Raffles

by Victoria Glendinning

  The journey from Cornwall to London was punctuated by sightseeing – the carpet manufactory at Axminster, Salisbury Cathedral, and the new Royal Military College at Sandhurst Park. Travers went ahead to London. He found a house for Raffles and his entourage to rent at 23 Berners Street, and lodgings for himself at number 52 over the road. (Travers was proving indispensable.) Berners Street, just north of Soho over Oxford Street, was favoured by artistic and literary people: Samuel Taylor Coleridge was lodging at number 71 in 1816. Raffles wanted to be placed advantageously, and this was a good, central address, a world away from Walworth.

  The rest of the party reached London on 16 July, and next morning Raffles presented himself at India House, confident that he would be vindicated once the Court of Directors knew all the facts of the Gillespie affair. Mercifully, the repayment of his disallowed salary raise while at Penang was swiftly waived. He had to wait longer for a response to Gillespie’s charges, and longer still for any judgment on his Javan administration.

  He reconnected with his family. Cousin Thomas called at Berners Street towards the end of July 1816, soon after some of the treasures from Java had arrived from the docks. He found Raffles out, and the house ‘full of oriental matters…many things curious and magnificent, and multitudes of people waiting to see him – together with servants and others in partially oriental costumes, presenting to my eyes a novel and somewhat amusing spectacle.’ Those in ‘partially oriental costumes’ included Raffles’ servant Lewis, the Raden Rana Dipura, and ten-year-old Dick, the Papuan boy.

  When Raffles came through the front door, Cousin Thomas was standing at the top of the stairs. He had been a boy when they last met, and was now ‘married and settled in life, the Minister of a large Church and occupying a laborious and influential position.’ Small wonder that they stared. ‘He did not know me, nor did I, for a moment, recognise him,’ Cousin Thomas wrote to his wife. ‘But when I had leisure to survey his countenance, I perceived that he had lost nothing of himself but his colour and his flesh… My cousin was astonished at my appearance, and so was I at his – he, that I looked so well, and I, that he looked so ill.’ They embraced, and ‘were immediately at home together.’ He was amazed by Raffles’ ‘unbounded flow of spirits; I fear too much for his strength.’

  Raffles took his household to hear Cousin Thomas preaching in Paddington – it was his third hour-and-a-half-long sermon in London that day – and the celebrated preacher expressed to his wife an ardent desire that ‘my poor efforts should be blessed to the promotion of the everlasting interests’ of so distinguished a relative. Back home, the ex-Lieutenant-Governor of Java was a star, and he expanded in the glow.

  Mrs Raffles had moved with Harriet and Ann to St Anne’s Cottage in Hampstead, north of London. Cousin Thomas’ parents, Raffles’ Uncle William and Aunt Rachel, were still at 14 Princes Street in Spitalfields. Cousin Thomas recalled his mother telling him how Raffles went to see her, arriving on foot, having discreetly left his private carriage round the corner so as not to attract attention in that modest neighbourhood. He walked straight into ‘the sort of parlour kitchen where my Mother was, busied as usual about her household affairs,’ knowing that he would find her there.

  Settled in the armchair by the fire where he used to sit in the old days, he was ‘affectionate and playful’ with her, ‘quite unconscious of the elevation to which he had attained since he had last sat there.’ The Rev. Thomas, dazzled by the distinction of his older cousin, could never be entirely unconscious of that elevation. Aunt Rachel was a match for Raffles, as Cousin Thomas recollected:

  ‘“Aunt,” he said, “you know I used to tell you when a boy, that I would be a Duke before I die.” “Ah,” she replied, “and I used to say it would be Duke of Puddle Dock” – which was a proverb in London at that time referring to a wretched locality in Wapping: and with which aspiring lads, who had great notions of the greatness they should hereafter attain, were twitted.’

  It is a good story, and would be a better one had Cousin Thomas remembered from his London childhood that the small wharf called Puddle Dock was not downriver at Wapping, but at Blackfriars, where Raffles’ unfortunate father had been born.

