Fancourt’s ‘black [i.e.Indian] servant’ might have given Mary Goring the articles to wash, and discussion of Mrs Fancourt’s dirty linen, the prisoner called in her defence two gentlemen in whose service she had been previously. They gave her ‘an excellent character’ and the jury brought in a verdict of Not Guilty.

  The only conclusions that can be drawn are that Olivia was not wholly indigent, since she kept two servants and Golden Square was a good if bohemian address; and that she had a strong personality, and was not shy.

  On 7 January 1800 Captain Jack Dempster, commanding the Earl Talbot, sailed for Bombay, taking his and Olivia’s daughter Harriet with him. While they were at sea, Olivia’s husband Joseph Fancourt died in India. In August, Captain Jack took the Earl Talbot on towards China, leaving Harriet in Bombay with his friend Philip Dundas, Master Attendant (harbour master). Dundas’s wife Charlotta sailed with Captain Jack, intending to return to England via the China route. They were caught by a typhoon in the South China Sea, the Earl Talbot was broken up on rocks, and all on board were lost.

  Before she knew of her father’s death Harriet, aged sixteen, married in Bombay William John Soper, Commissioner of Customs at the port of Surat, a friend of Philip Dundas, and twenty-two years older than she. In the same year Captain Jack Dempster’s legitimate heir died, and childless George Dempster made over the property at Skibo to Harriet. So she and her new husband left India, and he changed his name to Soper-Dempster. They had a son and four daughters within six years and lived at Skibo Castle.

  Olivia’s daughter would seem to have fallen on her feet, but Olivia was written out. Her name does not appear in the genealogical reference books, which devised ingenious ways of accounting for Harriet’s origins.

  In the course of the year 1800 Olivia Fancourt, rising thirty, lost her lover and her husband, and her daughter got married.

  She had a new friend in Thomas Moore, the Irish poet. ‘Melodious Moore’ sang most beguilingly the settings of his poems to his own piano accompaniment. Moore’s main patron was the fellow-Irishman, soldier and statesman Lord Moira, whose own patron was the Prince of Wales, to whom Moore in 1800 dedicated Anacreon, the volume of verses which made his name. Moore reported to his mother in June 1802 that he had attended with Mrs Fancourt a fancy-dress ‘Masquerade’ for which tickets cost ‘fifteen guineas each’. ‘Mrs Fancourt, as Wowski, was the best dressed and supported character I ever saw. I accompanied her as Trudge.’ (Wowski and Trudge are servant characters in a popular comic opera, Inkle and Yarico, set in the West Indies.) There could have been several Mrs Fancourts running round London, but Moore’s party-partner does sound very like Olivia.

  Lord Minto, when Governor-General of Bengal, meeting Olivia Raffles for the first time in 1811, wrote to his wife: ‘Mrs Raffles is the great lady, with dark eyes, lively manner, accomplished and clever. She had a former husband in India; and I have heard, but am not sure of the fact that she was one of the beauties to whom Anacreontic Moore addressed many of his amatory elegies.’ Olivia liked to suggest that she was the ‘Nona’ of a birthday poem by Moore published in 1801, even though Nona was a ‘lovely mortal child’ and Olivia a mature woman. Moore was eight years younger than Olivia, ambitious, gifted, self-made and self-making; small and vital. Tom Raffles, ten years younger than she, had similar attributes, and others more substantial.

  Raffles either met Moore through Olivia, or vice versa. As a Company widow she had the right to apply to the East India Company for support from their Compassionate Fund. Raffles, in the Secretary’s Office, could have been instrumental in processing the lump sum of twenty-five guineas and pension of one shilling and eightpence a day which she was awarded in 1804. But however the relationship between them began, it led within less than a year to their marriage.

  Before the new couple left for the East, six weeks after their wedding, Raffles arranged for some part of his salary to be paid to his mother. His father was out of the picture. In the letter to Cousin Thomas of 14 October 1819, Raffles wrote that when he was at India House the friends who ‘widened my prospects in life’ – he meant the Ramsays – were ‘entirely unknown to my family, at this time suffering in obscurity and distress. My earnings went to their relief, but it was insufficient. Long-standing debts, and a want of the means to prevent still further involvement, caused me many a bitter moment.’

  The outcome was that in July 1805, shortly after Raffles’ marriage and departure for the East, Captain Benjamin Raffles petitioned the Corporation of Trinity House for ‘alms and support’, leading to his admission to their almshouse for ‘decayed master mariners and pilots and their widows’ near St Nicholas’s Church in Deptford. There was a printed form to be filled in by the petitioner (Captain Raffles’ handwriting in italics):

  That your Petitioner Benj.ṉ Raffles was bred to the Sea, and served there as a Seaman & Commander of several Vessels for upwards of Forty years. The last Ship of which he was Commander was the Lord Rodney. has a wife & 4 Child.ṉ all females of the age of 20 years or under.

