Raffles

by Victoria Glendinning

  That very day

  From a bare ridge we also first beheld

  Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc…

  Mont Blanc as ‘idea’ was iconic to the Romantics. With this small synchronicity, which has everything to do with the opening up of European travel after 1815, Raffles’ sensibility chimed with theirs. In another life he could, like his cousin Elton Hamond, have lived among the poets. Sophia recalled that ‘a flower would call forth a burst of favourite poetry’ and, on the voyage back to the East, he read poetry to Sophia in the evenings.

  Raffles chose not to go with Cousin Thomas and Sophia’s brother William Hull when they climbed the Montanvert glacier. He stayed behind with ‘the ladies’, as he did when the two younger men visited the field of Waterloo, already covered with standing corn. Sophia was in the early stages of pregnancy. On the precipitous track down from Chamonix she was carried in a chair borne by relays of guards, while the rest of the party clung to the back of mules, which the ladies rode side-saddle. Cousin Thomas wrote that he twice saw Maryanne ‘when the descent was steep and rugged, completely lose her seat on the animal, and only regain it, and save herself from pitching over the precipice, by grasping the hair of the guide.’

  On 25 July 1817, the day they got back to London, Raffles was one of a party which included the Duke of Wellington and Government ministers at a dinner given at the City of London Tavern by the East India Company for George Canning, the new President of the Board of Control, whom Raffles had already met at Carlton House. His inclusion in such a top-level gathering suggests that Sir Stamford was now regarded as an ornament to the Company rather than a liability.

  Further proof came when, as he was just about to sail, it was decided by the Court of Directors that his appointment at Bencoolen was to be not as Resident but as Lieutenant-Governor, ‘as a peculiar mark of the favourable sentiments which the Court entertains of that gentleman’s merits and service.’ The designation was personal to him ‘and not to devolve upon his successor at Bencoolen.’ The brand new Company ship in which they were to travel back East was named The Lady Raffles. The world being as it is, the Court of Directors’ attitude to him was changed by his knighthood, the publication of his book, and the respectful welcome he and his collections received from ‘the Great Men of the Town’.

  Thus Raffles – Sir Stamford Raffles FRS – was rebranded and relaunched. He had a formal portrait painted in oils by George Francis Joseph (now in the National Portrait Gallery), with the fashionable haircut favoured by the Prince Regent and Lord Byron, his short locks curled forward round his forehead and temples. His right hand is holding papers, and his right elbow rests on a table on which are more papers and Javanese figures from his collection. It is a portrait of the Lieutenant-Governor as author and collector. Another and more informal portrait – now in the Royal Zoological Society – was painted by James Lonsdale, for which he wore a velvet jacket with a wide white collar; his hair is more approximate to its natural colour, with a marked thinning around the temples.

  He had one more project to float before he left England. When they were in Paris, staying at the Hotel Mirabeau in the newly-named rue de la Paix, the party visited the Louvre, the palaces and the monuments; they saw the guillotine which had decapitated Louis XVI; they glimpsed his younger brother, the restored Bourbon King Louis XVIII, at Mass in the chapel of the Tuileries. But what impressed Raffles most was the Jardin des Plantes. Knowing little of the work of French botanists, he was amazed to see specimens from Java and the Eastern Isles which he had believed to be unknown in Europe.

  Even more interesting to Raffles was the discovery that the Jardin des Plantes incorporated a small zoo. This was established in the revolutionary 1790s, stocked from the royal menagerie and from collections of exotic beasts in private ownership, and subsequently augmented by accessions from the French colonies. It was the first public collection in the world, and the first open to all, free of charge. The animals were kept in conditions as close to their natural environment as possible, and their behaviour studied and recorded. England, thought Raffles, should have something like this, and spoke to his naturalist friends in London about it. But the idea was on hold until his final return.

  Between August 1817 and their departure in October there was a flurry of visits. Old Queen Charlotte invited Raffles to spend an evening with her at Frogmore, in the Home Park of Windsor Castle. There he met Lord Amherst, only just back from an abortive trip as Ambassador Extraordinary to the Emperor of China in Peking, with the aim of establishing better commercial relations between Britain and China. The mission failed because Amherst declined to consent to the ‘kowtow’ ceremony, and so was not admitted into the Emperor’s presence.

