‘I cannot tell you the horror with which I think of the voyage and the dread I have of going to sea again,’ Sophia confessed to Maryanne. After one false hope – they were all set to leave on the Wellington, but the Captain went ‘raving mad’ – they embarked on the Mariner on 8 April 1824 and set sail once more two days later. To the Address of sympathy and praise which his colleagues in Bencoolen presented him, he replied (his script shaky, with a few crossings-out): ‘It may be that I placed too high a value on my Collections, that I was too confident in my future career, perhaps I was too much attached to the things of this world. The lot of man is a mixture of good and evil, and we must be content with it – and at all events we know that all worketh for good in the end.’
With a determination bordering on the crazy, Raffles set himself a rigorous programme of work for the voyage. He set out his daily timetable – mathematics, logic, Greek, Latin, Hebrew – in a notebook, like a schoolboy. He cannot have kept this up. The Mariner was thrown about by fierce gales for three whole weeks around the Cape, ‘the ship nearly torn to pieces and ourselves nearly worn out’. Raffles recorded in his notebook: ‘The gale was so severe that during this period we were unable to leave our cots, the sea poured through the decks into our cabin, and the roar of the wind was such that we could not hear each other speak. Lady Raffles, though boarded up in her couch, was obliged to have ropes to hold by to prevent her knocking from one side of it to the other.’ They had been at sea eleven weeks before, on 25 June 1824, they reached St Helena for a scheduled stopover.
Lieutenant-Colonel Farquhar had hung on in Singapore, waiting and hoping for a reversal of his dismissal as Commandant of the Garrison from the Supreme Government, which Palmer assured him would be forthcoming. But the Supreme Government, having endorsed Raffles’ decision, could not reverse it without appearing to be in error, and let it lie. By an unfortunate coincidence Farquhar, bound at last for retirement in Scotland, and on board the Maitland, anchored at St Helena just a few hours before Raffles and Sophia – ‘but we did not land till evening and the Colonel was anxious (as I conclude) to avoid an interview, he sailed the next morning and we did not see him.’
No Napoleon on St Helena this time; he died in 1821. The Raffles family stayed with the Governor at Plantation House, and while there Raffles received the news that his mother had died. It was not a surprise. In his final letter to Maryanne from Bencoolen, he wrote: ‘My last accounts of our poor Mother are melancholy, and I can hardly expect to see her alive.’ But it was, as he wrote to the Duchess, ‘a sad stroke at such a moment, just as I felt the possibility of once more embracing her… Pray excuse this hasty scrawl; my eyes are quite blinded with tears, and my hand is so nervous that I can scarcely hold my pen.’
Raffles would not learn until they reached England that, while they were on the high seas, the Treaty of London between the British and the Dutch was ratified, after four years of negotiations. It had been signed when Raffles was in Bencoolen between the fire on the Fame and his final departure. As part of the Treaty, Britain ceded Bencoolen and all other stations in Sumatra to the Netherlands. Malacca was again ceded to the British.
The great news was that the Netherlands withdrew all opposition to the occupation of Singapore. George Canning, one of the British signatories of the Treaty, recognised Singapore as the ‘unum necessarium’ for the future of the British Empire. This outcome was a triumph for Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles.
The Mariner left St Helena on 3 July and landed safely at Plymouth on 22 August 1824, a Sunday. They were home.
Chapter 14
Endgame
England 1824–1826
The Rev. Thomas Raffles was in the West Country, preaching and doing a little tourism the weekend that the Mariner anchored at Plymouth. On the Sunday, his sermon was in Devonport, beside Plymouth, so he was there to meet Raffles and his party when they landed. ‘Lady Raffles looks better than I expected,’ Cousin Thomas wrote to his wife, ‘but my cousin is much reduced, and excessively weak.’ Raffles admitted to ‘a sad headache from the effects of landing.’ They all spent that first night with Sophia’s sister Alice Mudge and the Rosdews at Beechwood in Plympton St Mary.