  Raffles wrote on 23 July 1816 to Cousin Thomas in Liverpool that ‘the Medical Gentlemen’ advised him to try the waters of Cheltenham to restore his health, ‘and I have resolved upon the trip the moment my more urgent visits to the Great Men of the Town are completed.’

  The Great Men of the Town with whom he got in touch were scholars, naturalists and natural philosophers. Some of them he had corresponded with already. Their power bases were the overlapping circles of learned societies, institutions and clubs, within which the scientific, the political and the social formed further intersecting circles. They proved to be very interested in charming, enthusiastic Raffles and his impressive collections. Number 23 Berners Street was always full of curious guests.

  He finally met William Marsden, now in his sixties, the oriental scholar, numismatist, and author of The History of Sumatra. He was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a Fellow of the Royal Society (and a former Treasurer and Vice-President), and a core member of its sociable offshoot, the Royal Society Club, dominated by Sir Joseph Banks. Marsden’s house was Edge Grove, in the Hertford-shire village of Aldenham, where Raffles visited him and his wife, taking as gifts fifteen square-holed bronze coins – not cash coins, but magic amulets.

  Marsden, currently working on a translation of the travels of Marco Polo, was never an ivory-tower scholar. He had held high office in the Admiralty in the early years of the century, and had known the eminent naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, since the 1780s, and been his protégé. Banks was a legendary figure, but now becoming ossified. Meetings of the Royal Society at Somerset House were formal. Papers were read, with no discussion or questions afterwards.

  The discussions took place at Banks’ London house, 32 Soho Square, where he displayed his natural history and ethnological collections, and held Sunday salons for scholars, naturalists and men of letters. ‘We are all delighted with the acquaintance of Governor Raffles,’ Banks wrote to Dr Horsfield. ‘He is certainly among the best informed of men, and possesses a larger stock of useful talent than any other individual of my acquaintance.’ In his introduction to The History of Java, Raffles thanked Sir Joseph Banks, ‘the venerable President of the Royal Society,’ for his ‘kindness and encouragement.’

  Banks made his name before Raffles was born. Only in his twenties, he travelled – paying his own way – as scientific observer on the Niger to Newfoundland and Labrador. He graduated from being a rich young gentleman and collector to a serious Linnean naturalist. At twenty-six he was the official botanist on Captain James Cook’s second voyage on the Endeavour (1768–71) to the South Seas, financing his own team of natural historians.

  The months that the Endeavour spent at Tahiti were for the purpose of astronomical observation. At ground level, Banks took advantage of the island’s sexual freedoms. He thus entered intimately into Tahitian society, and the collection which he brought home embraced far more than the botanical. The famous Endeavour expedition, and his collection, brought Banks to the admiring notice of learned society, and of King George III – only five years older than himself – whose friend and ally he became; he was put in charge of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

  Banks became a Fellow of the Royal Society the year after he returned from Tahiti, and its President in 1778, at the age of thirty-five – a position he contrived to hang on to until 1820 by means of loading the fellowship with his supporters. After he married a rich wife, and became a baronet, he morphed into a public man. He sat on councils, committees and governing bodies connected with science, trade, colonial policy, exploration, ‘improvement’ in agriculture, industry, elementary education, and imperial issues, becoming an overbearing and not altogether attractive figure. He is to be credited however with introducing and popularising ‘useful’ scientific knowle
dge and the practice of scientific methods.

  Some Fellows of the Royal Society disapproved of Banks’ snobbery: he favoured election to the Society of men who were well-born, socially agreeable and conservative in their politics. He discouraged radicals and dissenters, being of the generation whose Enlightenment values were skewed by the alarming upheavals of the French Revolution and fear of revolutionary contagion in England. This kind of double vision was common. Many men who campaigned for the abolition of the slave trade and religious emancipation were at the same time violently opposed to enlargement of the suffrage and the reform of Parliament.

