Raffles was on a high now, writing to his merchant friend A.L.Johnstone in Singapore: ‘My friends assure me that the Direction [of the East India Company] is open to me, and that I have no reason to expect difficulty in getting into Parliament.’ He asked Johnstone to remit all the moneys left with him ‘as soon as you can, as I am anxious to invest my little property as early as possible,’ since shares were soaring, and people were making quite astonishing sums of money on speculations abroad.
Too late. There was a financial crash in 1825. The Bank of England was chiefly to blame, with its expansionist monetary policies, irresponsible lending, poor supervision, and obfuscated operations. Bursting bubbles were followed by panic selling, falling share prices and a credit squeeze. Bail-outs came too late to prevent six London banks and seventy country banks from folding. Property values fell. Fortunes were lost. Notes were printed to ease the money supply. Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, told the Commons that ‘the law as to the constitution of banks was absurd and ridiculous in its nature, futile in its construction, and dangerous in its effects.’
In late 1825 Raffles’ man of business sent him the bad news that ‘the run upon our bankers all the week was very great in consequence of false reports and probably improper management.’ Payments had been suspended. ‘Our balance in their hands is only about £1,200,’ but would have been more if a payment due on Highwood had not been made shortly before. ‘We have removed our accounts from the Bank of England,’ which was then a commercial bank.
Raffles’ financial misfortunes did not stop there. He lost ‘some thousands’ in Bencoolen after it was returned to the Dutch, from his investment in a sugar plantation. In addition, a particularly ‘distressing and unlooked-for event’ was the commercial failure of Thomas McQuoid, in whose agency house in Batavia he had invested £16,000, now lost.
The seeds of recovery were there but not yet recognisable. In his letter to Johnstone in January 1825, Raffles enthused about ‘the Locomotive Steam Engines, which are to propel carriages without horses from one part of the country to another at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour!’ In September that year the first railway in the world was opened between Stockton-on-Tees and Darlington. ‘Steam packets’ were already churning round the British coastline. In April 1826 the steam vessel Enterprise made the voyage between Falmouth and Calcutta for the first time, although they ran out of coal at the Cape, and continued by sail. But a steam vessel was built in 1826 which would cut the voyage from Singapore to Calcutta from five weeks to about eight days; and a steam-vessel company in Singapore was formed to establish rapid transit between the ports of the Archipelago. The world Raffles knew was being transformed.
The first General Meeting of the Friends of the proposed Zoological Society took place on the premises of the Horticultural Society in Regent Street on 29 April 1826. Sir Stamford Raffles was appointed President of the Society by acclamation. He gave an opening address, and a letter was read from the Commissioners of His Majesty’s Woods, Forests and Land Revenues agreeing to lease to the Society five specified acres of the Regent’s Park, the Commissioners being at liberty to require the removal of any animal ‘which may be deemed likely to become a nuisance or objectionable in the neighbourhood.’
At the first Council Meeting on 5 May 1826 Raffles nominated four Vice-Presidents, and it was agreed that everyone on the list of subscribers should be considered Members of the Society. Sir Stamford, in the chair, was requested to look for a suitable house for the accommodation of the Society. Six sub-committees were formed, four of them to be chaired by Sir Stamford.
Raffles and Sophia moved into Highwood with the children and Nurse Grimes. He wrote to Cousin Thomas on 15 June 1825: ‘The house is small but compact and the grounds well laid out for appearance and economy, and I am assured I have not paid too much for it.’ The estate comprised 112 acres, mostly laid down to grass, and Raffles had bought the standing crop of hay. There was a working farm; the outdoor and indoor staff required must have been considerable, but Raffles made no mention of the numbers – or cost – of his establishment. He saw Highwood as an investment. It cost him ‘upwards of £20,000’ and thought it would yield in the long run more than the three per cent available on the market. ‘What the East India Company will do is uncertain, but if their liberality keeps pace with their delay, I ought to expect something handsome – tho’ I confess I do not look for much.’