From there Raffles and Sophia went by post-chaise to Sophia’s parents in Cheltenham – Raffles urging the post-boys to go faster because of Sophia’s ‘impatience to see her child’ – achieving about thirteen miles an hour ‘until our front wheel caught fire,’ as he reported to the Duchess. They were celebrities because of the fire on the Fame, which had been reported sensationally in the British press. When they stopped, people crowded round the carriage to get a glimpse of them, and landlords of inns waived the bill. When Sophia gave her name in a shop, the shopman said, ‘Lord, Ma’am, you aren’t the lady that was burnt in the Fame?’
In Cheltenham they were at last reunited with Ella. They did not move in with Sophia’s parents, but took ‘a snug house’ of their own at 2 Wellington Place. Raffles was as ever projecting himself into the future, confiding to the Duchess his dreams of how his life might develop. ‘I confess that I have a great desire to turn farmer’ – about two hundred acres, he thought. ‘With this, I suppose I should in time become a country magistrate; and if I could eventually get a seat in Parliament…’
He and Sophia made a ten-day foray to London a month after their arrival. Raffles had interviews with the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the Company and saw friends at India House, and conveyed to Cousin Thomas that the feeling seemed ‘very much in my favour.’ They also saw on this trip ‘the dear children from Ireland’ – Maryanne’s teenaged son Acheson and daughter Charlotte by her first marriage to Quintin Dick Thompson. Their guardians, the Baron and Mrs McLelland (Quintin’s sister), hearing that Raffles was in London, brought the young people to see him. Acheson, Raffles told Maryanne, was tall, ‘strikingly handsome and elegant’ and very like his father. Young Charlotte was ‘everything you could wish but by no means as handsome as Acheson,’ with ‘more of the Raffles face than any other… We will keep up a continuous communication with Ireland.’ Raffles and Sophia were more conscientious about Charlotte and Acheson than their mother was.
The most important task for Raffles in the autumn of 1824 was to negotiate with the Company for compensation for his losses on the Fame. He was also expecting a pension. He could count on about five friends among the Directors, and contacted other well-disposed – as he thought – and influential figures, asking them for support.
Lord Hastings, who had been summarily recalled from Calcutta, could not help: ‘On the strange terms existing between me and the India House, such an inconsistency would not fail to be taken up and distorted… It would rejoice me to be serviceable in any way without involving this dilemma, though I fear that I have at present little influence.’ Charles Williams Wynne, President of the Board of Control, wrote: ‘You appear to be unaware that in the award for services rendered to the Company we possess at the India Board [the new name for the Board of Control] only negative powers – we may refuse or curtail but we cannot originate or increase… I assure you that there is seldom a disposition to allow us by recommendation… to exceed those limits.’ Raffles’ lobbying may have been something of a misjudgement.
He was ‘drawing out a brief review of my public administration during the last twelve years’ in Java, Sumatra and Singapore, for the Court of Directors. He wrote to the second Earl of Minto, son of the late Governor-General, asking whether he might avail himself of his father’s papers. He wanted, to judge from the younger Minto’s reply, anything ‘tending to prove the very high opinion that my Father entertained of your merit and services’. Raffles also enquired about documents relating to the invasion of Java, since his own were lost with the Fame. Raffles had never met the late Governor-General’s eldest son and heir, and he proved unhelpful.
Raffles, characteristically, made up his mind that the loss of his records only rendered compiling his Statement of Services ‘the more interesting,’ and was optimistic a
bout its reception: ‘I expect the Court of Directors will make some compensation for my losses in the Fame, and I think it likely that by Christmas my Public Services will come under review of the General Court.’ Predictably, nothing happened by Christmas. He and Sophia were gathering strength for, as Sophia put it, ‘our winter campaign.’
William Marsden, apprised of the campaign, wrote a kindly letter saying he had ‘talked over very thoroughly with W.A. [William Astell, Chairman of the Company] the grounds and circumstances of your claims,’ and had some advice: ‘You will of course become, if you are not already, a Member of the Asiatic Society.’ Raffles would also be asked to join the Oriental Club, ‘but this (tho’ highly respectable) you may take time to consider of.’ Raffles did the following year become a member of the Asiatic Society, and of the Society of Antiquaries; and a Vice-President of both the Language Institution and the African Institution. He took Marsden’s hint and kept away from the Oriental Club – founded that same year, with a membership confined chiefly to past and present senior civil servants of the East India Company.
