Raffles

by Victoria Glendinning

  In 1816 there was still no sewage system, but the uniform streets and terraces springing up were paved and lit. There were the Assembly Rooms for balls and concerts, where, as at the Wells, it was easy to make acquaintances and gain introductions to the friends of one’s friends. The Promenade would not be laid out for another couple of years, but the Royal Crescent was completed, and Raffles, his sister Maryanne, Captain Thomas Travers and William Brown Ramsay were renting number three.

  Maryanne’s husband, Captain William Flint, was away fulfilling his obligations to the Admiralty, but she had with her in Cheltenham their first child, William Charles Raffles (known as Charles, or ‘Charley Boy’). Her son Stamford, by her first husband, died three months before Raffles reached home, and her two elder children were in Ireland with an aunt and uncle. Maryanne was an enchanting person whose domestic life was never entirely happy or stable.

  A Mr and Mrs Hull, with a selection of their unmarried sons and daughters, had recently moved into 349 The High Street in Cheltenham. The Hulls met the interesting group staying in the Crescent, and Sophia Hull struck up a warm friendship with Maryanne Flint. Sophia, rising thirty, and the elder of the two by three years, sent Maryanne the kind of extravagantly affectionate notes then customary between female friends: ‘You know dearest Puss how much I love you.’

  There is no way of knowing how much Maryanne’s brother and Sophia saw each other at this time, nor the extent to which Sophia’s devotion to Maryanne was designed to further her romantic interest, or his. But something was afoot, and Maryanne knew about it. ‘I did not expect to see Somebody this day,’ Sophia wrote to her, ‘and yet because I have not done so my heart is very heavy.’ The two families only coincided in Cheltenham for about six weeks – for one of which Raffles was away in London, negotiating the release of more boxes from the Customs.

  In September Captain Travers left for Ireland and his family home, Leemount, just outside Cork city. Raffles and Maryanne, with the young physician Sir Thomas Sevestre, returned to London and Berners Street. Raffles had begun to use his second given name, ‘Stamford’, in preference to ‘Thomas’; Sophia Hull kept up her contact with Maryanne in letters addressed to ‘Mrs Flint, c/o Stamford Raffles Esq’ at 23 Berners Street. ‘But when shall I see you again?’

  Mrs Raffles and Harriet visited Cheltenham after Raffles and Maryanne had left, maybe finishing up the lease on 3 The Crescent, and spent an evening with the Hulls. Sophia Hull complained to Maryanne about the exchange of family members: ‘They are I am sure very amiable and good but they are not like you…I can’t bear to lose sight of you, for you are quite identified with us as one of the family.’ She thanked Maryanne and ‘your Brother’ for being good to her own brother, Lieutenant William Hollamby Hull, who was in London.

  Raffles, in the autumn of 1816, finally succeeded in ‘getting the whole of my baggage freed from the Custom House’ with no duty payable except on the wines, and ‘our back drawing-room is now quite a Museum,’ as he told Cousin Thomas in October, adding the good news that his sister Harriet, having found no husband to her liking out East, had now found one in Thomas Brown of Hampstead – ‘he seems a very steady good kind of man and likely to make her happy – he is a widower with one child and has an office in Somerset House.’

  Raffles was working flat out on his History of Java, having decided to write it himself after all, but was still not well. He was suffering from heavy colds, and was taking mercury for a pain in his side. This toxic treatment, to which he was so frequently subjected, was familiarly known as ‘salivation’, on account of one of its effects, allegedly proof that the treatment was working. By November, having been ‘dreadfully ill’, he was feeling better, ‘the saliva now flowing from my mouth in a copious stream.’ (Other manifestations of mercury poisoning are sore gums, loose teeth, metallic halitosis, and discoloured stool.)

  Travers was so alarmed by the news of Raffles’ illness that he returned from Ireland, where he was courting Mary Leslie, his future wife. In December Raffles was ‘nearly killed’ by a mercury overdose, as he reported to Cousin Thomas, but was well enough to entertain a large party of ‘all my family that are within reach’ to dinner at Berners Street on Christmas Day 1816.

