Highwood became a shrine. In the dining-room hung the portrait of Raffles by G.F. Joseph, now in the National Portrait Gallery in London. A second portrait of Raffles by Joseph at Highwood had originally belonged to Thomas Otho Travers, who died in 1844. Lady Raffles used when in evening dress to carry a little scent bottle set in gold filigree attached by a chain to a ring on her finger. Her guests sat at a table of mottled Amboyna wood which extended to take twenty places. They ate with the King’s Pattern silver forks and spoons which Raffles bought in 1824, each piece engraved with his griffin crest. There were silver-gilt dessert forks, spoons and servers, and fruit knives with agate handles. (No wonder Raffles left debts.) The guests took coffee or tea from the Duchess of Somerset’s porcelain.
A gamelan orchestra was displayed in the hall. In a room known as the Museum were artefacts brought home from Java on Raffles’ 1816 visit to London. The whole of Highwood was a museum: family portraits on the walls, including a miniature of Maryanne in a tawny-coloured dress and another of Lady Raffles in a jewelled headdress, festooned with pearls. This was a small replica by E.A.Chalons of the watercolour he did in 1817, which went down with the Fame. Its companion piece of Raffles himself, in an identical frame, shows him with fine, light-reddish hair. All other portraits render his hair and eyes – which were large and light – much darker than they were.
Pudgy-faced William Flint hung there, and William Hull painted by Gerard de Vismes. There was a bust of Ella, showing her delicate profile; a bust of Napoleon by Canova which had belonged to Marshal Daendels, liberated by Raffles from Buitenzorg; and the original plaster cast of Raffles’ bust from Chantrey’s studio. In the ante-room to the drawing room stood a brass-inlaid round table made of the fine tortoiseshell William Flint procured for Raffles in Singapore. On this table lay a silver and tortoiseshell box with a key, lined in red silk and containing the remains of a human bone and a silver coin which had been found inside a fifteen-foot alligator. Also on the table were intricately worked gold boxes, and a kris in a gold sheath.
There was another and round Amboyna-wood table which, like the fourteen miniatures of the Mughal emperors from Tamurlane to Tippoo set in green velvet in a glass case, may have been in the drawing-room; likewise the ivory Chinese box fitted with intricately carved smaller boxes, containing tokens for various games made of mother-of-pearl and ivory filigree, every delicate piece engraved with the coat of arms on one side and ‘TSR’ on the other; and the folding chessboard of brass, tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl. There were small fragile objects in ivory filigree – fan-holders like miniature umbrella stands, to be fixed to a wall; a visiting-card holder, a toothpick-case.
Most of the ethnological collection must always have been ‘kept in boxes’ in the outbuildings of Highwood. One which travelled with them from Bencoolen has survived, with LADY RAFFLES stencilled on the side. It is made of thick, heavy wood, iron-bound, with a coved top, and is the size of a large travelling trunk, fitted inside with drawers and compartments. It would have weighed a ton even before anything was put in it, and they sailed with scores of such containers. Some were custom-made for individual objects, such as their bulgy silver tea-urn (engraved with the coat of arms).
The bulk of the Raffles Collection was presented by Charles Flint to the British Museum after Lady Raffles’ death. Another consignment was deposited in 1939 by Muriel Rosdew Raffles-Flint (Mrs J.H.Drake), Charles Flint’s granddaughter. There are around 1,500 individual objects associated with Raffles in the British Museum’s collections.
Of those items which are on display, some are in the Department of Asia, some in the Enlightenment Gallery, and a handful in other departments. The pick of the collection can be seen – Raffles’ table-top model gamelan orchestra and sets of gongs, the bird-woman and the heads of the Buddha from Borobudur, masks and puppets, small bronze Javanese deities. The items in the Coins and Medals Department were mostly donated by Lady Raffles in her lifetime.