  Amherst’s party took the opportunity to explore, sailing along the coast of Korea and to islands south of Japan. At least five members of the mission, including Raffles’ friend Captain Basil Hall, subsequently published books about their adventures. On the return voyage the Alceste, with Amherst on board, broke up on rocks off Java, everyone escaping in lifeboats to Batavia. At Frogmore, Amherst and Raffles, having so much in common, talked all evening – which saved Raffles a thousand pounds, he said, because otherwise he would have had to play cards with Her Majesty, who played for fiercely high stakes ‘and we should have played at least 20 games, and I should have lost them all.’

  Cousin Thomas knew William Wilberforce through their shared preoccupation with liberal causes and foreign missions. He took Raffles to meet the evangelical parliamentarian and veteran hero of abolition legislation at his home: Gore House, Kensington Gore, with its ten bedrooms and three acres of garden (where the Albert Hall now stands). Raffles and Wilberforce established a friendship, though Wilberforce’s health was beginning to fail, and he was one of those people in whom compassion and liberal instincts went hand in hand with a horror of public protest and radical uprisings.

  Raffles went with Sophia and Maryanne to Liverpool to see Cousin Thomas at home with his wife and baby, allowing two days to get there – ‘We have not yet looked at the Book of Roads therefore cannot say decidedly what time we shall arrive.’ He left his ‘ladies’ with the family in Liverpool while he took a side-trip to visit and dine with the Duke of Hamilton, father of the Duchess of Somerset, at Ashton Hall near Lancaster.

  Then, with the ladies, across to Ireland to see relatives of Sophia’s, and to visit Maryanne’s children by her first husband, Quintin Dick Thompson. Quintin’s sister Charlotte, the children’s aunt, was married to Baron James McLelland, who had built himself a fine house, Annaverna, outside Dundalk in Co. Louth. The McLellands had no children, and took on Charlotte Raffles Drury Thompson and Acheson Quintin Dick Thompson when Maryanne married William Flint.

  It was usual for British children to be sent from the East to family at home by the age of four or five because, once they were running around, they were at risk from infection; they were over-indulged by their attendants, and became spoilt brats; they must go to school, and acquire the manners of their tribe. Maryanne never reclaimed Charlotte and Acheson. They became to all intents and purposes the McLellands’ children. Baron McLelland was a notoriously harsh judge, punishing nationalist uprisings and ‘outrages’ with brutal public floggings and hangings. He may, for all we know, have been as mild as milk at home with his wife and the two children at Annaverna.

  Returning to England via Holyhead, Raffles went, without his wife and sister, ‘to the Dukes’ – the Somersets – at one of their country estates, Maiden Bradley on the Somerset-Wiltshire borders; then to stay for two days with Sir Hugh Inglis, the former Deputy Chairman of the Company who had approved his first appointment to Penang. Then there was a ‘famous dinner’ at the Albion tavern. ‘Sir Stamford took the chair,’ Travers wrote in his journal, ‘and Garnham and I were his supporters. We had some good singing, and a number of bumper toasts. On the Island [of Java] being given, Mr Ellis arose and, in a most elegant and appropriate speech, paid Sir Stamford’s administration a very
high compliment.’ (Henry Ellis had been with Basil Hall on Lord Amherst’s mission to Peking.)

  Sophia and Cousin Thomas had become close during the European tour. ‘How much my Heart is to your Heart, as yours to mine,’ she wrote to him in early October. ‘We are still in the midst of bustle and confusion and both much fatigued by the exertions we have been obliged to make.’

  Clearing out 23 Berners Street was a nightmare. (Travers was not there to help. He had rushed back to Ireland to get married, returning with his bride just in time to sail to Bencoolen with Raffles.) Writing in his turn to Cousin Thomas from Portsmouth on 21 October 1817, while waiting for their ship to appear on the horizon, Raffles said he had sent to his Aunt Rachel and Uncle William in Princes Street ‘a great many boxes of books and some odds and ends; not so many of the latter as I intended, in consequence of my people who, in their anxiety to clear the house, sent off more rubbish than was intended to the Duke’ – the Somersets had offered space at 1 Park Lane as a repository for his collections and possessions.