  By then his book was almost done. In the New Year of 1817, he was sending sheets to the printer each morning and correcting the proofs late the same evening. He was also moving in the highest circles. He went to see the opening of Parliament by the Prince Regent (whose carriage was stoned on the way), and attended the Prince’s levee at Carlton House. where he was introduced to George Canning, the new President of the Board of Control.

  Raffles was not over-confident about the book. More than ever he was missing John Leyden’s encyclopaedic scholarship. He had worked on his materials during the voyage home, and even got Cousin Thomas involved. Cousin Thomas, as hyperactive and driven as Raffles had, in addition to his itinerant schedule of celebrity preaching, already published the Memoirs of the Life and Ministry of the Late Reverend Thomas Spencer of Liverpool; he had translated Klopstock’s The Messiah from the German, and edited, with annotations, John Brown’s Self-Interpreting Bible.

  Raffles had brought home a partial and literal translation he had done – with assistance – of the Serat Bratayuda, which he called the ‘Brata Yudha’, Java’s ‘great national poem’ written in Kawi, the sacred Sanskrit-soaked language of the Javanese. He was anxious o include it in his book ‘to prove that the Javanese are not savages.’ Cousin Thomas was press-ganged into rendering the long epic into verse. He heroically produced two versions – one in the style of McPherson’s Ossian, the other in blank verse. Only fourteen stanzas of it could be fitted into The History of Java.

  In spite of illness, Raffles produced his two volumes with amazing speed, partly because to a large extent the book was a compilation. The data for the economic and demographic statistical tables derived from Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Mackenzie’s surveys. For reliable observations on natural history he relied largely, with warm acknowledgment, on the work of Dr Thomas Horsfield. The plans and drawings of Javanese temples and antiquities were provided by Major H.C. Cornelis, Captain George Baker and others. For the history and nature of the Dutch administration of Java he was indebted to his former Dutch colleagues H.W. Muntinghe and J.W. Cranssen.

  His model was Marsden’s History of Sumatra. Far more than a history, even though it was full of history, Marsden’s work started with the climate and ended with the ceremonial cannibalism of the Battas, covering in between – and among other topics – descriptions of people and of their languages, foods, tools, weapons, entertainments, ceremonies, endemic illnesses and sexual arrangements; the wild animals, crops, spices, birds’ nests, and the Upas Tree. Raffles’ book covered the same ground for Java in even more detail. A ‘History’ at this time was not necessarily a chronological narrative.

  It was natural that readers would compare the two, as did the reviewer for The Asiatic Journal for August 1817. Raffles need not ‘shrink from the comparison.’ But the ‘first place’ was assigned to ‘the elegant author of The History of Sumatra’ – in spite of the ‘vastly greater scope’ of The History of Java, and ‘that degree of zeal tinted a little with enthusiasm in favour of his subject, without which local history, if ever undertaken, is tamely executed.’ ‘Local history’, suggesting as it does the study of an English shire, was an awkward term to use for what was even then called ‘historical sociology’.

  The Edinburgh Review published two review articles on The History of Java. The first, in the issue for December 1818-March 1819, gave a full summary and found something to praise: the ‘happiness and fidelity’ of the descriptions of the island, the ‘correct and beautiful’ plates; and the map, ‘the best ever compiled.’ The anonymous reviewer found the author’s provision of ‘too ample details’ on the civil history of Java ‘among the greatest blemishes of the work.’

  ‘The book is hastily written, and not very well arranged. It is a great deal too b
ulky, and too expensive, to be popular… The style is fluent, but diffuse, and a little careless.’ The reviewer guessed that the author ‘composes with too much facility, and blots too little.’ The best sections were on the character, habits, manners and customs of the Javanese, and the accounts of religion and history ‘by far the worst.’

  The reviewer was dour John Crawfurd, and the article manages to encapsulate his ambivalence about Raffles’ way of being, as well as his scholarship. The second notice of The History of Java in the same journal appeared in December 1819, and was a tacit corrective. ‘The date of this work precedes that of our journal, but we are anxious, on several counts, to look back to it… We are too sensible of the worth and merits of its excellent author not to step a little out of our way to testify our esteem.’ Again, a full summary was given, and a special commendation for the ‘spirited manner’ in which Sir Stamford condemned the slave trade. The one pull-back was that ‘the whole is too little digested into a regular and connected narrative.’

