Lord William Bentinck: The Making of a Liberal Imperialist 1774 - 1839 [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520313613

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LORD W I L L I A M B E N T I N C K

By the same author •

LORD W I L L I A M B E N T I N C K AND THE B R I T I S H OCCUPATION OF S I C I L Y 1 8 1 I - I 4

L O R D AND L A D Y W I L L I A M

BENTINCK

D r a w n in R o m e , 1816, by Ingres. Musée Bonnat,

Bayonne

Lord William Bentinck THE MAKING OF A LIBERAL IMPERIALIST 1774-1839

By

JOHN ROSSELLI

U N I V E R S I T Y OF C A L I F O R N I A P R E S S Berkeley and Los Angeles

U n i v e r s i t y o f California Press B e r k e l e y and L o s A n g e l e s , California

All rights reserved. N o part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

© J o h n Rosselli 1974 ISBN 0 - 5 2 0 - 0 2 2 9 9 - 8 LC 7 2 - 9 5 3 0 2 Printed in G r e a t Britain

To Nicky

Contents Preface

page n

Acknowledgments

15

Abbreviations

17

P A R T I - T H E C A R E E R OF A S E C O N D SON 1 • 23• 4• 5• 6• 7•

A Reputation Burlington House A Studious Soldier A Disciple of Burke A Pittite in Disgrace An Evangelical Couple An Independent Canningite

19 23 33 39 45 56 66

8 • A Kind of Liberal

78

9 • A Fenland Improver 10 • The Road to Calcutta

86 100

P A R T II- EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y 1 • Serving the Nation

107

2 • The Nation in Arms: from Flanders to Sicily, 1793-1811 3 - British Greatness and Indian Happiness: Madras, 1803-1807 4 • 'The Queen of our Colonies': 5• 6• 7• 8•

Sicily, 1811-1814 The Italian Adventure, 1811-1815 'Nationality' for India, 1828-1839 A British Mughal Empire 'Responsible Partners': Native Agency and Native Agents 7

112 123 147 167 180 189 201

CONTENTS 9 • Nationality and Culture: Religious, Linguistic, and Educational Policy

208

10 • The Expansion of Empire P A R T III

225

THE PURSUIT OF

EQUITY

1 • From Certainty to Doubt

237

2 • Apprenticeship in Madras

238

3 • Apprenticeship in Sicily

245

4 • Disillusion and Fulfilment: the Western Provinces, 1829-1833

249

5 • The Shepherd and the Wolf: Judicial Reform, 1805-1835

265

P A R T IV

STEWARD OF A G R E A T

ESTATE

1 • The Rift in the Darkness

272

2 • British Rule and Indian Development, 1803-1839

277

3 • Development for Whose Benefit?

293

PART V

GOVERNOR

1 • The Wheel of Administration

298

2 • Head of the Service

301

3 • Administrative Generalship

316

4 • A Utilitarian Governor-General?

321

P A R T VI- NOT Q U I T E A

RADICAL

Epilogue

335

References

338

Index

377

ILLUSTRATIONS Lord and Lady William Bentinck, by Ingres. Drawn in Rome, 1816. Musée Bonnat, Bayonne. Lord William Bentinck, in old age. Drawing attributed to J . Atkinson. National Portrait Gallery, London.

8

frontispiece page 325

'Priegovi seguitiate la vostra stella, e non ne lasciate andare un iota per cosa al mondo, perché io credo, credetti, e crederrò sempre che sia vero quello che dice il Boccaccio: che egli è meglio fare et pentirsi, che non fare et pentirsi.' 'Pray follow your star, and give up not an iota of it for anything in the world, for I believe, have believed, and ever shall believe in the truth of Boccaccio's saying: that it is better to act, and be sorry, than not to act, and be sorry: NICCOLÒ

MACHIAVELLI

to Francesco Vettori, 25th February 1513

PREFACE This is neither a biography of Lord William Bentinck nor a history of his Indian administration. It is intended as a study of his career in its historical setting. This means, first, that I have tried to study Bentinck's career as a whole. T h e book takes as the most notable phase of that career Bentinck's seven years (1828-35) ¡ n the Supreme Government of India. But it gives almost equal importance to his involvement in British and Italian affairs, as well as to his early Governorship of Madras in 18031807; it glances at minor episodes elsewhere. Its aim is to show that for a man like Bentinck Indian administration was not an exclusive speciality: his work in India can be fully understood only if we understand the continuity of his inner development and of the issues he dealt with. Secondly, I have tried to show Bentinck's career as that of a member — i n some ways exceptional, in others representative'—of a particular class. Bentinck was not just a man who happened to run a diplomatic mission or the government of British India. He was a member, relatively unprivileged, of the British landed aristocracy—in his day an allpurpose governing class whose remarkable success in maintaining itself owed much to its ability to come to terms with competing or overlapping groups: at home, the landed gentry, merchant oligarchies, the emergent industrial and professional middle classes; in India, the corporate interest of the East India Company's services, declining or nascent Indian elites. I have therefore set out to follow Bentinck's changing relation to these groups as well as to his own, and, from time to time, to show what one or other group was about. Given these aims, a study of Bentinck's career faces obvious problems. One is that of giving some account of such disparate issues as Nottinghamshire politics, the Sicilian constitutional movement, and Indian judicial reform without losing the thread of the argument. A kindred problem is that of securing the choral resonance of history without drowning out Bentinck's individual voice. Then there is the proportion to be given to this issue and that. 11

PREFACE In tackling these problems I have by and large avoided strict chronology and have instead dealt with Bentinck's career by topics. After an account in Part I of Bentinck's development up to his governorgeneralship the book consists of a series of essays on historical problems which, as I think, this one man's career illuminates. In the words of Jacob Burckhardt, a pioneer of this kind of historiography, it is in each essay 'as if we were to take a number of figures out of a picture, leaving the rest where it was'. T h e advantage of the method is coherence of argument, the inherent risk repetitiveness. I hope to have secured the one and fought off the other. A book on a man who spent a total of eleven years as an Indian administrator—not to mention four years in command in the Mediterranean—is bound to leave something out. In India I have concentrated on internal questions in which Bentinck played a significant role. I have not dealt with external relations—with China, with Persia, or, except briefly, with the North-west border. Nor have I touched on the East India Company's other possessions in Burma, Malaya, and Singapore. Even within India I have dealt only skimmingly with some questions (the reform of the opium monopoly, the suppression of the Thags, the details of administrative reform within the company's services). In the Mediterranean I have virtually ignored Bentinck's dealings with Sardinia, Corsica, Greece, the Ionian Islands, and Dalmatia for the sake of concentrating on his much more important role in Sicily and mainland Italy. T h e book rests in the first place on Bentinck's vast collection of private papers (now at Nottingham University); except in one matter, land revenue administration, I have not attempted to go through the official records of his Indian governments in their still vaster bulk. I have, however, been greatly helped by the work of students who have done just that, especially by the unpublished theses of D r Cynthia Barrett, D r K . N . Pandey, and Professor J. F. Hilliker among others. I have unfortunately not been able to consult the volumes—forthcoming as I w r i t e — o f documents concerning Bentinck's GovernorGeneralship edited by Professor C . H. Philips and Dr B. N . Pandey; at an early stage, through the courtesy of the editors, I was able to see some of their typescripts, but I have in the event used the original documents. On Sicilian and Italian matters the book rests on a study of the Foreign Office documents. On all phases of Bentinck's career I have set out to use the available published sources as well as whatever manuscript evidence I could 12

PREFACE find. More of Bentinck's private letters turned up than might have been expected. Some have clearly been lost. I am aware of only two or three possible sources of letters to which I could not get access. One of them, the important collection of Louis-Philippe's papers lately deposited by the Count of Paris in the Archives Nationales, is unfortunately closed to historians for some time ahead. A word about the presentation of documentary evidence. It is the fashion among historians of British India, rather more than among modern historians at large, to reproduce the spelling and punctuation of late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century documents. I have not followed this practice. Bentinck for most of his life wrote 'publick,' 'contrail', 'oeconomy'; like other men of his day he capitalised many nouns. T o reproduce such features in documents of the modern period is, I think, to meet an antiquarian taste rather than to help comprehension; to follow literally the punctuation of Bentinck's diary entries — o f t e n non-existent—would confuse the reader. In quoting from documents I have throughout modernised spelling and punctuation; I have not, however, altered obsolete verbal forms (e.g. 'beat' for 'beaten'). On the same grounds I have not reproduced the often barbarous spelling of Indian names in contemporary British documents. Indian names appear as far as possible in the standard modern transliteration, but without diacritical marks. Indian place names follow what seems to be the English spelling now current in India. T h u s we have Calcutta, not Kalkata; but Thanjavur, not Tanjore. When the current spelling seems likely to confuse I have given, at the first mention, the older spelling in square brackets. Again as a help to comprehension, especially among Indian readers, I have either translated into English passages in Latin, French, or Italian, or else have given after each foreign phrase a translation in square brackets. Drawing a net round Bentinck's career seems to take a long time. T h e late Philip Morrell, who had access to the private papers, as early as 1909 was working on a biography; at his death in 1943 it was unfinished. M y own work began as long ago as 1948, though it was afterwards set aside for ten years. A long haul such as this leaves one with a debt of gratitude to many people. Most of my debts I have recorded below. T w o of them, however, I must mention here. One is to Professor Asa Briggs, who made it possible for me to return to historical work. T h e other is to Professor Sir Herbert Butterfield, my supervisor

13

PREFACE

many years ago, whose example as an historian has led me on and whose wise advice as a friend has stayed me at crucial moments. Neither is responsible for the form or content of this book. Without them it would not have been written. J . R. Brighton June 1972

14

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Papers in the Royal Archives, Windsor, are quoted by gracious permission of H.M. the Queen. I am grateful to the Duke of Portland for permission to use the Bentinck Papers in Nottingham University Department of MSS, and to the following persons for letting me use the collections listed after their names: Mrs Pauline Dower (papers of Sir Charles Trevelyan), the late Viscount Exmouth (Exmouth Papers), Earl Fitzwilliam and the City Librarian, Sheffield (Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments), Sir Fergus Graham, Bart. (Graham Papers), the Earl of Harewood (Canning Papers), Mrs Naomi Mitchison (letter book of Anne Dundas Strange), and Sir Harry Verney, Bart. (Qaydon House Papers). Illustrations are reproduced by permission of the institutions named in the captions. Far more librarians and archivists of public institutions have helped me than can be listed in detail. I have had a long-standing happy relationship with the Nottingham University Department of MSS, in particular with Mrs M. A. Welch, Keeper of MSS, with her predecessor, Mr J. H. Hodson, and with Mr A. Cameron. I have also had much help from officials of the India Office Library (especially Dr R. Bingle and Mrs M. Archer), the National Library, Calcutta, the National Register of Archives, the National Library of Scotland (especially Mr A. S. Bell), the Archives Nationales, Paris (especially Mme S. d'Huart), the Uttar Pradesh State Archives, the National Maritime Museum, the libraries of Trinity College, Cambridge, Friends House, London, and the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, the Curator of King's Lynn Museum (Miss A. S. Mottram), as well as from about one-third of the county archivists in England and from the officials of several branches of the Italian State Archives, in particular those of Turin, Milan, Florence, Naples, and Palermo. I thank them all. Professor Kenneth Ballhatchet kindly agreed to read the whole of this book in typescript. From him and from others who have read parts of it in one form or another—Prof. Asa Briggs, Dr Percival Spear, Prof. Eric Stokes, and Prof. F. M. L. Thompson—I have had iS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

much helpful comment; I remain of course wholly responsible for what follows. I am particularly grateful to Dr Spear for steady encouragement to pursue a subject he has himself been keenly interested in. I am indebted to the following authors of unpublished theses either for permission to read their work or, where it is freely available, for encouragement to draw on it: Profs. D. E. Ginter and J. F. Hilliker, Drs C. Barrett, M. Gupta, J. H. Moses, G. Seed, and A. Siddiqi. One author of a useful thesis, Dr K. N. Pandey, I was unable to trace. For help with finding papers, references, or illustrations, or for stimulating comments and discussions, I wish to thank Prof. M. L. Clarke, Prof. B. S. Cohn, the late Earl of Gosford, Dr Benedicte Hjejle, the late R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Mr D. Mack Smith, Dr James Maclean, Dr P. J. Marshall, Mrs Rosalind Mitchison, Prof. Morris David Morris, Dr B. N. Pandey, the late Henri Rivière, Prof. Rosario Romeo, and Dr Alex Wilson, as well as my colleagues Bruce Graham, Ranajit Guha, Anthony Low, and Peter Reeves. Grants from the Social Science Research Council and the University of Sussex enabled me to do research in India. A grant from the British Academy and a period of leave from the university enabled me to write this book. My wife Eleanor Timbres Rosselli has not typed, indexed, proofread, or done any of the other things historians often thank their wives for, apart from being herself. The book is dedicated to her. J. R.

16

ABBREVIATIONS IOL: I OR: BP:

India Office Library India Office Records Papers of Lord William Bentinck and other members of the Bentinck family in the Department of Manuscripts, Nottingham University Add. MSS British Museum Additional Manuscripts PRO Public Record Office Scot. Rec. Off. Scottish Record Office Canning MSS Papers of George Canning and Joan Viscountess Canning in Sheepscar Library, Leeds Claydon House MSS Papers of Sir Harry Calvert and Sir Harry Verney at Claydon House, Aylesbury, Bucks Exmouth MSS Papers of the first Viscount Exmouth at Canonteign, Exeter Graham MSS Papers of Sir James Graham (microfilm copy in Cambridge University Library) Manchester MSS Papers of the Dukes of Manchester in Huntingdonshire County Record Office, Huntingdon Minto MSS Papers of the first Earl of Minto, National Library of Scotland Pari. Papers Parliamentary Papers (the pagination is that of the volumes in the British Museum State Paper Room) DNB Dictionary of National Biography Bentinck and Sicily J. Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck and the British Occupation of Sicily, 1811-14 (Cambridge, 1956) 'Progetto italiano' J. Rosselli, 'II Progetto italiano di Lord William Bentinck, 1811-1814', Rivista Storica Italiana, LXXIX, no. 2 (1967) The place of publication of books referred to is London unless otherwise stated. Indian newspapers referred to are in the National Library, Calcutta. Glasgow newspapers are in the British Museum Newspaper Library or the Mitchell Library, Glasgow. 'Op. cit.' and 'loc cit.' are used only when the source in question has been referred to at most a page or two earlier; otherwise the title of a source already referred to is given in shortened form.

17

PART I

The Career of a Second Son 1-A

REPUTATION

Near the heart of Calcutta the Victoria Memorial enshrines the pomp, part reality, part fantasy, of Britain's Indian Empire. In the gardens stand the statues of some of the men who ran it. When the West Bengal Marxists in 1969 were busy removing from public places all tokens of 'imperialism' these, because the Government of India owns them, were spared to stand a while longer. Among the toga'd or bearded rulers one statue commemorates Lord William Bentinck; on its base runs a famous inscription which Macaulay wrote just after Bentinck in 1835 had left his last office as Governor-General of India: To WILLIAM CAVENDISH BENTINCK Who, during seven years, ruled India with eminent prudence, integrity, and benevolence: Who, placed at the head of a great empire, never laid aside the simplicity and moderation of a private citizen: Who infused into Oriental despotism the spirit of British freedom: Who never forgot that the end of government is the happiness of the governed: Who abolished cruel rites: Who effaced humiliating distinctions: Who gave liberty to the expression of public opinion: Whose constant study it was to elevate the intellectual and moral character of the nations committed to his charge: This monument Was erected by men, who, differing in race, in manners, in language, and in religion, Cherish, with equal veneration and gratitude, the memory of his wise, upright, and paternal administration.

A few years later Macualay drove in the point. He ended his diatribe on the imposition of British rule in Bengal by looking forward confidently to the 'veneration... with which the latest generation of Hindus will contemplate the statue of Lord William Bentinck.' 19

I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON By 1840, when Macaulay thus rashly took to prophecy, Bentinck was dead. He had died in Paris the year before. Through a wandering life he had carefully preserved his papers. His widow got them together; she meant to have his biography written. But she too died within four years; no biography ever came out.1 For lack of a record setting out his whole career Bentinck's reputation has ever since been fragmented. He appears in historical works on such disparate subjects as the Peninsular War, the Italian Risorgimento, and the North Indian agrarian economy; historians' interpretations of his character and work are strikingly at variance. Within the last few years one author has dismissed him as 'an ambitious opportunist with little political judgment and perhaps not even wholly sane'; 2 for another he showed 'genius' and 'his achievement has not been surpassed by any British administrator [of India] before or after him.' 3 Bentinck was a controversial figure in his lifetime; so he has remained. Bentinck, the second son of the Duke of Portland (Prime Minister in 1783 and again in 1807-9), lived through a quarter-century of war that scattered men over the world and brought them forward early. Even in that mobile age—when Wellington made his name in India and Talleyrand found refuge in America—his career was unusually broken up. It was not easy to make a coherent story out of a youthful Governorship of Madras (cut short after four years in 1803-7), followed by a stormy proconsulship in Sicily and mainland Italy in 1811—15, and then, after long delay, by a return to India as GovernorGeneral in 1828-35. Bentinck had, besides, served as a young Army officer in the Low Countries, Ireland, Northern Italy, Egypt, and the Iberian Peninsula. At home he was a member of Parliament, an agricultural entrepreneur, and a promoter of fen drainage and steam navigation. In time he travelled over four continents and served in three. It was a life dispersed. At his death Bentinck was remembered chiefly as GovernorGeneral of India. His tenure was known to have marked important reforms: he had abolished widows' self-immolation, begun to suppress the religiously dedicated murderers called Thags, brought forward Indians in the administration, and virtually freed the Indian press. At the same time he had made himself deeply unpopular with British civil servants and officers in India by an economy drive which cut their allowances. They nicknamed him—whose family had come over to England in 1688 with William of Orange—'the Clipping Dutchman'; they openly wished he would drown in the Ganges or break his neck 20

1 • A REPUTATION in the mountains. In the folk memory of the British services traces of the 'clipping' with its attendant bitterness survived down to the Second World War. 4 The obituaries in the Calcutta press—written and read for the most part by Englishmen—uneasily mirrored this dual reputation. On the one hand the newspapers felt the need to apologise for Bentinck's 'failings'—chiefly his zeal in putting through the economy drive; on the other hand the missionary papers praised him for having given Indians 'the sense that their country was still their own, and their rulers were likewise their stewards'. 5 Even in this there may have been a touch of obituarist's piety; writing a few years earlier at the close of Bentinck's term, a civil servant had publicly dismissed him as 'the busy meddling governor of detail'; 'to a certain extent' Bentinck had meant well, but his mind, a 'strange mixture' of greatness and 'inferiority', fitted him at best to rule over 'a small island in the West Indies'. He spoke for others.6 In London Edward Thornton, an official at the East India House, wrote off Bentinck's administration, one or two displays of 'extravagance' apart, as 'almost a blank'. 7 In Victorian times Bentinck's reputation was a party matter. According to a Liberal commentator (who ranked him with such great humanitarian reformers as Wilberforce and Shaftesbury in having benefited mankind) 'the Whigs would regard his rule [in India] as a pattern of what is good; the Tories would denounce it as an example of what is bad'. 8 Indeed a Tory historian attacked Bentinck's 'total want of military capacity' and blamed his 'unstatesmanlike retrenchments' for the disasters of the First Afghan War.« Historians with Indian experience, however, even when they blamed this or that act of policy, gave him an honourable place among British rulers; one of them called Bentinck's term 'the most memorable period of improvement' in the first half of the century. 10 This last view has ever since gained ground. For several reasons— the spread of liberalism, the rise of a Westernised Indian intelligentsia, the decline of empire, and the closer study of sources—it has become orthodoxy to see the social and educational changes of the 1830s as a turning point in Indian history. The mid-twentieth-century Liberal view has been put by Percival Spear. Completely reversing Thornton's judgment, he sees Bentinck as the most important if not the ablest of nineteenth-century governors. Bentinck 'commenced a political and social revolution and introduced a new era'. His decisiveness led him at times into hasty acts, but it was on the whole an 'unmixed good for 21

I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON India' whose welfare Bentinck had steadily at heart. The dislike he incurred among the British came about not in spite but 'because of his courage and public spirit'. Spear has also been influential in presenting Bentinck as a man moved by Benthamite Radical doctrine. 11 This still leaves open the question: how far was Bentinck an imperialist? Writing in 1892 at the height of the last period of European imperial expansion, the author of the 'Rulers of India' volume on Bentinck found it necessary to apologise for 'the absence of foreign adventure and territorial conquest' and the prevalence during his rule of 'unattractive internal reform': set beside the exploits of Lord Wellesley and other conquerors it might 'seem commonplace'. 12 An eminent Indian nationalist historian, however, has since reversed both diagnosis and judgment: Bentinck's annexations of Indian States, though unspectacular compared with earlier and later conquests, still 'fairly illustrate' the British policy of 'aggressive imperialism'. 13 Whether Bentinck should or should not be thought of as an imperialist ('of free trade' or of some other kind) remains largely uninvestigated. By historians of India Bentinck's share in European affairs has been almost wholly ignored. It has drawn very mixed notice from a few British and Italian historians. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars Bentinck was one of the first to raise the standard of Italian independence and unity; he had previously helped to bring about a liberal constitution in Sicily, then a virtual British protectorate. Some of the bold steps he took to these ends—at times in defiance of his own government—were presumably in the mind of the diarist Charles Greville when he wrote of Bentinck (his maternal uncle) as a man who 'is not right-headed, and has committed some great blunder or other in every public situation in which he has been placed'. 14 This attitude has persisted in historians who have looked at Bentinck's doings either, like one or two early British and Austrian writers, 15 from the point of view of Queen Maria Carolina (whom he expelled from her Sicilian kingdom), or, like the great diplomatic historian Sir Charles Webster, with Britain's European policy in mind; for Webster Bentinck was 'a brilliant and unbalanced egoist, all the more dangerous because he was also imbued with a species of idealism'. 16 Yet for a Liberal historian of European nationalist movements Bentinck's Sicilian policy was 'enlightened'; the constitution remained 'a signpost to the whole Italian Liberal movement'. 17 At the same time another British historian of far from Liberal persuasion could describe Bentinck as uncommonly capable and far-sighted—because he was study22

1 • A REPUTATION ing Bentinck's mission to the Spanish Junta at the start of the Peninsular War rather than his more controversial Italian career. 18 T o Italian historians Bentinck was for long something of a puzzle, in part because the Sicilian movement which he helped along—and which aimed at the island's independence from the mainland—did not fit Risorgimento orthodoxy. From 1890 to the Second World War a string of historians interested in the secret societies concluded that 'English gold', liberally administered by Bentinck, had had much to do with stirring up and even with founding Italian conspiratorial groups at the end of the Napoleonic period. A great historian, Croce, concluded on the one hand that Bentinck's Sicilian career was evidence for a persistent British design on the island, on the other that the attempt to raise and unite mainland Italy in 1814 was no more than 'a headlong sally or an adventure'. 19 More recently Marxist historians have tended to write down the importance of the moderate aristocratic groups on which Bentinck relied both in Sicily and on the mainland and hence of his Italian career as a whole. T o survey Bentinck's role in historiography is not to mock at historians' disagreements—a game far too easy—but to bring out how fragmented views of a career such as this must lead to discord and bafflement: all the more when the subject is by temperament a forerunner, that is, a man who grasps at more than he can fully understand, and who starts more than he can finish. The present work attempts to study and interpret Bentinck's career as a whole. In this interpretation the main themes of his career are two. An able, energetic, not particularly intellectual man of high birth but no fortune grows from a youthful passion for ideological war against the France of the Revolution and Napoleon to a liberalism advanced for his time and class. A man who has fastened early on the idea of the nation united and independent tries to apply it, first in Italy, then in India, each time within a vision of Britain as imperial benefactor. The book follows, through diverse scenes and activities, the making of an early Liberal Imperialist.

2 - B U R L I N G T O N HOUSE British officials in India often appear in historical works like demigods out of nowhere. They arrive, carry out their tasks, and depart. At most we glimpse their home background; their function, as the historian sees

23

1 • A REPUTATION ing Bentinck's mission to the Spanish Junta at the start of the Peninsular War rather than his more controversial Italian career. 18 T o Italian historians Bentinck was for long something of a puzzle, in part because the Sicilian movement which he helped along—and which aimed at the island's independence from the mainland—did not fit Risorgimento orthodoxy. From 1890 to the Second World War a string of historians interested in the secret societies concluded that 'English gold', liberally administered by Bentinck, had had much to do with stirring up and even with founding Italian conspiratorial groups at the end of the Napoleonic period. A great historian, Croce, concluded on the one hand that Bentinck's Sicilian career was evidence for a persistent British design on the island, on the other that the attempt to raise and unite mainland Italy in 1814 was no more than 'a headlong sally or an adventure'. 19 More recently Marxist historians have tended to write down the importance of the moderate aristocratic groups on which Bentinck relied both in Sicily and on the mainland and hence of his Italian career as a whole. T o survey Bentinck's role in historiography is not to mock at historians' disagreements—a game far too easy—but to bring out how fragmented views of a career such as this must lead to discord and bafflement: all the more when the subject is by temperament a forerunner, that is, a man who grasps at more than he can fully understand, and who starts more than he can finish. The present work attempts to study and interpret Bentinck's career as a whole. In this interpretation the main themes of his career are two. An able, energetic, not particularly intellectual man of high birth but no fortune grows from a youthful passion for ideological war against the France of the Revolution and Napoleon to a liberalism advanced for his time and class. A man who has fastened early on the idea of the nation united and independent tries to apply it, first in Italy, then in India, each time within a vision of Britain as imperial benefactor. The book follows, through diverse scenes and activities, the making of an early Liberal Imperialist.