  The plethora of important collections arriving in London was posing a storage problem. Live animals shipped back from the East and, increasingly, from the Arctic regions, were generally shot and stuffed. Some of Raffles’ material went to the Company’s museum in India House. The British Museum, opened in 1759 in the remodelled seventeenth-century Montagu House, was a disgrace. A governor of the Museum, Sir William Scott, wrote to the Duchess of Somerset in 1818, that ‘The building is in a most crazy condition; the floors have sunk; and have given ample notice of danger to our collections there, and to the crowds who come to see them; and all the apartments are so chuck [sic] full, that there is no room for any new addition in any department. What is to be done under this want of space and safety? I hope you will approve of our applying to Parliament for a new spacious and solid building.’

  Not until 1823 was the demolition of the old mansion, and a long-drawn-out building programme, set in train. Not until the 1880s were the natural history collections moved to South Kensington. Meanwhile, in 1817 while Raffles was in London, the sagging Museum accepted the Elgin Marbles. A Select Committee of the House of Commons questioned the legality of Lord Elgin’s action. The ethics of stripping the Marbles from their position on the Parthenon was raised. The Committee submitted an inconclusive interim report. The morality of the removal of important cultural objects from their place of origin is equally relevant to Raffles’ activities. It did not worry him, or anyone else in London. The heads of the Buddha, like other pieces from Borobudur and most of Raffles’ ethnological importations from the Eastern Isles, would eventually find homes in the new-built British Museum and its satellite depositories.

  The History of Java had been issued in an edition of 900 quarto copies, with a folding map and 66 engravings and aquatints. The artist commissioned by Raffles, William Daniell, was a great draftsman who had himself been in Java. The publishers were the Company’s booksellers, Black, Parbury and Allen, and John Murray of Albemarle Street, Byron’s publisher. The price was six guineas – not cheap. Two hundred and fifty sets of the 900 were printed off first, on better paper (so the reproduction of the illustrations was sharper than in the rest), calf-bound and in larger format, at eight guineas. One of these Raffles inscribed to his new mother-in-law: ‘Presented to Mrs Hull, by her Affectionate Son, Tho’s S. Raffles’ – evidence of Raffles’ adoption of Sophia’s family as his own.

  By the time Raffles was leaving for Bencoolen, 200 of the 900 sets of The History of Java remained unsold. There was a strong vogue for traveller’s tales and accounts of exotic peoples and regions among the educated population, but The History of Java did not gain a wide readership. It is salutary, in estimating public taste, to recall that Cousin Thomas’ account (1813) of the life of the charismatic teenage preacher Thomas Spencer – a Liverpudlian prodigy who drowned at the age of twenty – is said to have sold 6,000 copies. Java was of consuming interest only to those concerned. Major William Thorn, Brigade Major in Gillespie’s division, pipped Raffles to the post by publishing in 1815 his Memoir of the Conquest of Java, a blow-by-blow battle-book with topographical essays and coloured engravings, and minimal reference to ‘Mr Raffles’.

  Raffles left his cousin Elton Hamond with the task of preparing a second, improved and corrected octavo edition, relying on Cousin Thomas to collaborate in the editing: ‘You must recollect that it is a great point in my interest, character and fame, that during my absence, all my friends act in unison – it will delight me to hear that my two literary Cousins are giving their mutual aid towards the correctness of the second edition.’

  It was rash of him to entrust his second edition to Cousin Elton, and little wonder that he pressed Cousin Thomas to remain involved – that is, if he realised how disturbed Elton had become. Elton had planned to commit suicide back in 1813, and told the diarist and journalist Crabb Robinson so. In October of that year, Raffles wrote Elton a long letter. From internal evidence it is clear there was an ongoing correspondence, and that Raffles respected Elton Hamond’s views. Raffles explained to him the currency crisis, the problem of the devalued paper money and his decision over the sale of lands. He promised to go further into the subject of land tenure in a later letter, and that ‘when I may make up my mind to write a book on Java,’ he would develop these important points.