  This was written by someone who saw Raffles in London (probably Captain Basil Hall), since the reviewer describes hearing the Radin ‘who accompanied the late governor to England’ playing on one of the gamelan instruments ‘before an eminent composer, several of his national melodies, all of which were found to have a striking resemblance to the oldest music in Scotland.’ Whether Raffles himself had a hand in fixing this second notice is an open question.

  Raffles’ ‘zeal’ in The History of Java was political. ‘The English came to Java as friends,’ he wrote – an assertion which, made about an invading power, may well raise an eyebrow. It makes sense in that the book is geared towards emphasising the abuses of the ‘capricious and semi-barbarous Government of the Dutch,’ contrasted with the amelioration achieved during his own administration. Underlying all is his conviction that the British Government made a frightful mistake in handing back to the Dutch such a promising, potentially profitable and strategically important country.

  It is an uneven book. The thematic shifts are too sudden, there are repetitions, and long extracts introduced by quotation marks which never close. The meat is in the first volume. The second ‘subsidiary’ volume is scrappier, containing more history, an account of Batavia, an inadequate description of the antiquities, the sections on Bali and on the Japan trade, and other appendices. The second of the Edinburgh reviewers was right when he said that the lasting value of The History of Java might be as source material for future historians.

  Yet the work remains compelling. Raffles loved Java – especially the central provinces with their fertile, black volcanic soil and abundant water: ‘Nothing can be conceived more beautiful to the eye, or more gratifying to the imagination, than the prospect of the rich variety of hill and dale, of rich plantations and fruit trees or forests, of natural streams and artificial currents… The whole country, as seen from mountains of considerable elevation, appears a rich, diversified, and well watered garden, animated with villages, interspersed with the most luxuriant fields, and covered with the freshest verdure.’

  Much had been said, he wrote, about the ‘indolence’ of the Javans. That was wrong. ‘If they do not labour during the whole day, it is because such persevering toil is unnecessary, or would bring them no additional enjoyments.’ The villagers worked in the morning, rested in the heat of the day, and at six returned home to spend the hours till bedtime ‘in little parties for amusement or conversation… I have always found them either pleased and satisfied with their lot when engaged at their work, or social and festive in their hours of pleasure.’

  Those, on the other hand, who lived in cities or at the princely courts, or who were in public service ‘are frequently profligate and corrupt, exhibiting many of the vices of civilisation without its refinement, and the ignorance and deficiency of a rude state without its simplicity.’ The truth was that ‘the further they are removed from European influence and foreign intercourse, the better are their morals and the happier are the people.’

  He drew no conclusions from these insights, which undermined his every theory about economic colonial expansion.

  Sophia Hull travelled from Cheltenham to London sometime in the New Year of 1817, and Travers recorded that both he and Ramsay knew, ‘long before’ the event, that she and Raffles were to be married. On 4 December, in an emotional letter to Maryanne, ‘my dear little Puss’, Sophia had confessed that ‘it is the charm of my existence to cherish those I do love with all my heart and soul, but I am too humble to expect the same in return unless I would deserve it.’ Her letter collapses into vague haverings about the ways it is possible ‘to love a Husband.’ Sophia had already met Raffles’ mother, in Cheltenham. This was a rapid but not a runaway romance.

  Raffles gave to Sophia, as an engagement present, an oval gold box decorated with whorls of repoussé filigree, and the initials ‘SR to SH’ engraved on the bottom. On 20 February he and Travers escorted the two famously pretty daughters of Sir Everard Home to the Queen’s Drawing-Room, and on 22 February he married Sophia. He slipped out of the house before breakfast, taking neither Travers nor Ramsay with him. Sir Thomas Sevestre, living in the house, knew nothing about it.

  The marriage was solemnised at the still unfinished St Marylebone parish church, ten minutes walk from Berners Street. The witnesses were not recorded. Big weddings were not in the culture for people like the Raffleses and the Hulls. There could, too, be personal reasons why Raffles did not make a celebration of the occasion. Olivia had been a great love, to whom he now had to say goodbye. Marrying Sophia Hull was not something that would greatly interest his new London acquaintances. He had a full diary, and a book to get through the press. His marriage was a private matter.