The Archipelago was being reconfigured, and Raffles submitted his views. C.Williams Wynn told him that ‘the plan of Government has been formed very much in conformity with your suggestions and those of Governor Phillips.’
The Foreign Secretary, now George Canning, wrote to say he was ‘greatly pleased and gratified’ that Raffles was satisfied with the new agreement with the Netherlands: ‘No one more competent than you to judge.’ He added: ‘I cannot deny that your extreme activity in stirring difficult questions, and the freedom with which you committed your Government without their knowledge or authority to measures which might have brought a war upon them, unprepared, did at one time oblige me to speak my mind in Instructions of no very mild reprehension. But I was not the less anxious to retain the fruits of your policy which appeared to me really worth preserving – and I have long forgotten every particular of your conduct in the Eastern Seas except the zeal and ability by which it was distinguished.’
This was typical of authority’s ambivalent attitude to Raffles. No one could fail to recognise his zeal and, especially as regards Singapore, his peculiar genius – yet so much of what he did outrageously exceeded his remit.
Raffles explained to Maryanne the imminent ‘arrangement for Singapore and the union of the 3 settlements under one Government.’ This tallied with his previous impassioned recommendation to Lord Hastings. Penang, Singapore and Malacca, under a single Governor and Council, were ‘each to have a Resident and be independent of each other.’ None of this, he assured his sister, should affect William Flint, but he must ‘keep quiet and save all he can.’ On 1 August 1826 the Straits Settlements, which lasted until 1946, came into being.
In Cheltenham Raffles was hampered in the writing of his Statement of Services by illness, and in late October 1824, Captain Thomas Otho Travers made the crossing from Cork to visit him. He found Sophia ‘looking uncommonly well. Indeed I was surprised at her appearance. She complained of loss of weight but I have never seen her look better.’
Sophia’s life, miraculously it must have seemed, was back on track. She was with her little daughter, and her parents were just around the corner. She made light of Raffles’ troubles to Maryanne – and perhaps to herself as well – his headaches were ‘bilious not nervous.’ Luckily Charley Boy and Ella played together nicely. ‘Ella is as pretty as the most perfect regular features can make her, as well as the most intelligent of expressions.’ She was like her father, ‘with strait, chestnut hair, but not a very fair skin.’
With the arrival of Travers, Raffles rallied and became positively ‘energetic’. This was more than a reunion, it was a reconciliation. ‘Tot and I have burnt the papers, as the saying is,’ Raffles wrote to Maryanne. For they had parted badly, with recriminations from Travers after he was sent by Raffles to be Resident at Singapore, only to find that Farquhar had no intention of leaving. Tot worried that Raffles’ constitution was so thoroughly undermined. ‘He seemed a complete Skeleton with scarcely enough skin to cover his bones – his head tormenting to a sad degree.’
Raffles said he was putting on some weight and ‘gaining strength daily and sometimes fancy I am growing young again.’ Yet one may wonder, as he shivered through that dull, dank English autumn, wrapped up in his worsteds and woollens, whether his imagination did not conjure up the tropics with something like nostalgia – the humid warmth, the fierce, short-lived afternoon rains, even the reliably scorching sun.
He and Sophia left Cheltenham before Christmas, moving to London for their ‘winter campaign’. Raffles thought the cost of placing himself at the centre of London life was money well spent. He rented 104 Piccadilly ‘next door to the Marquess of Hertford’s’, but it was too small. Sir Humphry and Lady Davy were moving out of 23 Lower Grosvenor Street in Mayfair, and Raffles took it from Sir Humphry on a thirty-year lease, planning to move in February 1825 ‘when the London season will be commencing.’
Sophia’s parents left Cheltenham too, and bought what their daughter called ‘a most delightful house in a most beautiful part of the environs of London.’ Their new home was a large villa in rural Hornsey called, by mischance, Farquhar House. Charley and Ella spent much time at Farquhar House when Raffles and Sophia were away on visits.
Raffles’ youngest sister, Ann, was never part of the Hulls’ family parties at Farquhar House. She was always ‘difficult’, and had led a restricted life as companion to their mother. Since their mother’s death, Ann lived in Edinburgh with their cousin Mary Anne Wise, daughter of the Rev. John Lindeman, and Raffles paid her an allowance of £150 a year. On 23 May 1825 she died, aged thirty-two, ‘carried off by a rapid consumption’.