2 - B U R L I N G T O N HOUSE British officials in India often appear in historical works like demigods out of nowhere. They arrive, carry out their tasks, and depart. At most we glimpse their home background; their function, as the historian sees

23

I

THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON

it, is to govern India and no more. Yet when we look at British India in the first half of the nineteenth century, before the Indian Civil Service came to be a career for which the universities prepared their best men, an historical perspective of this kind is likely to distort. A younger son of the aristocracy like Bentinck went out to India partly to make money, partly because it was his birthright to share—if he had the least capacity—in running Britain and her empire. Service in India was not fundamentally different from any of the tasks Bentinck could and did set his hand to. His two spells there should be seen, not as peaks emerging from a mist, but as episodes—his GovernorGeneralship as the crowning episode—in a career no more diverse than those of many men of his class and time. To understand that career we should see Bentinck at the intersection of several overlapping circles—circles of family, of class, of political or territorial connection, of religious persuasion, of school and Army friendship, and only lastly of ideological conviction. He was a Bentinck; a younger son; a member of the Whig aristocracy; born of a Prime Minister and party leader; in the personal and ideological crisis brought on by the French Revolution, a Portland Whig and ultimate follower of the younger Pitt; afterwards related, through his brother, to Canning, and through his wife to militant Evangelicals; involved, through his family, with the concerns of Nottinghamshire, and later, through his own activity, with those of the Fens and of Glasgow; increasingly identified, as time went on, with Evangelicals and other Westernising reformers in the East India Company; in his many sojourns on the post-Napoleonic Continent a member of the international liberal aristocracy of which his great friend King Louis-Philippe was for a time the exemplar. We will trace his progress, not as a lone comet, but as a sharer—in some ways uncommon—in all these groups. The Bentincks were the type of the Great Revolution family. Their ancestor Hans Bentinck had come over from the Netherlands as William I l l ' s great friend; several of his descendants bore the name William. This first English Bentinck won great offices and estates and the earldom of Portland. By 1774, when Lord William was born, the family had several branches on either side of the North Sea. His immediate branch held the Portland title, elevated since 1716 into a dukedom. They were territorial, hence political magnates. The third duke, Bentinck's father, held vast though at that time ill-managed and ruinously expensive estates: Welbeck, in the agricultural and coal 24

2 • B U R L I N G T O N HOUSE country of North Nottinghamshire, carrying with it as a rule one of the Nottinghamshire seats in the Commons; Bulstrode, in Buckinghamshire, which carried with it one of the Buckinghamshire seats; Bothal in Northumberland; a large slice of the London parish of St. Marylebone, then entering its great period of development. Their town mansion, Burlington House in Piccadilly, they held on loan from their near relations the Cavendishes, dukes of Devonshire. Bentincks and Cavendishes were related twice over: the third duchess, Bentinck's mother, was Devonshire's sister (hence sister-inlaw of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire); Portland's mother, the energetic Margaret Harley—grand-daughter of Queen Anne's Prime Minister—was a Cavendish by descent and had brought with her the Cavendish estates at Welbeck and elsewhere. Portland in 18o i —though his wife by then was dead and he had suffered a painful political breach with Devonshire—changed the family name to CavendishBentinck, thus signalling the confluence of families as their names and those of their estates are perpetuated today in the Marylebone addresses of doctors' consulting rooms. Great families like this—a match for some Continental royalty, if only in the scale of their lands and debts—easily developed a special face and character. Disraeli indeed, two generations on, was to introduce Queen Victoria to 'one of the most singular species in Your Majesty's dominions, the Bentinck'. 1 They could by then strike an historian as eccentrics who 'did everything with an intensity surpassing that of normal m e n . . . passionate in friendship, implacable in enmity'. 2 In the late eighteenth century as in the mid-nineteenth several of the men in the family showed uncommon obstinacy. The third duke, in his despondent way, endured much before he made up his mind to break with Charles James Fox in 1794 over British policy towards revolutionary France. A politically estranged though still affectionate friend thought Lord Titchfield, the duke's eldest son, 'a fool of the most hopeless s o r t . . . obstinate as a mule, and stone deaf to everything but his own crotchet'; 3 Titchfield himself when fourth duke explained that 'what other people term obstinacy, we Bentincks consider to be justifiable firmness'.4 Lord William Bentinck was to incur the same kind of criticism, and answer it in much the same way. Extreme shyness, too, ran in the family in the third duke's time, perhaps intertwined with a strain of depressiveness, though not yet at the pitch of revulsion from human contact which made the fifth duke (Disraeli's bugbear, a sufferer from a painful, perhaps psychosomatic

25

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skin complaint) build high glass walls round his town garden and spend years having underground rooms dug at Welbeck.5 The third duke's 'embarrassment in speaking in public' was well known; so were his bouts of indecision and his silences. When his friends in 1792 were pressing him hard to break with Fox he could scarcely reply at all, and sat for two hours with 'intervals of ten and fifteen minutes' silence': 'I, although I have often seen him benumbed and paralysed, never saw him, or anyone else, so completely so before . . . nothing could be so painful. . .' 6 He presently undertook to speak in the Lords but failed to do so from 'mere nerves, and the horror of public speaking'; afterwards he was 'miserable' and 'looked . . . like Johnny when he has had an accident in his breeches . . .' 7 Yet what exasperated friends took to be dithering may have been Portland's way of putting off a hurtful resolution. He was a much more diligent, less volatile leader than Fox; his silences over the three years of the 1 7 9 1 - 4 party crisis, though they cost him much, kept his options open. Their source may have been the same that enabled him, when cut for the stone in old age, to lie 'seven minutes under the knife without a groan'. 8 Portland's timidity may have been the strength of the stubborn weak. He himself urged his eldest son to be a little more sanguine: 'What despondencies! What fears! What doubts!' Titchfield had shown —even about his happy marriage.® Lord William, the second son, was later to admit to 'a great deal of irritable shyness'; 10 a young man who became a great friend was disconcerted at first by 'a cold forbidding manner, which intimidates most around him'. 1 1 Moments in Bentinck's life rather bore out the description a Madras botanist gave of the plant (Bentinckia conda panna) he proposed to name after the young Governor: 'opposita, dichotoma, rigida'. 12 The stereotype of the seemingly cold, no doubt unhappy English gentleman found in some of the Bentincks a distilled embodiment. Yet, as often happens with families that strike outsiders as odd, they seem to have had their own inward norm. In their own terms they were affectionate and close. The raffishness and irreligion of the Georgian aristocracy have been much exaggerated in popular legend. Many families led sober lives in harmony with what they understood as Christian doctrine. T h e deepening of religious feeling which affected so many towards the turn of the century—it caused even the adulterous Lady Bessborough to feel repeated twinges of guilt and to discuss the need for Sunday observance"—in others worked on an extant ground of steady Anglican faith 26

2 • BURLINGTON HOUSE and a morality tinged with the bourgeois virtues of moderation and industry. By 1808 the philosopher James Mackintosh could exclaim at 'the diffusion of the religious spirit among the people, and its prevalence among men of rank and opulence'.14 To a Bentinck like Lord William this meant no doubt an intenser, but not a new experience. In his boyhood the family, though closely bound up with Fox and the Devonshires, shared in none of their free ways. At Bulstrode and Welbeck all was 'moderation and innocence—sixpenny cribbage and dancing with the children the evening amusement'.15 There were no known adulteries, no excessive drinking, no gambling on any but the most domestic scale. Lord Edward, the duke's brother, was a gambler, perpetually in debt, and a burden; but he was mostly away. Portland's own debts had other causes. The duchess seems to have set the tone. Her standards were strict. A bonhomous friend of the duke was put off by her 'cold and particular ways'; 16 because she would not receive Mrs Fitzherbert, her husband and the Prince of Wales had at one time been estranged for two years. 17 Her letters to the duke are sensible and terse; even her playfulness was brisk. 'What a wicked man you are not to have wrote me one letter all this time... . " I am unreasonable enough to hope, wish, and expect to hear from you again today.' When she was pregnant with William and the duke was out foxhunting: 'The lady hares I suppose are in my situation therefore it is inhuman to chase them.' She wrote about children's colds, worms, and fevers, her visits to the opera, her daily walks 'above Hampstead', always lucidly and briefly. She was consulted about arrangements for her brother Devonshire's wedding to Georgiana Spencer: 'I shall be cautious how I give my advice as it can only be from civility that it is asked.' Terseness could grow ruthless: 'Topham Beauclerk is dead which everybody is glad of.' 18 The clear stream of her extant correspondence only once touches a deeper note. In 'the times we live in' (a decade before the French Revolution) it was quite wrong to let the ten-year-old Titchfield think he had five or six horses of his own—to ride perhaps six weeks in the year. She would rather shoot them than let him go on with more than one or two at most. The outburst went on: I see all this with the more concern and fear, because I think he, from not having been treated so much as a child as he ought to have been, has none of the timidity and backwardness so amiable in youth, and which all would have if properly brought up, for I 27

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am well convinced that it was designed by Providence that shyness in our first years should be a check upon our actions till we had gained experience and judgment: and they who move with meekness will pass through this world with more credit and satisfaction to themselves, and in the end applause from those one would wish to have applause from, than they who do not, I am very sure. I feel what I have said very strongly, rather more so than is comfortable to me. . . , 19 Had the duchess been touched by the early Evangelical revival? She was too controlled to go on about it like later Evangelicals. This solitary outburst with its praise of meekness at least raises the question. The duke and duchess had six children: besides Titchfield and Lord William there were two younger boys, Lord Frederick and Lord Charles, and two girls, Lady Charlotte and Lady Mary. Frederick and Charles grew up to pursue routine careers in the Army: both deviated from their parents' morality by figuring extensively in the memoirs of the courtesan Harriette Wilson—as younger sons they may not have been able to buy her off; Charles married Lord Wellesley's natural daughter after a scandalous elopement and divorce. Charlotte married Charles Greville, a Nottinghamshire connection, and became the mother of the famous diarist. Mary died unmarried. All the children seem to have been fundamentally strong and healthy; all lived into middle age at least. Their upbringing was that of their class and time. In the late summer and autumn the family withdrew to Welbeck; there there might be in one day 'sailing, riding, driving, cricket playing, and kite flying . . .'. 20 Frederick as a young man kept his elder brother posted with accounts of foxhunting. 'We ran into him (where do you think? I'll be hanged if I knew at first, for a thick fog covered the atmosphere with carbonic acid) at last by the intervention of nitrogen, we found ourselves in Rufford Park in at the death.' Another day the fox leapt up on a beam in Kirton church porch and was 'pulled down into the midst o f . . . the hounds . . . by Mat the whipper-in'. As a schoolboy a few years earlier Frederick had told his brother at the front: 'I am very glad to hear you do not spare those French rascals. Pray kill six or seven for my sake.'21 Mary as a girl was full of news of forthcoming marriages and just how many thousands of pounds the brides had. The family were to have gone to see the menagerie at Osterley but as Lady Druce 'has kicked the bucket Mama thinks it won't be decent to go . . 28

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In their own terms, then, a cheerful family. Yet the two eldest boys, Titchfield and William, stood somewhat apart. Titchfield, always withdrawn, perhaps marked by the family's worst financial straits—he was the only one old enough fully to have taken them in—was to spend his adult life single-mindedly rebuilding its fortunes. Whether because of some reluctance in Titchfield or for other reasons, William, the second son, came—it appears—to play the role in which families often cast the eldest: the exemplary child, who does well, behaves well, feels responsible, and is consulted. Of William's earliest years almost nothing is known. He was born at Burlington House on 14 September 1774. He was a fine healthy child. 23 When he was seven it was time for him to join Titchfield at the Rev. Samuel Goodenough's school, ten miles west at Ealing. The lives of magnates like the Bentincks were surrounded and eased by men who were neither servants nor equals. Lawyers looked after estates and shares; other lawyers dealt with political organisation; clergymen acted as secretaries or tutors. In a society based on rank and degree these men were deferential without necessarily being servile. They prospered: through the duke's patronage some of the lawyers got seats in the Commons or on the bench, the clergymen canonries and bishoprics; their sons might go to school with the young Bentincks and rise into the gentry or the peerage. Samuel Goodenough was one such. A former under-master at Westminster—Portland's old school—with a reputation as a classical tutor, he had started in 1772 taking ten (later twelve) small pupils from aristocratic families and preparing them for Westminster. It was an intimate establishment, not perhaps greatly unlike keeping a tutor at home. Goodenough was a genuine scholar; in later years he made enough of a mark as a botanist to become vice-president of the Royal Society. Yet he went on considering himself the Bentincks' 'faithful servant', feared his 'heart would burst' when he officiated at Titchfield's wedding, and was at length pushed by the duke's 'interest' up the ladder of Church preferment to the bishopric of Carlisle.24 His educational methods were enlightened. He taught reading and writing by what would now be called the 'building' method of recognising whole words instead of bothering about letters or rules. The curriculum included classics, English, French, Scripture, history, dancing, fencing and probably arithmetic. Only Bentinck's earliest progress is documented. At seven he showed some 'inattention and a sort of giddiness'; perhaps more significantly, he 'cannot bear to be 29

I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON turned back when he attempts to say a lesson', and got 'very angry' when thus thwarted. T o judge by Goodenough's sensible letters and the number of bills for torn breeches, these schooldays must have been happy enough.25 TTie next step was Westminster. Bentinck went there at an uncertain date, probably when he was about n ; he must have left at 16 or 17 to join the Army. The school where he spent his adolescence was, like the few other public schools of the time, a mixture of the regimental mess and the Dyak longhouse with a tinge of academic learning. Politically it was Whig; socially, a hierarchy tempered by anarchic outbursts. Boys lived in long rooms where the seniors hogged the fireplaces while others made coffee or blacked shoes. Boys frequented playhouses; in 1779 six of them were tried for a violent assault on an outsider; sometimes they rioted against inadequate meals or coals. Apart from the usual servitude of fag to fagmaster, bullying could be so rough that after one thrashing young Edward Paget nearly died. Vincent, the headmaster, was something of a flogger; even he had trouble keeping order. 26 Such a school, untouched by the high-minded reforming movements of the nineteenth century, was perhaps as yet a stage rather than a forcing-house for young males of the governing class. Of its emotional significance for a shy stubborn boy we know nothing—though Bentinck was anyhow willing in later years to act as steward at the anniversary dinner. What we do know is that, typically, among his contemporaries were boys whose careers were to intertwine with his. All his brothers were there; so was a close boyhood friend, Fred Hotham, son of one of Portland's retainer-followers; so were three future companions-in-arms, Edward Paget, Stapleton Cotton, and Robert Wilson. Charles Abbot was to be Speaker of the Commons, Charles Arbuthnot a high civil servant and fellow speculator in the Norfolk Marshland. Henry Bunbury as Secretary at War was to be almost the only Minister to share Bentinck's views on Sicily (where he had been just before Bentinck's time) and on Italian independence; as a Fenland landowner he was to work together with Bentinck on the politics of drainage. Amherst was to precede Bentinck in Sicily and Bengal; Paget and Cotton (Lord Combermere) were Commanders-inChief in India just before or during his time. These were not all necessarily friends. But they shared a matrix. 27 Bentinck emerged as a young adult near the start of the 1790s, a tormented decade during which the country experienced war, invasion

30

2 • BURLINGTON HOUSE threatened or attempted in Ireland and in Britain itself, mutiny in the Fleet, all this at a time of rapid population and industrial growth in the midst of inflation and repeated seasons of acute distress. The governing class faced a chain of revolts in Ireland: most of them took seriously the threat of subversion at home from the spread of democratic ideas and the examples of the French Revolution. Portland, first as Whig party leader and then, from 1794, as Home Secretary, in his low-keyed way was at the heart of the struggle. 'We live in times of violence and of extremes', Fox admitted late in 1793, though he tried to keep his head; four years later so equable a man as Cornwallis could see the country as 'torn . . . by faction, without an Army, without money', dependent on a Navy which had just mutinied and which perhaps could not be paid: 'How are we to get out of this cursed war without a revolution?'28 For Bentinck as for many contemporaries these years were deeply formative. Within the family he emerged as the son of whom much was expected, eldest perhaps in authority though not in years. He embarked on a double career, as soldier and as politician. The ties he made as a soldier were among his few close friendships; the war was to take him over much of Europe and the Middle East. In politics ties of family and Nottinghamshire connection first made at this time shaped much of his career; more important, the crisis of 1791-4 within the Whig Party precipitated him into all-out support for the war and for Pitt. A soldier and a Pittite he remained until very late in life, arguably throughout. Through the influence of Burke the Whig crisis—we shall see—appears to have implanted in Bentinck the idea of nationality, which he was strikingly to pioneer in Italy. Finally, these were years when religious fervour was spreading through the upper classes—when, for instance, the future Elizabeth Fry, the Quaker banker's daughter, got rid of her new 'purple boots laced with scarlet' and renounced worldly amusements in favour of preaching and good works.2» True, Bentinck's direct Evangelical commitment was to come later, after his marriage. The spirit blows unevenly; the Evangelical revival—not wholly to be accounted for by dread of revolution or any other single cause—spread like a tide over estuary sands: some it touched early, some late, some (like Palmerston) not at all. Lord William as an adult had the Bentinck face, to be seen in a number of the family's portraits—a rather long, full oval tending to jowliness, with a small mouth, an aquiline nose, and a pronounced chin. He was uncommonly tall: because of his long legs, one of the 3i

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Cowpers joked, everyone would like to have him as a second in a duel to pace out the ground. 30 When he was 24 one of his father's friends thought him 'very pleasant and sensible'. 31 In his early and middle life a word that came easily to his acquaintance was 'placid': at Madras even 'the placid Lord William' was driven to scratching and scrubbing with prickly heat; on the battlefield at Corunna, seated on his 'quiet mule', he talked to his brother officer Charles Napier through the heavy gunfire 'as if we were going to breakfast . . . with perhaps an increase of good-humour and placidity'—'this chap takes it coolly or the devil's in it', Napier exclaimed.32 He was 'the kind-hearted, undemonstrative Lord William'; 33 he himself wrote half-jokingly of his 'cold blood and not very excitable temper'. 34 Yet he shared the Bentinck obstinacy: 'you are generally pretty tough'—a friend wrote who knew the family well—'and especially so when you are in the right'. 35 Only as Governor-General, when he was ageing and often ill, did he at times become snappish. Yet as he grew older he also became gentler; the touch of youthful priggishness vanishes from his later letters, which are straightforward and humane. What seems to have happened is a gradual loosening of inward control, a greater spontaneity. Portland told his son's commanding officer when Bentinck was 27 that he knew of no act of Bentinck's life 'which I should have wished not to have been done' 36 —a rare enough statement from any parent, with, it may be, a touch of hyperbole. Yet there is other witness that Portland showed early 'partiality' for the second son whose 'dispositions and habits' as he grew up roused in him great expectations. 37 Relatives and friends thought Bentinck had a strong influence over his elder brother even when, as fourth duke, he was head of the family, and over his sister Mary. 38 He it was who prevented an entanglement between Mary and the attractive womaniser John Ponsonby, who tried to see that a drunken valet at length dismissed by Portland was provided for, who, after his father's death, kept up with old followers whom his brothers and sisters ignored.39 The good son was expected to make his mark. The normal way for a younger son to do this was to go into the Army. By the beginning of 1793, when Bentinck at 18 was a captain in the 2nd Light Dragoons, Britain entered the war with France that was to shape the lives of his generation. By May he was in Flanders as aidede-camp to the Duke of York.

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3 -A STUDIOUS SOLDIER Bentinck's military record is one of the paradoxes of his career. He first saw fighting at 18; he died 46 years later a full general. ' l a m a soldier and very much attached to my profession':1 this with him was a lifelong refrain. Yet if he had been a soldier and no more his career would not be worth studying. What soldiering did for Bentinck was to fit him for the works of peace. By his last years in India he had become 'an old soldier who has a holy horror of war'. 2 Well before then his military experience had shaped his cast of mind. War against revolutionary and Napoleonic France confirmed his distrust of autocracy. Yet habituation to the chain of command led him at times to act brusquely and to look for 'subordination' and efficiency. Bentinck, like Wellington, Palmerston, and many others, belonged to the generation of the French wars as some men still consciously belong to the generation of the First World War. His first campaign, in the terrible year 1793, saw him at the sieges of Valenciennes and Dunkirk. Later in the year he accompanied Lord Moira's expedition: this tried in vain to join the Royalist armed bands in Western France; the Royalists were shortly massacred. After a few months in England, mostly on recruiting service, Bentinck went back to Flanders for the 1794 campaign. Soon Britain's Austrian allies began to lose interest; the Duke of York had gradually to withdraw his forces (among them the young Wellington, just blooded) until the French overran the Low Countries. As an 18-year-old captain in the 2nd Light Dragoons, who owed his commission to his father's rank and purse, Bentinck was far from having a 'holy horror of war'. On the contrary, he was 'cursedly sorry' when anything kept him from the fray; he was sure at first that the army of the French Convention—the first modern example of 'the nation in arms'—was 'whether individually or collectively taken the most despicable that ever existed'. Like many young officers he was critical—not without reason—of the way the war was being fought. The siege of Valenciennes was 'carried on with so much exactness to the règles [rules] that even the natural advantages of the ground were rejected'; the siege of Dunkirk was a botch dictated on political grounds by British Ministers; again and again positions taken up in the 1794 retreat were bad.3 B

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I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON What Bentinck made of the fighting itself is not known. This was no ceremonious war. Towns were devastated; 'the sufferings of the unfortunate peasants'—Bentinck's fellow-aide-de-camp recorded—were 'beside all description'.4 Another young dragoon never forgot 'the awful and meditative sight of thirteen villages in flames' while survivors were being killed and women raped.5 Bentinck's later horror of war was learnt in a good school. He spent the next three years (1795-8) on garrison duty in Ireland— first at Gonmel in the South and then, but for short stays at Dungannon and Sligo, in command at Armagh in the North; during the period of martial law in 1797-8 he was military governor of Armagh. This was the height of the troubles that preceded the Act of Union—a revolutionary situation combined with the danger, threatened or actual, of French landings, and, more and more towards the end, with a civil war between Protestant and Catholic or (what outside Ulster was often the same) between landlord and tenant. It was a time when Lord Gifden ordered the dragoons to burn down 450 of his tenants' cabins within view of his own house and not to let the peasants rescue any of their possessions: one officer in command of a burning party 'was almost ready to shoot himself'. 6 Bentinck in Ulster had to cope first with the United Irishmen who planted trees of liberty in the night while their chains of 'blazing signals' stretched from Armagh into Connaught, and then with the Orangemen who night after night sacked and burnt Catholic houses. He was now in his early twenties, a lieutenant-colonel in the 24th Light Dragoons. His duty was twofold: as officer commanding, to direct the scattered parties of dragoons that tried to keep order in a tormented and hostile country; as magistrate, to search for arms and court-martial 'seditious' persons, at times some of his own soldiers who had taken the United Irishmen or the Orange oath.7 He had begun by feeling that 'wretched and miserable' as Ireland was 'the civility and hospitality of all ranks is quite astonishing'. Three years later he was, like many Englishmen, ready to call the Irish 'cowards' and 'savages'.8 What little evidence we have none the less suggests that he did his best to keep his troops disciplined and to act fairly and moderately; even some of the republican United Irishmen were said to be friendly to him.9 Meanwhile Bentinck had been learning his business as an officer. His own commanding officer in Ireland was a humane man who urged him never to lose sight of 'the necessary wants of the soldier and the 34

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care of him': in the face of slow and muddled supply Bentinck learnt the lesson well. In later years he repeatedly acted to preserve private soldiers' 'health and happiness'; at the end of his life he was still trying to stir up the Government against the 'inequality and injustice' of Army pay in India. 10 As a youth of 19 he had also shown a personal self-control fairly rare among the quarrelsome officers of his time. When a fellow-officer—'a military Sir Lucius O'Trigger'—sent him an insulting letter he avoided a duel and settled for an apology: though he felt himself to be in the right, and adventurers might lose no chance of 'showing what is called spirit', he did not wish 'to make my entrée into public life in the character of a duellist'.11 So far, at home, in the Low Countries, and in Ireland, Bentinck's experience had been that of many young officers of his day. His next task was unusual. It began to shape his career away from ordinary soldierly pursuits. It took him to Italy and awakened in him a new view of Britain as a patron of independent nations. At the outbreak of the War of the Second Coalition in 1799 an Austro-Russian force swept across Northern Italy, driving the French back from the lands the young Bonaparte had won in 1796-7. The British Foreign Secretary, Grenville, sent Bentinck to act as liaison officer at allied headquarters. Little came of the mission: by the time a British force at length appeared off the Italian coast in the summer of 1800 Napoleon's descent from the Alps and the battle of Marengo had completely reversed the course of the war; it was too late for the forces to join up. But to Bentinck himself the two years he spent in Italy (with a break at home in the winter of 1799-1800) meant a great deal.12 After making his way through Germany he arrived in Italy just in time to witness the battle of the Trebbia; he was then present at Novi and at the siege of Cuneo. In the 1800 campaign he was at Marengo; afterwards, with the Austrian Army in retreat, he was based in or near Verona. When Austria finally had to sign an armistice and give up most of Italy he spent a few months in Trieste and Venice before going home in April 1801. Bentinck's mission had at first been to Suvorov, the legendary Russian commander. To some of the British—among them Portland's friend Minto, then Ambassador in Vienna—Suvorov seemed a 'mad mountebank', dirty and drunk. To the 24-year-old Bentinck, on the contrary, he seemed 'venerable and respectable', 'a very good sort of man. . . . He received us very kindly, kissing me on both cheeks'. But Suvorov's Russians soon vanished into Switzerland; for the rest of the 35

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war Bentinck was attached to the Austrian commander, Bellegarde. He fought, even when there was no need to expose himself; with youthful ardour he called the 1799 campaign 'the most brilliant that History ever recorded'. He came to know young officers of several nationalities —Austrians, French émigrés, Irish, Italians; he shared their highspirited life, in which the hazards of debt or of unforeseen encounters with the husbands of beautiful Italian countesses figured almost as largely as those of battle. No sooner had Bentinck got back to London from Italy in June 1801 than he was off again within seven weeks to join Sir Ralph Abercromby's expedition in Egypt. But by the time he reached Alexandria in September the French force which Napoleon had brought to Egypt three years earlier had been mopped up: there was nothing for him to do and the whole war was anyhow drawing to a temporary end. He spent a month in Egypt, had coffee and sherbet with the oneeyed white-bearded Grand Vizier, saw 'no beauty' in the Sphinx or in Cleopatra's Needles and no discipline in the Turkish troops who 'murder or b r all [Christians] they meet in the street'; presently, like many later British soldiers in Egypt, he was writing 'Dust intolerable May I soon leave the country never to return to it.' He hoped to go to Greece but settled for a journey home through Rhodes, Smyrna, Constantinople, and the Balkans. Travelling through the less romantic parts of the Ottoman Empire was then rough fare; it meant sleeping in hovels, men and horses together, sometimes with arms by one's side for fear of robbers, and eating what olives, walnuts, and eggs a wayside Greek convent could spare. In Constantinople Bentinck talked to a French soldier who at the massacre of Jaffa had made one Turk roast another in retaliation for the same treatment inflicted on a Frenchman—'il y avait de quoi rire [we had a good laugh]', the soldier said. Everywhere he was deeply impressed with the evil effects of despotism: 'no law, so no order, much oppression, and much poverty'. In Wallachia too the postboy would seize the horse of any peasant on the road if it was better than his own: 'no man with English feelings can see patiently such transactions'. With relief Bentinck crossed into Austrian-held Transylvania, and then, over bad roads and sparsely populated country where there were sometimes no travellers going through for a fortnight, to Budapest and Vienna. From there he made for Amiens with dispatches for Cornwallis, who was negotiating the Anglo-French peace, and then managed a short trip to Paris, his first, before reaching London in January 1802. 13

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These journeys of Bentinck's over the previous four years, all made before he was 28, were a good education in a Europe in turmoil; the world of the Grand Tour had given way to scenes of action. As it happened, however, Bentinck's fighting career was almost over. In the winter of 1808-9 he was with some distinction to command a brigade in Sir John Moore's retreat across Northern Spain to Corunna. In 1813, with much less distinction, he commanded for a few months an army in Eastern Spain: his troops captured Tarragona but, partly through his own tactical errors, suffered a defeat at the Pass of Ordal. For the rest he was from now on the administrator, the negotiator, the developer, rather than the man at arms. From the start he had anyhow been a studious soldier—a soldier who read. His military gift was strategic rather than tactical. When not blinded by his own overmastering hopes—as he was to be in Italy at the close of the Napoleonic wars—he had a good eye for a total situation. In Northern Italy in 1799 he was one of the few who foresaw Napoleon's descent from the Alps; so too in Spain in 1808 he thought from the first that the Spaniards were over-confident, and was almost alone in forecasting disaster once the French should march.14 In his last months in India he was to draft a series of Minutes that showed considerable insight into the problems of running a native army in a dependent country and, 22 years before the Mutiny, considerable prescience. As a young soldier he had put himself to a classic school: like Wellington, Sir John Moore, and the Duke of York, he was Germantrained. In 1798-9 he studied privately with General Jarry, the former Intendant of Frederick the Great's École Militaire at Berlin. Jarry was then about to open the school which, in its later form at Sandhurst, became the nursery of the British Army. Under his tutelage Bentinck studied not only classic battles but the most striking example of modern warfare, Bonaparte's Italian campaign of 1796. 15 Bentinck's later remarks on war and armies were often concerned with 'military principle'. So far as a soldier is likely to be an intellectual he was one. This is all the more notable because a persistent legend has it that Bentinck did not read. The legend arose from a remark Bentinck made to James Mill just before he set out to India for the second time in 1828, and which Mill reported to Jeremy Bentham: 'I must confess to you that what I have ever read amounts to very little, and that it is not without pain that I can read anything.' So struck was Bentham with this that he decided to have his ideas on government expounded to

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I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON Bentinck verbally by a Calcutta disciple, as briefings were later administered to President Eisenhower. 16 What Bentinck meant by his remark—if it was correctly reported—is not clear. He did stand in some awe of Mill, and later of Macaulay; they were formidable intellects. But the notion that he did not or could not read is absurd. Anyone who works through the vast bulk of Bentinck's papers will need no persuading that he was a diligent reader and writer, if only of official documents. He was also a thorough interrogator. A visitor who brought news of occupied Italy reported: 'he sucked me so dry that I came home in the shape and likeness of a squeezed lemon . . ,'. 1 7 From his papers we can document his reading. Much of it was directed to a purpose: when he was to go out to a new job or a new place Bentinck undertook a course of appropriate reading—an obvious thing to do, though not all soldiers or administrators do it. Before going out to India for the first time he made copious notes from works by Alexander Dow, Luke Scrafton, and Rennell on ancient and modern Indian history; he had also read Sir William Jones. He read Barbeau de la Bruyère on Arab history and Hoghton and Campbell on Persia. Before going to Egypt he procured from the Welbeck clergyman a digest of biblical references; before his Sicilian mission he read travel books about the island; before looking at pictures in Holland he bought Reynolds's Discourses. In his twenties and thirties his general reading, typical of an educated gentleman of the time, included Gibbon, Hume's history, Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Blackstone, and Adam Smith; on all of them he made notes. In leisured spells at Madras he read one of the Spectator papers every morning—'I go back with great eagerness.' His later reading ran to military history, current affairs, and works on agriculture and religion. ' I wish'—he once wrote—'I knew a great many more things than I do': astronomy, for instance. This may explain the modesty of a man who had not been to a university. In his Madras diary he occasionally noted, as something worthy of remark, 'Read nothing.' 18 The greatest single intellectual influence on the young Bentinck, however, had begun to work on him even before he had taken up arms. This was Edmund Burke. The great orator's influence was not a matter of reading alone. On Bentinck as on so many men of the time it worked through personal exhortation and example; it worked through the crisis that, in the face of the French Revolution, tore the Whig Party asunder. As a soldier of 18 Bentinck shared in Europe's discovery of the energies which 3»

3 • A STUDIOUS SOLDIER

revolution could let loose. The garrison of Valenciennes which surrendered in 1793 might strike him as the worst 'set of ill-looking rabble* ever gathered together; but within six weeks he was having to marvel at French resilience—'attacked by all Europe, attacked by internal enemies also, still superior armies are found, well equipped, well clothed, wanting in nothing'.19 The struggle within the party he experienced on his leaves home and in correspondence with family and friends. A young Bentinck with expectations could not fail to be marked by it.

4 - A DISCIPLE OF BURKE Burlington House in Lord William's youth was the headquarters of the Whig opposition. It had been that ever since the crisis which the governing class had gone through at the end of the American War of Independence and in particular since the younger Pitt's triumph over the Fox-North coalition in 1783-4. Portland, the nominal leader of the coalition in 1783, was the effective organiser of the party, the man who spent hours at his desk while Fox provided the inspiration, the social charm, the rhetorical fire. Portland it was who with his helpers organised elections and kept open house for party members during parliamentary sessions. Right through to the outbreak of war with France men whose relations were already strained, and who were shortly to fall out in divisions as deep as those over the repeal of the Corn Laws or Irish Home Rule, met at Burlington House to discuss party policy: Fox, Devonshire, Fitzwilliam, Malmesbury, Elliot, Thomas Grenville; Burke too was sometimes there, talking without a break for as long as an hour.1 To these men the French Revolution as it moved rapidly on posed a complex challenge. They held to a rhetoric drawn from another revolution, the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Since the latter years of the American War some of them had been involved in varying degrees in the British movement towards the widening of the franchise and the curtailment of privilege. It came easily to them to distrust the power of the Crown; in the eighties even the more conservative upholders of aristocratic rule—Portland himself and his closest followers—had been more willing than the old followers of Lord North to approve, if only on tactical grounds, measures of parliamentary and economical 39

3 • A STUDIOUS SOLDIER

revolution could let loose. The garrison of Valenciennes which surrendered in 1793 might strike him as the worst 'set of ill-looking rabble* ever gathered together; but within six weeks he was having to marvel at French resilience—'attacked by all Europe, attacked by internal enemies also, still superior armies are found, well equipped, well clothed, wanting in nothing'.19 The struggle within the party he experienced on his leaves home and in correspondence with family and friends. A young Bentinck with expectations could not fail to be marked by it.