  A large, and largely passive, Royal Society membership supported by their subscriptions the work of active scientists. Some of the aristocrats elected to the Royal Society had serious intellectual interests. One such was the Duke of Somerset; he was probably the person who first presented Raffles to the Prince Regent. The Duke and Raffles liked and respected each other, and his first Duchess (Charlotte, a daughter of the Duke of Hamilton) became Raffles’ special friend. The Somersets were a handsome couple, somewhat older than Raffles. She was apparently known for being close with money, but was generous to Raffles, giving him a fine porcelain tea or chocolate set – large shallow cups with handles, plus jug and sugar-bowl, decorated in apricot and gold, intact and in use to this day by a descendant of Maryanne’s. She was a lively conversationalist, though delicate health forced her to receive her visitors while reclining on a sofa in her drawing room at number 1 Park Lane. She knew Byron, and corresponded with Metternich. Some of Raffles’ best and most informal letters were written to this attractive, intelligent Duchess.

  The Duke was a lifelong student of science and mathematics, and would, after Raffles’ time, become President of the Royal Institution and of the Linnean Society. He was already in 1816 President of the Royal Literary Fund and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. The Duke’s younger brother, Lord Webb Seymour, when he heard from Captain Basil Hall an account of the Raffles-Gillespie affair – entirely in Raffles’ favour – wrote to the Duke with a gossipy version of the quarrel as he understood it: ‘Gillespie appears to have been a man of infamous character.’ The Duke of Somerset’s own character is exemplified by his reply: ‘I have not looked into the question respecting the charges… Indeed I feel very averse to enter upon enquiries of that kind, unless I am particularly called upon to do so; because there are so many obstacles in the way of coming to a right opinion.’ Raffles’ History of Java however, ‘bears many marks of an active benevolence of disposition.’

  The Duke of Somerset took Raffles as he found him, and was interested in his ethnological and natural history collections. He was less sympathetic to his geopolitical visions. ‘I cannot approve of the interference of one nation in the internal Government of another,’ he wrote later in life, ‘either in spiritual or temporal terms.’

  The Duke’s brother Lord Webb Seymour was an accumulator of facts about every branch of knowledge, which led to nothing because – in an earnest parody of the prevailing intellectual culture – he lacked the mental equipment to draw any conclusions. He lived in Edinburgh, making friends among the professors at the University.

  Writing to the Duke while visiting London in October 1816, Webb Seymour provides a glimpse of the changing city which Raffles was encountering: ‘The other day I walked to look at the new Vauxhall Bridge. It makes a fine appearance from a distance, but the railing, and all the details of the work, are in a style far too plain… I have not yet been upon the Strand Bridge’ – this was Waterloo Bridge, not open to traffic until the following summer – ‘which I am told is far more worthy of admiration …You mention Brunel as a member of the Royal Society Club; that is a name I am not acquainted with. Who is he?’

  Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Lord Webb Seymour reported, was causing a stir. He did not mention the publication of Jane Austen’s Emma, or Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’.

  Raffles’ short period in England was at a wretched time. The years 1816 and 1817 were years of post-war recession and unemployment. The previous summer had been cold and sunless, owing to the ash-cloud from the Tambora eruption. Crops failed, potatoes rotted, prices soared. In 1816 the crops again failed. There was excruciating rural poverty and typhoid epidemics in the filthy alleys and courts of the cities. Home-workers (weavers and lace-makers) were breaking into factories and smashing the new machinery which took away their livelihoods. Labourers marched on the industrial towns and rioted. In March 1817 the law of habeas corpus was suspended, enabling law officers to detain persons at will, without trial.

  Cousin Thomas was properly aware of distress in Liverpool, since his own congregation and community were affected, as were ‘connexions’ of his own, in his wife’s family. None of this wretchedness impinged on Raffles, circulating like a small new planet around the centres of scholarship and privilege in the politer parts of the capital. Going straight to the top, he met the great and the good of the scientific world incrementally. Sir Humphry Davy, just three years older than Raffles, was a key contact.

  Davy was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society when only twenty-four, but became more closely connected with the Royal Institution where, from 1802 to 1812, he was the Professor of Chemistry. (The Royal Society did not have its own laboratories, but funded experimental science.) The Royal Institution, in which Sir Joseph Banks was inevitably involved, was founded in 1799 to introduce new technologies and scientific discoveries to the general public. Support, membership (and subscriptions) came originally from landowners, keen to find more productive farming methods. The Royal Institution held popular lectures and demonstrations at its premises at 21 Albemarle Street, with fierce competition for tickets. As with celebrity preachers, celebrity lecturers such as Davy provided spectacle, like the theatre.