‘Poor thing,’ wrote Sophia, ‘it seems to have been a mercy to herself and all those connected with her, for her weaknesses and waywardness increased every day – till at last they were by all accounts beyond endurance.’ Sophia could be acerbic. When Uncle William, Cousin Thomas’s father, died in November 1825, Sophia’s comment was, ‘No great loss. It is a pity his wife did not die too.’
Raffles and his replacement creatures and collections, although fewer than those lost, were, as before, much in demand among fellow naturalists, and specimens were swapped and compared. He assured the Duchess that he was following her advice – ‘idling and playing the fool with my time as much as possible,’ but that was not in his nature. The idea of a Zoological Society was still alive, and had been reviewed by the Zoological Club of the Linnean Society in 1823. The first meeting of Friends of a proposed Zoological Society was in July 1824, and Raffles had been appointed Chairman in anticipation of his return.
He and Sir Humphry Davy together moved things forward; the first circular was sent out on 1 February 1825, with no mention of live animals, only ‘preserved specimens’. A meeting of 26 February was chaired by Raffles, and the prospectus of 1 March was the first to posit a collection of live animals. Davy, going out of town, left Raffles with the job of writing to influential people to solicit subscriptions. In his application to Sir Robert Harry Inglis on 28 April Raffles said that he hoped to have a hundred names ‘within a day or two’. He had Robert Peel, the Home Secretary (secured by Davy), on the top of his list. ‘In the first instance, we look mainly to country gentlemen…but the character of the institution must of course depend on the proportion of men of science and sound principles which it contains.’ His own insistence on ‘the scientific aspect’, he said, put him ‘a little at issue with Sir Humphry Davy.’
Raffles’ social life was correspondingly febrile. On 18 May 1825 he told Cousin Thomas: ‘Necessity has compelled me to go much into society: and I am almost surprised that, at this gay season of festivity, I have been able to carry on the war – seldom a day passes without an engagement for dinner and for many weeks I have not been able to command an hour’s leisure.’ Everything was ‘so new varied and important in the Metropolis of this great Empire, after so long an absence in the woods and wil
ds of the East, that like the bee I wander from flower to flower and drink in delicious nutriment from the numerous intellectual and moral sources which surround me.’
At the same time, he was negotiating a country house purchase. Though Lower Grosvenor Street ‘suits us exactly,’ he and Sophia had been ‘in search of a cottage to retire to in the summer in preference to the wandering life of Watering Place visitors.’ They found what they wanted through William Wilberforce.
Raffles was in touch with Wilberforce as soon as he moved to London, but his social whirl was not Wilberforce’s style. He was living with his wife out at Uxbridge Common ‘for the very purpose of not being tempted out after dinner,’ which they took at ‘a rather early hour,’ so he was ‘sadly unsociable in the Dining way.’ But if Raffles and Lady R would come and see them in Uxbridge, and if a ‘homely’ reception was acceptable, they would be more than welcome. Wilberforce became very fond of ‘my dear Lady R.’
Wilberforce was projecting a final house-move – to a property called Hendon Park, ten miles out of London, with more than a hundred acres. It was on Highwood Hill on the northern edge of Mill Hill, a farming hamlet on the borders of Middlesex and Hertfordshire. Mill Hill was a favoured retreat for the prosperous on account of its elevation and proximity to London.
Adjacent to Hendon Park on Highwood Hill was another property, Highwood House. This too was for sale, and at Wilberforce’s suggestion Raffles decided to acquire it. Once more, he would have a Hill. Highwood was a two-storey white-stuccoed house, its façade featuring two rounded bays flanking a central portico. An earlier mansion on the land had belonged to Lord Russell, executed for his part in the Rye House plot to murder Charles II, which added a certain frisson.
When Cousin Thomas’ father died in November 1825 and was buried at Christ Church, Spitalfields, Raffles was present – and straight after the funeral the cousins sped up to Mill Hill so that Cousin Thomas could see Highwood. He reported to his wife that it was ‘a lovely place… The views are most extensive and the diversity of hill and dale, wood and lawn, truly delightful.’
Raffles Page 31