4 - A DISCIPLE OF BURKE Burlington House in Lord William's youth was the headquarters of the Whig opposition. It had been that ever since the crisis which the governing class had gone through at the end of the American War of Independence and in particular since the younger Pitt's triumph over the Fox-North coalition in 1783-4. Portland, the nominal leader of the coalition in 1783, was the effective organiser of the party, the man who spent hours at his desk while Fox provided the inspiration, the social charm, the rhetorical fire. Portland it was who with his helpers organised elections and kept open house for party members during parliamentary sessions. Right through to the outbreak of war with France men whose relations were already strained, and who were shortly to fall out in divisions as deep as those over the repeal of the Corn Laws or Irish Home Rule, met at Burlington House to discuss party policy: Fox, Devonshire, Fitzwilliam, Malmesbury, Elliot, Thomas Grenville; Burke too was sometimes there, talking without a break for as long as an hour.1 To these men the French Revolution as it moved rapidly on posed a complex challenge. They held to a rhetoric drawn from another revolution, the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Since the latter years of the American War some of them had been involved in varying degrees in the British movement towards the widening of the franchise and the curtailment of privilege. It came easily to them to distrust the power of the Crown; in the eighties even the more conservative upholders of aristocratic rule—Portland himself and his closest followers—had been more willing than the old followers of Lord North to approve, if only on tactical grounds, measures of parliamentary and economical 39

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THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON

2

reform. The great changes in France in their earlier phases could hold allurements—all the greater because in international matters they for a time put a dangerous rival out of action. On the other hand the mounting attack on the property, then on the lives of the aristocracy set up—even in Fox and in the young men on his left who joined the Friends of the People—a tug of alarm at odds with the appealing rhetoric of liberty and equality. The first to turn right round was Burke. As early as 1790 his Reflections on the Révolution in France provided for the Whigs a means of dissociating the rhetoric of 1688 which they claimed to live by from the rhetoric of 1789 which they saw in action. It did more. It justified a belief in the rule of aristocracy and property by an appeal to the free institutions of Britain as they had emerged from the long experience of the British race. Together with Burke's other writings it held up the nation as a mystic entity independent of soil, population, or rulers temporarily in office. The true France, for Burke, was in the Vendée and among the émigrés at Coblenz.3 Among the Whigs the group eventually known as the Windhamites or 'third party' were much agitated throughout 1792; they formally seceded in February 1793 at the outbreak of war. These men followed Burke in seeing the struggle as ideological; they were foremost in urging a British commitment to the restoration of the Bourbons and meanwhile to royalist counter-revolution. This put them for some years at odds with the Government men, their old opponents Pitt and Henry Dundas, who had seen the war at first as the familiar trial of strength between commercial and imperial powers, and who for some years were reluctant to commit themselves to all-out ideological war. The Windhamites in contrast could not see what the acquisition of islands or the gains of merchant shipping had to do with 'a contest, ad internecionem, of Governments. . . . The contest was not for what we should have, but whether we should be . . .'• On the basic issues Portland's sympathies were from the first with Burke. To his sons Titchfield and Lord William he recommended the constitutional principles of the Reflections as 'the true Whig creed'. But one thing Portland would not do if he could help it: that was to break up the Whig Party and part from Fox. Though Burke's attacks in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs 'grieve[d him] to the soul', service to the state was for him 'inseparably connected' with 'the preservation of the true Whig Party'. s Hence, over the three years 1791-4, his agonised silences, his occasional tears, the doggedness with 40

4 • A DISCIPLE OF BURKE

which he sat, uttering not a word, beside Fox at meetings of the Whig Club where toasts of democratic tinge were being given deeply offensive to his inmost beliefs. At length alarm at the Terror in France and at the spread of Radical groups in Britain wore down even the duke. In January 1794 the Portland Whigs broke with the Foxites; the next few months they spent making up their minds to join the Government, and they entered it in July. 6 What was the significance of this choice? Portland gave reasons of state: Because Ireland may be saved by it and made a powerful and useful number of the British Empire. Because the true spirit of aristocracy and the true principles of Whiggism may be revived and re-established. Because the liberty of Europe may be saved. Because at all events it is the best chance we have of maintaining our own Constitution, and because if we decline taking our share of responsibility in the present moments the danger with which this country and all the civilised world are threatened must be unavoidably and greatly increased. War aims to be put to Pitt included, for France, restoration of the monarchy and 'a government of which property forms the basis'.7 Portland was sincere. People might call him a Tory after the change, but he—like Pitt and Burke—went on calling himself a Whig. He became in fact a Pittite.* For historical reasons no Bentinck could call himself a Tory until Lord George Bentinck unexpectedly made himself the champion of Protection in 1846. But although the Whig Party that broke up in 1791-4 was a party in that it had a common historical myth, common memories of struggles waged together, some kind of understood common attitudes, and an organisation advanced for its time, it was also, much more than any late nineteenth- or twentieth-century party, an association of magnates and connections bound by ties of friendship and kin. The breach was painful; some of the pain came of the overmastering by issues and ideology of ties that had withstood less critical pressures. Families were divided; friends stopped seeing each other. Portland was parted from most of his wife's family, the Cavendishes. A little later he was parted from Fitzwilliam: in 1798 this still left in him 'deep traces of • Though some Foxites identified all supporters of Pitt's war policy as Tories, as late as 1816 Holland distinguished between 'Pittite and Tory country gentlemen': to Grey, 4 Dec. 1816, Durham University Grey MSS box 34.

41

I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON grief'. 8 Worst of all was the parting from Fox. Here was the charismatic leader, the delightful friend for whom Portland had felt 'predilection and tenderness'. Fox himself felt 'some way as if I had the world to begin anew'. Portland felt wounded and affronted. On both sides the parting left a trail of bitterness.9 Through most of the crucial months of 1793-4 Bentinck was with the Army, either in the Low Countries or on Lord Moira's expedition. He returned to London in November 1794, a young man of 20 whose mother had just died (on 3 June), whose father had thrown over the personal and political connections of a lifetime, and whose commander (the Duke of York) was about to withdraw from Holland after a disastrous campaign—the outcome, as Bentinck and his brother officers believed, of wrongheaded policies pursued by his father's new colleagues, Pitt and Dundas. The Pitt Cabinet had insisted on the siege of Dunkirk; it had depended on Continental allies who had now left York's troops in the lurch. Bentinck talked of cutting off the alliances and fighting on alone beside the French royalists; his 'abuse of P[itt]' was 'unbounded'. 10 Portland's coalition with Pitt meant for his second son a personal crisis. Public policy was not the only reason. Bentinck had in William Plumer of Gilston Park—member for Hertfordshire and 'one of the most opulent country gentlemen in the kingdom'—something of a second father. Plumer and his wife had been on intimate terms with the duke and duchess; because of his vanity and perhaps his vast girth the duchess had been in the habit of calling him 'the Duke of Plumer'. When the Portlands were away the Plumers would have the Bentinck boys to Gilston for the holidays: homely, pawky, fussy, they were, Lord William recorded, 'kindness itself to children'. T o the 'fine old Whig' himself Bentinck later w r o t e : ' . . . born and brought up in your society, I have invariably received from you the kindness of a second parent'. But in 1794 Plumer sided with Fox. He vowed not to enter Burlington House again; he and Portland never got back on the old intimate footing." Bentinck was torn. A few days after his return he 'examined with great apparent anxiety the grounds of difference between his father and Mr. F[ox]', expressed 'an ardent wish that they could be reunited', and asked an anti-Pittite agent whether Fox would come to his father if sent for. 12 His anxiety did not last. Within eight months an old school friend could describe him to his face as 'bigoted to the measures of administra-

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A D I S C I P L E OF B U R K E

tion' to the point of scouting all news of the fearful 1795 distress.13 Bentinck had sided with his father and with Pitt. As sometimes happens with late converts, the Bentincks became firmer Pittites than some of Pitt's earlier colleagues. The tie was further strengthened in 1800 when Titchfield and Pitt's disciple Canning became brothers-in-law. Bentinck distrusted the 1801-4 Addington administration which replaced Pitt and made a temporary peace. By 1805, when there had been talk of Fox joining Pitt's last Government, Bentinck reiterated his opposition to Fox, who deserted the Constitution in its utmost need. You observe [he told Windham], Si nott errasset, fecerat tile minus [if he had not erred, he would have achieved less]. The first part of that verse has been alone accomplished. I do believe his principles are sound at the bottom. I was brought up with feelings of love and admiration for him. I do still respect him very much. But my judgment, and more particularly my veneration for Mr. Burke, prevents me from not condemning his past conduct with all my heart and soul. Before I could excuse, I must be satisfied that his opinions have undergone a thorough reform.' 14 Allegiance to Pitt, Canning, and the venerated Burke had certain consequences. It meant eagerness to carry on the ideological war to the end. 'Whatever doubts may have been entertained respecting the justice and necessity of other wars,' Bentinck wrote in 1 8 0 3 , . . upon this there cannot be any difference of opinion.... I trust it is reserved for England to punish the mad and insolent ambition of Bonaparte.' In Ireland he had called for a scorched earth policy if the French should land. By 1807 he still thought Napoleon was likely to invade Britain: he called for conscription.15 Hatred of Napoleonic despotism to the end fuelled his dreams of Italian independence. All this meant, conversely, a lasting mutual alienation from the Foxite hard core. Among Fox's heirs the line, well into the wars, was that Portland had never been good for anything but letter writing; his second son was an incompetent whom Ministers put up with for the sake of his ducal father and brother.16 In practical terms Bentinck's career was to depend for many years on the goodwill of Portland Whigs and faithful Pittites. Government influence brought him for the first time into the Commons in MarchMay 1796 as ephemeral member for the rotten borough of Camelford, until then held by 'Ossian' MacPherson, a Portland Whig. Pitt's 43

I • T H E C A R E E R OF A S E C O N D S O N

Foreign Secretary sent him on a mission to the Austro-Russian armies in Italy in 1799, chiefly to give the Home Secretary's son the chance 'to learn a little Russian tactique'.17 Pitt, though out of office, in 1802 secured for the inexperienced Bentinck the Governorship of Madras; he was helped in this by two more old Portland Whigs, Henry Strachey and Edward Monckton. The appointment was a plain concession to Portland's personal standing and 'Parliamentary interest' in the teeth of Dundas and most of the Directors of the East India Company.* 18 Finally, the various jobs which the insecurely based Perceval Government offered Bentinck in the two years after his father's death in office in 1809 were plainly intended to keep the new Duke of Portland, Canning, and their friends if not sweet, at any rate neutral. A late echo of this tale of political 'connection' was Canning's far from eager appointment, shortly before his death in 1827, of Bentinck to the Governorship of Bengal. In all this there was nothing very unusual. It was an age when the young Aberdeen (the future Prime Minister) could be sent off to the crucial Vienna Embassy in 1813 with less experience than Bentinck had on setting out for Madras. Personal relationship, clientage, and the rule of property were the stuff of the society. But for Bentinck this meant that his career down to the 1820s depended on Pitt's heirs—on men like Castlereagh, Liverpool, Bathurst, and Canning. Of these the first three had absorbed the conservative aspect of Burke's message, but (anyhow during the wars and the years of distress that followed them) they were not inclined to make much of Burke's love for constitutional liberty, his interest in nationality, or his view of States' rights of benevolent interference in each other's affairs; even Canning was muted. Bentinck's political development was that of a man who, from an unpromising background, came to make much of just these aspects of Burke's thought and to go beyond them to a full-fledged liberalism. Add the Bentinck stubbornness and Lord William's own streak of audacity and it is not surprising that his career turned out choppy. # Edward Monckton, a former Madras civil servant, and M.P. for Stafford, was one of the group within the East India Company that had a close financial interest in the affair of the Nawab of Arcot's debts. His son, who had been with Bentinck in Italy in 1799-1801, went out to Madras as Bentinck's aide-de-camp. For the membership of the Portland Whigs, see O'Gorman, The Whig Party, 250-3. O'Gorman (pp. 136, 185-6) assumes that Bentinck's appointment as aide-de-camp to the Duke of York in March 1793 and his promotion to major in February 1794 were political sops to Portland, who was still making up his mind to break with Fox or to join the Government. This may be so: there seems no direct evidence for it. It was normal enough for the son of a magnate to be thus favoured.

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5 • A PITTITE IN DISGRACE

5 - A PITTITE IN DISGRACE By 1802 Bentinck's apprenticeship was done. He had served in several theatres of war. He had carried out a minor mission on his Government's behalf. He had seen as much of Europe and the Mediterranean as an Englishman in time of war was likely to. For six years he had represented in Parliament—though largely as an absentee—the county where his father was a dominant landowner, Nottinghamshire. Now the Peace of Amiens seemed to make a military career unpromising. The time had come for the younger son to find another path to advancement. Portland's answer was to secure for his son the Governorship of Madras. This was a prize of slightly ambiguous glitter. Under Pitt's India Act of 1784 Madras, like its sister presidency of Bombay, embodied twice over the uneasy balance built into the control of Britain's Indian possessions. In vital matters—war, diplomacy, revenue—it was subordinate to Bengal; yet it was also separately answerable to London. There, in turn, power lay between the political head of the Board of Control and the Court of Directors of the East India Company—in theory, often in practice the fount of instructions and patronage. Though the bonanza days were past a job like Madras could go to an aristocrat in need of a fortune and a proving-ground. Even while he used all his and Pitt's influence to secure it Portland looked farther still. The highest prize in India was the Supreme Government at Calcutta. From the start it was Portland's 'anxious wish' that his most promising son should have the reversion of Bengal if the then Governor-General, Lord Wellesley, came home. 1 When he sailed to India in the spring of 1803 Bentinck seemed to be on the way to a respectable fortune, perhaps a succession of high posts and a peerage. He also seemed likely to found a new family: he had been married on 19 February to Mary Acheson, a daughter of an Irish peer, Lord Gosford, whom he had first met during his Irish service some six years earlier. None of these hopes came true. T h e new Governor and his bride landed through the surf at Madras on 30 August 1803. He was then not quite 29. Just over four years later he sailed back again in disgrace. He and the Commander-in-Chief, Sir John Cradock, had been recalled by the Court of Directors: the cause was the mutiny of Indian troops at Vellore in the previous year. It was the turning-point of Bentinck's career. 45

I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON The disgrace bit deep. A quarter-century later Bentinck still felt that 'there never has been, or can be, a measure of more extreme injury.. .'. 2 To win reparation, to wipe out the slur, to build up the 'independent fortune' he had been unable to put together at Madras—preferably by going back to India as Governor-General: this became the overriding purpose of Bentinck's life. His four years as governor were active. He helped one of the company's ablest officers, Thomas Munro, to launch the raiyatwari system of land revenue settlement—ideally settlement with the individual cultivator—which in the end became official policy. He spread to the whole of Madras the network of independent courts which Cornwallis as Governor-General had introduced in Bengal in the early 1790s. He directed operations against rebellious chiefs. He tried to take the finances of Madras in hand by setting up a Government Bank. But his work was overshadowed by greater events—by the struggle which Wellesley was carrying on, first within India against the Marathas, then at home against the majority of the Court of Directors. It was indeed partly because he followed Wellesley in defying 'the cheesemongers of Leadenhall Street''—and went on doing so after Wellesley had gone home—that Bentinck was in serious trouble even before the Vellore mutiny sealed his disgrace. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Calcutta was already a metropolis: to Bentinck—who had seen Paris, Vienna, and Constantinople—it appeared, when he first set eyes on it in 1805, 'the most curious and magnificent' spectacle and, after London, the richest of cities.3 Madras in comparison was a backwater. Fort St. George, the company's headquarters, faced the sea with, at its back, the wholly Indian 'black town'—'that abominable town', Bentinck called it, 'that surrounds us ninefold like Styx . . ,'. 4 The new Government House, where he lived, was a fine example of plantation Doric, set a mile off amid trees. The few hundred other Europeans nearby lived in villas dotted about the plain, so buried in greenery that they reminded a governor-general fresh from England of that new gentlemanly retreat, Wimbledon. A visit might mean a three-mile drive in a carriage driven by an Indian got up exactly like an English postilion: their work done, the coachmen 'strip off their European finery, and walk off stark naked to their own huts and dress their rice'.5 That was about as much as many Europeans had to do with Indians, or they with them. This small European society was clique-ridden. Some officials (and 46

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their wives) were not on speaking terms. One quarrel over a young woman who had jilted her fiancd divided the settlement into factions: 'at last a reconciliation took place, but all parties are so irritated that the bets ran high upon a second quarrel before the end of the reconciliation dinner'. A captain attacked Bentinck's aide-de-camp at Wellington's (Arthur Wellesley's) farewell dinner: Bentinck ordered him to be arrested, but the town major, 'blind drunk', arrested the wrong man.6 In all this the heat, and the failure of the handful of British to adapt themselves to it, played a large part. Bentinck got away now and then to Pulicat, some thirty miles up the coast, where he had a bungalow open to the sea wind. He went a few times to the garrison town of Vellore. For the rest he saw little of the presidency but for one overland trip to Calcutta. He planned to visit every district; but the mutiny, a symptom of his and his fellows' isolation, prevented him from breaking out of it. Bentinck had anyhow reached Madras armoured in youthful priggishness. Throughout his time there he was given to parading his own integrity and the soundness of his principles. In a small, often meanminded community like the company's Madras establishment, with its channels of 'connection' running back to the Court of Directors, this was to expose oneself unnecessarily. Before leaving for India Bentinck had written to old Plumer—his 'second parent', a homely enough audience—that he hoped to serve his country as well as his own fortune: 'feeling a satisfactory consciousness in my own uprightness and integrity, I do hope that many millions of my fellow creatures may be benefited by my own personal exertions'.7 There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this or of like utterances during his governorship. 'Our case is the governed'; since landing at Madras he had 'with unceasing anxiety been endeavouring to rescue this great population from the oppression which they have suffered'; he had steadily pursued 'the happiness of the natives of India, the true interests of the East India Company, and the justice and honour of the British character'—all this in implied contrast with the habits of the Madras establishment, 'where interest is professedly made the great principle of action'.8 It all reflected the elevated teaching of Burke. But it was a bit pompous, even for a time when public men easily struck Roman attitudes. Bentinck also liked to ballast his communications with maxims that showed him a true child of the Enlightenment. 'Is not human nature everywhere the same?' he asked when considering the foundations of 47

I • THE CAREER OF A S E C O N D SON British rule in India. Was not the raiyatwari settlement based on 'that surest and most certain of all principles of all human action, selfinterest'? Should not the French in captured Pondicherry be expected to observe the social contract, 'the price which every man pays for his individual protection, and not affecting in any degree his allegiance to his own country'? A collector who was said to be virtuous but who had none the less abused his power must have been insane: 'in proportion as his natural disposition may be virtuous, so much the more violent must be his subjection to furious passion'.9 All this was the commonplace of Enlightened thought, shared, probably, by most of the men whom Bentinck thus lectured. But there was about it a touch of the solemn schoolboy. Bentinck, besides, followed Wellesley in freely threatening to resign over his differences with the 'cheesemongers'; but he did not carry Wellesley's guns. Old Edward Monckton with his Indian experience found a need to give him some worldly advice: . . . although I admire your noble sentiments, I should have been as well pleased if you had stopped with exculpating yourself without so strongly marking the impropriety of [the Directors'] conduct. Consider the Directors are like other men an heterogeneous set, some liberal-minded, others not so, and we may suppose that their letters are written by one of the Chairs [the Chairman and his deputy] and the Secretary without much attention being paid to them by the rest. . . . Now by making a serious charge you are likely to unite them and divide them from you. T h e more justly people are charged with being in the wrong the more apt they are to try to prove their accusers so; on the other hand if unjust charges are merely done away they feel the forbearance with gratitude and they are more likely not to repeat anything of the kind. Besides, Monckton pointed out, men and tempers could change over eighteen months (the length of time that might well go by between one India dispatch and another on the same subject). An offer of resignation such as Bentinck's might be jumped at and his friends might just then be unable to help. 10 This kind of sagacity was beyond the young Lord William. Wellesley thought him 'not yet qualified' for the Supreme Government; 11 one can see why. T h e distance between Britain and Madras, together with his own 48

5 • A P I T T I T E IN DISGRACE involvement in home politics, gave the young Governor many moments of anxiety about his career. As a member of the war party he, like Wellesley, distrusted the Addington Government which had appointed him. 12 The choice of the aged Cornwallis to succeed Wellesley in 1805 appalled him: not only did it for a time stand in the way of Bentinck's own hopes of promotion; Cornwallis had negotiated the Peace of Amiens which Portland disliked, and in India stood for 'concession and moderation' which Wellesley had scorned. 13 The news of the last Pitt Government of 1804-6, with Portland as Lord President of the Council, was encouraging. But friends could be more dangerous than opponents: Melville—Henry Dundas, for years the great fount of Indian patronage—was back in office; in March 1805 Bentinck, though most reluctant, let Melville's daughter importune him into appointing her husband, James Strange, to a vacancy on the Madras Council over the heads of two senior civil servants who were already giving trouble. Though he knew it would rouse 'clamour', he plainly did it as a sop to the Dundas clan and hoped Melville would see the appointment confirmed. What no one knew was that at home Melville was about to be impeached and driven from office. By the time the Court of Directors came to deal with the matter Pitt was dead, the Pittites had given way to the Fox-Grenville Ministry of All the Talents, the Directors were free to uphold seniority and show their displeasure; they threw out Strange and in his stead appointed Thomas Oakes, Bentinck's troublemaker-in-chief.* 14 The coming of the Ministry of all the Talents was Bentinck's greatest worry. Not only he but a number of other people in Madras thought he might be recalled as a straight political job. True, political alignments had shifted since 1794 and some of his father's old friends now sat in this anti-Pittite administration; two of them, Minto and Thomas Grenville, succeeded each other briefly in charge of Indian affairs as President of the Board of Control. But the core of the Government were the Foxites; to them Portland's 'political conduct could not be agreeable'. From October 1806, George Tierney, 'my father's enemy', was President. After 22 years in the wilderness the Foxites' 'sweep' was 'general' and Bentinck fully expected to be included in it, 'harsh and violent' though the measure might be. 15 * Melville, a persistent man, had already tried through Castlereagh as President of the Board of Control to secure in 1802 S(range's election to the Court; in 1808 he was still trying through his son Robert Dundas, by then President, to unseat Oakes: Philips, East India Company, 119; Melville to Dundas, 26 Mar. 1808, Scot. Rec. Off. GD 51/195/68. 49

I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON How well founded was this expectation? To a distressed job-hunter the Prince of Wales—still a friend of the Foxites—'condescended to mention Madras'; a little later Minto as Governor-General thought the fall of the Talents might mean his own recall. 16 It was something that people objected to in principle but might be tempted to do; as late as 1835 a Governor-General (who had not yet gone out) had his appointment revoked on straight party grounds. So Bentinck was probably not far out. In 1806-7 he anyhow knew that the Court of Directors were incensed with him on a number of grounds—the Government Bank, quarrels within the Madras Council and the service and between the civil and military authorities. These were matters which friends in office might gloss over and opponents seize upon. As the first rumours of the Vellore mutiny began to reach London Tierney was in fact saying, with Sir Arthur Wellesley's reluctant assent, that the 'confusion' at Madras 'could be relieved only by a change of authority, and by sending out there a person having the confidence of Government . . .'. I7 Bentinck for his part had still been hoping, up to October 1806—well after the mutiny—that he might get the reversion of Bengal, though only as a gesture; he was sending home memoranda justifying himself over matters like the bank.18 The one thing that seems not to have occurred to anybody at Madras was that he might be recalled because of Vellore. The Vellore mutiny was in some way a rehearsal for the great mutiny of 1857. For Bentinck it raised in stark form the question of how far a head of government should hold himself responsible for acts done or not done in his name. The garrison at Vellore Fort—some 1800 Indian soldiers and 400 British—guarded the large family of Tipu Sultan, state prisoners since the fall of Tipu's Mysore kingdom in 1799. Early on 10 July 1806 the Indian soldiers surrounded the European quarters and mowed down the men, the commanding officer of the garrison among them. Some British officers rallied the survivors and managed to reach the main gateway. One of Tipu's sons—how eagerly is not clear—agreed to lead the rebels; his father's flag was hoisted on the fort. But the mutineers quickly got out of hand and started looting. Seven hours after the outbreak an officer from nearby Arcot scaled the wall, led the survivors in a charge and massacred and dispersed the Indians. Nine British officers were dead, 105 British other ranks, and some 350 Indians.1» The mutineers had achieved complete surprise. One or two men had talked, but they had been disregarded. This was as great a shock as the SO

5 • A PITTITE IN DISGRACE mutiny itself. In subsequent months a flurry of inquiries, charges, and counter-charges brought forward a number of alleged causes, from Christian missionary activity to the new system of courts and a Muslim plot. The most obvious immediate cause, however, was a series of changes in Indian soldiers' dress. This was thought to have convinced men already ill-paid and ill-considered that they were about to be made into 'Firingis'—Christians. John Malcolm, a soldier with much Indian experience, thought the trouble at bottom was the 'rage for dress and military tactics' which for twenty years past had 'been brought from the German school into England': Madras officers were promoted less on their knowledge and understanding of their men than on 'a talent for improving the dress and appearance or of perfecting by the most harassing drill the discipline of the native troops'. 20 Certainly Cradock, the Commander-inChief, and his Adjutant-General and Deputy Adjutant-General, Colonel Agnew and Major Pierce, were all keen on 'smartness'. From February 1805 Agnew and Pierce worked on a new consolidated code of regulations. In November an order of Cradock's brought in a new turban with a leather cockade. In January 1806 he submitted to the Governor in Council a code of some 150 folio pages. Agnew and Pierce had been supposed to mark the new clauses; but they failed to mark a new clause forbidding caste marks on the face, directing chins to be clean shaven, and 'uniformity [to] be preserved in regard to the quantity and shape of the hair upon the upper lip'. Hence Bentinck and the Council were unaware of the clause when they sanctioned the code on 13 March—or indeed until after the mutiny. From April to June Indian soldiers at various stations showed considerable resistance to the turban. At Vellore on 7 May they paraded in handkerchiefs and called British officers dogs. At a court-martial on 9 June Hindu and Muslim witnesses stated that the turban did not offend against their religion. Several soldiers were therefore given sentences of 500 and 900 lashes. By now Cradock, urged by another officer, was beginning to be 'somewhat uneasy about this cursed turban business' and to blame Agnew and Pierce. 21 He therefore asked the Council on 29 June whether he should rescind the turban order. But the Council (which still knew nothing of the orders about caste marks and beards) accepted the evidence of the court-martial witnesses and upheld the turban. Bentinck did draw up on 4 July a general order pledging that the Government did not mean to interfere with Indian soldiers' religion or to force Christianity on them. Cradock, however, by then 5i

I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON thought things were on the mend; he withheld the order. T h e mutiny then blew up on 10 July. Bentinck and the Council now found out about the orders banning caste marks and whiskers. The soldiers, they concluded, had been justified in a 'general apprehension . . . that their religious customs are no longer to be respected'. They at once rescinded both these and the turban order. Meanwhile near-mutiny at Hyderabad and threatened mutiny at Wallajabad had started a panic among Europeans which went on till the end of the year. Bentinck briefly shared in the panic at the beginning of August: it seemed then that there might be a general conspiracy involving the whole native army. For the most part, however, he settled on the orders about dress as the cause, acted to remove them, and stood out for leniency. In September, after a court-martial, five of the Vellore ringleaders were shot, eight hanged, and six blown from guns. The other mutineers were gradually set free and the officers among them pensioned off. By January 1807 the panic was dying down. By July Bentinck was writing home: 'the subject seems forgotten'. 22 At the same moment he began to hear rumours of his impending recall. News of Vellore had reached London in March. T h e Court of Directors at once decided to recall Bentinck and Cradock. Bentinck they blamed for having 'neglected to profit by the repeated warnings of the danger'. But they already had quite separate reasons for wishing to be rid of him: they took the occasion to mention 'other [measures] which . . . impaired our confidence in him'. Bentinck's father Portland, as it happened, had just come into office again as head of a new Government. He could do nothing. The Court had the right of recall and the previous Government had agreed to it. All the new President of the Board of Control, Robert Dundas, could do was to strike out of the dispatch recalling Bentinck any mention of Vellore or other causes.23 For over a year Bentinck had been divided between hope and fear— hope that he might be promoted to the Supreme Government; and fear that he might be recalled, though not on account of Vellore. . . The foundation stone of all good government', he had written in 1804 when transferring an official, was 'the responsibility of the individual who undertakes any charge . . . in the administration of it'; the official might have meant well, but he 'ought to suffer for the good of India'. 24 Now that the Court was applying this doctrine to Bentinck himself it came as a shock, all the greater because he genuinely felt

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innocent of responsibility for the soldiers' unrest: if anything he thought he deserved credit for having 'stopped an evil not produced by myself...'." Rumours of the recall kept coming through July and August. On i September news of Portland's new Government came as a great relief. Eight days later Bentinck was at dinner with Melville's daughter (sister of the new President, Robert Dundas) 'rejoicing . . . at the change of administration' when the official dispatch arrived recalling him 'without delay'. Bentinck at first thought he might go on acting as Governor without drawing his salary, was dissuaded, and from then on 'appeared like any other private gentleman'. In the hope of reaching England in time to justify himself while his father was Prime Minister he got his friend Sir Edward Pellew, the admiral in command at Madras, to advance the sailing of a convoy ship. He left at the end of September. By his own wish no officials saw him off. At sea he took stock: My great misfortune . . . made very little impression upon me. For twelve hours after being acquainted with the news I was a good deal knocked down. All unpleasant feeling immediately left me and from that time to this I have felt delight. I have no apprehension whatever for the result—but calculating upon complete disappointment of my hope of convincing the Court of Directors and my friends of the rectitude and, I will think, of the merit of my conduct, my conscience is perfectly at ease. I feel great delight at the thoughts of returning home. The possibility of meeting a ship at sea reinstating me in the Government has occurred with great horror to my imagination. Even the appointment to the Supreme Government, if it should arrest my return home, would sadly mortify my feelings. 26 It needs no acumen to detect in this journal entry a large helping of self-deception. The blow had gone deep. How deep was shown by his efforts to vindicate himself, and by the uncertainty that attended the next few steps in his career. On his return to England in February 1808 Bentinck tried to get the Court of Directors to say that their first impression of his conduct over Vellore had not been justified by later knowledge. For complex reasons which had only in part to do with him the Directors did in the following year resolve that Bentinck's fault had been merely not to have used 'greater care and caution . . . in examining into the real sentiments . . . 53

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of the sipahis before measures of severity were adopted'.27 This, for him, was not enough. Bentinck remained permanently available for a job in India that should publicly restore his 'character'. Meanwhile he had to do something. As it happened the Spanish revolt against Napoleon almost at once opened a new field for British arms. Bentinck threw himself into his old profession of soldiering. He sailed in July 1808 as a major-general on the staff of the British forces in the Peninsula. Within three weeks of landing at Lisbon he was sent on a mission to the Madrid Junta. He reached Madrid on 24 September by way of Cadiz. The 'disasters of war' had begun: on the way he had heard from passing Franciscans tales of French soldiers ripping open pregnant women and sticking children on pikes. For the next two months Bentinck, like some later observers of embattled Spanish Governments, was torn between admiration for the spirit of the people and despair at jealousy and procrastination among the leaders. The purpose of his mission—it had been his own idea—was twofold: to negotiate about joint operations in Northern Spain, and to arrange supplies and information in country the British knew very little about. Both turned out to be extraordinarily difficult. By November the French advance was bearing out all his misgivings. Even then Bentinck was strongly committed to the Spaniards: 'to be cold in such a cause is impossible'. He pressed on the new British commander, Sir John Moore, a forward strategy. But there was no more to be done. Bentinck rejoined the British force: he took part in the harrowing march to Corunna, the battle, and the evacuation.28 Once again he was in England. In the next few months there was talk of his returning to Spain, or going on a mission to the Austrian Army after the outbreak of war between Austria and France, but nothing came of it.* 29 One reason for staying at home was his father's health. As Prime Minister in 1807-9 Portland was a figurehead, old and ill, beset with troubles at home and abroad, compelled to preside over the break-up of the old Pittite group, his Government in the end riven by the quarrel between Castlereagh and Canning; he kept going painfully with laudanum. Portland resigned in September 1809 and died at the end of October. Even before Portland's death his successor Perceval was trying to bring Bentinck into a reconstructed Government as Secretary at War * The difficulty of reaching Austria with most of the Continent in unfriendly hands held up Bentinck's departure until June. Austria's swift defeat in July did the rest.