There remain around 800 objects stored in boxes and drawers, both on the BM’s main site and in its off-site depositories. (Raffles did not want his collection to be ‘kept in boxes’.) They include inter alia his Javanese puppets, masks, krises, musical instruments, the Dutch torture instruments Raffles salvaged in Malacca, some textiles, and a quantity of miscellaneous artefacts chiefly of value by accumulation. Raffles was concerned with the materiality of life, ‘the habits of man’ – what the Enlightenment called ‘res humanae’. His obsession with collecting was sympathetic and systematic. Everything was labelled. Not only original objects, but models and miniatures commissioned by him, served his primary purpose – which was to bring home, in both senses, to the United Kingdom the complexity and ingenuity of south-east Asian culture and civilisation.
Ella, pious like her mother, growing up among artefacts from countries she never knew and in the sunlight and shadow of her father’s memory, became engaged in late 1839 to the newly ordained John Sumner, eldest son of Lady Raffles’ friend Charles Sumner, the Bishop of Winchester. She was small like her father – ‘little Ella will always be little Ella’ said her mother, who believed that ‘tall people are seldom as strong as short ones.’ Soon after her engagement she succumbed to tuberculosis. In February 1840 she declined rapidly, ‘reduced to a skeleton’. She was taken to the south coast for the sea air, and died at St Leonard’s on 5 May 1840, aged nineteen. Her mother was devastated. Her grief was terrible and uncontrolled. She had lost her last child and her last link with her husband.
The Bunsens, when the Baron was Prussian Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St James, moved to Oak Hill at Barnet, four miles from Highwood. At Oak Hill Lady Raffles met James Brooke, the Rajah of Sarawak in North Borneo. The Sultan of Brunei had granted him this hereditary title, with total sovereignty, in return for services rendered by him against the Sultan’s enemies. Brooke was back in England in 1847, being lionized and feted (rather as Raffles was in 1817) while campaigning, successfully, to gain recognition of his kingly status from the Government.
Brooke was an army officer in the Company’s service who, after his father died leaving him £30,000, bought his own schooner, which he converted into a small warship. His plan – consciously following Raffles’ example and Raffles’ expansionist aspirations – was to stymie the Dutch by establishing a chain of British settlements from Singapore to North Borneo to northern Australia. He knew Singapore, and was inspired by what Raffles wrote about Borneo’s potential in his History of Java. He shared Raffles’ liberal and reformist views and his fantasy of being ‘the great Mogul’ – although his harsh measures against the indigenous people were, in 1851, the subject of an enquiry in Singapore. But in 1847, talking with dashing James Brooke, a man after her own heart, and one who appreciated the genius of her husband, would have been most agreeable for Lady Raffles.
A year and a half before Lady Raffles died, she bade a formal farewell to her friends, explaining that she was no longer in a fit state to write letters. Her sister Mary Jane, widow of Peter Auber, came to look after her at Highwood. She died in December 1858, aged seventy-two, and was buried in the graveyard of St Paul’s, Mill Hill, the new church built at the instigation of Sir Stamford Raffles and William Wilberforce, to whom she had remained close, sharing his religious piety, until his death in 1833.
Frances Bunsen, learning of Lady Raffles’ passing, thanked God ‘for the termination of such a living death as she had existed through for years.’ She did not mean just mental and physical decline, but the burden of grief and loss that Lady Raffles – that ‘astonishing person’ – had borne. Lady Raffles left a small annuity of £30 to Mary Grimes ‘as a reward for her kindness and faithfulness.’ Highwood was left to her sister Alice Mudge’s daughter, Jenny Rosdew Mudge, who had married Maryanne’s son – transformed, by the taking of holy orders, from Charley Flint into the Rev. William Charles Raffles Flint. They sold Highwood and its land in 1859. The Rev. Charles Raffles Flint became Vicar of Holy Trinity Church at Sunningdale in Ber
kshire, to which he added a chancel and a chapel in memory of Sir Stamford Raffles, his uncle and guardian. He died in 1884.
Cousin Thomas, the Rev. Thomas Raffles, retired in 1861 on a pension of £400 a year. He died in 1863 and his funeral in Liverpool was, unlike his cousin’s, a public event.