He ‘farmed the ground’ himself – which means he micro-managed the farm, not that he wielded a scythe – and ‘Sophia takes care of the poultry and pigs. We brew our own beer and bake our own bread and lead an entire country life…I devote my time almost exclusively to the farm and grounds.’ There was happiness at Highwood, not only for Raffles but for Sophia: ‘You don’t know what a sweet pleasure Highwood is and what a delightful pretty yard and dairy I have.’ They were self-sufficient, she told Cousin Thomas, producing enough to have some left over to sell. Wine and fish were all she had to buy in.
Wilberforce, the old campaigner, still had one more crusade in him. That summer he recruited Raffles as a partner in his plan to ‘build a Chapel of Ease in our neighbourhood.’ He was obsessed with the project, writing Raffles long and increasingly illegible letters on the subject. A Chapel of Ease – a satellite place of worship within a large parish – was desired because St Mary’s at Hendon, the parish church for Mill Hill, was four miles away. The Vicar of Hendon, the Rev. Theodore Williams, was a choleric gentleman who – on account of the sources of his own income – deplored the abolition of the slave trade. Wilberforce and Raffles were not the sort of people he liked. On 7 February 1826, Raffles reported to Cousin Thomas: ‘We have not yet come to any conclusion and the difficulty seems to rest with our Vicar who is of a very peculiar character… My recommendation is to set about building the Chapel at once and discuss the government of it afterwards.’ Controversy was such that the building of St Paul’s Church, as it became, was not begun until 1829.
Raffles made his Will. Dated 5 September 1825, the witnesses were the Rev. Thomas Raffles, Sir Everard Home, and Mary Grimes. Sophia was an executrix, along with her brothers, John Watson Hull and William Hull, and Gerard de Vismes, an artist who was married to Sophia’s sister Ella. The male executors were left in Trust Raffles’ two houses and all his ‘stocks, funds and securities’ to provide for Sophia and their daughter Ella, with immensely complicated arrangements for all conceivable eventualities. Surplus funds were to be invested in real estate. Any children he had subsequent to the writing of the Will were to be treated equally with Ella – and if twins or triplets, ‘on the same principle of division’. Maryanne’s share of dividends was to be put into her own hands ‘for her own separate and peculiar use and benefit exclusively of her present or any future Husband and without being subject to his debts control interference or engagements.’
Given the state of his finances in late 1825 the provisions of his Will were Utopian. Meanwhile he had every intention of involving himself in local life, writing to Sir Robert Harry Inglis on the last day of 1825 that ‘my neighbours’ – that is, the Wilberforces – urged him strongly to become a magistrate, though he feared that although he had spent his life ‘directing others how to execute similar offices, I might myself be deficient in the details.’ But he would put himself forward, not only from a desire to be useful, but because of the opportunity it would give ‘of becoming practically acquainted with the real state of our society,’ which he knew only ‘theoretically’.
Lieutenant-Colonel William Farquhar was in London, though he and Raffles never met. He composed a long Memorial, submitted to the Court of Directors, setting out his complaints against Raffles’ treatment of him and requesting to be reinstated to the command of Singapore. He claimed that Singapore as a settlement had been his choice, and that it had ‘matured under his personal management’. Early in 1825 the Court asked Raffles for his comments. Both Farquhar and Raffles had a case, and each exaggerated his claim in the course of maki
ng that case.
Farquhar’s mistake was making his Memorial hinge on his request to be reinstated as Commandant in Singapore. That was impossible. The clock could not be turned back. The Court rejected his Memorial. Raffles gave his version to Maryanne on 13 November 1825: ‘Colonel Farquhar has had a very long and of course a very hard case before the Court ever since he has been at home, complaining of course in no very decent or moderate terms against me and petitioning to go back to Singapore, but it was only decided last week, and in a manner not I believe very much to his satisfaction. It was my wish, poor man, that he should be let off as easily as possible, but he seems to have failed in all he has attempted, and if he has not been so severely handled as he might have been, he may thank me for it.’