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5 • A P I T T I T E IN DISGRACE (an administrative post which did not as a rule carry Cabinet rank). Perceval's reasons were simple. Now that the Pittites had fallen apart he was having trouble patching up any sort of Government; he was particularly 'ill off for second rates' and for 'men of rank'. Canning was alienated; by drawing in one or two of Canning's relations and supporters Perceval hoped to broaden his administration's 'bottom'. He tried several, but Bentinck and at least one other declined; in the end the job went to the young Palmerston.30 Perceval's Government, however, was never secure; he and his Ministers went on trying. Early in 1810 Liverpool, the new Secretary of State for War, tried to persuade Bentinck to go back to Portugal as Wellington's second-in-command. Once again Bentinck declined; at first he gave 'private reasons', then reasons of precedence—he would not have succeeded as temporary commander-in-chief if Wellington had been put out of action. Liverpool, however, thought him 'most desponding with respect to the cause of the Peninsula'. 31 Bentinck seems also to have declined a post 'in America' (this perhaps meant Canada). 32 When Liverpool and Wellesley, now Foreign Secretary, in February 1 8 1 1 offered him the combined posts of Minister to Sicily and Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean he had thus declined at least three jobs in a row. This time he accepted at once.33 Why this succession of refusals? It was common enough, even in wartime, for high-ranking soldiers to stand on their dignity or convenience; Bentinck was not the only one. He himself claimed that he could not ask for a suitable job while his brothers failed to support the Perceval Ministry in Parliament.34 But something else seems to have been at work. Bentinck spent the two years 1809-11 uninterruptedly in England. For the first year or so he was busy preparing and then bringing out a memorial in protest against the terms of his recall. In late 1809 and 1810 he was also trying to advance the fortune he had been cheated of at Madras by joining in the land rush; it was the start of his disastrous farming ventures in Norfolk. He had not embarked of set purpose on a long stay. 35 Yet he stayed. A close friend thought there was something wrong about his declining one job after another.36 Here we can only speculate. But it may be that in these years Bentinck went through a period of depression and also—what sometimes feels like the same thing—of religious crisis: that his 'desponding' was less about the Peninsula than about himself. He had come back, as he felt, in disgrace. About this he was highly

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I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON sensitive: 'after the ill luck I had had in India,' he told his commanding officer in Portugal in 1808, ' I was not anxious to put myself unnecessarily forward and I could not but believe that there might be some prejudice against me.' 37 His recall had cast him for the first time in the role of victim. An aristocrat who comes to see himself as a victim may react by identifying the persons or groups responsible for his fall; he may then, by standing out against them, seek to restore his normal aristocratic posture of command within his peer group. On the other hand he may come to identify himself with victims in general, and may seek to exercise the aristocratic function of leadership on their behalf, if necessary against his peers. A classic example is Shelley. Bentinck was no Shelley. But in these years we begin to see him move gradually away from the triple cocoon of the Bentinck family, the Army, and the Pittite group. He, who seemed never to have questioned the right of the landed aristocracy to rule, was soon to promote in Sicily the rights of the middle class and the peasantry against an aristocracy he saw as incapable and oppressive. A man born and brought up in Burlington House now came to make middle-class friends and adopt middle-class ways. In this, it is true, Bentinck's was only a marked example of a subtle and long-drawn-out process within the aristocracy of his time. He had been out of England, with only short breaks, for sixteen years; in those wartime years England had been changing. His stay in 18091 8 1 1 was the first chance he had had to look about him and reflect without attending to immediate duties. It was his first chance to absorb some of the new modes of feeling, particularly religious feeling, that had grown up at home, as well as to make new acquaintances among his Fenland neighbours and among his wife's family. Lady William Bentinck's relatives included several strong Evangelicals. Religious crisis or no, it is clear that from about 1810 or 1 8 1 1 Bentinck and his wife began to take part in Evangelical activities, and that by the early post-war period ¿hey were rapidly becoming firm though moderate Evangelicals.

6 AN E V A N G E L I C A L COUPLE T o understand Bentinck's development we need to understand his relationship with his wife. They were, by common consent, a united 56

I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON sensitive: 'after the ill luck I had had in India,' he told his commanding officer in Portugal in 1808, ' I was not anxious to put myself unnecessarily forward and I could not but believe that there might be some prejudice against me.' 37 His recall had cast him for the first time in the role of victim. An aristocrat who comes to see himself as a victim may react by identifying the persons or groups responsible for his fall; he may then, by standing out against them, seek to restore his normal aristocratic posture of command within his peer group. On the other hand he may come to identify himself with victims in general, and may seek to exercise the aristocratic function of leadership on their behalf, if necessary against his peers. A classic example is Shelley. Bentinck was no Shelley. But in these years we begin to see him move gradually away from the triple cocoon of the Bentinck family, the Army, and the Pittite group. He, who seemed never to have questioned the right of the landed aristocracy to rule, was soon to promote in Sicily the rights of the middle class and the peasantry against an aristocracy he saw as incapable and oppressive. A man born and brought up in Burlington House now came to make middle-class friends and adopt middle-class ways. In this, it is true, Bentinck's was only a marked example of a subtle and long-drawn-out process within the aristocracy of his time. He had been out of England, with only short breaks, for sixteen years; in those wartime years England had been changing. His stay in 18091 8 1 1 was the first chance he had had to look about him and reflect without attending to immediate duties. It was his first chance to absorb some of the new modes of feeling, particularly religious feeling, that had grown up at home, as well as to make new acquaintances among his Fenland neighbours and among his wife's family. Lady William Bentinck's relatives included several strong Evangelicals. Religious crisis or no, it is clear that from about 1810 or 1 8 1 1 Bentinck and his wife began to take part in Evangelical activities, and that by the early post-war period ¿hey were rapidly becoming firm though moderate Evangelicals.

6 AN E V A N G E L I C A L COUPLE T o understand Bentinck's development we need to understand his relationship with his wife. They were, by common consent, a united 56

6 • AN E V A N G E L I C A L

COUPLE

couple. Lady William affected her husband's career in a number of ways. She united a fey charm with persistently bad health which again and again failed to stand up to the English or the Indian climate. She was childless: perhaps because of this, she and Bentinck came in time to act as parental figures to a series of gifted young men (and one young woman), some of them influential in British and Indian affairs. Most important, soon after her marriage she and her family became deeply involved in the Evangelical movement. When Bentinck married Mary Acheson in 1803 he had probably had little enough experience of women. After he had met her, but before they had become engaged, the North Italian campaign of 1799-1801 had thrown him together with young officers much of whose time was spent on love—often taken in the spirit of Don Giovanni's list. A brother officer (one of them wrote) had gone to fetch his wife—'we shall not fail to cuckold him at the first opportunity'.1 That sets the tone. Bentinck fell in with it. He appears to have suffered an attack of venereal disease.* After the end of the campaign he found excuses to stay on for three months in Trieste and Venice: he was having an affair with a ballet dancer known as La Belle Giuditta. He cared enough to have her portrait sent after him when at length he went home; but although it is pleasing to imagine the future Evangelical GovernorGeneral gadding about Venice with his Giuditta in the Carnival of 1801 this seems to have been a passing and final episode.2 On his return from Egypt in the following year Bentinck was quickly engaged and married; the rest of his career seems to have been utterly monogamous. It was a love match. Mary Acheson's family, Scotch-Irish landowners, like many others had scrambled up the Irish peerage by giving timely support to the Government; but the bride seems not to have brought with her any fortune. The new Lady William was always to strike some English acquaintances as Irish in an uncomplimentary sense: on the one hand 'unbounded kindness', on the other a flow of talk that seemed to them 'bother-headed', even 'very silly'. 'What a good-natured, kind-hearted, potato-headed woman she is, always in a bother, every second word a blunder! She calls Mr. Strangways Mr. Stapleton, Mr. Tiemey Mr. Burdett, and seems scarcely to know if her own head is on her shoulders or not.'3 * 'Un maudit chancre me tient prisonnier': Bentinck's endorsement of letter received 3 Jan. 1801 and passed on to Bellegarde, BP/PwJa/139.

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Yet a young French scientist thought her 'very pleasant and witty'. 4 A Mrs Malaprop is not necessarily a fool. A woman who, like Lady William in India, could act as mediator, pacifying an irascible Commander-in-Chief here and a zealous Evangelical bishop there, was evidently far from being one. To her husband she was and remained 'my best friend'. 5 Her feyness was, at most, grounds for tender chaffing. Thus she made herself ill in 1820 by agreeing to give evidence for Queen Caroline in the royal divorce trial: when the Queen's solicitor 'reprieved' her 'immediately all illness vanished and today [Bentinck wrote] she is as bold as brass and fancies that she could get through the examination with perfect sangfroid'. 6 Her health was none the less a real and continual worry. What ailed her is unclear. At one time and another she was said to suffer from pains in her side, in her hip, in her head, in her jaw, to have had trouble with her liver, with 'nervous attacks' and fainting fits, with 'spasms' apparently brought on by the weather. Some of this illness may have been psychosomatic—a defence put up against life by a woman easily flustered—though her lifelong coughs and chest pains were real enough. She lived to be 68; her ailments cannot have been devastating. For Bentinck, himself nearly always in robust health, they meant that his career had several times to wait on her needs.* If her childlessness was a worry we know nothing of it. As the couple moved towards middle age they began in effect to adopt a series of young people as child figures. The young men they helped, listened to their private worries, and if need be made gentle fun of. With the young woman—Lady William's niece Millicent Sparrow—Bentinck's relationship was more ambiguous. The tale of putative sons opens in 1813 with James Graham, a future Home Secretary and leading politician but at that time a depressive 21-year-old. It goes on with an obscure officer from Nice who served under Bentinck in the Mediterranean, Giulio De Andreis, then with the sons of two of Bentinck's service friends, Fleetwood Pellew and especially Harry Verney; it ends in India with the scientist • References to Lady William's 'delicate' health, far too many to quote, are scattered throughout Bentinck's correspondence. At Madras in 1803-7 she would consult three doctors separately; Arthur Wellesley asked her whether she then took all three prescriptions. 'She said no, but selected which of the three she thought best': Philip 5 th Earl Stanhope, Notes of Conversations with . . . Wellington (1889; 1st ed. 1888), 67-8.

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Victor Jacquemont and—the only one of these figures to influence Bentinck's Indian policy—the civil servant Charles Trevelyan. In some of these young men the filial tie was explicit. To Graham— then politically at odds with his own father—Bentinck was 'one whom I regard as a father', whose 'return of affection . . . combined the confidence of a brother with the tender experience and care of a father', 'my best and dearest friend'.7 To De Andreis he was 'the man in the world I love and respect most, and whom at the same time I am a little afraid of I regard you as a sort of father ' 8 Harry Verney, son of one of Bentinck's oldest friends (who had just died), wept when it seemed Lord and Lady William thought him too 'restless' and 'changeable' (as we should say, too neurotic) to take out to India with them; he wanted Bentinck to act as a substitute father and could not bear having 'anyone else nearer your confidence than myself.» Lady William evidently had a store of maternal feeling which spent itself often in acts of kindness and solicitude, sometimes in teasing. Anthony Troyer, an Austrian officer friend whom Bentinck took to India (and who became in consequence a noted Orientalist), thought her a saint and an angel: though there was always in these relationships a touch of dependence this seems not to have been flattery.10 Jacquemont recalled with 'a melting of the heart' the hours he had spent with both husband and wife: almost as soon as they met he and Lady William talked for hours of religion, Mozart, Rossini, Madame de Staël, happiness, unhappiness—'we never spoke of trifles'." Her husband was a more difficult figure to get on terms with, especially in his earlier years. He could be formidable. He thought it his duty to put what he called 'pressure' on the jealous Harry Verney (at that time his secretary) by showing him no special cordiality.12 His 'cold forbidding manner' at first put off James Graham; but, Graham added, 'he daily communicates more freely with m e . . . . To gain his approbation and esteem would be the pride and honour of my life.'13 He could also be mild in reproof. Troyer at Madras got into trouble by publicly hoping that Napoleon might, through conquest, unite the world. Bentinck readily put this down to 'feelings of general philanthropy totally unconnected with political partiality. . . . But my dear and good friend, will others, who do not know you as intimately as I do, reason in the same manner?'14 Now and then he could give the young the pleasure of the shared joke, chaffing the 18-year-old Harry Verney about his dandiacal taste in 59

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dress or his father's ill success at shooting.15 But the impression he gave—perhaps against his will—was by and large austere. Late in Bentinck's life Jacquemont tackled him about his aloofness. The English, he told his new friend, 'by banishing from their manners all lively expression of tender feeling, deprive themselves of one of the greatest pleasures within their reach; many of them close their hearts against it altogether'. Bentinck, 'after a moment of thoughtful silence and melancholy inwardness', agreed.* What did Bentinck give these son figures? First of all, exacting and responsible tasks. By this means he pulled Graham through an unhappy love affair with a married woman, at one point himself 'pacifying' the lady. 16 Troyer and Jacquemont he helped with their scholarly work, De Andreis with money and advice in an emergency; to Harry Verney he gave a chance to prove himself overseas, to Charles Trevelyan high praise and promotion for his 'manly conduct' in the Indian service. 17 The son figures, all but one, in return developed a special loyalty. De Andreis as a grey-haired widower was still writing Bentinck affectionate letters. Trevelyan, with his brother-in-law Macaulay, did most to vindicate Bentinck's reputation. Verney, as a middle-aged Liberal M.P., followed suit. The exception, not surprisingly, was the man who seems to have owed Bentinck most, James Graham: when the two became politically estranged Bentinck remained friendly, but Graham started abusing him behind his back.18 Bentinck did not, as Lord Wellesley did in India, mould a group of disciples. But for some men he had the authority that inspires affection. His aloofness as well as his childlessness probably explains his tie with the one person he openly called 'child of my heart'. Millicent Sparrow was the daughter of Lady William's elder sister Lady Olivia Sparrow. As Bentinck had no children, so Millicent at an early age had lost her father. In 1816-22 she visited the Bentincks several times; with her uncle she kept up a lively correspondence, sometimes daily. Bentinck thus carried on a relationship half flirtatious, half parental with a young woman who was not only intelligent and high-spirited but safe, and in whom he confided at least as deeply as in his wife. 'Most dear to me is your letter of this morning, dearest friend and child . . . ' . She was his 'dearest icicle', 'most lovely and all-conquering • Jacquemont, Correspondance, I, 96-^7. Jacquemont says this conversation took place with those few English people at Calcutta whom he knew and liked best. These clearly included the Bentincks; the passage follows close on Jacquemont's 'melting of the heart' at the thought of the week he had just spent with them. It is at least highly likely that the conversation took place with Bentinck.

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6 • AN E V A N G E L I C A L COUPLE priestess', 'my epistolary darling'; he signed himself 'your placable uncle'. She, after the fashion of the time, gave him a Greek name, Morpheus, and signed herself 'Chattering Polly'. They discussed religion and Sir Walter Scott, horses and politics, casual gossip and Millicent's affairs of the heart.'. . . You have chosen me as a butt upon which to practise sentiment', he expostulated; he pretended to find her 'horribly impressible'; he undertook to pacify the watchful Lady Olivia by making out 'that you . . . have no heart and sentiments whatever, and are resolved to marry nothing but a saint—that heaven and not earth is your sole consideration—God bless you and direct you and us for the best. . . .' He made fun of the High Toryism she shared with her mother; more ambiguously, the two of them now and again made gentle fun of Lady William. T o all this jocularity between a man in his mid-forties and a woman in her early twenties there was a faint erotic edge. Bentinck was upset when 'Dearest Mill' seemed about to be rushed into an engagement; on another occasion he could not answer her daily letters 'because my time, unlike my thoughts, cannot be at your sole disposal —there Madam!' She then married Lord Mandeville, heir to the Duke of Manchester; the letters as we have them ceased. Their erotic halflights seem anyhow to have been unconscious. The friendship went on. Twenty years later Lady William, the third party in this innocent group, remembered the middle-aged Lady Mandeville in her will. 19 T h e relationship had been all the more ineluctably pure because Millicent and her family were deep in the Evangelical movement. They had in fact played a decisive part in drawing both Lord and Lady William towards an Evangelical understanding of the Christian faith. The drift within the family seems to have set in after the death in 1807 of Lady William's father, Lord Gosford. He had been a quiet Protestant, in Ireland particularly helpful to Catholics during the troubled 1790s. His widow was said to have been brought 'through many sufferings . . . to a deep and, at length, a consoling sense of religion'. 20 But the dominant member of the family was their eldest daughter Lady Olivia Sparrow. This formidable woman was said to have £14,000 a year; from her house at Brampton she held sway over much of Huntingdonshire, where her initials ' O B S ' may still be found on mid-Victorian schools. She was a friend of leading Evangelicals—Wilberforce and Hannah More—and herself an extreme Tory Evangelical. A holiday on the Riviera was to her chiefly an occasion for converting local Catholics 61

I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON and Jews to Protestantism; she was quite capable of summoning her daughter through four closely written pages to pray and search her conscience because Millicent, chaperoned by her aunt and uncle, had gone to London evening parties with some thought of perhaps finding a husband. (Millicent replied that she had searched her conscience and it was, in effect, all right to go to evening parties; extreme Protestantism does have these resources.) Lady Olivia's other child Robert died young in an odour of Evangelical sanctity, saying 'that he would unhesitatingly prefer his present state of health, provided he were certain of becoming decidedly religious, than to be restored to health and strength with no more religion than he formerly possessed'. A visitor to Brampton once found 'the hall crowded with people all kneeling, and Malan (from Geneva), a saint-like looking person, engaged in fervent prayer . . . many individuals of high rank with the servants, cottagers etc. etc.' Among them was Lady William Bentinck.21 Bentinck stayed at Brampton for the first time in February 1808; whenever he was in England during the rest of his life he made frequent visits. Through his wife's relatives he also got to know Joseph John Gurney, the Norwich Quaker banker and brother of Elizabeth Fry. Gurney was a member of a comfortable family whose younger generation, after flirting (like many Dissenters) with 'infidel' and democratic ideas in the early 1790s, had turned to an intenser religious experience, some of them within the Church of England. Joseph John, however, from about 1809-10 became a deeply introspective strict Quaker. One of his sisters married the anti-slavery reformer Fowell Buxton and the whole family were deep in the anti-slavery agitation: Joseph John when less than two years old is said to have refused slave-grown sugar. In early nineteenth-century England even a rich Dissenter was unlikely to be on visiting terms with the highest landed aristocracy. The antislavery movement brought Gurney and Bentinck together. It was something of an event when the Bentincks stayed with Gurney at Earlham, near Norwich, in 1825^—'Lord William is a man of excellent sense and great integrity of purpose', Gurney noted—and Bentinck at a public dinner moved resolutions calling on Parliament to abolish West Indian slavery.22 For a duke's younger son to do this marked a real commitment. Bentinck in 1809-10 formed yet one more tie with a leading member of the Evangelical movement. Charles Grant in those years was deputy chairman, then chairman of the Court of Directors and the dominant figure in the East India Company. He had shared in the decision to 62

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recall Bentinck from Madras; but there were reasons why, after Bentinck's return to England, the two men should make common cause in fighting off some of the interpretations of the Vellore mutiny then being put about. Bentinck had thought the previous chairman 'nothing better than a canting rascal'; he evidently got on terms of mutual respect with Grant, who after several interviews described him as 'honest, frank, and well-meaning' and 'much regretted' the disaster to his career.23 It was almost certainly Grant who drew up from Bentinck's rough text an early draft of Bentinck's memorial to the Court of Directors—a plea addressed to himself. It was also Grant who got the Court in August 1809 to soften the terms of the recall, though the new form of words still failed to set Bentinck's mind at rest.24 How far Grant influenced Bentinck to an Evangelical outlook is not clear; the two seem not to have become close friends. This was, all the same, a direct link with the 'Saints' of the Clapham Sect; Bentinck in the postwar years, especially around 1819-22—the last declining period of Grant's ascendancy—came to enjoy the trust of a majority of the Court of Directors. What was the quality of Bentinck's new religious experience? He and his wife moved gradually; they never attained the extreme zeal of a Grant, a Gurney, or a Lady Olivia Sparrow. Of the two, Lady William was the less reticent. By 1813 the young James Graham was writing home 'for the consolation of my dear mother'—a strong Evangelical and a friend of Wilberforce—that Lady William 'borders on being truly1.25 About the same date, Joseph John Gurney had'religious intercourse' with her, 'not to my own satisfaction', but by the time she and her husband stayed at Earlham in 1825 he was 'much pleased' with both.26 By the 1820s and 1830s Lady William was a voluble though always courteous evangelist. A Continental friend she had just visited recommended Bentinck to 'draw her down from heaven to keep her on earth'; in India the young rationalist Victor Jacquemont, a very lukewarm Christian, reported that 'as she is devout, or tries to be', she had set out in the wittiest and most amiable way to 'convert' him.27 Bentinck for his part seems always to have been a practising and believing Christian. But until his recall from Madras in 1807 he had not been in the habit of displaying his religious beliefs in his correspondence. The recall itself drew from him an expression of that selfconscious meekness which might have pleased his mother: 'I have been well paid and though my services may not deserve

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disgrace, I am far from thinking that they have been particularly meritorious, or that I have made an adequate return for what I have received.' 28 From 1808 on he began now and then to refer to Providence, unaffectedly enough, as guiding human affairs. Thus Providence might 'interfere in behalf of the Spaniards' when the French started to move, though 'according to every military principle' their armies were bound to be destroyed.29 From that date one also begins to find in his diaries a record of assiduous church attendance. By 1815, after Napoleon's escape from Elba, Bentinck could say that he placed his 'whole reliance in Providence, and this Providence is so good that the uniform wretchedness and stupidity of us mortals does not seem to affect its kind dispensations in our favour. We do what we can against ourselves, but, I hope, in vain.' 30 He signified his new interests by joining, not later than 1 8 1 1 , the British and Foreign Bible Society. In after years he attended a number of Bible meetings in Nottinghamshire and the Norfolk Marshland, one of them in the teeth of a Nottinghamshire neighbour, the High Tory Duke of Newcastle, who regarded such meetings on his home ground as an 'unfriendly interference'. Bentinck also founded a branch of the society in Marsldand. 31 T o be active in the Bible Society meant, first, an interest in missionary work, and secondly a willingness to work with Dissenters as well as Anglicans. It was an Evangelical activity; the president of the society, Lord Teignmouth (as Sir John Shore a former Governor of Bengal), was a leading Evangelical. In accepting the presidency of the Retford branch in 1820 Bentinck expressed his 'gratitude and pride both as a Christian and an Englishman for the amazing results which [the society] has been the means of producing, tending equally . . . to the best interests of mankind and to the truest glory of the British nation'. 32 During the Spanish and Italian Liberal revolutions of 1820-3 he was sympathetic enough with the extreme Protestant outlook to assure Millicent Sparrow—as keen a Protestant missionary as her mother—that with the 'great spirit of political reformation [which] is gone abroad . . . will be also dispelled the religious darkness in which much of Europe is enveloped'. 33 Yet Bentinck was never himself an extreme Protestant. Where Lady Olivia Sparrow was a raging anti-Catholic, and thought her daughter might be 'tainted' by exposure to the French and Italian nobility, Bentinck was perfectly willing to attend Catholic services on the Continent. At various times between 1812 and 1824 he kept the Lent 64

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fast with friends at Verona, went to Mass with Louis-Philippe in Sicily (feeling embarrassed because he did not know enough to bow at the Elevation), and, at Dresden, attended Catholic and Lutheran services on the same day. 34 Most unlike the 'saints' of the Clapham Sect, he disliked religious controversy: it sprang mainly from vanity and might lead to doubt.35 The work of Christian apologetics he presented to a sceptical friend on the Continent was that of an unusually tolerant theologian.* When the beloved Millicent tried to find out whether a suitor—somewhat unsuitably old—could have been sent by Providence or not, Bentinck came as close as he ever did to expounding his creed: It is in my judgment a gross delusion to imagine . . . when we decide this most important question by our feelings mainly, with some small assistance of judgment, that we are acting under the influence of a special interposition. Let us pray indeed for assistance, but let us act as if we depended only upon the means given us by nature, directed, as nearly as we weak creatures are able, by the true principles of Christianity.... I believe, as we all must, in the general law, I see no signs of special interposition.36 This was to mark himself off clearly from the extreme Evangelicals. The central concern of Evangelicalism was salvation; this the individual must seek through a right face-to-face relation with God, and hence through individual prayer, self-scrutiny, and religious emotion, transcending (without necessarily bypassing) rites, laws, and institutions. The search for the right relation with God easily led a man either to rely from day to day on intimations of Providence ('special interposition') or, when the thread seemed lost, to fall into extreme gloom. Bentinck did not go so far. He remained a child of the eighteenth century, willing to rely in practice on 'nature' and 'the general law'. But he shared with the Evangelicals the central concern with individual salvation and the central awareness of personal inadequacy. It was a 'constant state of preparation for another world' that had placed a late * Bentinck gave what he described as Erskine's Evidences of Christianity to his friend the Due de Dalberg (Lord Acton's grandfather, a former Minister of both Napoleon and Louis XVIII): 1824 Continental journal, 13 Sep., BP/PwJe/1082-4. This seems to have been Thomas Erskine of Linlathen's Remarks on the Internal Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion (Edinburgh, 1820). Erskine, though a member of the Church of Scotland, was close to Episcopalianism and a friend of F. D. Maurice; he preached the eventual full redemption of all mankind through Christ: DNB. C

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friend 'above all the hazards and contingencies of this life'. 37 Only the Evangelical sense of guilt can have led Bentinck, when GovernorGeneral, to tell a delegation of missionaries that their praise must not mislead me from a deep consciousness and confession of my own unworthiness, or make me forget that only in humble dependence upon the Giver of all mercies I can hope with earnest prayer to obtain forgiveness for the unprofitable use I have made of the talents committed to my care. 38 Bentinck's new Evangelicalism, though moderate, had important consequences. Just because Evangelicalism insisted on salvation as the first concern of each human soul, and on the infinite value of each soul before God, it led men to act: they must enable other men too— potentially every one of them a precious vessel—to reach out for the highest good. Thus James Graham and Shaftesbury were concerned with the souls of British factory children, Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay with those of African slaves, Charles Grant and—ultimately —Bentinck with those of Britain's Indian subjects. In practical terms this meant not only that Bentinck as GovernorGeneral would rejoice in a Bishop of Calcutta who was 'no High Churchman', 3 « and show a good deal of interest in missionaries and missionary schools, 40 but that he would go some way towards bringing about the 'true happiness' of Indians by rooting out customs 'repugnant to the best feelings that Providence has planted in the human breast'. 41 True, Bentinck never went all the way with those who would have made Britain's mission in India a showing forth of godliness. Prudence and a belief in strong government held him in check. All the same, a great change had been at work in him between his Madras governorship and his seven late years as Governor-General. He who had been Wellesley's disciple, and had not questioned British rule in India as an expansive despotism, was now more nearly a disciple of Wellesley's adversary-in-chief, Charles Grant.