The year in which Sophia Raffles died also saw the end of the East India Company, following what was called in England the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857. It started with a rebellion of the Company’s sepoy soldiers in Meerut and spread through native states, with British retribution of the most severe kind. It was a case of ‘something must be done’. The Government of India Act of 1858 – properly, the Act for the Better Government of India – provided for the liquidation of the East India Company and the transfer of all its functions and property to the British Crown.
Lord Grenville had advocated such a transfer during the debates on the 1813 Charter renewal. Five years before Raffles was even born, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776) argued against monopolies on the grounds that they worked against the nation that set them up:
Since the establishment of the East India Company … the other inhabitants of England, over and above being excluded from the trade, must have paid, in the price of the East India goods which they have consumed, not only for all the extraordinary profits which the Company must have made upon those goods in consequence of their monopoly, but for all the extraordinary waste which the fraud and abuse inseparable from the management of so great a company must necessarily have occasioned.
With free trade, Smith suggested, merchants would find it in their interests ‘to reside in the East Indies and to employ their capital in providing goods’ for Europe. The Company’s settlements ‘should be put under the immediate protection of the Sovereign.’
And so, more than eighty years later, they were. India House in Leadenhall Street, and its furniture and fittings, was sold in 1861, and the buildings were demolished the following year. Nothing is to big to fail.
Note on Sources
William Dalrymple in The White Mughals says that there are fifty shelf-miles of East India Company papers in the India Office Records in the British Library. I can well believe it. No one in a lifetime could read them all. Every researcher, within a relevant topic and period, reads what he or she can. Fortunately we are all in search of something different; I extracted material on what most preoccupied me, and have benefited, and quoted, from previous writers on Raffles who published letters, official despatches and documents which I have not myself read. In those hours in the Asian and African Studies Reading Room, battling with recalcitrant microfilm-reading machines, I was particularly concerned with the Raffles-Minto Collection, the Raffles Collection, and most of all with the Raffles Family Papers which had not been available to previous biographers.
Chief among those previous biographers is the grandfather of Raffles studies, Charles Edward Wurtzburg who, on his death in 1952, left a manuscript of 450,000 words. Clifford Whitting edited it down to 788 pages, and it was published as Raffles of the Eastern Isles in 1954. The work remains so dense that you cannot always see the wood for the trees, but I have constantly consulted Wurtzburg, also his copious research papers deposited in the Cambridge University Library. The research papers also include miscellaneous copies of letters, including those from Raffles to his friend in Penang David Brown and to Thomas McQuoid. Wurtzburg should really be mentioned in the endnotes for every chapter, but my debt to him is acknowledged here once and for all so as to avoid endless repetition.
The other principal Raffles biographies are by D.C. Boulger, The Life of Sir Stamford Raffles (1897); H.E. Egerton, Sir Stamford Raffles and the Far East (1900); J.A. Bethune Cook, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, Founder of Singapore (1918), specially strong on missionaries and the Singapore Institute; Sir Reginald Coupland Raffles 1781–1826 (1926); Emily Hahn, Raffles of Singapore (1946), which is useful for the Dutch view of Raffles and Dutch documents; H.F. Pearson This Other India: A Biography of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1957); Colin Clair, Sir Stamford Raffles, Founder of Singapore (1963); Maurice Collis, Raffles (1966).
If C.E. Wurtzburg was the grandfather, then Professor John Bastin is the father of Raffles studies. Since the early 1950s he has been publishing articles, monographs, pamphlets, editions, introductions and short books about every aspect of Raffles’ life and career, his policies, his family, friends and colleagues, his collections, and South East Asian culture and geopolitics. The footnotes to the books and documents edited or introduced by him constitute a Raffles encyclopaedia. My bibliography and endnotes testify to my enormous obligation to this body of work.
An essential, if partisan and partial source, incorporating many letters, documents and despatches, is Sophia Raffles’ Memoir of the Life and Career of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1830): 723 pages of text, plus 100 more of additional material, appendices and index. It can be read in the 1991 facsimile edition with an introduction by John Bastin.