If Raffles had any remorse about how he had behaved he would never admit it to anyone, not even to himself. The unhinged state of his own mind being as it was in those last weeks in Singapore, he maybe hardly remembered the brutal way he got rid of Farquhar. He felt vindicated. ‘The Court took the same view as the Bengal Government,’ and ‘there this mighty affair has finished.’ Both Farquhar and Crawfurd ‘are now hors de combat, and god grant you may do better under the new dynasty,’ he said to Maryanne. (Crawfurd was replaced by Robert Fullerton that month.)
In February 1826 they closed up Highwood – ‘carpets being taken up etc’ – and returned to Lower Grosvenor Street for the London season. With the Farquhar affair resolved, Raffles was anticipating good news from the Company, ‘now taking up my case and granting me an annuity – but I fear it will be very moderate and £500 a year is the largest amount I hear of.’
The Court of Directors finally delivered their response to his Statement of Services on 12 April 1826.
On Java, the Court conceded the success of the invasion force was ‘promoted’ by his plans and information, and that he was correct in his assessment of the financial difficulties that he encountered as Lieutenant-Governor, increased by ‘inevitable’ hostilities in Palembang and Yogyakarta. His sale of lands however was judged to be ‘a questionable proceeding’. His other measures might have proved financially efficacious had the colony remained in British hands. In Sumatra, his internal reforms were approved. But his political measures ‘incurred the strong disapprobation of the Court’.
The occupation of Singapore was ‘approved by the Bengal Government,’ and the measures ‘ultimately carried into effect are to be attributed to his instrumentality, and to him the country is chiefly indebted for the advantages which the settlement of Singapore has secured to it. The Court considers this to be a very strong point in Sir Stamford Raffles’ favour.’
The summing-up was mainly positive, but with pull-backs: ‘The Government of Sir Stamford Raffles appears with sufficient evidence to have conciliated the good feelings of, at least, the great majority of the European and Native population; his exertions for the interests of literature and science are highly honourable to him, and have been attended with distinguished success; and although his precipitate and unauthorised emancipation of the Company’s slaves, and his formation of a settlement at Pulo Nias, chiefly with a view to the suppression of a slave traffic, are justly censured by the Court, his motives in these proceedings, and his unwearied zeal for the abolition of slavery, ought not to be passed over without an expression of approbation.’
But there was no mention of compensation for the losses on the Fame, and no mention of a pension. There would be neither. The Accountant’s Department had been doing sums. On the same day, Raffles was invoiced by the Company for £22,272, for immediate payment.
This debt, which was itemised, included repayment of his Bencoolen salary claimed while he was in England, plus interest; ‘Loss in respect of discount’ plus interest; ‘Commission on exports’ (£6,194); ‘Extra charges at Acheen and Singapore’, and a little afterthought of £592 for losses on spices from Borneo.
It was shattering. In a dignified letter to Secretary Joseph Dart written on 29 April, Raffles said he had already made arrangements for the disallowed Bencoolen salary, plus interest, to be paid from the Bengal Treasury out of Government securities in his name, the balance to be covered by an order on his agents. As for the ‘Commission on Exports’, the commissions were sanctioned by the Bengal Government, subject to the approval of the Court of Directors. Until now, the Court had made no reference at all to the sums drawn, which led him to assume there was no objection. Because of the failure of his agents and bankers he was unable to meet their demands. He asked for time.
There was an abyss between Raffles’ successful public life and his private circumstances. Just how dire the circumstances were can be judged by what Sophia wrote to Maryanne: ‘We mean to go abroad next year, everything here is in such a dreadful state you are well out of the way. People starving, merchants failing, bankers ruined – in short, nothing can be more melancholy… We thought ourselves so comfortably settled, and now we shall be obliged to dispose of Highwood to meet the loss at Batavia.’
After the first General Meeting of the proposed Zoological Society, General Hardwicke, a retired Calcutta friend, sent Raffles a warning: ‘Remember this is your first season of your Change of Climate; and bear in mind, that if you run into all that gaiety of the society in which you move, and yield to the many flattering invitations your friends will press upon you, you must not expect in one summer to renovate a constitution much shaken by long residence and arduous labors in an enervating clime.’