7 - A N INDEPENDENT CANNINGITE The years of 'desponding' and uncertainty that followed the recall from Madras in 1807 came to an end in 1 8 1 1 when Bentinck was once again sent out, this time as Minister to Sicily and Commander-in66

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friend 'above all the hazards and contingencies of this life'. 37 Only the Evangelical sense of guilt can have led Bentinck, when GovernorGeneral, to tell a delegation of missionaries that their praise must not mislead me from a deep consciousness and confession of my own unworthiness, or make me forget that only in humble dependence upon the Giver of all mercies I can hope with earnest prayer to obtain forgiveness for the unprofitable use I have made of the talents committed to my care. 38 Bentinck's new Evangelicalism, though moderate, had important consequences. Just because Evangelicalism insisted on salvation as the first concern of each human soul, and on the infinite value of each soul before God, it led men to act: they must enable other men too— potentially every one of them a precious vessel—to reach out for the highest good. Thus James Graham and Shaftesbury were concerned with the souls of British factory children, Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay with those of African slaves, Charles Grant and—ultimately —Bentinck with those of Britain's Indian subjects. In practical terms this meant not only that Bentinck as GovernorGeneral would rejoice in a Bishop of Calcutta who was 'no High Churchman', 3 « and show a good deal of interest in missionaries and missionary schools, 40 but that he would go some way towards bringing about the 'true happiness' of Indians by rooting out customs 'repugnant to the best feelings that Providence has planted in the human breast'. 41 True, Bentinck never went all the way with those who would have made Britain's mission in India a showing forth of godliness. Prudence and a belief in strong government held him in check. All the same, a great change had been at work in him between his Madras governorship and his seven late years as Governor-General. He who had been Wellesley's disciple, and had not questioned British rule in India as an expansive despotism, was now more nearly a disciple of Wellesley's adversary-in-chief, Charles Grant.

7 - A N INDEPENDENT CANNINGITE The years of 'desponding' and uncertainty that followed the recall from Madras in 1807 came to an end in 1 8 1 1 when Bentinck was once again sent out, this time as Minister to Sicily and Commander-in66

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Chief in the Mediterranean. In effect the Foreign Secretary—his old Indian superior Lord Wellesley—made him a proconsul fully empowered to set to rights the internal affairs of an ally which had long proved troublesome. Once Sicily was thus fitted to play her part in the war against France Bentinck's job was to use the troops on the island either to descend on mainland Italy or to help Wellington's Peninsular campaign through a landing in Catalonia. The Mediterranean episode of 1 8 1 1 - 1 5 marked an important stage in the development of Bentinck's Liberal imperialism; its implications are studied in Part II. Neither Bentinck nor Wellesley had foreseen the difficulties British intervention would bring. In the course of a running battle to establish constitutional monarchy in Sicily—the outcome not just of his own acts but of a pre-existing crisis in Sicilian society— Bentinck came to expel the Queen and to propose the annexation of the island to the British Empire. He helped along the making of a new 'English' constitution for Sicily; when this broke down he ruled the island for a few months as dictator. He reached Catalonia in 1813 but then had to go back to Palermo to face the constitutional crisis. When in 1814 he finally managed what he had set his heart on, a landing in mainland Italy, he gambled everything on an appeal to the Italians to rise against Napoleon and form a nation united and independent. He followed this up by quarrelling, against orders, with Napoleon's brother-in-law Murat, King of Naples (who had temporarily changed sides), and—also against orders—by proclaiming the restoration of the Genoese Republic. At this point Wellesley's successor Castlereagh eased Bentinck out of the Sicilian mission, nominally by sending him on leave. He kept the Mediterranean command until 1815: a last gamble—he tried to get the King of Sardinia to rally the Italians by promising a constitution—led to his recall while the final struggle against Napoleon was still on. Once again Bentinck was in disgrace. For his career these events had a long-term significance. This was not merely that Bentinck was out of a job, then and for the following twelve years. The episode parted him from the remnants of the old Pittite group to which his father had belonged; it labelled him a Whig in a sense Portland would not have acknowledged; it set him on the path to Liberalism. This gradual change—it went together with the gradual deepening of his religious feeling—marked Bentinck's stance both in national and in local politics. He had begun as a member of the war party, irreducibly opposed to Fox; he was to make common cause on some issues 67

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with the heirs of Fox. He had sat off and on since 1796 as his family's nominee for a constituency—Nottinghamshire—ruled by landed magnates; he was to draw closer to the emergent middle class and, at the very end of his life, to represent in the Commons one of the largest, rowdiest, and most Radical industrial seats in the kingdom, Glasgow. Until the Mediterranean episode Bentinck had been in home politics an appendage of leading Pittites—first of his father Portland and then of Canning. After the break-up of the Pittite group he had been given the Sicilian job largely to neutralise the estranged Canningites. The men who dominated the British Government in the last years of the wars, Liverpool and Castlereagh in particular, were self-conscious disciples of Pitt. It was these men whom Bentinck's acts in Sicily and on the Italian mainland now alienated. At the same time he incurred the lasting hostility of Wellington—till then a well-disposed friend and colleague from Madras days—by leaving his Catalan command in 1813The word these conservative heirs of Pitt found to vent their displeasure with Bentinck was 'Whig'. Already in 1 8 1 2 Lord Harrowby— a Minister under Pitt, Portland, Perceval, and Liverpool—thought Bentinck 'Whig-mad' on the strength of the new Sicilian Constitution. By March 1814 Liverpool was blaming his 'Whig principles' for the mess in Sicily; shortly afterwards, faced with the Murat quarrel and the Genoese proclamation, Castlereagh denounced him as 'intolerably prone . . . to Whig revolutions everywhere'. 1 Yet in what sense was Bentinck then a Whig? He had been developing old Burkeian Whig ideas of nationality and constitutional liberty which the members of the Liverpool Government had long since moved away from—if they had ever held them. But he could not be a Whig in a party sense. From the fall of the Ministry of All the Talents in 1807 to the end of the war the Foxite Whig remnant under Grey and Holland carried on a largely negative and despondent opposition. With these men Bentinck could not be identified: they were grudging supporters of the war; and the echoes of the 1794 breach between Portland and Fox were not yet stilled. Thus Lord and Lady Holland derided him; an emissary of Grey was actively hostile to him in Sicily. 2 When the Whigs attacked the peace settlement they made much of the subjection of Genoa to Piedmont in breach of Bentinck's proclamation; but Bentinck took no part. By 1815 he had alienated his father's old political colleagues without being able to join the opposition. He was isolated. 68

7 • AN INDEPENDENT CANNINGITE There still existed, however, a large area of political life where party groupings mattered little. Thus Bentinck could be returned to the House of Commons in 1816 on the old basis, as a representative of the Nottinghamshire landed interest who had Canningite connections. With the peace, besides, old animosities began to wear off; the Portland - F o x breach, which had been kept alive by the war, receded into the past. Especially after the distressed agitated years 1816-20 the Liverpool Government grew more liberal, the Whig opposition slackened; new alignments could grow up little affected by old factional ties. In a man so closely touched by the 1794 breach as Bentinck this change showed first of all in his social life. Until the end of the war the people he exchanged visits with in England were nearly all close relatives, Nottinghamshire and Fenland neighbours, old soldier friends, and members of the Government: altogether a fairly narrow group. The only Foxites among them were the Plumers—virtually family. In 1810, however, he had come once again to be on visiting terms with his Foxite relatives, the Devonshires. With the peace the stream broadened out: by 1815 he was on visiting terms with Coke of Holkham, by 1817 with the Duke of Norfolk, by 1819 with the Russells; these were all old Foxites. By 1821 he visited Lord Fitzwilliam—the man who had fallen out with Portland in 1795—and noted: 'Cordial reception, had not been there since 1782 or 3'. 3 Among the magnates the old wounds were healed. In 1820-3, besides, Bentinck could make common cause with the Opposition against the crushing by the Great Powers of Liberal revolutionary movements in Naples, Piedmont, and Spain—movements that were reaching out for the constitutionalism he had preached in 1 8 1 1 - 1 5 . Here was a straight issue of liberty against oppression, 'jLes Gouvernements', as his friend Louis-Philippe had said a few years earlier, had everywhere adopted 'the system of keeping down les gouvernés'; 'convulsions' were the inevitable result.4 Bentinck was in no doubt. As with many Englishmen of reforming temper his views sharpened when he looked abroad. For a time—but only for a time— he talked republicanism. 'Délirant reges [the Kings have gone mad]', he wrote in November 1820 as the European monarchs prepared to crush Naples. When the Austrian Army marched it was an 'atrocious proceeding'; to Millicent, a High Tory, he said ironically that the act of course revolts my Whig feelings prodigiously, but I suppose kings and emperors can do no wrong. . . . There will be a sad 69

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recoil upon monarchy in general. I fear the world may think that when once royalty com[bine] for the general oppression, the sooner the world gets rid of the [word missing] the better. Perhaps all this is Radical. A visit to Holland, where he got news of the Piedmontese revolt, prompted him to reflect that 'these dense atmospheres have given birth to greatness of soul and to an ardent love of liberty, the mainspring of all that is great and good . . . a great spirit of political reformation is gone abroad . . .'. s When the Neapolitan revolution was crushed, and with it, once again, the independence of Sicily—which had flared up in a separate revolt—Bentinck made a full-dress speech in the House for the first and only time. He put down a motion calling on the Government to intervene in defence of the Sicilian liberties it had once promoted. The motion was predictably defeated by 69 to 35; those who voted with Bentinck were Opposition Whigs—not only James Mackintosh, David Ricardo, and Samuel Whitbread but the party leader, Tierney, the man Bentinck had dreaded in 1807 as 'my father's enemy'. 6 Bentinck had already in 1819 joined Mackintosh—and gone against his family—in opposing the Foreign Enlistment Bill (which prevented Englishmen from going out to join the South American revolutionaries). In 1823, when France on behalf of the European Powers intervened against the Spanish Liberal Government, Bentinck took part in several initiatives side by side with leading Whigs. He presided over two public dinners; the first raised money for Spanish hospitals, the second for arms. Among those who organised the dinners were Brougham and Lambton—not just Whigs but Radical Whigs: at the second dinner Brougham and Mackintosh 'made violent speeches against the sovereigns'. The first dinner had brought Bentinck a courteous note from 'a friend of liberty and justice': it was from Lord Holland, the nephew and spiritual heir of Fox. 7 The reconciliation was complete. In the following year Bentinck was elected to Brooks's Club: to join this was generally taken to mean "listing in the Whig Party with a vengeance'.8 All the same, there is no doubt that Bentinck, right up to his departure for Bengal in 1828, is best described as an 'independent friend' of Canning.9 British politics in the 1820s were fluid. These were years of relative quiet. The issues lumped together as 'cash, corn, and Catholics'—financial and trade policy, the Corn Laws, and Catholic 70

7 • AN I N D E P E N D E N T C A N N I N G I T E Emancipation—largely cut across old party lines. Economical Reform and the movement towards free trade went forward under Government patronage. It was possible to be in favour of a moderate Parliamentary Reform without belonging to the old Whig core, just as it was possible to be a thorough Whig and feel no enthusiasm for Parliamentary Reform. Bentinck's political career in the twenties—in itself of scant importance—illustrates this fluidity. A Radical Reformer in his own constituency could describe him after the 1826 general election as 'a firm and decided Whig'; yet, at the same election, the supposed Whig had elsewhere appeared on the hustings in support of the Tory candidate for Huntingdonshire, Lord Mandeville (heir to the Duke of Manchester), against the sitting Whig member, Lord John Russell. T h e reason was simply that Mandeville was now Millicent Sparrow's husband; the Manchester family 'interest', previously dormant, was reasserting itself against Russell, an outsider with 'no stake in the country'; the new Lady Mandeville, who did most of the campaign managing on behalf of her gloomy and diffident husband—he tried at one point to back out because of religious 'scruples about the people getting drunk' —no doubt called in her beloved uncle Lord William Bentinck. 10 Bentinck's own view of himself was, to begin with, not much clearer than this episode implies. In the difficult years up to 1820 he shared some of the confusion that beset the country gentlemen in Parliament as they tried to understand the nation's economic problems. During the financial debates of 1819 he still saw himself as a disciple of 'that great man', Pitt: this meant standing out against the deflationary policy that heaped indirect taxes on the poor and in favour of Pitt's old measure, the property tax: 'if three millions are to be taken from the lower orders . . . what difficulty [can there] be in taking twice that sum from the property of the country and the funds [?]' He was also, at this stage, a moderate protectionist." The prolonged uproar over Queen Caroline's divorce in 1820 saw him move from sympathy with the Queen—'sad, sad, sad!'—through repeated waverings to a feeling that the vengeful, malicious George IV and the 'profligate and impudent' Caroline deserved each other. Agitation at home, revolution and repression abroad deepened his scorn for the King's 'miserable' Ministers—Liverpool, Castlereagh, and the rest—especially now that Canning had gone out of office. What the 'independent public' wanted, he told Millicent, was a government 'marked by manliness, nobleness, and high principle'—'great, high, independent councils'. Great 7i

I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON changes must come; but there must be no extremes, 'no breach in our Constitution'. He stood with the newly influential and reforming Times in opposing 'radicalism... the empire of the mob . . . the Hunts, Cobbetts, Burdetts &c and all demagogues in principle'. Revolution seemed a real danger, the freedom of the press the best safeguard : 'unless the reasonable interfere' to bring about changes that must anyhow come 'we shall gallop rapidly towards changes that may involve all in disorder'.12 This was broadly the policy on which, after many twists and turns in the late twenties, Canningites and Whigs were at length able to unite during the Reform crisis of 1830-2. Before 1820 Bentinck was already a supporter of Catholic Emancipation—part of the legacy of Pitt which the Canningites had held to. Now, under the spur of repression at home and abroad, he joined a number of M.P.s—till then quiescent— in coming out for Parliamentary Reform. In 1821-2 he voted several times for Reform motions, as well as for the repeal of the Six Acts, for an inquiry into the Peterloo massacre, and against the Alien Bill. 13 This was to align himself with the more active part of the Opposition. After Canning re-entered the Government in 1822 as the dominant figure in the Commons it also meant taking up a more forward stance than that of Canning himself. Bentinck—who now sat across the House from his relative—differed from him not only on Parliamentary Reform and the timing of Catholic Emancipation but on British foreign policy. He held to the Burkeian 'principle that in every Continental concern we ought to interfere'—and by this meant that Britain should support constitutional liberty.14 As Foreign Secretary Canning, for all his rhetoric, was much more cautious. The immediate consequence of Bentinck's aligning himself against Ministers was that in 1822 Canning joined Liverpool in blocking his appointment as Governor of Bengal. As the twenties wore on and lines of conflict blurred, Bentinck grew more optimistic. By 1826 he was a free trader. 'Everything,' he wrote in that y e a r , ' . . . is steadily improving . . . the corn question . . . will I think be easily and satisfactorily arranged.' The outlook for Catholic Emancipation was good; as for free trade, 'the great majority of the country are against [it], but that party is opposed by the press and by the liberals of all parties and hence it has no man of consequence for their leader'.15 Like other men of varying backgrounds he had in fact become one of the 'liberals of all parties'. Though Bentinck's changed stance was part of a general shift in British opinion it was also explained by particular causes: his experi72

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ences abroad; the day-to-day traffic of parliamentary business; above all, the new groups of men he had become involved with in local affairs. Then as now a man did not necessarily enter Parliament to forward a cause, make a name as an orator, or become Prime Minister. Many were content to look after their constituents' affairs and, for the rest, be themselves. With such men Bentinck had at least one thing in common: he hardly ever spoke. The family shyness had him in its grip. In 1819 he drafted a speech which would have broken an 'uninterrupted silence' (since 1796) but failed to deliver it. When he opened the debate on Sicilian independence in 1821 it was his only full-dress speech on the floor of the House in a career spanning, with breaks, 43 years; that apart, he spoke only four times, always briefly. Such reticence was not surprising in an age when even first-rate debaters rose to speak with parched throats and knocking knees.16 Though Bentinck voted on the great issues his chief business as member was to forward private Bills, serve on the Nottingham Grand Jury and the committee of the Lunatic Asylum and Infirmary, turn up to meet the country gentlemen at quarter sessions and horse races. The Nottinghamshire of Bentinck's youth had been summed up as 'four dukes, two lords, and three rabbit warrens'. 17 The Dukeries is still the name for the country about Mansfield and Worksop where collieries scar the rolling farmland. Nearly all of it then belonged to a few interrelated families, ducal or of ducal descent: Bentincks, PelhamClintons, Pierreponts. The county constituency was wholly under their influence. They supplied or at least backed all the members; in the century up to 1832 Nottinghamshire never had a contested election.18 Yet the great houses had to reckon with the gentry families who formed the second tier of landed property. These country gentlemen were at once deferential and jealous. 'No county,' one of them declared in 1803, 'will in the end continue satisfied to see both their members come out of peerage houses: to the entire exclusion of the country gentlemen!'" They could on occasion force an ambitious electoral manager to retreat. No one wanted a contest; the 'peace of the county' was the great thing. But as there were limits to deference, so there were limits to ducal power. 20 For Bentinck this meant recurring difficulties. The country gentlemen did not much care about his opinions; he and they were anyhow at one in the 1790s when 'about sixty fine young fellows' of the Mansfield Woodhouse Volunteers paraded to suppress 'any democratical

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21

mobs'. But the squires did mind about having a member who would stand in the proper social and personal relationship to them and get 'their business done' at Westminster. Bentinck, though an obvious candidate virtually by inheritance—he took over one of the Nottinghamshire seats from his uncle—was away a great deal. If he stayed away for years at a time 'the disaffected' might work up an opposition. * 2 2 Portland and Bentinck therefore concluded in 1803 that on going to Madras Bentinck must resign his seat. He stood again in 1 8 1 2 ; by then he was away once more, this time in Sicily. His brothers, worried at murmurs among the gentry, promised that if he could not soon come back he would once again resign. By the summer of 1 8 1 3 his friends were pressing him to return in time for the November session of Parliament. Bentinck heard from them at the front in Catalonia. On the same day he got news of the Sicilian constitutional crisis. He was already worried about the mounting costs of his agricultural ventures in Norfolk. All these ill tidings coming together led him into a rash act. He was 'very anxious' to keep his seat. He asked Castlereagh to relieve him of the Sicilian mission, and meanwhile to let him have a few months' home leave. This enabled Castlereagh, when he turned decidedly against Bentinck in 1814, to get rid of him without in so many words dismissing him. 23 Bentinck in fact resigned the seat in 1814: he needed to spend the next two years in Italy recouping his fortunes. He got in again at a byelection in 1 8 1 6 — a testimony to his 'personal standing in the county and the continued strength of his family's interest' 24 —and at the general elections of 1818 and 1820. But money troubles and his wife's health still meant repeated absences on the Continent; he feared at one time it might 'not be considered quite decent' to miss the whole parliamentary session.25 He ended by announcing in 1825 that he would retire at the end of that Parliament. By then, however, Bentinck had his own 'parliamentary interest' at King's Lynn. Since 1816 much of his parliamentary time had gone on forwarding the needs of the surrounding area—the Norfolk Marshland • Only two months before becoming member for Nottinghamshire at the general election of 1796 Bentinck had got in at a by-election for the Cornish rotten borough of Camelford. The reason why he gave up this convenient seat (which needed no attention other than £300 or so at election time) was presumably that the family who had controlled it on behalf of Government sold out to the Duke of Bedford, a Foxite Whig: W. P. Courtney, The Parliamentary Representation of Cornwall to 1832 (1889), 350-3; History of Parliament: The Commons 1754-1790,1, 227; information kindly communicated by Dr. James Maclean.

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7 • AN I N D E P E N D E N T CANNINGITE —where he was an agricultural entrepreneur. His exertions in the cause of 'improvement', together with his properties, had given him since 1821 effective control of one of the two King's Lynn seats. This had come to him 'handsomely', all expenses paid and 'with every possibility of permanency'. Bentinck treated this seat as the lords of the Dukeries treated the Nottinghamshire seats (and as many other men treated many other seats)—that is, as family property. His brother, the fourth Duke, disliked politics; rather than exert himself on behalf of his eldest son Lord Titchfield he wished Bentinck to go on as member for Nottinghamshire and paid his election expenses. Bentinck accordingly saw Titchfield returned in 1822 as member for Lynn; when Titchfield died in 1824 he did the same for the duke's second son Lord John. At the 1826 general election Lord John retired on the grounds that his health was poor and Bentinck now came forward at Lynn on the grounds that his wife's had improved; quite possibly both were telling the truth. Bentinck thus became member for Lynn. 2 6 Even here there were complaints from the losing side against 'this transferring scheme' within the Bentinck family; one of Lord William's aldermanic supporters felt the need publicly to acknowledge 'that His Lordship paid only flying visits, and it was sometimes difficult to find him'—but he was always working on Lynn's behalf none the less. Bentinck's own view, stated two years earlier, was that the seat was 'secure and cheap . . . and it would give me pleasure to transmit it as my legacy to the family.' He did just that: when he went to Bengal in 1828 he handed the seat over to his brother's third son, Lord George— later famous as the scourge of Peel. Lord George at first regarded himself as his uncle's locum tenens and promised Bentinck 'not to treat my constituents to my opinions'; in fact he held Lynn till his death twenty years later. 27 The people Bentinck worked with at King's Lynn were, once again, an oligarchy. But, rather than landed magnates, they were the topmost layer of prosperous merchants, brewers, and bankers; rather than Pierreponts or Pelham-Clintons, families with Shakespearean names like Bagge, Pigge, and Hogge. These families controlled Lynn Corporation—as in many old chartered towns, a 'self-elected and irresponsible body', though it seems to have been neither incompetent nor corrupt; the Corporation in turn chose the 300-odd freemen who, out of some 10,000 inhabitants, alone had the parliamentary franchise. The 'principal merchants', all interrelated, thus formed what a Radical outsider called 'not a holy, but a Corporation family alliance'.28 75

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From the moment when the Lynn worthies offered him control of one of the parliamentary seats Bentinck was tied to the 'Corporation family alliance' in local politics. He and they were bound not by sentiment but by their usefulness to each other in the improvement of Fen navigation and drainage. Lynn politics ran to a pattern; ideology had very little to do with it. From 1822 to 1835 nearly every parliamentary election resolved itself into a clash between the 'family alliance' on the one hand and, on the other, a group of lesser freemen—merchants and shopkeepers—who denounced the Corporation as 'a kind of noblesse . . . the tyrants of the town'. In the background—sometimes riotously in the foreground—stood the Lynn seamen, most of them without a vote, and the 'bankers' who dug the new waterways in the Fens. These often controlled the streets at election time. The seamen had struck and rioted for higher wages in 1 8 1 4 ; they persistently agitated against impressment into the Navy. In the 1822 election the bankers rioted to such effect that a troop of dragoons had to be called in. Whig and Tory hardly came into any of this. There were members of both persuasions on either side, though Radicals were to be found only among the lesser freemen. T h e oligarchy was always successful; the two members it returned were nicely balanced, one leaning to the Government, the other to the Reform side, one a Walpole (from an important Norfolk landed family), the other a Bentinck. Lord William took an active part in two contests; in 1824 he campaigned on behalf of his painfully shy nephew Lord John Bentinck, who never appeared, in 1826 on his own account. It was therefore Lord William who in 1824 spoke from the hustings amid cries of 'No Orange, no Dutchman'—'two brave tars' had to protect him by 'hoist[ing] their flags . . . and . . . say[ing] in noble defiance, "Touch them who dare!"'—and who was later chaired round the market place and nearly overturned. In 1826 he once again had a rough passage; this time he spoke out more clearly than in previous campaigns. He justified himself for having upheld impressment: the Navy in wartime could not be manned without it. ' I am, gentlemen,' he added, 'a Reformer'—though he was 'perhaps . . . not inclined to go so far' in the matter as the leader of the anti-Corporation freemen. Bentinck had thus at length experienced the rough-and-tumble of a contested election. But he was still a long way from having to face a 'popular' constituency: here 'the leading gentlemen of the town', give or take a few knocks, still held sway; it was quite enough for Bentinck to say in his address that he would promote Lynn's welfare and 'continue to follow, 76

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moderately but firmly, the same line of politics which I have hitherto professed'. 29 On behalf of the Bagges, Hogges, and their fellows Bentinck piloted through the Commons a series of private Bills on such matters as new Fenland canals, drainage rates, and bridges. This work meant repeated stagecoach trips to King's Lynn and to the rival town of Wisbech, conferences with solicitors and engineers, committees attended by minor gentry and aldermen well aware of their local importance. The transition in Bentinck's life from the Court of Palermo and the battlefields of Catalonia to committee meetings at the Duke's Head, King's Lynn, was like the shift from Don Pedro's knightly entourage to the civic homeliness of Dogberry and Verges. This, no less than the shift in Bentinck's political opinions, reflected a change in the tone of British life. Though the people Bentinck met socially were still for the most part aristocracy and royalty—Devonshires and Norfolks at home, Talleyrands, Broglies, and Schwarzenbergs abroad—more 'Mr's were beginning to appear in his pocket diaries. Among them were not only great mercantile figures like William Roscoe and John Gladstone (father of the Prime Minister), with whom Bentinck stayed at Liverpool in 1822, but a man with a son apprenticed to a vintner and a Lynn grocer whose acquaintance Bentinck made on the outside of the Wisbech coach—'a very intelligent man, a dissenter'. 30 On a trip abroad he admired the people of Saxony for their contented social harmony and lack of class barriers. 'It is quite a pleasure to see them in their public coffee gardens. They are like one great family. They seem also a very industrious people.' 31 Bentinck was getting to know and to value the emergent middle class. The Bentinck family seems always to have avoided pomp—perhaps under the influence of Lord William's mother. Amid the vastness of Burlington House and Welbeck this simplicity can only have been relative. From about 1810, however—as Bentinck began to move towards Evangelicalism,—his personal simplicity of dress and manner became a matter of remark. During the 1 8 1 4 Italian campaign Murat entertained him to dinner; Bentinck's aide-de-camp noted the difference between the two: . . . the one all gold and silver—Brutus head—curls attached— and rouged cheeks—covered with stars, crosses, and ribbons: the other plain and simple without ornament or attendant. Lord William in an old oilskin h a t . . . Murat in a magnificent plumed headdress . . . 77

I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON By the end of the wars Bentinck had already adopted the style of life which, at Calcutta a decade and a half later, was to strike Jacquemont as that of 'a Pennsylvania Quaker'. In this austerity, uncommon even at a time when noblemen's clothes and habits were growing more sober, Bentinck seems to have deliberately identified himself—as his friend Louis-Philippe was to identify himself when King of the French— with the new middle class.

8 - A K I N D OF L I B E R A L Allied in his constituency to a merchant oligarchy, willing to campaign for a Tory on grounds of family sentiment, a Reformer but within limits—Bentinck on his departure for Bengal at the beginning of 1828 might have seemed little more than a somewhat advanced 'independent friend' of Canning, one of the 'liberals of all parties', with all that that implies of moderation and a search for compromise. How was it then that eighteen months later Jacquemont could write of him: 'He is a Liberal: this in English is called Radical, a term that grates more harshly on the ears of respectable English people than does sansculotte on ours'? 1 Was this just a misreading by a foreigner imperfectly acquainted with British politics? Radicalism in the 1820s and 1830s was an ill-defined term. Radicals could be for more government or less, for or against taxation, sympathetic to working-class organisation or hostile, in foreign affairs bellicose or pacific. The one attitude they had in common was hostility to privilege, even though they might not agree on the exact array of privilege to be attacked. John Stuart Mill in 1838 defined Radicalism in this sense: European reformers have been accustomed to see the numerical majority everywhere unjustly depressed, everywhere trampled upon, or at the best overlooked, by governments; nowhere possessing power enough to extort redress of their most positive grievances, provision for their mental culture, or even to prevent themselves from being taxed avowedly for the pecuniary profit of the ruling classes. T o see these things, and to seek to put an end to them, by means (among other things) of giving more political power to the majority, constitutes Radicalism. . . . 2

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I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON By the end of the wars Bentinck had already adopted the style of life which, at Calcutta a decade and a half later, was to strike Jacquemont as that of 'a Pennsylvania Quaker'. In this austerity, uncommon even at a time when noblemen's clothes and habits were growing more sober, Bentinck seems to have deliberately identified himself—as his friend Louis-Philippe was to identify himself when King of the French— with the new middle class.

8 - A K I N D OF L I B E R A L Allied in his constituency to a merchant oligarchy, willing to campaign for a Tory on grounds of family sentiment, a Reformer but within limits—Bentinck on his departure for Bengal at the beginning of 1828 might have seemed little more than a somewhat advanced 'independent friend' of Canning, one of the 'liberals of all parties', with all that that implies of moderation and a search for compromise. How was it then that eighteen months later Jacquemont could write of him: 'He is a Liberal: this in English is called Radical, a term that grates more harshly on the ears of respectable English people than does sansculotte on ours'? 1 Was this just a misreading by a foreigner imperfectly acquainted with British politics? Radicalism in the 1820s and 1830s was an ill-defined term. Radicals could be for more government or less, for or against taxation, sympathetic to working-class organisation or hostile, in foreign affairs bellicose or pacific. The one attitude they had in common was hostility to privilege, even though they might not agree on the exact array of privilege to be attacked. John Stuart Mill in 1838 defined Radicalism in this sense: European reformers have been accustomed to see the numerical majority everywhere unjustly depressed, everywhere trampled upon, or at the best overlooked, by governments; nowhere possessing power enough to extort redress of their most positive grievances, provision for their mental culture, or even to prevent themselves from being taxed avowedly for the pecuniary profit of the ruling classes. T o see these things, and to seek to put an end to them, by means (among other things) of giving more political power to the majority, constitutes Radicalism. . . . 2

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A year later, with nearly a decade of prevailingly Whig government behind him, Mill went on to equate Radicalism in this sense with Liberalism. Class, he said, largely made Radicals and Conservatives; the landed interest (whether nominally Conservative or Whig) was pretty solidly Conservative. He added: In all privileged classes there are individuals whom some circumstance of a personal nature has alienated from their class, while there are others sufficiently generous and enlightened to see the interest of their class in the promotion of the general interest, and to desire it by no other means [than Liberalism].'* 3 In these rather general terms, Bentinck in the late 1820s and early 1830s could be seen as a Liberal, even perhaps as a Radical. Mill's stress on the role of 'enlightened' or 'alienated' members of the privileged classes is significant. Just because Bentinck was younger brother to a duke it did not take very much for people to see him as an advanced reformer. He was mildly 'alienated' in that he had been twice dismissed from official posts, had tried to flout Castlereagh's Italian policy, and had gone some way to identify himself with the rising middle class. He was 'enlightened' in that he had welcomed Continental revolutions and supported Catholic Emancipation, Economical Reform, and Parliamentary Reform. In India between 1828 and 1835 he developed further; after his return he was to be thrust, not quite willingly, into 'popular' politics of a marked Radical tinge. But on home affairs up to 1835 his attitude differed little from that of Lord Althorp and other mildly advanced members of the Grey Government. It could almost have been described by the term coined for his friend Louis-Philippe's Governments in France after 1830, the 'juste milieu' or balanced centre. One has to say 'almost': though Bentinck did not always by any means espouse Radical policies he had the Radical temper. A characteristic, often repeated utterance was 'Be bold and no half measures'.4 In practice he often saw the need for caution and compromise; but his instinct was to go to the root. His father had always dreaded 'popularity'—that is, political strength drawn from the majority or the crowd.5 Bentinck himself for a good many years drew the distinction, common among the respectable in the early nineteenth century, between 'the people' and 'the * Mill was making a point contingent on the politics of the moment, and historically somewhat premature. But it shows how Liberalism could be presented by an intelligent contemporary.