I have not loaded the narrative with footnotes, but have appended for each chapter the principle texts and documents consulted, listed in the order in which they were drawn on or quoted, with comments where required. Readers who want more detailed particulars can enquire on the website rafflesbook.co.uk.
All letters from Raffles to his sister Maryanne, and all letters to or from Sophia Raffles (other than those to the Rev. Thomas Raffles) are from the Raffles Family Papers in the British Library, a collection which also includes many letters from non-family members.
The inflammatory correspondence between Raffles and Colonel William Farquhar was read in the National Archives of Singapore.
Raffles’ letters to his mother, to the Rev. Thomas Raffles, to his Uncle William Raffles, and Sophia Raffles’ letters to the Rev. Thomas Raffles, are in the Tang Holdings Collection in Singapore, edited with commentary and holograph facsimiles by John Bastin as The Letters and Books of Sir Stamford Raffles and Lady Raffles (2009).
The letters and papers of John Palmer are in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, as is the letter from Raffles to Alexander Hare about meeting Napoleon on St Helena.
The Indian Papers of the First Earl of Minto, which include Captain William Taylor’s manuscript journal and letters, are in the National Library of Scotland.
Endnotes
Introduction
Patrick O’Brian, H.M.S. Surprise, The Thirteen Gun Salute, The Nutmeg of Consolation
T.M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire
Chapter 1
Wa Hakim’s reminiscences recorded by H.T. Haughton in 1882 and published in Sheppard, Singapore 150 Years. The Malay historian quoted in translation is Raja Ali Haji ibn Ahmad, see Matheson and Watson, The Precious Gift
Capt., J.G.F. Crawford’s unpublished Diary is quoted in Wurtzburg
Thomas Sadler (ed) Crabb Robinson
Thomas Stamford Raffles B.A, etc (ed) Memoirs of the Life & Ministry of the Rev Thomas Raffles
For Walworth: Survey of London Vol.. 24 1955; various websites. The Cuming Museum is now at the Old Town Hall, 151 Walworth Rd
Peter Wilson Coldham, Child Apprentices in America from Christ’s Hospital
Thomas Faulkner, The History and Antiquities of the Parish of Hammersmith
Sophia Raffles, Memoir …
John Bastin, Letters and Books Chapter 1
D.C. Boulger, Life of Sir Stamford Raffles for ‘the letter of 14 October 1819’. The original is in private hands
C.H. Phillips, The East India Company 1784–1834
John Keay, The Honourable Company
H.V. Bowen, The Business of Empire
Sir Frank Swettenham, British Malaya
C.B. Buckley, Anecdotal History of Olden Times in Singapore Vol. 1
A.E.H. Anson, About Others and Myself (for the Ibbetson story)
Captain Thomas Williamson, The East India Vade-Mecum
John Bastin, Olivia Mariamne Raffles
John Evans, The Gentleman Usher
James Fergusson (ed) Letter
s of George Dempster to Sir Adam Fergusson
London Metropolitan Archives for the Old Bailey report
Burke’s Landed Gentry
Charlotte Louisa Hawkins-Dempster The Manners of My Time
Robert J. Devenish and Charles H. McLaughlin Historical and Genealogical Records of the Devenish Families of England and Ireland
Brian Harrison, Holding the Fort
Karl Marx ‘Primary Accumulation’ Capital Vol. 2
David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste
Chapter 2
Captain Thomas Williamson, The East India Vade-Mecum
Sir Evan Cotton, East Indiamen
Frank Swettenham, British Malaya
Alfred Spencer (ed) Memoirs of William Hickey Vol. IV
John Bastin, Olivia Mariamne Raffles
Jan Dalley, The Black Hole
John Bastin, John Leyden and Thomas Stamford Raffles
Sophia Raffles, Memoir …
Rev. James Morton, The Poetical Remains of the late Dr John Leyden
Elisha Trapaud, A Short Account of Prince of Wales’s Island in the East-Indies
Prince of Wales Island Gazette
Stephen Tomkins, William Wilberforce
Chapter 3
Raffles Page 34