  That your Petitioner is not now able to support him self & Family without the Charity of this CORPORATION, having no Pension or Relief from any other Public Charity or Company, except [blank]

  Your Petitioner therefore most humbly prays that He may be admitted a Pensioner of this CORPORATION, at the usual Allowance.

  It could be supposed that Mrs Raffles, Harriet, Maryanne, Leonora and Ann were also going into the almshouse, were it not for the singular ‘He’ in the last paragraph.

  So Raffles’ father was going to be looked after and Raffles, with his increased salary, must now support his mother and sisters.

  There was contact between Olivia and her daughter. Before Olivia and Raffles left England, the two women were together in London to have their portraits painted in miniature by Nathaniel Plimer of New Bond Street and set in pearl-bordered frames. Olivia and Harriet are very alike. The dark hair of both is fashionably short and curled round the face, and both are wearing low-cut white dresses with short puff sleeves.

  There would be malicious gossip about Raffles’ marriage, but he thought his decision needed no explanation. ‘When I was about to q
uit all other ties and affections,’ he wrote in the letter of 14 October 1819, ‘it was natural that I should secure one bosom friend, one companion on my journey who would soothe the adverse blasts of misfortune and gladden the sunshine of prosperity.’ He actually had two companions on his journey, for he and Olivia were taking with them to Penang his third sister Maryanne, the pretty one, aged sixteen.

  Olivia and Raffles knew each others’ sad secrets. She had made the long voyage before, she had lived in India. There was a lot she could teach Raffles. He, who had never since his birth at sea been abroad, and never further from London than Wales, was sailing in April 1805, with his hopes and his high ambitions, into the blue.

  Chapter 2

  Great Expectations

  Penang 1805–1807

  It cost money to go out to East India. Raffles borrowed around £2,000 from the Company’s agents and other sources, and paid it back over the next four years. He had to pay the captain of the Ganges £150 for himself and Olivia, and £110 for Maryanne, and provide clothes for them both. Fortunately for them, female fashion was well suited to the tropics, where they were going to be living in an equatorial rain-forest climate with temperatures between 29C and 35C and extremely high humidity. Modern young women were wearing light muslin dresses gathered under the bosom in the Empire style, which the Calcutta lawyer William Hickey found ‘unbecoming and preposterous’, calling it the ‘no-waist system’, making every girl look as if she were pregnant. But it was simple, practical and pretty.

  As for Raffles’ own kit, Captain Williamson’s East India Vade-Mecum recommended for young men travelling East in the Company’s service an ‘out-fit’ of four dozen calico shirts, undershirts which would double as nightshirts, pantaloons, long drawers and ‘a substantial great-coat’ for wearing on shipboard; three dozen pairs of cotton stockings, four dozen neck-handkerchiefs, two dozen white linen waistcoats. Passengers who were still growing should take clothes a size too big, or they would have grown out of them by the time the ship reached its destination. This would no longer apply to Raffles, in his twenties. The average height of an Englishman was about five feet six inches. Since he was reckoned to be a small man, he was probably no more than five feet four inches tall, and slight in proportion.

  Passengers provided their own bed, bedding and mattress, washbasin, ewer and chamber-pot; and their own cutlery. Any furniture for the cabin – a desk, a table, chairs, a bookshelf – you also provided yourself, to be utilised on arrival in a new home more than five thousand nautical miles away. Captain Williamson advised packing clothes and books in brass-clamped wooden boxes, and had a packing-tip useful to travellers at any time, recommending making up ‘sets’ – in this case of a shirt, undershirt, stockings and neck-hand-kerchiefs – and rolling up each set tightly in a towel.

  The Ganges sailed with a fleet, for no East Indiaman risked sailing alone, and the Raffles family joined the ship at Plymouth. The voyage to India could take four months, or it could take ten. On this occasion it took under six, including the final leg from Madras to Penang. During the voyage, the heaving, lurching vessel was the whole world – a wooden world, with constant risk of fire. Smoking was not allowed except on the forecastle. No candles to be lit for reading in bed, and no candles at all after ten p.m. Fresh water, in barrels stacked between the gun emplacements on deck, became unfit to drink after a while, so passengers were advised to bring crates of beer and wine.

  The decks were washed twice a week, but still the ship stank. There was no sanitation other than tipping matter overboard. Infections on board spread fast, and two young writers (clerks) died on the Ganges on this voyage. To add to the noise and smells, there were live chickens, ducks and turkeys in coops, and sheep, goats, pigs, rabbits and cows living on hay on the poop deck, for slaughtering at sea.

  The passenger cabins were temporary constructions, divided by means of thin wood bulwarks or hanging canvas partitions. Not much privacy there. The best were fitted along the sides of the ‘great cabin’ in the extreme aft, with great square windows letting in the light. Here a rich man, eating his own provisions and drinking his own wine, could make himself really comfortable. The Raffles trio had no luxuries, though another family party on board doubtless did: among the twenty-six Company officials on board, some with wives, was the new Lieutenant-Governor of Prince of Wales Island, as the Presidency at Penang was officially called. He was the same Philip Dundas with whom Olivia’s daughter Harriet had stayed when she went with her father to Madras. Since he and Captain Jack Dempster had been good friends, Dundas knew who Olivia Raffles was. So did the commander of the Ganges, Captain Thomas Harrington, who had been fourth officer on the Rose when Olivia sailed for Madras with Dempster in 1792.