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mob'. In 1808 talk of the 'character and goodness' of the 'mob' still struck him as 'dangerous nonsense'.6 In Sicily in 1813 he was theoretically prepared to let the democrats have their heads, but when he saw them at close quarters he was too alarmed to try the experiment.7 Yet Bentinck, unlike many of his fellows, had held to the libertarian teaching of Burke. Even in the depths of the reaction against the French Revolution the Pyramids, which he saw in 1801, 'disgusted' him— 'horrible monuments of folly and the despotic abuse of human labour'; they felt to him like 'an abortion . . . a most distorted figure of nature'.8 Hatred of tyranny fuelled his relentless opposition to Bonapartism. After the wars the tyrants sat in the seats of the victorious allies. Even then Bentinck's general view was that—as he put it 'very guardedly' to an authoritarian Russian officer—'as much liberty should be given as could be safely done . . He had to speak 'guardedly': after his attempt to secure Italy's independence under a constitution he was the bugbear of the restored absolutist regimes. Metternich had done his best to keep him out of Italy in 1814 and, ten years later, was still intercepting his letters. There are signs that Bentinck rather enjoyed being feared on the Continent as a man of advanced opinions; he liked to point out that the Pope at any rate was friendly to him, 'heretic and revolutionary as I may be'. 10 In India he joked about his own position as absolute ruler•—'my quiet despotic composure, in which I have been living so long'. His friend Harry Verney must not prepare any Radical fireworks against his return to England—'I shall retreat under the auspices of the protectors of Germany or Italy if you do'. 11 All the same, Bentinck's near-republicanism of 1821 had been a momentary impulse. True, the 1830 French revolution served the European monarchs right for not having '[made] their institutions more popular. . . . One stitch in time would have saved nine.' But he was sorry to see Louis-Philippe compelled to take Republican Ministers; the new king, he was sure, would do his utmost to stave off extreme measures.12 The need, then, was for institutions to be made 'more popular'. But how much more? To Bentinck far away in India the advent of the Whig Government in 1830 seemed to bring forward 'the men and the principles which I most approve and admire'. The Reform Bill from the first was 'an excellent measure'. 'The sense of the country cannot be resisted' and the Lords would be fools to try. As news came in of the great Reform battles of 1830-2 Bentinck felt that 'a great revolution is 80

8 • A KIND OF LIBERAL obviously in progress. . . . I have so much confidence in the sense and courage of the educated classes that I feel sanguine as to the results.'13 In other words, he was thoroughly satisfied with the kind of moderate reform that Althorp and Lord John Russell were putting through, aimed at bringing 'the educated classes' within 'the pale of the Constitution' but carefully designed not to concede the principle of political equality, let alone the enfranchisement of the working classes. Many were aware at this time of what was often called 'the war of property and no property'. Indifference to the sufferings of the industrial working classes, James Graham had written in 1826, might 'lead inevitably to some fatal crisis, which may shake even property itself'. Jacquemont thought England more likely to succumb to revolution than France. Bentinck himself opposed the reintroduction of the death penalty for machine-wrecking; 'the agricultural distress... of the lower orders' had long seemed to him 'the worst and most irremediable of all our political evils'. 14 Bentinck's Pittite inheritance provided him with an answer. Like his more thoughtful contemporaries—Graham, Althorp, and finally Peel—he found it in the direct taxation of the rich. But this was not mere altrusim; it was to set strict limits to reform. We must [Bentinck told Graham in 1831] come to a property tax sooner or later—and the sooner the better from the essential good it would do, by allowing the abolition of those taxes which press upon the lower orders. We must not conceal from ourselves that a war is going on between property and no property, and the sooner the former take the best position to fight their battle in the better. That is the property tax. We may then say, we have given you all we can, and for the rest we must fight.15 As agitation went on into the mid-thirties Bentinck's attitude hardened. He was glad that Louis-Philippe's Government had put down the 1834 Republican insurrections in Paris and Lyons, thus discouraging any more such 'pranks'. He was pleased that in England the great trade union strikes had failed and the new Radical members of the Commons were 'sinking into their proper insignificance and public business no longer interrupted seriously by their nonsense and vanity'. When the propertied classes repressed trade unionism in the countryside all he had to say of those who marched on behalf of the Tolpuddle Martyrs was: 'I see there were 29 four-pounders to tickle them in case of necessity.'16 In the new conditions brought about by the Reform crisis the sometime member of the 'liberals of all parties' was, by his 81

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return from India in 1835, a firm supporter of the Whig Government: privilege had yielded, wisely and necessarily, but it had yielded enough. Yet was not Bentinck at this time a Philosophic Radical or Benthamite? Should one not expect him to have called for a more thoroughgoing reforming policy? The assertion that he was a follower of Jeremy Bentham has echoed from one book to another. He was at one time thought to have gone to receive Bentham's philosophic blessing as he was setting out for India; only recently has it been brought out that he and Bentham never met. 17 It is still a textbook commonplace that his Benthamism deeply influenced his Indian policy. 18 The aged Bentham himself used to say '[James] Mill will be the living executive—I shall be the dead legislative of British India.' 19 A great issue is then at stake. What did it mean in the 1820s and 1830s to be a Benthamite? The term was used in two main senses. On the one hand the Benthamites were a small close-knit group of men who sat at the feet of Bentham and James Mill, spent much time together, and—though they did not agree on everything—shared views often peculiar to themselves. Like the Fabians at the end of the century they drew up plans for social engineering and hoped to persuade the great to put them into effect. Such were the Austin brothers, Grote, Chad wick, Southwood Smith, and, in India, James Young. On the other hand Benthamites might be people who were generally influenced by the writings of Bentham and his immediate disciples. Here identification becomes far more diflicult. Of the ideas held by the Benthamite inner group a good deal was the current coin of the time. They relied on a sensationalist view of the human mind as shaped by the environment—but so, up to a point, did Wordsworth and Coleridge. They set a high value on efficient, simple, and clearly ordered administration—but so did many other people in a society becoming rapidly industrialised and more complex. They opposed privilege and the rule of'connection'—but so did many unprivileged people from all sorts of motives. They accepted the 'laws' of political economy; so did an unregenerate Whig aristocrat like Grey's successor Melbourne. Mill regarded the state of Indian society as 'hideous'; so did an Evangelical like Charles Grant. Men who adopted specific Benthamite nostrums like 'single-seatedness' (individual responsibility in a clear administrative hierarchy) or, above all, the Panopticon (Bentham's rationalised model prison) may reasonably be thought to have been under direct Benthamite influence. Men who set out to tidy up the laws, to make court procedure simpler, more access82

8 • A KIND OF LIBERAL ible, and more uniform, to instil 'useful knowledge' through the schools, may have been under some kind of general Benthamite influence; yet their acts can be seen as part of a general movement of which the Benthamites were—at times eccentric—outriders.20 How far Bentinck can be called a Benthamite in this second, more general sense must emerge from a discussion in later chapters of his career in Italy and India. What is clear is that he was not a Benthamite in the narrow sense. His links with the inner group were tenuous; they were exaggerated by a hopeful old man (Bentham himself) and, much later, by a somewhat snobbish old woman with an inexact memory (Mrs Grote). Harriet Lewin, from 1820 the wife of George Grote, was a distant cousin of Bentinck's 'second parent' William Plumer. She stayed with the Plumers from time to time and made Bentinck's acquaintance there. In 1826-7 Plumer's widow was briefly married to Harriet's brother.21 Meanwhile Harriet had got to know her husband's Utilitarian friends; though admiring, she was a trifle impatient of them and came to prefer the society of aristocrats and musicians. Grote for his part was at first reluctant to meet his wife's aristocratic friends; in 1827 he wrote to her in some irritation of 'the great people whose visits you are expecting' (Bentinck and Lady William) 'and whose caprice and uncertainty thus detains you away from me'. 22 Bentinck, then, was Mrs Grote's friend rather than Grote's. By her own account, written half a century later, they were on a footing of 'friendly intimacy'. By the same account James Mill 'always dined with George Grote and his wife to meet Lord William when he came to Threadneedle Street [the Grotes' house]. With Lord William Mrs Grote maintained an occasional correspondence during the whole period of his residence in India.'23 What did this amount to? Bentinck's papers, which are unusually complete, suggest that his correspondence with Mrs Grote was 'occasional' indeed. As for Mill's 'always' dining with the Grotes to meet Bentinck, the first of the two such dinners on record, in 1822, was arranged by Mrs Grote so that Bentinck could discuss with Mill a forthcoming trip to Ireland; true, Mill—by then Assistant Examiner of Correspondence to the East India Company—already had a high regard for Bentinck as the fittest candidate for the governorship of Bengal, and Bentinck for Mill as the author of the History of India.1* There is no sign of any further meeting between the two men until 1827, when at a 'mob dinner' of thirty or forty people they met

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seemingly for the first time in years. They had some talk; to give them a further opportunity Mrs Grote arranged a tête-à-tête dinner shortly before Bentinck's departure. Here Mill, to Bentham's gratification, proved himself'a sincere trumpeter of Panopticon', and Bentinck—as Mill reported—made the well-known statement: ' I am going to British India, but I shall not be Governor-General. It is you that will be Governor-General.' 25 Bentinck was younger brother to a duke: this was clearly important to Bentham, to Mill, and to Mrs Grote. To Mrs Grote he was the lord in her life; she dropped his name several times in her biography of her husband. Mill, a strong supporter of Bentinck as Governor-General, wrote after his return that he was 'worth making much o f . . . . When I consider what he is, and what he has done, in a most important and difficult situation, I know not where to look for his like.'26 This seems to mean 'how extraordinary—and hence how much the more valuable —that a member of the highest aristocracy should have accomplished such a reforming task'. Back in 1828 Bentham had had 'high hopes of Lord William's good intentions: so much better than from so high an aristocratical family as his could have been expected'.27 Bentinck, in other words, was a catch. But was he caught? The Benthamites undoubtedly hoped he was. Mill, besides 'trumpeting' Panopticon, gave him a copy of Bentham's book on the subject (which he thought might amuse even Lady William); he reported Bentinck as 'well inclined' to Panopticon and in general 'well intentioned' though not very 'well instructed'. From Calcutta nine months later James Young reported approvingly that Bentinck was the only man he had seen in power who acted 'as if he thought patronage was not private property but a trust'. 28 Yet in their approach to the duke's younger brother these men seem to have been remarkably gingerly, none more so than Bentham himself. When Bentinck in Calcutta invited suggestions from the public on the improvement of the country Bentham thought he beheld 'the golden age of British India'. 29 Yet a few months earlier, when Bentham had first set about writing to Bentinck direct, his approach had been that of a man who feels the need to establish his credentials, and who even thinks his correspondent may not have heard of him. Bentham began by explaining 'myself, my occupations and situation in society'. He referred Bentinck to Mill and Young as men who knew his mind. As if this was not enough, he proposed to send 'a copy of two recent testimonials in M S in addition to those which are in print' so as 84

8 • A KIND OF LIBERAL to establish his 'position... in civilised society'. He reminded Bentinck that 'between seventy and eighty years ago at Westminster School I was not unknown to your ancestors'. At this point Bentham feared he might be misunderstood: The idea of a man who as a means of honest livelihood is . . . in some such situation as that of a country schoolmaster will [be] apt to be perumbrated to imagination by such averment [he wrote in choice Benthamese] but against error from that source, sound judgment will be your supreme security. You will have heard from Mr. Mill and others that remuneration in a pecuniary shape is out of the question in my instance. Bentham went on to flatter Bentinck as a man of'intellectual power' as well as enlightenment, and to proffer suggestions for the codification of laws and the reform of the judiciary. 30 More suggestions followed in later drafts. It is not even clear whether the drafts were sent. What is clear is that Bentham—an octogenarian apt to be 'much gratified' by the approval of Sir James Graham, Bart. 31 —greatly hoped to captivate Bentinck; but that if Bentinck was a disciple of Bentham the last man to know of it was Bentham. What of Bentinck's own view? This is hard to discover: he rarely mentioned Utilitarianism or its advocates. He had indeed subscribed in 1826 for two shares in the newly founded University College, London —an institution under combined Whig, Benthamite, and Dissenting control, and a forward battalion in the 'march of mind'; but he had done it at the invitation of Auckland, a Whig, and as a kind of substitute for his retiring brother the duke.32 In India he dropped a 'kind hint' to the civil servant most marked by Utilitarianism, Holt Mackenzie, 'regarding the name of Bentham': this seems to have meant that Mackenzie should beware of exposing himself unnecessarily.33 Bentinck certainly thought Mill 'one of the very few who can form a correct judgment' on India, though he did not mind recording that he differed from Mill on aspects of land revenue policy.34 His famous remark that Mill, not he, would be Governor-General can be explained in various ways. It could mean that Bentinck as faithful disciple would carry the Benthamite gospel to India; this, for the reasons already given, is out of the question. It could mean that Mill as examiner at the East India House, charged with drafting the revenue dispatches, would shape Indian policy. Or—perhaps most likely—it could mean that Bentinck's view of Indian policy had been

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I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON deeply affected by his reading of Mill's History. If this last is the true explanation then Bentinck had indeed—like many contemporaries— come under general Benthamite influence, though he had no close ties with the Benthamite inner group. It is, finally, conceivable that the remark was compounded of genuine awe at Mill's intellect and a little bit of a joke at the expense of the solemn, categorical Scot. Mill, on this reading, missed the joke and bore the nugget triumphantly back to Bentham: the new Governor-General was almost converted, Panopticon and all. Historians have often remarked that in the early nineteenth century the Evangelical and the Utilitarian paths converged. Both led to a strong sense of individual responsibility. Both stemmed from a revulsion against the easy-going, the traditional, the established. Both sought to make institutions anew and to do it through education, though the two groups differed on the inner quality of this renewal and of the education aimed at achieving it. In Indian affairs both rejected traditional Indian society out of hand; both, though again from different motives, sought to assimilate Indians to Western values.35 By 1828 Bentinck had grown into a settled but moderate Evangelical. It is by no means as clear that he had absorbed much of the specifically Utilitarian doctrine. He went to India for the second time as an Evangelical Liberal of moderate political convictions, of radical temper, and of unusually wide sympathies for the son of a duke, determined to wipe out the trauma of his recall twenty years earlier, and to do good.

9 -A F E N L A N D IMPROVER Bentinck had one other pressing reason for going out to India again at 53. He badly needed money. His Indian career had from the start been governed by his financial needs. Its vicissitudes in turn led him into a lifelong activity as improver and entrepreneur.1 Because his early recall from Madras in 1807 disappointed his expectations of making a fortune, Bentinck plunged into speculative enterprise in agriculture and agriculture-based industry in the Norfolk Marshland. Because this venture proved ill-timed it gave him a strong motive for going out once more to Bengal. Meanwhile he had been drawn into the affairs of the Fenland, in particular into the long effort 86

I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON deeply affected by his reading of Mill's History. If this last is the true explanation then Bentinck had indeed—like many contemporaries— come under general Benthamite influence, though he had no close ties with the Benthamite inner group. It is, finally, conceivable that the remark was compounded of genuine awe at Mill's intellect and a little bit of a joke at the expense of the solemn, categorical Scot. Mill, on this reading, missed the joke and bore the nugget triumphantly back to Bentham: the new Governor-General was almost converted, Panopticon and all. Historians have often remarked that in the early nineteenth century the Evangelical and the Utilitarian paths converged. Both led to a strong sense of individual responsibility. Both stemmed from a revulsion against the easy-going, the traditional, the established. Both sought to make institutions anew and to do it through education, though the two groups differed on the inner quality of this renewal and of the education aimed at achieving it. In Indian affairs both rejected traditional Indian society out of hand; both, though again from different motives, sought to assimilate Indians to Western values.35 By 1828 Bentinck had grown into a settled but moderate Evangelical. It is by no means as clear that he had absorbed much of the specifically Utilitarian doctrine. He went to India for the second time as an Evangelical Liberal of moderate political convictions, of radical temper, and of unusually wide sympathies for the son of a duke, determined to wipe out the trauma of his recall twenty years earlier, and to do good.

9 -A F E N L A N D IMPROVER Bentinck had one other pressing reason for going out to India again at 53. He badly needed money. His Indian career had from the start been governed by his financial needs. Its vicissitudes in turn led him into a lifelong activity as improver and entrepreneur.1 Because his early recall from Madras in 1807 disappointed his expectations of making a fortune, Bentinck plunged into speculative enterprise in agriculture and agriculture-based industry in the Norfolk Marshland. Because this venture proved ill-timed it gave him a strong motive for going out once more to Bengal. Meanwhile he had been drawn into the affairs of the Fenland, in particular into the long effort 86

9 • A F E N L A N D IMPROVER to improve fen drainage, navigation, and communications and to reclaim land from the Wash. Bentinck's later encouragement of capitalist enterprise in India owed at least as much to this experience as to political economy or Benthamism. He made the point himself: after fifteen years' work on agricultural improvement at home he looked upon the whole of India 'as a great estate of which I am the chief agent. . . \ 2 T h e younger sons of the English landed aristocracy have by custom been allowed only the most modest share in the family fortune. In the nineteenth century a few lived idly on an allowance or portion from the estate; many more went into the Army; some undertook other kinds of public service. What is seldom clear is how their financial needs directed the successive steps in their careers. The key to a good deal in Bentinck's career was the tangled fortunes of his father. The third duke, one of the greatest landowners in England, was heavily in debt for most of his life; at his death in 1809 the debts totalled ¿512,000. As a young man he had incautiously agreed to pay his mother £16,000 a year in exchange for entering upon her estates: this commitment, swollen by ruinous electoral struggles and by some procrastination and muddle, kept the duke from ever getting over his indebtedness. It touched bottom about 1780, when the servants' pay was years in arrears and the duchess could not think how to pay the coalman; possibly only the death of the duke's mother in 1785 saved him from bankruptcy. The duke's troubles owed nothing to gambling or extravagance. They seem none the less to have impressed his two elder sons in the formative years. T h e eldest, when he succeeded as fourth duke, kept aloof from politics as far as he could and devoted himself to restoring the family fortunes. The second son, Lord William, as a newly married man of twenty-nine thought it 'absolutely necessary for our future comfort that I should make a sufficient fortune . . .'. 3 A younger son with a colonelcy in the Dragoons was not likely to do this unaided even if, like Bentinck, he shared his father's simple tastes. Bentinck as a young man had an allowance of £600 a year from the duke; by 1 8 1 1 it had turned into an annuity of £900. He had a sinecure as Clerk of the Pipe: this brought in about ¿ 1 , 0 0 0 a year, but it succumbed to the Economical Reform movement (which Bentinck supported): by the mid-1830s it had been converted into a pension of £ 1 8 7 . 14. 6d. a year. His father had presumably bought him his commission: this meant an income, but also some expenditure. What

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I • T H E CAREER OF A SECOND SON capital Bentinck may have had, whether from his family or from his wife's, is not clear. There is no sign that it amounted to much. Plumer, the 'second parent', was rich, but only at Mrs Plumer's death in 1831 did Bentinck inherit a house in Cavendish Square and perhaps £10,000. 4 All this may explain why Bentinck kept buying lottery tickets, a habit that stayed with him most of his life even though he was not a gambler; his occasional bets never exceeded two figures. When Portland in 1802 secured for his ablest son the Governorship of Madras (worth £15,000 a year) he hoped that Bentinck would have the reversion of the Supreme Government, which, at £25,000 a year, would in every sense have brought greater rewards. There was a recent precedent for thus linking the two.5 Bentinck himself owned that 'my first inducement in going to India is pecuniary consideration'. Though he claimed higher motives as well, he might not have gone if Plumer had come through sooner with an offer of financial help to keep him in England. 6 There was nothing unusual in Bentinck's regarding the Madras appointment chiefly as a means to fortune. The eighteenth-century notion that India with its high death-rate was a place to make a 'competency' in and get out of as soon as possible was common well into the nineteenth; among those who advanced or assumed it without any sense of impropriety were not just men with a load of debt like Lord Hastings, the Governor-General, or Sir James Mackintosh (who was driven to become a Bombay judge), but such thoroughly respectable Madras officials as Bentinck's eventual successor Sir Thomas Munro and the Chief Justice, Sir Thomas Strange. Macaulay's decision to recoup the family fortunes by going to India in 1833 is well known. As late as 1839 'the less thoughtful' Balliol undergraduates thought anyone going to India would 'come back a nabob'. 7 At most Bentinck's family circumstances may have driven him on a little harder. When he had been at Madras for two years the young and confident Bentinck explained to his elder brother his 'most inmost thoughts'. His annual saving on his salary as governor, exclusive of Indian interest at 8 per cent, he reckoned at £9,000 a year; after paying various debts and initial expenses he had already saved some £10,000. What would happen next depended on two things: Lady William's health and his chances of getting the Supreme Government. I f , as then seemed likely, he did not get Bengal, 'it is my resolution to remain [at Madras] if I am permitted four years from the 1st January 1806 . . . which will give

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me a fortune of between £50,000 and £60,000'. The only grounds for limiting himself to four more years were his wife's health and the age of both their parents; he himself 'never was better in my life. I like the situation and am exceedingly interested in i t . . . . I am quite at my ease and I believe the country is doing well under my government.' Or, as he put it a little later: 'My weight has increased considerably. I hope my property will increase also.' If, on the other hand, Bentinck were shortly to succeed the aged Cornwallis in the Supreme Government, 'the greatness of the situation and the vast benefits which would accrue to myself and to my family' would induce him to stay on rather longer: I should not wish to stay less than three years in Bengal and supposing Lord Cornwallis to leave India in three years, my stay would be six years or till 1812. . . . The saving in Bengal is I believe £20,000 per annum—I am not sure of this—but say £15,000. My fortune at the expiration of that term would be £100,000 which would make us very much at our ease and would prevent any great descent from the style and comfort in which we have both lived, and which becomes of importance when occupation ceases, and where an economy approaching parsimony does not exist.'* 8 These speculations came to a rude end. Not only did Bentinck not get Bengal: the Vellore mutiny led to his recall before he could serve out the term he had looked for in Madras. In June 1807, three months before sailing home, Bentinck reckoned that his net savings amounted (give or take £1,000) to no more than £20,000, or half the minimum he had hoped for.® After the year he spent in the first Peninsula campaign (1806-8) Bentinck set about repairing his fortunes. As he was to say more than once later on, he was interested not in honours or in a peerage but in an 'independence': this he tried to achieve in one way or another. The true reward of public service, he said in 1813 when he was battling through his difficult Sicilian mission, was 'the public respect which you will enjoy if you deserve it. . . . this depends wholly . . . upon my own conduct. But the Government can give me what the public cannot, * Minto, who did get the governorship of Bengal, found that he could 'depend on laying by £1,500 a month or rather more. It will be more as I get a larger sum to bear interest': to Lady Minto, 20 Nov. 1807, Minto MSS. M. 36.

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which is income and comfort. Respect is very good food for the mind, but not for the body.' In 1827 he advised Canning's widow to take an income rather than a title—'I do not set the value of a rush upon the peerage.' He himself was to refuse a title in 1835. Meanwhile, in 1809, Bentinck set about gaining an 'independence' by investing heavily in agricultural enterprise in the Marshland district of Norfolk. He was not alone. In the years of peak agricultural prices from 1809 to 1812, this rich silt area saw a markedly speculative land boom that drew a number of eminent men from London—in the words of a Radical contemporary, Peers, courtiers, statesmen, nabobs, royal physicians, naval and military commanders, etc. This . . . has filled all Marshland with astonishment, so as to make its homely and unlettered inhabitants ready to lift up their voices and cry out with the ancient Lycaonians, 'The gods are come down to us in the likeness of m e n ! , . . . The enormous price given by these newcomers for the estates they have purchased has greatly astonished the whole country, being about double the current valuation, or what lands usually fetched here before . . . . One of the chief promoters of the boom was Vice-Admiral William Bentinck, an Anglicised member of the family's Dutch branch, which for several decades had been active in Marshland. Among the 'characters in high life' the Admiral brought in were Canning, Huskisson, and his own distant cousin Lord William. In 1809 Lord William bought North Lynn, an estate of some 914 acres near King's Lynn; eight years later he was to buy Orange Farm, some 185 acres with a cottage residence and a Dutch windmill, four miles west at Terrington St. Clement. Altogether Bentinck sank not far from £50,000 into land purchase alone. These ventures were clearly those of an entrepreneur. Bentinck had no thought of settling down in Marshland. His visits, though frequent, lasted as a rule no more than two or three days—just long enough to do business with stewards and neighbours. Marshland, in fact, was 'adventurer's land' even though it was outside the old fenlands that bore than name. 'Frontage' on the shifting coast of the Wash in particular was recognised as highly speculative; and North Lynn had plenty of frontage. This made for the chance of lucrative conquests from 'the enemy', as Bentinck called the sea; it made for heavy expenditure on banks and drains and for damaging floods, and perhaps also 90

9 • A FENLAND IMPROVER for the disappointing returns common among nineteenth-century landlords who enclosed salt marsh too fast. Bentinck frankly wished to make money. But he was not a pure speculator on capital gains. When he thought of reselling some land it was a desperate measure. The quick returns he optimistically looked for were returns of income. By the 1810s he was a dedicated improver. T o Millicent Sparrow, who had acquired a farm, he wrote that it would make her 'useful in your generation. I trust you will get a good steward, who will be a good agriculturist and who by his authority and good sense will be able to make the tenants follow your example'. In 1824, even after years of adverse fortunes, he could write that the heavy silt of North Lynn was 'capable of being greatly improved by draining, but not without considerable e x p e n s e . . . . Both for pleasure and profit I cannot refrain from making these improvements; but as they cannot but be progressive slowly, it is probable that not I, but my successor, will reap the harvest. . .'. In fact his belief in improvement could get in the way of his desire to make money. So at least thought his friend Exmouth, the retired admiral who farmed in Devon. 'Your mind is too liberal to farm profitably', he told Bentinck in 1818. 'You must improve and invent, which are the expensive articles in farming.' Bentinck himself in after years blamed his own 'mismanagement'. 10 The truth was perhaps rather that Bentinck set about improving at the wrong time. He had bought near the top of the market during the wartime boom, and had borrowed heavily to do so. He then set about improving his estates and launching other enterprises—in particular an oil mill—during the years of falling prices and agricultural distress. This, together with repayments of the original debt, called for repeated injections of capital that was increasingly hard to come by, so that by the early 1820s Bentinck—like many others—was in serious trouble; he kept going largely thanks to his family connections. Both as a convinced improver and as a rare Marshland representative of the great landed aristocracy Bentinck, however, had meanwhile come to take the lead in several co-operative ventures, notably in the making of the new channel above Lynn called the Eau Brink Cut, and in the building of Sutton Bridge across the river Nene. It was these ventures that—after some initial friction—sealed his political alliance with the Lynn merchant oligarchy. Almost as soon as he had bought North Lynn Bentinck set going various costly improvements. In 1 8 1 0 - 1 2 he started spending at least 9i

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£3,000—possibly much more—on a new sea-bank at North Lynn to enclose part of the salt marsh, and on repairs to the river bank; the plans were drawn up by the great engineer John Rennie, who, together with Telford and the younger Rennie, was to work with Bentinck on the Eau Brink Cut and Sutton Bridge projects. At the same time Bentinck built a new great sluice at 'heavy expense'; he bought a threshing mill; he set about building cottages and stables as well as— with the aim of exploiting the increasing seaborne trade—a jetty on the west bank of the Ouse at North Lynn. But his biggest venture was the oil mill he set up at North Lynn in 1818 for the commercial manufacture of cattle cake and oil—a long-standing local industry, which in the eighteenth century worked by milling eastern European linseed in wind-driven 'stamper' mills. 92