  Davy was a poor boy from Cornwall who aspired to be a second Newton. Through a chain of lucky circumstances and his own talent, he came to work with experimental scientists and to know the Romantic poets. Culture was unitary; there was little separation between experimental science and the arts, or even between experimental science and mysticism. Davy’s first influential monograph was on the various oxides of nitrogen; he moved on to electrochemistry. He would take on anything, learning about tanning in order to give a lecture on the subject, and investigating fertilisers, insecticides, and soil analysis.

  There was in Edinburgh a spirited and wealthy Scottish widow, Jane Apreece, who had met Madame de Staël in Geneva, and declared herself to be an incarnation of the eponymous heroine of de Staël’s novel of 1807, Corinne – that is, gifted, passionate, idealistic, and doomed to suffer. Jane Apreece was a recognisable sort of intelligent, provocative woman who loves to crack the shells and break the hearts of sober intellectuals, and she exercised her charms on Edinburgh University professors. But it was Sir Humphry Davy who married her in April 1811, three days after he was knighted by the Prince Regent. (It was not a happy marriage.)

  Sir Humphry Davy had his last major success in the year Raffles returned to London, having put his mind to the problem of deaths from fire-damp and choke-damp in coal-mines. A naked flame would reveal the gas, but precipitated lethal explosions. Davy went down the mines, made experiments, tried out various prototypes, and came up with the Safety Lamp. The appearance of the flame alerted the miners to the presence of gas, while a mesh of iron-wire gauze prevented the flame from passing through. George Stephenson was working on the same idea at the same time, but the Davy Lamp won the day.

  When Raffles met Sir Humphry and Lady Davy in 1816, they were living at 23 Grosvenor Street in London’s Mayfair. After his marriage, like Sir Joseph Banks after his, Sir Humphry became grand. His rise from humble beginnings is an example of how science was now a career ladder, like the church or the law – or the East India Company.

  Medicine was another career ladder. Sir Everard Home (created a baronet in 1813) was a physician and comparative anatomist from Hull whose brother-in-law was the distinguished surg
eon John Hunter, on the back of whose fame Home rose like a balloon. He was an executor of Hunter’s will, the custodian of Hunter’s papers and, while Raffles was in London, became the curator of Hunter’s collection of anatomical specimens and published a volume of his own lectures. He had a large medical practice, and read scores of research papers to the Royal Society.

  Sir Everard was interested in Dick, the Papuan boy, contributing a paragraph about the particularities of Dick’s physique to Raffles’ History of Java, and he dissected and described some of Raffles’ animal specimens and skeletons. Later it transpired that he had been lifting for his own publications material from Hunter’s research papers, which he held on to on the grounds that he was cataloguing them. Plagiarism was not yet suspected when Raffles knew him.

  Raffles spent time with all these intellectual entrepreneurs and more. When in March 1817 he himself was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, his chief sponsors were William Marsden and Sir Everard Home. It was intoxicatingly exciting. As his widow Sophia put it in the Memoir, he ‘enjoyed the pleasures of society with a zest that can be imagined, when the vigour of his mind and the variety of his tastes are considered. He left England, indeed, at an age when he had no opportunity of judging of the attractions of its best society…and he returned to England with talents ripened, and with a taste formed for all the intellectual enjoyments of life.’

  But he had to get his health back.

  It was the fashion, as William Hickey put it, ‘for all those recently returned from the East Indies to take an early trip to Cheltenham with a view to getting quit of all lurking bile and correcting the debility supposed to arise from living in so sultry a climate, by the efficacious springs of the place.’ One sip of the water was more than enough for Hickey. Raffles took the water each morning. The Wells had been exploited for a century as the cure for any number of ailments, but the change came when the King visited in 1788. What was in 1801 a town of 3,000 inhabitants was expanding fast.