  The new couple went off for two nights’ honeymoon to Henley-on-Thames – no doubt to the famous Red Lion Inn, where the great Duke of Marlborough had furnished a room for himself, left untouched since his death, to break the journey between London and Blenheim Palace. Boswell and Johnson had stayed at the Red Lion, and it was frequented by royalty.

  From Henley, on 23 February 1817, Raffles wrote to Cousin Thomas: ‘You will I doubt not approve of the change I have made in my condition in again taking to myself a Wife; and when I apprize you that neither rank, fortune nor beauty have had weight on the occasion, I think I may fairly anticipate your approval of my selection – the lady, whose name is Sophia, is turned of thirty, she is devotedly attached to me, and possesses every quality of the heart and mind calculated to render me happy – more I need not say.’

  This is ungracious. It is his bride’s devotion to him, and not his to her, that he chooses to mention, and he does not even tell his cousin her last name. The tone is explicable if one surmises that the Rev. Thomas had warned Raffles not to marry the first pretty face he fell for, or someone too young for him, or for worldly reasons. In the same letter he told Cousin Thomas that he had received from the Company ‘the most full and satisfactory conclusion’ to the affair of Gillespie’s charges against him, that the post in Bencoolen was open to him, and ‘as there seems an inclination to extend my political authority there, I think it almost certain I shall go out in the course of the year.’ Outlining immediate plans, he wrote ‘I’ not ‘we’. Raffles always was the hero of his own story.

  Gillespie’s charges were thrown out. The significant despatch to Lord Moira in Calcutta was dated 13 February 1817, but Raffles would have known its contents in advance. After long examination of the evidence, the Court of Directors decided that ‘we think it due to Mr Raffles, in the interests of our service, and to the cause of truth, explicitly to declare our decided conviction that the charges, in so far as they went to implicate the moral character of that gentleman, have not only been made good, but that they have been disproved to an extent which is seldom practicable in a case of defence.’

  There was a bit of a pull-back in the Directors’ remark that the ‘expediency’ of Raffles’ measures in Java could not be assessed fully without further informati
on. His purchase of lands at public auction was ‘unquestionably indiscreet’ but without ‘any selfish or sordid taint’. His policies might be questionable – they could not yet pronounce on that – but not his integrity or his honour. It was a neat solution. It is unlikely that the Court of Directors had ever come to grips with the contents of Raffles’ justifications and explanations of all his Javan policies, or that they ever would.

  The author Thomas Love Peacock entered into service at India House in 1818 at the age of thirty-four; the Department of the Examiner of Indian Correspondence was in need of some mature brain power. As an entrance test, Peacock had to write a paper on ‘Ryotwar and Zemindiary Settlements’ from material supplied. Maybe the Directors thought a summary of this knotty subject would come in handy. The official comment on Peacock’s paper was, ‘Nothing superfluous, nothing wanting.’

  Raffles’ confirmed return to the East precipitated his marriage to Sophia, as his appointment to Penang had precipitated his marriage to Olivia. Sophia needed a husband. He needed a wife. Neither could have chosen better. Sophia, on the cusp of spinsterhood, embarked on a more exciting life than she could have dreamed of, or than many women would have had the courage to sustain. If Raffles was the hero of his own story, he was the hero of hers as well. She gave him unconditional love, became his confidante, his best supporter and, after his death, the creator and curator of his fame and the keeper of the shrine.

  Travers described Sophia as ‘amiable, affectionate, sensible, personable, tho’ not very handsome, with a good figure, and extremely well brought up and possessing many amiable qualities, both of head and heart.’ She was fluent on paper, a good pianist, an opera-lover, and in Cheltenham had begun learning to play the harp. Her background was very suitable. The brother whom Raffles had welcomed in London, William Hollamby Hull, was in the Royal Navy. An uncle, William Hollamby, had been Quartermaster of HMS Discovery on Captain James Cook’s third voyage to the Pacific. Her father, James Watson Hull – from Lisburn in County Down, in the north of Ireland – had joined the East India Company as a writer at the age of nineteen, and married Sophia Hollamby in Bombay.