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Bentinck's transactions over the oil mill suggest the uncertainty that, during the Industrial Revolution, attended the carrying into effect of new techniques. A new, far more economic technique was available in Joseph Bramah's hydraulic press of 1795; but it was not effectively used for oil milling until 1822, just too late for Bentinck. After much uncertainty he had got William Tierney Clark, another leading engineer, to build a mill using the old-fashioned stamper presses. But the mill's steam engine was wrecked on its way to Lynn by sea; this initial disaster seems to have cost Bentinck £6,500. T h e oil mill, set up just before the worst years of agricultural distress, had a fitful career. It seems never to have worked for more than a few weeks at a time; by the 1830s it had stood idle for years. This was almost certainly the most burdensome of Bentinck's investments. There were other losses to be faced. In 1810 and again in 1820 and 1836 severe gales and tides broke banks and flooded fields with salt water. 'A large brig is lying in the middle of a wheatfield in Terrington Marsh', his steward reported in 1820; the sea had overrun some 350 acres. Bentinck, however, went on pursuing scientific improvement. What evidence there is of his farming practice suggests that he at least kept up with contemporary Marshland ideas about crop rotations. He urged his friends elsewhere to drain and irrigate, continually noted on his travels local practices of clay burning, Swedish turnip cultivation, or the feeding of cattle on cake; he inspected new kinds of agricultural implements; he had forms printed for his farms to show in detail— rather as on an Army return—the weekly state of labour, tasks performed, numbers of cattle, cereal crops disposed of or bought, and receipts and expenditure. All the same, much of the time his agents and stewards were in practice left to get on with the job: his long absences on the Continent meant that he could not supervise the farms in detail. The farms lost money in the distressed years around 1820. 'Sad and gloomy beyond any period in my memory is our agricultural prospect', Bentinck wrote to Millicent in 1 8 2 1 . In the mid-twenties the farms did better, partly no doubt because of the general upturn in agricultural incomes; even then Bentinck seems to have done little better than break even. Capital expenditure was high: banks had constantly to be renewed, and tile drainage was costly. Low prices in the early 1830s made the land once more a 'dead weight'; by 1835 both farms were let. Right from the start, in 1809-12, Bentinck had borrowed £39,000 to 93

I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON buy North Lynn and pay for capital works. By 1 8 1 3 he had run into unexpectedly heavy capital charges—this on top of running interest charges of at least £2,000 a year: he owed Drummonds, his chief bankers, £40,000. At this point Bentinck—then in the Mediterranean —panicked: ' I am quite frightened by the amount of my debt—and I must diminish it greatly at whatever sacrifice.' He decided to sell part of the land as well as his London house. What happened next is unclear: nothing seems to have been sold. Possibly the break in the land boom forestalled any chance of carrying out Bentinck's instructions. He was thus in a bad way. He grew still worse off in 1814 when he lost the Sicilian mission: while it lasted he had been able to live within his official salary, and he wished to hang on to it because of his 'temporary embarrassment' in Norfolk. He then recouped himself somewhat by living cheaply in Italy for most of 1 8 1 4 - 1 6 . After that he embarked on what seems to have been the classic speculator's move, throwing good money after bad: instead of selling he bought. The purchase of Orange Farm in 18x7 was followed a year later by the setting up of the oil mill. Bentinck entered the years of deepest agricultural distress with his commitments increased. He touched bottom in 1819-22: more than once he borrowed hurriedly from one country bank or relative to pay off another; his Quaker bankers at Lynn were sending him increasingly stiff demands for repayment of loans and 'liquidation of thy accounts current'. This helps to explain the urgency with which he tried to secure the governorship of Bengal in 1822. Bentinck borrowed from nearly everyone in sight: from banks, from Norfolk landowners (on mortgage), from Marshland neighbours, from a former Madras colleague, from six of his and his wife's relations; nearly all these people had to be paid 5 % interest. By far his biggest creditor was his elder brother the fourth duke. Portland became heavily involved from 1819 on. In that disastrous year Bentinck opened a series of complex negotiations that went on until 1825. His aim, through many shifts, was always the same: to raise capital, if necessary by selling the freehold of one or other farm or both, without losing the chance of carrying on his agricultural enterprise as a tenant on a long lease. As he told Portland in 1820, 'my great want is capital. . . . my own means would suffice, if I could convert them into money'. ' M y wants' (he added a few days later) 'are very urgent and without your aid I cannot without much sacrifice meet them.' His income apart from farm and mill was 'perfectly adequate to the same establishment I have 94

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hitherto had': the problem was not penury but how to find disposable resources to keep going 'a concern which carries with it every fair prospect of success', and which might ensure for Lady William a comfortable old age. Four years later, when Portland had already put large sums into the enterprise, Bentinck pressed for still more. He advanced two main reasons. First, the North Lynn estate had enabled him to bring one of the Lynn parliamentary seats into the Bentinck family 'interest'; secondly, his efforts to improve the estate by draining it would no doubt benefit his successor rather than himself, but 'my pleasure would be greatly diminished if I felt that I was working for the benefit of a stranger'. For Portland to bail Bentinck out yet again would therefore 'be very useful, politically, and very satisfactory, feelingly, to me'. Portland, on the other hand, was beginning to wonder whether Marshland was such a good investment after all. In the end, after many false starts, he did as his brother wished: he bought the freehold of the two farms (Orange Farm in 1819, North Lynn in 1825) and let them back to Bentinck on a long lease, keeping an option to buy in the lease at Bentinck's death. By 1824-7 things were going better for Bentinck as for other farmers. He began to repay arrears of interest. From 1827 the GovernorGeneralship ended his troubles. In India he started remitting money home at a rate of £10,000 a year. Much of this went to settle debts which in the mid-twenties had amounted to some £80,000. In 1835-6, after his return, Bentinck settled what appear to have been the last remaining debts. That was the end of his Marshland venture.* As a Marshland farmer Bentinck was one among a number of passing figures who strove with varying success to make agriculture a business proposition. As a leading improver he left a more permanent mark. He was concerned with three main undertakings: the Eau Brink Cut; the new road over the Nene at what is now Sutton Bridge, together with the improvement of the Nene outfall; and the improvement of Lynn harbour. When he left for India he was contemplating a fourth: no less than the reclamation of the Wash on the lines since followed * Bentinck's need to remit money home to pay off the debt saved him from losing it in the great crash of the Calcutta Houses of Agency, where many servants of the East India Company invested their savings at high interest rates. Bentinck lost only about ¿800 in the crash; Lord Combermere, the former Commander-inChief, lost £40,000: to Portland, 27 Feb. 1833, BP/PwH/293. 95

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by the Dutch in the Zuyder Zee. Bentinck had bought land as an investment; but his rank was bound to make him a local notable. On his return after the wars he was in demand to take the chair at meetings and pilot legislation through Parliament. His own passion for improvement combined with the pressure of local affairs to make him take the lead, now of this 'interest', now of that. Of the two ventures that chiefly took up Bentinck's time, the making of the Eau Brink Cut to channel the silted and meandering Ouse above King's Lynn concerned most of the highly contentious 'interests' in the area: Lynn itself; the South and Middle Levels of the Fens upriver; and Marshland. In economic terms, it set the Lynn navigation interest at odds with the Fen landowning interest, since Lynn's trade in corn and coal was thought to depend on keeping the rivers navigable as far upstream as possible, while the Fen landowners on their readily flooded peatlands wished to see the waters drained out to sea as fast as possible. The making of the road bridge at Sutton—involving as it did the channelling of the lower Nene—also set the town of Wisbech at odds with its hinterland in the North Level; it affected Marshland as well as the equivalent silt area of Lincolnshire, South Holland. In the making of the Eau Brink Cut Bentinck was at all times identified with Marshland by his landholdings there: he worked closely together with his neighbours Sir Andrew Hamond (a retired Comptroller of the Navy) and Thomas Hoseason (a self-made man who had been naval storekeeper at Madras during Bentinck's governorship). He had many dealings over the cut with the engineers—Thomas Telford and the two John Rennies, father and son—who were retained by the conflicting navigation and drainage interests. The same engineers reappeared in much the same roles in the making of Sutton Bridge; but here Bentinck's role was different. As a proprietor directly affected by the Eau Brink Cut he was the leader of one of the conflicting interests. But in the matter of the road bridge and Nene outfall the Marshland proprietors as non-ratepayers were—to the thinking of the time— outsiders: as a free agent Bentinck was able to play the part of broker or catalyst. The Eau Brink Cut, only one among many attempts at improved drainage of the fens in a long unending succession, was first proposed in 1751, legislated upon in 1795, begun in 1817, opened in 1821; it proved inadequate almost at once and, after many wrangles, had to be 96

9 • A F E N L A N D IMPROVER widened in the late twenties. Bentinck's share in the business at first consisted in reconciling Lynn and then—with the help of his old military friend Sir Henry Bunbury, of Mildenhall—the South Level to the proposed cut. In the disputes over the widening of the cut in the 1820s he and the other Marshland proprietors were increasingly drawn into identifying their interests with those of the Lynn merchants against those of the upriver landowners and especially of the old statutory body concerned with drainage, the Bedford Level Corporation. Much of the struggle—fought out in the courts and through the promotion of local Bills—turned on the Lynn-Marshland proposal to pull down Denver Sluice, where the Old and New Bedford Rivers join the Ouse. It ended in 1825 in a compromise, largely the work of Bentinck and of the Bedford Level agent: the cut was to be widened and a decision on Denver Sluice put off (the sluice was in fact rebuilt in 1832). The building of the new embankment and road bridge at Sutton was more directly the work of Bentinck as entrepreneur; he also had a large share in pressing forward to a conclusion existing plans to carry the Nene right out to sea—a measure which, when completed in 1830, meant a greatly improved drainage for Wisbech, for the North Level of the Fens, and for South Holland. Throughout his career Bentinck was a wholehearted advocate of good roads as the key to economic improvement. His illustration of what was wrong with his deputy and successor Charles Metcalfe as an Indian civil servant was: 'He sets no value upon a good road'. 11 The proposed road over Sutton Bridge was to encourage the flow of trade by shortening the journey from Norfolk to the East Midlands by twenty-five miles. The difficulty was that a road bridge meant the channelling of the lower Nene, still more silted and meandering here than the Ouse before the making of the Eau Brink Cut. Rennie in 1814 had reported in favour of a complete outfall cut right out to sea, both to help landward traffic and to unclog the port of Wisbech. But the project was expensive; it also ran into repeated trouble with the Wisbech merchants whose warehouses a new cut might bypass. Bentinck had to wage two 'campaigns'—his term,—in 1818-21 and again in 1824, before a final sharp burst of negotiation in 1825-6 persuaded all parties to go forward. These were his own initiative: the second time round, in 1824, he decided to 'have this subject brought again before the public', if necessary to the point of bringing forward another local Bill (a first Bill had had to be given up in 1821), against D

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I • THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON the advice of his supporters. This struggle too was carried on through public meetings, pamphlets, and the promotion of local Bills. Bentinck also successfully launched a company in 1825 to raise £40,000 and build the bridge. This last seems to have been a calculated move to stir up the Bedford Level interest: after a further flurry of wrangles and negotiations, Bentinck and the Bedford Level reached another compromise in March 1826. Under its terms agreed Bills were promoted; both bridge and outfall cut were built by 1830. By the prosperous mid-twenties the upriver proprietors seem to have needed no more than a push—which Bentinck supplied. The impulse, though helped by the speculative fever of 1825, outlasted it. Bentinck himself had been fairly belligerent at times; in launching his bridge company in May 1825 he had announced that since 'insuperable difficulties' in the way of Rennie's complete Nene Outfall Cut (which he supported) 'probably still continue... I for one shall take no further trouble to remove them': he would go forward regardless with building the bridge—presumably over a shifting marsh. In 1826, however, he felt it 'most desirable to avoid opposition and not to put to hazard a measure which, if it should now fail, will in the general opinion be lost for our times'. >( Bentinck thus for some ten years played a leading part in the improvement of the whole of the Fen country. Some of this work was, at that time, almost bound to come the way of a man of his rank who owned property in the area. But much of it came from his own inclination: he 'must improve and invent'. At Lynn he was in correspondence with Rennie in 1826 over the need for a deep-water dock—something that was built only in the 1840s; in 1835, after his return from India, when he was no longer M.P. for Lynn or even thinking of standing there, he proposed to the Mayor the building of a quay. A year later he retorted to the Duke of Bedford and the North Level, who were opposing the 'wild and desperate plan' for carrying the Great Northern Railway across their land, that 'for a price I should consider such a project, executed at the expense of others, a godsend'. The project that most clearly transcended local interests was the reclamation of the Wash. Bentinck had long been interested in land reclamation, not only on his own property at North Lynn but on public grounds. In 1825 he began to look into plans, which several engineers had already suggested in the past, for taking not only the Nene but perhaps also other rivers to outfall points far out into the Wash. By the time the younger Rennie had carried out a survey on behalf of a com98

9 . A F E N L A N D IMPROVER mittee with Bentinck at its head the project had grown to Zuyder Zee proportions: there was now to be a single channel in mid-Wash uniting all four main rivers (Witham, Welland, Nene, and Ouse); the area to be reclaimed was, Rennie later said, 'from 150,000 to 200,000 acres . . . in other words, a new county, of most valuable land, would be added to the kingdom'. T h e new project 'took the world by surprise': but when Bentinck and Hoseason went to India in 1828 'there remained none of sufficient energy and influence to push it forward'. The only— belated—result was a new cut below Lynn. Bentinck was something of an all-purpose improver. He did not become rooted in Marshland; there is no sign that he wished to be. He took his Norfolk experience with him to Bengal; there he wrote off to his brother for samples of British draining tiles—'I hope to do miracoli [miracles] with them.' As he worked on the drainage of Calcutta and on steam navigation along the Ganges, he once or twice explained that he knew something of such matters through his work on the Eau Brink Cut: 'Bengal,' he said, 'is almost a facsimile upon a gigantic scale of the Great Level of the Fens.' 1 2 What Bentinck had not got out of Marshland was the 'independence' he had hoped for back in 1809. But for Portland he might easily have gone bankrupt, like so many others, in the bad years around 1820. Even then he needed the Governor-Generalship to bail him out. There was no doubt a touch of special pleading in his declaration to his young friend Harry Verney—whom he wished to dissuade from coming out as his secretary—that ' I know not any good whatever, except r i c h e s . . . , to be had in India'; 1 3 but perhaps only a touch. In India Bentinck's illnesses once or twice made him fear that he would not last the course. He had earlier made a will based on the expectation—perhaps optimistic—that the sale of his farms would yield his widow an unencumbered capital of £40,000. In 1831 he hoped to leave India in January 1834, to 'take away near £40,000 and to find a clear income at home—but to live so long may be some difficulty'. 14 By his return in 1835 he had perhaps saved as much as £70,000 out of his salary; much of this went in settling the debts of the past quartercentury. When he died in 1839 all his property—unstated—went to his widow. When she in turn died four years later her will was proved at under £40,000. It was not much to show for a total of eleven years as an Indian governor. Lady William left nearly all her estate to her Bentinck relatives, more than half of it to the widow and children of her husband's brother Lord Charles Bentinck. In 1879 Lord Charles's

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grandson succeeded as sixth Duke of Portland. Lord William's lifelong enterprise, first spurred on by the principle of primogeniture and then saved by it from failure, thus ended by benefitting the holder of the title. In economic terms some of Bentinck's investments, notably in the oil mill, must have run to waste. His attempts to improve his own farms possibly, and his work on fen drainage certainly, made that part of East Anglia more productive. India paid for much of it, and got in exchange the services of one of her better governors.

10 -THE ROAD TO CALCUTTA India had failed to give the career of the second son the expected initial push. But another chance might come. In the twenty years between the recall from Madras and Bentinck's appointment as Governor-General in 1827 there was often a possibility that the Court of Directors of the East India Company would choose to send him out again. In some of those years Bentinck needed a job very badly. From 1 8 1 0 on he had drawn closer to some of the Directors, especially to the dominant figure among them, Charles Grant. For eight years before his reappointment he was persistently spoken of or put forward for Indian governorships. In 1819 the Court offered him a second term at Madras. Bentinck would have accepted if he had been made Commander-in-Chief as well as Governor. The point of this was to wipe out 'the injury done to my character' by the 1807 recall—the causes of which had never been publicly explained. 'It is not sufficient that I should appear . . . to be simply pardoned': if he was to work effectively at Madras he must go back with clear 'proofs of the confidence and respect of the authorities at home'. The Court was willing to give him the double appointment; but Canning, then President of the Board of Control, was not. Bentinck therefore declined. In a first draft of his refusal—which he later toned down—he gave vent to his feelings: I have deeply suffered: I have learnt the value of character from the injury done to it: I have learnt the uncertainty of justice: I have learnt that a man's fame is in his own keeping alone: I have learnt the emptiness of all other dependence. . . . I must not and 100

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grandson succeeded as sixth Duke of Portland. Lord William's lifelong enterprise, first spurred on by the principle of primogeniture and then saved by it from failure, thus ended by benefitting the holder of the title. In economic terms some of Bentinck's investments, notably in the oil mill, must have run to waste. His attempts to improve his own farms possibly, and his work on fen drainage certainly, made that part of East Anglia more productive. India paid for much of it, and got in exchange the services of one of her better governors.

10 -THE ROAD TO CALCUTTA India had failed to give the career of the second son the expected initial push. But another chance might come. In the twenty years between the recall from Madras and Bentinck's appointment as Governor-General in 1827 there was often a possibility that the Court of Directors of the East India Company would choose to send him out again. In some of those years Bentinck needed a job very badly. From 1 8 1 0 on he had drawn closer to some of the Directors, especially to the dominant figure among them, Charles Grant. For eight years before his reappointment he was persistently spoken of or put forward for Indian governorships. In 1819 the Court offered him a second term at Madras. Bentinck would have accepted if he had been made Commander-in-Chief as well as Governor. The point of this was to wipe out 'the injury done to my character' by the 1807 recall—the causes of which had never been publicly explained. 'It is not sufficient that I should appear . . . to be simply pardoned': if he was to work effectively at Madras he must go back with clear 'proofs of the confidence and respect of the authorities at home'. The Court was willing to give him the double appointment; but Canning, then President of the Board of Control, was not. Bentinck therefore declined. In a first draft of his refusal—which he later toned down—he gave vent to his feelings: I have deeply suffered: I have learnt the value of character from the injury done to it: I have learnt the uncertainty of justice: I have learnt that a man's fame is in his own keeping alone: I have learnt the emptiness of all other dependence. . . . I must not and 100

10 • THE ROAD TO CALCUTTA cannot consent to an arrangement which may seem to lower my character in the eyes of my countrymen. 1 Three years later Bentinck seemed to have another chance—this time of the Supreme Government. Canning had been about to go to Bengal as Governor-General when Castlereagh's suicide brought him back into the Cabinet in September 1822 as Foreign Secretary. On the face of it the return to office of his relative might have helped Bentinck. Grant and 'a very powerful party' among the Directors favoured him for the Bengal appointment. It was not to be. Bentinck had on several occasions opposed in the House the Government which Canning had just joined. Worse still, as the matter hung in the balance his nephew Lord Titchfield, for whom he had found a parliamentary seat at King's Lynn, made a speech strongly attacking the Government. The Prime Minister, Liverpool, decided that for Bentinck to be appointed through the support he commanded among the Directors would in the circumstances be 'humiliating'; Canning acquiesced. Bentinck, however, did not take the decision lying down. He went on lobbying the Directors—who were theoretically free to put forward anyone they chose; he drove Canning into counterlobbying; he tried to force Liverpool publicly to veto his appointment instead of getting the Directors to approve the 'harmless' candidate Canning had brought forward, Amherst. None of this availed. It seems there were no hard feelings: a month later Lady William briskly congratulated Canning and herself on Amherst's appointment.2 T h e seeming upshot was that Bentinck's old constitutional ventures in Italy, together with his increasingly liberal stand in current affairs, had damaged him for good with a Government that looked like going on for ever: Liverpool, Prime Minister since 1812, was to serve until 1827. In 1825, when there was talk of recalling Amherst, Wellington was clear that the Government should again block Bentinck's appointment.3 On the other hand Canning seems to have been left with a faint sense of obligation; and Bentinck went on being 'a great favourite' with some of the Directors. 4 There remained a chance. Meanwhile Lord and Lady William settled further into the kind of life they had embarked upon at the end of the wars. He had no job, no fortune, no fixed residence, a disastrous speculative enterprise in Norfolk, and a tenuous commitment to attend Parliament for a few months in the year. Both he and his wife had come to dislike a climate such as England's where—he commented—'it is w e l l . . . when one out of two

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has no complaint'.* For all these reasons they were constantly on the move. Lord William in particular was an indefatigable traveller. He was quite prepared to travel non-stop from Turin to Paris for six days and nights. In England he went everywhere by the newly speeded-up stagecoaches, often on the outside; here too he would make rapid crosscountry journeys, stopping one or two nights in a succession of places. The only time the system failed him was when he was 'driven out of [the] carriage by a stinking child'. With the peace he became an eq ally indefatigable tourist; he could spend five hours in an Amsterdam picture gallery and then go to La gazza ladra in the evening. He earned the title his friend Mrs Grote gave him—'Your meteoric Lordship.'6 In 1814-27 Lord and Lady William spent most winters on the Continent—in Florence, Rome, Paris, or Nice; in several years they stayed abroad longer still. The reason for some of these travels was beyond doubt the need to live cheaply. In London they had a succession of Mayfair leasehold houses—first at 26 Bruton Street, then, from 1817, at 20 Park Lane, and finally, from 1826, at 59 Lower Grosvenor Street —but from time to time Bentinck was driven either to sell the lease or to let the house furnished. Another resource, financially helpful as well as socially agreeable, was to make a round of visits to friends and relations at their country houses. By the 1820s the Bentincks were as much at home on the Continent as in Britain. This was signalled by their nicknames in the family— 'Lordship' and 'Ladyship', apparently bequeathed by some Continental servant. Their servants—they seem at most times to have had about five—were indeed an international crew: French, German, Spanish, Italian as well as British. It was at all times a polyglot household, though Bentinck's own fluent French and more fragmentary Italian were never as correct as his wife's. As time went on the Bentincks came to be most at home in Paris. Here they knew several of the leading political figures of the Restoration period. They were also firm friends of Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orleans, then uneasily living through the rule of his Bourbon cousins. The hazards of war had thrown Bentinck and Louis-Philippe together in Sicily in 1 8 1 1 : though Louis-Philippe was the King of Sicily's sonin-law the two men had acted together in the difficult struggles with the Court. After the peace they went on seeing eye to eye in European politics. By 1822 Louis-Philippe was writing: 'My friendship for you 102

10 • T H E ROAD TO CALCUTTA will last as long as I live.' 7 It was Bentinck who was to die first, in a Paris ruled over by the new King of the French. With a wide acquaintance, with an active social life wherever he happened to be in Europe, with what his nephew Charles Greville called his 'magnificently hospitable' mode of life, Bentinck remained an essentially solitary figure. His family apart, he was a member of no close-knit group. Among his contemporaries almost the only close friends he had were officers he had served with in early youth—men whose friendship was loyal and undemanding, and to whom (if we are to judge from his surviving letters) he talked frankly about his public life but not much more. To us too his inmost life is closed. Yet he was a man of strong inner impulses: witness the courage—or foolhardiness—with which he had gambled his career on Italian independence. His rooted distrust of half-measures stayed with him: he once calmly told the Town Clerk of King's Lynn, who complained of damage to the harbour from recent alterations in fen drainage, that the best thing would be for time to 'show the harbour destroyed'—Parliament would then have to act and the harbour would in the end be 'much better than it has ever been'.8 He was a man of considerable energy and will—even if to some this looked like wilfulness. An intelligent Sicilian who saw a good deal of him thought he showed 'no little strangeness, and even . . . extravagance; he might at times have been thought a child of nature, a truly eccentric being . . .'* Like some other people who strike contemporaries as strongly marked or even bizarre characters Bentinck held as his own ideal of conduct moderation, simplicity, and 'straight and direct' dealing.10 After Vellore he liked to feel, amid whatever reverses, that he had done his duty—'and this conviction, as I know from dreadfully dear-bought experience, is the only consolation that defies all contingencies'." When he met the Landgravine of Hesse, a daughter of George I I I condemned to live with a dull husband and a 'ludicrous' miniature court in a house worse than an English gentleman's, he admired in her 'that perfect satisfaction of mind which good sense and good feeling could alone have inspired'.12 That was what he sought also. By the mid-1820s, when he was in his early fifties, Bentinck was not only an inwardly solitary figure. He was an apparent failure—twice recalled in disgrace, his military career far from brilliant, the Sicilian constitutional experiment long since buried, Italy still parcelled out under despotic rule. He was childless and deep in debt. At this point 103

i . T H E CAREER OF A SECOND SON he embarked on the most notable part of his career. He became at length Governor of Bengal. This was a piece of luck. Canning became Prime Minister in April 1827. He died in August. His short-lived Government had to find a man to replace Amherst in India. The Directors still wanted Bentinck —they voted for him in the end with only one dissentient. But Canning and his President of the Board of Control, Wynn, did not share their enthusiasm. Canning offered the job to five men in turn—all of whom declined; he then fell back on Bentinck. A few months earlier with Liverpool in office, a few months later with Wellington, Bentinck would not have had even sixth refusal. 13 Lord and Lady William sailed from Plymouth on 8 February 1828. It was the worst voyage they ever experienced. The ship was several times awash. In a four-day gale off Morocco the bulkhead of Bentinck's cabin was three times stove in; his trunks and cases washed about for several hours; he himself fell, injured his ankle, and bruised himself so badly that his leg next day was 'completely black from the knee to the toes'. Lady William, washed out of one cabin, was carried into another by a sailor; she was taking off her chemise to put on the sailor's shirt—she had asked him to turn his back—when a 'second sea filled the cot and cabin she was in . . . without ceremony [the sailor] took her away to another cabin and brought another of his shirts which she also put on'. Rough fare for a couple aged 53. The ship at length reached Madras on 21 June. Thousands of Indians lined the beach to greet the Bentincks, among them some of their old pensioned servants, who had not seen them for 21 years. On 4 July Bentinck landed at Calcutta and took his seat on the Supreme Council. 14 He now filled what his predecessor had called 'the highest situation . . . a subject can hold in the world'. 15 From the time of his appointment he had been deluged with the requests for jobs and favours that came the way of every Indian ruler. He was entrusted with—as cliché then had it—'the happiness of millions'. But he had come into the job at a difficult time. The East India Company's charter was up for renewal in 1833. I f s monopoly of the China tea trade, perhaps its existence, lay under threat. The Burma war of the mid-twenties had run up a large deficit. T o face its critics in Parliament the company had to wage a drastic economy campaign. Bentinck's task, as he knew from the start, was to enforce it. This meant cutting British allowances in India; and that in turn meant for the Governor-General deep unpopularity among his 104

10 • THE ROAD TO CALCUTTA fellow-countrymen. Within nine months, amid the storm he had raised by his 'half-batta' order—cutting officers' old double allowances or batta,—he was writing home that he feared his most popular act had been to bring in a French chef at Government House. 16 Bentinck had intended to spend four years in India. He stayed seven. They were years of hard work, taxing to his energy and his health. British power in India was by then clearly supreme, yet, as contemporaries saw, in some way paradoxical and insecure. The task was consolidation and reform. On the surface the British were extraordinarily confident. Jacquemont marvelled at their disregard of the climate, their mania for violent horseback riding and port and madeira drinking in the heat, the ordered state in which they lived and travelled; at Simla, then just beginning its career as hot-weather capital, they dined in silk stockings at 7,000 ft. and got the Calcutta papers every day. In Calcutta too everything at Bentinck's Government House dinners was 'royal and Asiatic': here the excellent wines came in moderate quantities, but they were served by bearded servants in gold and scarlet turbans; torchlight played on piled-up fruit and flowers; between courses a band played Mozart and Rossini. When Bentinck travelled he moved about with an escort of 300 elephants, 1,300 camels, 800 bullock carts, and one cavalry and one infantry regiment. 17 For colour and pomp the climax of Bentinck's travels—which took him to North and Central India for two and a half years—was his famous meeting with the great Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh in 1831. Ranjit accompanied Bentinck on elephant-back down a 'street' one mile long formed by Sikh troops to a space 2,000 yards square enclosed in silk cloths. Here stood the royal tent of scarlet lined with yellow velvet worked with gold: a hundred 'amazons' with bows and arrows sang; Ranjit, wearing the Koh-i-Noor, put a string of pearls round Bentinck's neck; later, somewhat tipsy, he had gold dust thrown over his guests. More prosaically, Jacquemontrecorded that Ranjit 'pissed most gravely in a corner of the splendid tent where he was with Lord William and the whole of the Governor-General's court'. 18 Yet in the midst of all the state then inseparable from Indian rule stood a tall, aloof figure, deliberately simple in his ways, taken up day after day (Sundays excepted) with vast quantities of paperwork. It had long been so. A newcomer to Palermo in 1812 had found Bentinck immersed in a roomful of maps and documents and waving aside as 'so much waste paper' the young man's letters of introduction—let

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him work hard for promotion, he said.19 Bentinck brought to India something of a Victorian style of public life. His friend Jacquemont caught this in a famous passage: Lord Bentinck, on the throne of the Great Mogul, thinks and acts like a Pennsylvania Quaker. You may guess whether there is any want of people to complain of the dissolution of the empire and the end of the world when they see the temporary master of Asia riding about in a frock-coat without an escort, and setting off for the country with his sunshade under his arm.. . . Long involved in scenes of tumult and blood, he has kept pure and unsullied that flower of humanity which the habits of military life so often wither. . . . Tried by the most corrupting of professions, diplomacy, he has emerged from the test with the straightforward thoughts and the simple and sincere language of Franklin; he finds no subtlety in appearing worse than one is. . . . When I thought of the immense power wielded by this excellent man, I rejoiced for the cause of humanity.20 No more than Macaulay's inscription was Jacquemont's eulogy the last word on Bentinck's historical role in India. That role was more complex than Jacquemont supposed, the contrast between the Mughal imperial past and the governor with his sunshade, between the soldier in the French wars and the 'Quaker' bent on civil reform less stark. There was in fact a continuity between Bentinck's warlike past and his pacific governorship; it sprang from the working upon one another, throughout his career, of personality and social group, aspiration and experience, individual will and historical process. That continuity in his inward and outward development—at times a continuity in selfcontradiction—we will now set out to trace.