  It seems from the letter that it was Elton who sowed the seed of the book: ‘I observe what you mention respecting the advantages attending a literary work, such as a statistical account of Java,’ Raffles wrote, ‘and, although I am fully sensible of my incapacity to appear before the public as an author, I feel some inclination to the undertaking… I believe there is no one possessed of more information respecting Java than myself: – but how far I may be able to put it together, and to bring it before the public, I know not.’

  Elton’s behaviour became more and more odd. Inheriting his father’s tea business in Milk Street, he sacked the employees because the business interfered with his life. He told Raffles in London that, since Raffles owed everything to his father Charles Hamond – he was thinking of the £500 bond to the East India Company for which Hamond had stood guarantee back in 1795 – Raffles was morally obliged to give him, Elton, half of his earnings as Lieutenant-Governor of Java. Raffles gave him an order for £1,000, out of pure good humour. Elton, mercifully for Raffles, disdained to cash it.

  Somehow Elton retained the increasingly bewildered friendship of Jeremy Bentham, the poets Coleridge and Southey, and Sir Frederick Pollock – top lawyer, MP and mathematician – who said that Elton had ‘in the highest degree one mark of insanity, viz, an utter disregard of the opinion of the rest of the world on any point on which he had made up his own mind.’ He was driven by an insistence on the truth as he saw it. When Elton was eleven, he had told his sister Harriet that he was going to be greater than Jesus Christ. ‘His after-misery’, wrote Crabb Robinson, ‘lay in this, that while he had a conviction that he was to have been, and ought to have been, the greatest of men, he was conscious of the fact that he was not.’

  Literary women clucked around Elton Hamond. Anna Letitia Barbauld, elderly poet and pedagogue, took on his sister Harriet as her companion. Mrs Barbauld’s parson husband had become insane, attacked her with a knife, and then killed himself. Crabb Robinson found among Elton’s papers after his death ‘one which discussed at great length the best way of “putting an end to Mrs Barbauld’s life”.’ Maybe there was something peculiarly maddening about Mrs Barbauld. Elton turned down various job offers over the years. Instead, he covered hundreds of quarto pages with unpublishable autobiographical and philosophical writings.

  Raffles perhaps hoped that revising The History of Java might focus Elton’s literary energies. Maybe he thought to help Elton’s mother, his Aunt Elizabeth, by helping Elton. Whatever Raffles’ reasons for entrusting his ‘interest, character and fame’ to his troubled cousin, they were nothing but benevolent. Any profits from the second edition were to be Elton’
s. The something excessive in Sir Stamford Raffles was sympathetic to the something excessive in hapless Elton Hamond.

  Raffles was only returning to the East in order to make and save enough money on which to retire. He wrote to the Duchess of Somerset: ‘Oh! That this leave-taking were at an end; my heart is sad, and yet what avails it to repine? I must go, and the sooner I am off the better; my house is filled with those who are all determined to say good-bye, and make me more miserable when it requires all my fortitude to keep my spirits calm and uniform.’

  The Lady Raffles, commanded by Sophia’s brother-in-law Harry Auber, picked up its passengers at Portsmouth, where Maryanne came to see the party off. The newly-weds, Travers and his wife Mary, joined Raffles, the pregnant Sophia and their servants, plus the Radin, and Dick the Papuan boy. Loaded on board was a quantity of livestock, and seedling plants for Bencoolen.

  From the George Hotel in Portsmouth, on 22 October 1817, Raffles wrote to his mother, thanking her for an ‘affectionate letter’: ‘You don’t know how it has soothed me and how it has lightened my heart in going away. My only uneasiness was your feeling too much for your strength. It is only a little time and I will be with you again. Nothing can keep me beyond five years and I may be home much sooner. In the mean time we shall always be thinking of you and anxious to hear how you are going on… Keep up your spirits my dear Mother – there is much happiness and comfort in store for you.’

  John Tayler, the agency friend who had looked after his affairs in London, ‘will take care you want for nothing. Should any accident happen to me your £400 a year is still secure, therefore you can never I hope be again distressed for money. Sophia desires her kindest love and affection…’