Raffles should have heeded General Hardwicke. He collapsed in the street after visiting Thomas Murdoch in Portland Place, and was brought home to Lower Grosvenor Street by a doctor who happened to be passing. He was unconscious for an hour. The episode was reported in the newspapers of 24 May 1826, but he was well enough to write to Cousin Thomas that day assuring him that although he was ‘still rather weak and nervous, I am getting about again. My attack was sudden and unexpected, but fortunately was not apoplectic as was first feared… I am afraid of writing too much as my head is not quite what it should be.’ His confidence was shaken. Sophia talked down his seizure as a ‘fainting-fit’. Travers walked round the Regent’s Park with him to look at ‘the numberless new buildings which astonished me to see erected in so short a space of time’ – the Nash terraces – after which they went to hear Weber’s new opera Oberon at Covent Garden. But Raffles was changed. ‘Although his spirit and animation was great, his articulation was at times heavy, thick and inarticulate.’
Wilberforce had not moved into Hendon Park full-time as he was having work done on the house. Raffles supervised the laying out of his grounds. Cousin Thomas recalled ‘the glee with which he said, taking me to a long mound which he had raised and planted with shrubs and flowers, “There, I have raised this mound that the little man may enjoy his daily walk, sheltered from the north winds which would otherwise be too severe for him.”’ (Wilberforce, the ‘little man’, was a good deal shorter even than Raffles.)
On 30 June 1826 Raffles attended the second Council Meeting of the Zoological Society, chaired this time by the Duke of Somerset. As President, Sir Stamford Raffles laid before the meeting ‘a sketch [by Decimus Burton] of the proposed plan for laying out the grounds in the Regent’s Park,’ and £1000 was voted for proceeding. Sir Stamford undertook to negotiate terms with Mr Burton. Sir Stamford reported that he had found a house, 33 Bruton Street, suitable for offices, the museum and the library. He was requested to close on the lease on the best terms available.
Sir Stamford also reported a proposal from James Cross, owner of the old Exeter Change menagerie, offering his services in the management of the Society’s animals, plus his own present collection. The Council declined. The previous February, an elephant in the menagerie had run amok, maddened by pain from a poisoned tusk, and his death had been mismanaged. It took more than a hundred musket balls, followed by a thrust from a sabre, to bring him down.
Why did Raffles get up in the small hours of 5 July – five days after that meeting, the day befo
re his forty-sixth birthday? He had been suffering for some days from a ‘bilious attack’ but went to bed at his usual time, between ten and eleven. Was his head giving him so much pain that he could not stay in bed? When Sophia woke at five o’clock and found him gone, she got up to look for him. She found him senseless at the bottom of the stairs. Medical help was called. But he was dead.
Sir Everard Home came straight to Highwood and performed an autopsy on the spot. He found a gross abnormality inside Raffles’ head, but it was neither a tumour nor an abscess. He wrote an immediate draft report, expanded into a formal one: ‘Upon removing the cranium, the anterior part of the right frontal bone was twice the thickness of the left… The outer covering of the brain was in a highly inflamed state, which had been of long continuance, from the thickness of the coats of the vessels. In one part, immediately upon the sinciput, this vasculosity exceeded anything I had ever seen.’ (In his draft, he wrote that ‘a space two inches long and one broad was so loaded with blood vessels as to appear of a different organisation from the rest of the membrane.’)
In addition to this swollen tangle of blood vessels, there was in the right ventricle of the brain a coagulum of blood ‘the size of a pullet’s egg’. From this mass, four or six fluid ounces of bloody serum escaped during the autopsy. In the draft, Home said this occurred ‘in sawing the sheaths’ – the meninges protecting the central nervous system. The ‘extravasion of blood,’ or haemorrhage, ‘which had been almost instantaneous, was the cause of immediate death, so far as the faculties of the brain are concerned.’ There was no evidence of disease in any other part of the body.
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