  Dundas was a scion of a powerful Scots family long associated with British Government and the East India Company. He was the nephew of Henry Dundas – from 1802 the first Viscount Melville – a former Lord Advocate of Scotland and Home Secretary of England, First Lord of the Admiralty, and confidential advisor to the young Prime Minister, William Pitt. Henry Dundas had been active in establishing the Board of Control, was one of its first members, and later its President. Philip Dundas, impeccably well-connected, had made serious money for himself in Bombay as Master Attendant, always a coveted job, responsible for receiving port dues and customs duties and overseeing the harbour and its wharves. Allowances, private arrangements and levies raised a Master Attendant’s income considerably. The Company salaries were moderate, and corruption, not seen as corruption but as necessary supplements and the perquisites of office, made up the lack.

  Dundas was travelling to Penang with his new second wife, daughter of another Scots grandee, and his wife’s sister. The meeting between Olivia Raffles and Philip Dundas, if it had undertones of embarrassment, was carried off by them both. Since Dundas must have approved the appointment of Raffles as his Assistant Secretary, Olivia’s history cannot have disturbed him. Raffles always got on well with Dundas, but trouble came from Dundas’s wife and sister-in-law. They decided that raffish Mrs Raffles was not someone whom they wanted to know and ostracised her accordingly – very awkward, in the enforced intimacy of the ship. Raffles kept his head down, occupying himself during the voyage by learning Malay.

  Our informant for the Dundas ladies’ snootiness is another Company passenger to Penang on the Ganges, sixteen-year-old Robert Ibbetson. He had picked up a different reason for Olivia being ostracised. He spread a story that William Ramsay, the Secretary of the Company, had a relationship with her, and that Raffles was given his advantageous appointment in exchange for taking her off his hands.

  This canard may have been circulating in the grimier corridors of India House at the time of Raffles’ promotion and marriage. It first surfaced publicly in 1816, after the deaths of both Olivia Raffles and Mr Ramsay, when Raffles was in England on leave. The supplement to Henry Colburn’s A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland alleged that Raffles went to India ‘through the interest of Mr Ramsay, secretary to the company; and in consequence of his marrying a lady connected with that gentleman.’

  Ibbetson never had anything good to say about Raffles. He lived to be ninety-one, the last survivor of the cohort which sailed to Penang in 1805, and dined out on Raffles anecdotes. If his assertion were true, Raffles would hardly have remained the closest of friends with William Ramsay’s son William Brown Ramsay, as he did. Nor would he have referred to Mr Ramsay, in a letter to William B., as ‘more to me than a parent’; nor would he have expressed ‘the grateful sense I do and ever shall entertain of his friendship and protection – I look upon him as I have often told you, as a father.’

  Raffles happened not to see Colburn’s Biographical Dictionary until 1819, after he remarried. The discovery provoked the long autobiographical letter of 14 October 1819 to his cousin the Rev. Thomas Raffles. He insisted that Olivia was ‘in no way connected with Mr Ramsay, they never saw each other, neither could my advancement in life
possibly be accelerated by that marriage – it gave me no connections, no wealth, but on the contrary a load of debt, which I had to clear off.’ It increased his difficulties, and thus increased his energies; ‘it gave me domestic enjoyment and thus contributed to my happiness, but in no way can my advancement in life be accounted owing to that connection.’

  He is not gallant in this letter about ‘that marriage’, but then his devoted second wife, Sophia, encouraged no sentiment about Olivia. She probably thought that Olivia had just been trouble. When in widowhood she came to compile her Memoir of the Life and Services of Sir Stamford Raffles she made no reference to her predecessor. The book reads as if she were the one and only wife that Raffles had ever had. On the sole occasion when Sophia absolutely had to refer to Olivia in order to make sense of the text, she did so in a brief, inaccurate footnote. And so for a second time, Olivia was written out of her own history.

  For any British coastal settlement in India and the East Indies, all commercial opportunity and all human interest came by sea. Officers on the ramparts of the fort, merchants on the quays, Government aides on long first-floor balconies, the sentry on the Hill, all raked the distant horizon through their telescopes. A Hill always had a capital H, in the East. A Hill meant not only reconnaissance, but a desired place to live, with fresher air, fewer mosquitoes, escape from the miasma of foetid streets and waterways.

  The dark specks on the horizon could be the predatory Dutch or, during the long war, the hostile French, who might, this time, pass slowly across the line of sight and disappear. An incoming fleet from home, sailing round the perilous Cape of Good Hope and carried on by the southern monsoon winds, brought in European household goods, wine, crates and bales of commodities for buying and selling, boxes of official documents, precious letters from home, new books and months-old newspapers and journals, news of victories and defeats in the war with the French, gossip from ports of call, old friends, young ladies.