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PART II

Empire and Nationality 1 • SERVING THE N A T I O N On 9 March 1814, near the end of the 'wars of liberation', Bentinck's army came ashore at Leghorn—a mixed expeditionary force partly made up of Italian and other Continental exiles. This Italian Levy, as it was called, landed with banners bearing the device 'Italian union— national independence'. For more than three years Bentinck and other like-minded men had persevered in an attempt to raise the mainland of Italy in a revolt against Napoleonic despotism. Now, as they hoped, the culminating point had arrived; the outcome they looked for was the creation of a new united Italy. On 14 March Bentinck issued a proclamation to the Italians at large. With Britain's help, he said, Spain, Sicily, and now Holland had saved themselves from 'the iron yoke of Buonaparte': . . . is then Italy to remain under the yoke? Shall Italians alone contend against Italians, in favour of a tyrant, and for the thraldom of their country? Italians, hesitate no longer;—be Italians, and let Italy in arms be convinced that the great cause of the country is in her hands. The 'warriors of Italy' he called upon, not indeed to join him, but to vindicate their own rights and to be free. 'Only call, and we will hasten to your relief; and then Italy, by our united efforts, shall become what she was in her most prosperous periods, and what Spain now is.' The attempt came to nothing. Italy failed to rise. The victorious Allies had little difficulty in imposing a settlement which ensured the sway of Austria over the patchwork of Italian States. Political union and independence were to be the work of another half-century. By this act Bentinck none the less showed himself a pioneer both of the Italian Risorgimento and of the British Liberal movement of sympathy with what Gladstone was to call people 'rightly struggling to be free'. 107

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Bentinck was thus in Europe an early nationalist. At first sight this was a paradoxical stance for a man who spent eleven years governing first part and then the whole of a subject Asian empire. But only at first sight. Bentinck did much to instil both in theory and in practice a view of Indian government which was the precondition of Indian nationalism. As governor of Madras he followed Wellesley in advocating a 'system of policy which could embrace the whole of India'; by the time he himself was Governor-General 25 years later he felt able to say that 'all India now virtually composes one empire'. Both early and late he wished to '[found] British greatness upon Indian happiness'. Nationalism has defined itself most plainly by reaction, in circumstances where the collective national entity with which people had come to identify themselves was most obviously fragmented, or suppressed, or trenched upon. It has thus arisen most intensely in areas like Central and Eastern Europe and large parts of colonial Asia and Africa, where, until the nineteenth century, national identity was least clear and least present to consciousness, where political boundaries continually shifted and languages and religions existed side by side. In these broad terms Italy and India of the early nineteenth century had something in common: both were clearly defined geographical areas, both were former seats of empire, both were politically fragmented but retained some awareness—however partial and qualified— of a common culture; each of them was swayed by an outside Power and neither could determine its own future. It is not surprising that the early Indian nationalists, when they appeared at mid-century, should so often have taken Mazzini for their exemplar. In Bentinck's day Indian nationalism was as yet barely conceivable. But Bentinck and others like him, by insisting on the unity of India under British paramount rule, and on the values with which Britain was morally bound to endow the newly unified empire, helped to prepare the ground. If India was one empire, why not one nation? If Indian happiness was the end of government, why should not Indians themselves determine it? There was thus no break, but rather a continuity, from Bentinck's explicit Italian nationalism to his Indian concern with benevolent imperial rule. The notion that India would one day come to rule herself was anyhow present to his mind—and to those of contemporary Englishmen in India like Macaulay, Mountstuart Elphinstone, and Charles Metcalfe—though only as the most shadowy anticipation of nationalism. 108

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The idea of the nation held for Bentinck, from an early age, a high value. As with many early nationalists this value was closely bound up, on the one hand with the eighteenth-century notion of the people's liberty, virtue, and happiness, on the other with the individual's choice of public service over private interest. 'The good of mankind is my vanity', Bentinck wrote from Sicily to his close friend and confidant Sir Edward Pellew. ' I had rather make a nation happy than gain thousands of battles and all the glory attendant thereon.'2 Here the nation was Italy: Bentinck, as he then thought, was about to invade the mainland and raise an insurrection. 'We both' (he told Pellew a few months later) 'serve the nation and not the Ministers—and it in fact only concerns us that the first should be satisfied. If they [the nation] are, the Ministers cannot remove us, and if they are not, the Ministers will not protect us.'3 Here the nation was Britain: Bentinck, who in practice owed his job largely to his birth and connections, claimed— not for the first or last time—to give allegiance only to a stern ideal of public service. The claim was sincere enough; more important, this sort of claim is likely to come true the more insistently it is made, since the man who makes it cannot in the end afford (in his own eyes or other people's) to put private interest first. In Britain as in Italy to make such claims was to body forth the nation as inspirer, beneficiary, and judge. How did Bentinck come to this elevated view of the nation? Partly no doubt like some of his contemporaries, by living through the vicissitudes of the time. More specifically, he once again owed much to his Burlington House mentor, Edmund Burke. Bentinck's Flanders campaign in 1793 had shown him what 'the nation in arms' was capable of when fired by a new defiant patriotism. In the same year the final dismemberment of Poland shocked many people into thinking afresh of nations' rights and liberties: twenty years later, when Austria and Murat as King of Naples seemed about to partition Italy between them, Bentinck spoke of 'this second Poland'.4 As early as the 1760s Burke had taken not only Poland but Corsica—transferred willy nilly from Genoa to France—as his text for an attack on governments that disposed of nations like so many pieces of real estate.5 Shortly before the war the impeachment of Warren Hastings had led Burke, alone among the men of his time, to proclaim it as Britain's first duty in India 'to pursue [the Indians'] benefit in all things', even if this meant putting British economic advantage second. No more than Poland or Corsica was Bengal to be 109

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treated as property; all three were sentient collectivities whose integrity and customs should be respected. 6 The upheaval in France threw Burke into deeper reflection on what was at stake when such a movement swept boundaries aside and overturned institutions. He was one of the first to see that the Revolution meant 'an end to the system of Europe': for the old pursuit of the balance of power by States dynastically and territorially defined must be substituted 'new things in a new world'—an appeal to opinion and enthusiasm, an ideological war of propaganda turning 'much more upon the benefit of the people; on good order, religion, morality, security and property, than upon the rights of sovereigns'. 'To do anything [against France] without raising a spirit (I mean a national spirit) with all the energy and much of the conduct of a party spirit I hold to be a thing absolutely impossible.' Hence his insistence on British support for the émigrés and the Vendée.7 Bentinck seems to have got almost the whole of his idea of the nation from Burke. He followed Burke not only in setting a high value on national integrity but in holding that this could be reconciled with a Great Power's right to interference in the affairs of others. Burke himself followed the French philosopher of international law Vattel in arguing that 'there is a Law of Neighbourhood which does not leave a man perfectly master on his own ground': Britain, in other words, had a right to intervene in France, not to foment new divisions but, since divisions already existed, to uphold right against tyranny and oppression. So too Burke had earlier argued that 'a little of that busy spirit of intermeddling' on Britain's part might—without going so far as war— have saved Corsican and Polish independence. 8 Bentinck's reliance on this part of Burke's teaching can be documented: when dealing as Governor-General with the Indian States he more than once quoted Vattel—probably mediated for him through Burke.» Throughout his career he upheld the right of benevolent interference. At Madras he applauded Wellesley's policy of curbing the Indian States and forcing them into alliances. He himself made Sicily into a virtual protectorate. After the wars he wished Britain to intervene in Spain, in Italy, in Greece. Bentinck was as willing as Palmerston to throw Britain's weight about in a cause he judged good. In certain moods—when things were moving too slowly—a bullying strain came uppermost. 'Notwithstanding the cant of our political Methodists,' Bentinck wrote near the start of his Sicilian venture (a dig at the Prime Minister, Perceval, who had wished to avoid strong no

1 • SERVING THE NATION measures), there was 'only one way with these as with our friends in India and, I am inclined to add, Spain also—force—force. The end must justify the means. N o other policy will suit these times . . .'. I 0 Perhaps the final paradox of Bentinck's career was that as GovernorGeneral he was bound to carry out in India the Company's policy of strict non-intervention in the affairs of the States—the deliberate opposite of Wellesley's old forward policy. Any attempt to do this had its own inherent contradictions; here it was further tangled because Bentinck, though dedicated in his later years to the arts of peace, and made cautious by the troubles he had earlier run into, had by no means altogether given up his old belief in Britain's right of benevolent interference. The result, a curious oscillation between withdrawal and threat, could scarcely satisfy anyone, Bentinck included. Where Bentinck was able cautiously to act on his belief, as in making the neighbour state of Sind open up the navigation of the Indus, he still saw no clash between the extension of British power and the pursuit by each nation of its own 'happiness'. T o his kind of liberal expansionist the happiness, the integrity, ultimately the freedom of nations was to flow from British interference and to justify it. This was so in the Panjab as in Sicily, in Piedmont as in the hill States of the Deccan. The one real change that came over Bentinck in this matter was that, where as Governor of Madras he had believed in the need for despotic British rule through the East India Company's monopoly, by the 1830s he was foremost in wishing to give Indians the greatest possible share in running their own country. He was by then deeply aware that the British were 'strangers in the land' and their sway was impermanent. The best hope was that Indians should become so 'civilised'—which to him had come to mean that they should adopt Western ways, industrialise their country, and perhaps turn Christian—as to ensure a final parting the least hurtful possible. Bentinck was thus a forerunner not only of Italian but indirectly of the Westernising strain of Indian nationalism, and of that strain in British policy which looked to Indian independence as the crowning achievement of British rule.

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2 - T H E N A T I O N IN ARMS: FROM F L A N D E R S TO SICILY, 1793-1811 Bentinck spent much of his career in what were to be some of the chief growing-points of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalism: Ireland, Spain, Italy and India. It was characteristic of an Englishman of his generation that, though a pioneer of nationalism abroad, he should have failed to recognise a problem capable of calling forth a nationalist answer where it lay closest to home, in Ireland. Whether as a young colonel of dragoons on Irish garrison duty in the violently disturbed years 1795-8, or as a visitor or member of Parliament in later years, Bentinck gave few signs of having ever come to grips with the Irish problem. Like other men of goodwill he all along favoured conciliation, voted to remove Catholic disabilities, and wished to make further concessions on matters like tithes; in his last years he came round to qualified approval of Daniel O'Connell as a leader who put forward a 'just exhibition of Ireland's wrongs'.1 But, like many Englishmen, Bentinck easily lost patience; he was as apt as the next man to call the Irish savages; even in his liberal old age he could blurt out that the most complete cure for Ireland's troubles would be 'to repeal the Union and to allow the parties to fight it out among each other. British connection would soon again be courted as a blessing.'2 All this matters only because it shows the limitation on his thinking. Granted the contradictory mesh of conflicts—religious, ethnic, economic—that baffled Irishmen themselves and that have impeded a clear nationalist solution to this day, Ireland was the last place early nineteenth-century Englishmen were likely to see in focus. For Bentinck Ireland did do one thing: it taught him what guerrilla warfare might accomplish when waged by a disaffected people. In command at Armagh, he felt like 'the captain of a company in an army on foreign service, whose knowledge extends but to a short distance to his right and left—by the way, a sort of knowledge that I am afraid all British captains do not always possess.' The quick, hardy, devious gangs that struck invisibly by night 'would make the best irregular troops in the world'—and might yet be turned against England itself if the French should make a successful landing.3 Bentinck was thus better placed than many Englishmen to understand armed peasant resistance movements when he came across them on the Continent. During the campaigns of 1799-1801 Italy saw a number of ferocious 112

2 • FROM FLANDERS TO SICILY, 1 7 9 3 - 1 8 1 1 large-scale peasant risings: most of them came out against the French, but one at least against both French and Austrians. These peasant armies might seem no more than ragged mobs stirred to violence on behalf of the Madonna and of half-understood traditional values. But one group of'primitive rebels' in the mountains of Central Italy had at its head a disaffected Jacobin with a vision of some kind of Italian empire; the inward force that could rouse these tens of thousands of the poor was—though regional in outlook, inchoate and millenarian in expression—the germ of a national resistance to foreign rule and hence of a national consciousness.4 Bentinck as a young man of 25 first met these peasant masses among the foothills of the Apennines in Southern Piedmont, where they had captured the chief towns. Never yet had he seen 'inveteracy and detestation of the French so general and carried to such l e n g t h s . . . . T h e whole people are armed, and, headed by a priest (who marches with a crucifix in his hand), perform the most wonderful e x p l o i t s . . . . Yesterday a body of 15,000 prevented a very strong column of the enemy from marching by a particular road.' 5 T o Bentinck this peasant resistance suggested above all the need to encourage a positive national effort against France. The nation he looked to, however, was not the whole of Italy; it was Piedmont, the country of mountainous terrain and strong military tradition where he spent the first few months of the campaign. Without the Piedmontese people, Bentinck declared, a long frontier in Alpine country was indefensible; yet instead of drawing on this asset the Austrians, for the sake of establishing their hegemony in Northern Italy, were trying to incorporate Piedmontese soldiers into their own army. 'The German discipline,' he wrote soon after his arrival, 'will not suit the Piedmontese soldier. He must be led by his honour and not by the baton.' Over a year later, when the Allies in November 1800 were fast heading for defeat and armistice, he wrote bitterly that the ' z e a l . . . bravery and animosity' of the Piedmontese— 'real good soldiers,' 'a brave and generous nation'—had been thrown away merely to serve narrow Austrian interests: National pride, which is peculiar to this people above all the rest of Italy, will prevent them from making the same exertions for Austria, whom they only consider as a milder conqueror than France, as they would in favour of their own sovereign and their own rights. "3

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y What was to be done? If Britain in a later campaign were to send to Northern Italy an expeditionary force of her own, she need only place at the head of the Piedmontese Army the British Commander-inChief: the Piedmontese, Bentinck maintained, 'are attached to the English and would act without mistrust under their protection'. Here in 1800 was the germ of the project which Bentinck eleven years later was to try to launch on an Italian scale: a national Italian army under the disinterested protection of Britain, with himself as commander and (in the words of his young friend James Graham) potential 'Lord Wellington of Italy'. Here too was the headlong opposition to Austrian policy in Italy and elsewhere that was to rule Bentinck's view of Europe: theirs was, he wrote as the Austrians faced defeat, 'the most miserable policy that ever entered into the mind of man'. Bentinck admired Austrian military valour and was on good terms with many Austrian officers. What he denounced was what Burke had denounced—the tendency of the Austrian Government to put its dynastic and territorial interests well ahead of ideological war with France. Already in Flanders in 1794 Austria's seeming readiness to sacrifice the Low Countries to its interests in South Germany had driven Harry Calvert, Bentinck's brother officer and close friend, into voicing his 'contempt and abhorrence' for the 'infamy' of the Austrian Cabinet. 6 Calvert almost certainly spoke for Bentinck too. In 1800 as in 1794 British partisans of all-out war railed at Austrians who were more vulnerable than they to the incursions of French armies, and who acted accordingly. After this repeated experience it is not surprising that Bentinck should have opposed root and branch at the end of the wars Austria's Italian policy of reaching a compromise with Murat: to him the Austrians in 1 8 1 3 - 1 4 were still 'the worst politicians in the universe'; to rely on Austrian hegemony in Italy as a barrier against France was utterly hopeless. What Bentinck did not reckon with was that since Pitt's last Government just this reliance had become, for Pitt's disciple Castlereagh, a maxim of British policy. By the last years of the wars not Bentinck alone but many others had drawn from a fresh source a deeper understanding of popular revolt and of the forces it could unleash in the cause of national resurgence. This was Spain. Bentinck's mission to the Spanish Junta in the first few months of the Peninsular War impressed him deeply with the 'spirit, courage, and unanimity' of the people—from the aged Minister, the Count of 114

2 • FROM FLANDERS TO S I C I L Y , 1793-1811 Florida Blanca, who against all European custom refused to talk to him in French ('he had endeavoured to forget it'), to the guerrilla bands that harassed the French armies. The Junta might 'keep no pace' with the people; but even this, Bentinck urged, might be cured if a British Minister was at once appointed with full powers to withold aid unless the Junta took 'such measures as the good of Spain obviously required'—the very role he was to play three years later in Sicily. 7 Even when disaster loomed in November 1808 Bentinck trusted that the Spaniards would go on rejecting French domination. As an officer told him who, in beleaguered Zaragoza, had seen women take their dead husbands' place at the guns, 'this was not a war of Cabinets—this was a war of the people'. Bentinck himself concluded: The presence of Bonaparte does not intimidate these people. . . . They will rise more vigorous from the flames. . . . It will be a war of the Vendée. There will be no submission but where entailed by superior force. If the Government are brought to a stand, the people will go on fighting... hard as I think things are, in the end I feel confident of success. Spain will at any rate be the tombeau [tomb] of the French armies, and of Bonaparte also, I trust.8 A good prophecy. It was easy enough for Bentinck, once back in England after the evacuation from Corunna, to put together his early experience of the Piedmontese armed bands with the later and continuing example of Spanish national resistance, and to conclude that what had worked in Spain would work again in Italy. In this too he was not alone. At intervals throughout the French wars of 1793-1815, as in the great European wars of the twentieth century, British Governments faced a seeming choice between, on the one hand, striking out at the dominant Continental Power by the most direct route, and, on the other, using British sea-power to strike at the enemy's rear, generally in the Mediterranean. The drawback of the first course was, broadly, that it required strong land forces which Britain never had ready at the start and found great difficulty in building up; of the second, that Britain's superiority afloat was easily offset by the difficulties of communication, co-ordination, and supply inrugged territories far removed from the home base. Problems of this kind, bad enough at Gallipoli in 1915, were far more daunting a century earlier, when it generally took a month to sail from Plymouth to Britain's Mediterranean base in Sicily. " 5

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y A group of British soldiers, sailors, and politicians none the less hoped from time to time to be able to act against France in her southward rear, that is, in Provence and above all in Italy. This hope generally flared up when France was most deeply engaged with her remaining Continental enemies in Northern Europe: during the war of the Second Coalition in 1799-1801, again during the war of the Third Coalition in 1804-6, finally during the Austro-French war of 1809. Each time a British force tried to establish a foothold in Italy; each time it failed either to land or to maintain itself; each time peasant risings gave the French a great deal of trouble but were ultimately crushed. Though the record was one of failure, that of British attempts to tackle French power head on in the Low Countries was no better. True, from 1808 on the Iberian Peninsula offered a field of operations which British ships could reach within days rather than weeks: Liverpool, Secretary of State for War from 1809, steadily put it first. But in the disheartening state of things in 1809-11, with virtually the whole of the Continent under French dominion, it was still possible to look for another way. 9 It was also possible to see the Mediterranean as an area where Britain might achieve much more than strategic advantage. This was 'that exhilarating time' when, thanks to Spain, 'after so long and unmitigated a season hope came upon us like the first breath of summer'. 10 Wordsworth in 1809 proclaimed that 'a numerous Nation, determined to be free', might outdo the strongest foreign oppressor: national independence was 'indispensable' to the highest form of individual and social life; he looked to the Italians and Germans each to 'dissolve the pernicious barriers which divide them, and form themselves into a mighty People'. A little later Sir James Mackintosh concluded that Britain need neither conquer for selfish ends nor seek to restore the old sovereigns: by 'contending for the independence of nations' she could now turn France's old revolutionary weapon against her. 11 The aims of men who looked to the Mediterranean could thus vary: to strike at the Napoleonic Empire from the rear, to bring the blessings of constitutional freedom to oppressed nations, to extend British trade, to take over a chain of islands for Britain's own imperial purposes—all these aims could coexist, sometimes in the same individual. Grenville as Prime Minister in 1806 had wished to use Sicily as the first link in an island chain, 'highly useful to us both in war and in commerce'. A humbler figure, G . F . Leckie—a Scotsman who had farmed in Sicily— brought out in 1808 a book which seems to have had some influence. 12 116

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This advanced Whig argued that the Italians should, as a prime aim of British policy, be roused to emancipate themselves and form a single nation united against the French. This was not all: British power and British trade should so extend all over the Mediterranean as to demonstrate (Leckie privately explained) that 'while France conquers to devastate, Britain conquers to do good'. His vision was that of an early 'imperialist of free trade': given one essential condition, he wrote, the British master of the Mediterranean holds Egypt under his foot: Tunis is his tributary; and the depot of the commerce of belligerents, the Barbary Powers, cease to have ships of war. He watches the fall of the Turkish empire, and stands with expanded wings to pounce upon Greece. He closes the Dardanelles with Lemnos, and forbids the Russians to enter the Archipelago. 13 The essential condition was this: Sicily, along with Sardinia the only piece of Italian soil still outside French control, must be regenerated under British tutelage—if need be to the length of becoming an outright British colony. In this way Sicily would turn into both a firm base for British power and a shining example to mainland Italy. Sicily had long been a problem, to its owners, to those few Sicilians who were becoming aware of the outside world, and latterly to its British defenders. 14 The island, long a Spanish possession, had in the course of the eighteenth century had four masters in turn—all of them outsiders. The last, the Bourbons of Naples, were to many Sicilian minds worst because nearest. Neapolitan Governments for their part had tried since 1780 to bring Sicily under effective control: this meant a policy of 'enlightened' centralisation and absolute rule, since the island, left to itself, was an extraordinary museum of late medieval institutions, in which the barons—still legally possessed of feudal rights—dominated the vestigial Parliament and the courts and almost wholly avoided paying taxes. At the same time the barons were going through an economic crisis. Their real income from the land had been falling: as they increasingly became absentees, and surrendered to intermediaries their functions as feudal landlords, they began to lose the benefits which those functions had once brought them. The restrictions which feudal law still placed on the alienation of lands began to appear burdensome, and the system as a whole antiquated. Thus the aristocracy, while it 117

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y defended its privileges against monarchical centralism, was impelled to question some of the very rights it had begun by defending. More than this, those few Sicilian barons who read and travelled, and the equally few clerics and lawyers who with them made up the island intelligentsia, were beginning in the late eighteenth century to articulate a sense of a distinctive Sicilian culture and Sicilian State. As islanders on the edge of Europe they were particularists: in looking for means of asserting their identity and reforming their institutions they looked to their own past—often to the Norman Conquest which they shared with England; when they sought a model abroad it was, anyhow for the first wave of reformers, England rather than revolutionary France. T h e leading figures in this early group, the Princes of Belmonte and Castelnuovo and the Abate Paolo Balsamo, were to be Bentinck's closest collaborators and the makers of Sicily's 'English' Constitution of 1812. From 1799 on, the conquest of Naples by the French—repeated in 1805—gradually brought the Sicilian crisis to a head; the war further distorted it by bringing into the island not only the Bourbon Court with their Neapolitan Ministers and pensioners and large Neapolitan army, but also their protectors the British, who subsidised them and hoped—generally in vain—to see them contribute vigorously to the struggle with France. War, finally, meant inflation with its attendant unrest. The exiled Court was dominated by two of the most remarkable characters of the period, King Ferdinand IV, whose gawky plebeian manners, superstitious mind, and notorious idleness masked a shrewd tenacity in defence of his prerogative; and his wife Maria Carolina, an intelligent hysteric worn out with childbearing and caught up in a whirl of contradictory activity whose one fixed point was her desire to recover the Kingdom of Naples. Right from the start of the British occupation dealings between the Court and British envoys and commanders were bedevilled by mistrust. The Court feared with some reason that when peace came Britain would not help them to recover Naples and might even barter Sicily away; hence a series of haphazard intrigues by the Queen aimed at recovering Naples through the good offices of Russia or Austria or even France, if need be at the cost of giving up Sicily itself. The British in Sicily denounced this as 'treachery' and complained that the subsidy was thrown away to no purpose. Already in 1806 the British Minister had come close to forcing a Sicilian administration on the Court and virtually annexing Sicily to 118

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the British Empire—a course which Sir John Moore, second-incommand of the British forces on the island, would have reinforced by expelling the Queen. These measures were put off; but mutual suspicion between Great Power and small Power festered on until a crisis blew up in 1810. In the summer of that year Murat, the new King of Naples, came down to the Straits of Messina to attempt an invasion: the Court, far from standing out against him, seemed to be trafficking with him; the landing was repulsed by the British and by Sicilian peasants. At the same time the reforming group among the barons, led by Belmonte, reached deadlock in negotiations with the Court through which they had hoped to secure a Sicilian Ministry responsible to Parliament in exchange for a fairer distribution of taxes. The upshot was that the Court had to raise taxes unconstitutionally; the Belmonte group appealed to the British for help in bringing about reform. Lord Amherst was at that time the British Minister. He had done his best to keep on good terms with the Court; but he now concluded that Britain must intervene. If she did not, either the Court might betray the island to Murat or the Sicilians might turn against their Neapolitan rulers: hence Britain had better 'direct the concerns of those who are themselves unequal to the task, a n d . . . administer by force the remedies on which the salvation of this kingdom will ultimately depend'. Such remedies might well include the responsible native administration and free Parliament remodelled along English lines which the Belmonte group wanted. The nation was ripe for resistance: . . . to become a province of England would not, I believe, [Amherst wrote] be looked upon as a misfortune by the major part of its inhabitants. But an independent Government and a free Constitution would be considered as a boon, the attainment of which would irrevocably bind the Sicilians to the nation which should procure it for them. On top of this Amherst, together with the Commander-in-Chief, Sir John Stuart, resigned in disgust. This was the situation which the Perceval Government had to deal with in the winter of 1 8 1 0 - 1 1 ; they met it by offering both Amherst's and Stuart's jobs to Bentinck. When the offer came in February 1811 it fitted happily into a much larger scheme which Bentinck had been talking over since the previous summer. 'There may be,' he had confided to Pellew, 'a very great game played. I think through British means in the Mediterranean there may 119

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y be raised a power of annoyance against our great enemy not inferior to that produced by Spain itself.' This might be the chance of helping his country and mankind which alone would induce him to serve. IS In other words, an Italian revolt. The treaty which ended the Franco-Austrian war of 1809 stripped Austria of all her remaining Mediterranean lands, from Trieste to Ragusa [Dubrovnik]. It also expelled from the Austrian Army all officers from the ceded provinces. A small group of these now unemployed soldiers were in touch with a British agent in Vienna. They began to think of recruiting their fellow-officers and sending them through the Balkans to set up an exile force in the Mediterranean; at the same time other agents were to stir up revolts in Italy, the Tirol, Switzerland, and Dalmatia. At the centre of the group was the Archduke Francis of Austria-Este, an ambitious young Habsburg with a claim to Modena, one of the minor Italian States swallowed up by Napoleon; he nursed still wider hopes of becoming king of an emancipated Italy. General Nugent—an Austrian officer of Irish origin, and an old acquaintance of Bentinck's from the Italian campaign of 17991801—accordingly went off to London in 1810 by a circuitous route to try to get the British Government's backing for the plan: as a first step he proposed that the Archduke should be set up as ruler of the Ionian Islands and supplied with funds to gather and train his exile force there. This was almost certainly the 'great game' Bentinck had got wind of. Between March and June 1 8 1 1 he was deep in talks with Nugent and with the Foreign Secretary, Wellesley; the Prince Regent was also keenly interested. 16 From the first Bentinck 'ardently seconded' Nugent's plan-not the specific aim of an Ionian Islands principality, which he dismissed as an irrelevance, but the grand design for the liberation of Italy. It looks indeed as though Bentinck rather than Nugent shaped the plan away from its first dynastic orientation—Nugent hoped to rouse proHabsburg forces in all the old Austrian lands—towards the encouragement of a nationalist rising in Italy proper. It also seems clear that to Bentinck Sicily mattered chiefly as a base where he could raise the banner of constitutional freedom in the sight of Italy: a reform of abuses in Sicily was important above all because 'it may have a very great political effect in Italy, whenever . . . the Italians shall be prepared to assert their independence'. The Italian mainland, he told Wellesley, was thoroughly discontented with French rule; it offered 120

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Britain a long coastline accessible to seapower; above all, the British would find 'a people equally brave with the Spaniards, and equally enthusiastic in the cause of liberty, but much more intelligent and more tractable'. As a first step Bentinck wished to set Sicily in order by demanding control of the army and subsidy, a Sicilian administration, and a reform of abuses; if the Court declined he was ready for 'almost a forcible seizure' of the government. Wellesley and Perceval, however, would not at first let him go beyond warning the Court against 'exasperating] the people to acts of violence' which Britain would not help to repress; this unwelcome advice they coupled with professions of delicacy, and provided no means of enforcing it. Nor would they go beyond a vague authorisation to look into the Archduke Francis's plans. Bentinck landed at Palermo in July 1811 to find that the Court had just imprisoned Belmonte, Castelnuovo, and three other barons for having protested against the new unconstitutional taxes; his representations got nowhere. On his way, however, he had stopped in Sardinia to meet the Archduke Francis and his lieutenant, the Savoyard Count Sallier de la Tour; they had just got there after a long journey from Vienna by way of Turkey. Bentinck quickly fired La Tour with his own belief that—as La Tour put it—'the creation of one Italy is, and will always remain, the true great idea . . .'. After only five weeks in Sicily Bentinck sailed back to England. One motive was to help the 'poor oppressed people' of Sicily: previous envoys had 'cried wolf so often' that some striking move was needed to jolt British Ministers into taking notice.17 But another motive, at least as weighty, was to persuade Wellesley to back the Italian project. While Bentinck was in London in October news came that yet another emissary had reached Sardinia, this time from the Italian mainland. This man, Alessandro Turri, was unconnected with the Archduke. A promising young official of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, he claimed to represent a 'party of Italian unity and independence' which included many of the highest members of the Italian administration. According to Turri, these men no longer wanted either French domination or a return to the old sovereigns: trained by Napoleon to exert their ancient military valour but alienated by Napoleonic despotism and fired by the example of Spain, 'all wise and enlightened Italians now acknowledge that they can hope for happiness only from the independence of their fatherland, and that they can achieve 121

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independence only through unity . . .'. From the British they asked only arms, naval support, perhaps a landing by an Italian expeditionary force made up of exiles and prisoners of war, and acceptance of a united Italy under a Constitution. Bentinck and Wellesley doubted Turri's alleged high connections and his military capacity; all the same, these proposals fitted well into those of the Archduke's group. Britain, it seemed, could look on the one hand to an internal movement of revolt—Bentinck hoped it would run on Spanish guerrilla lines, 18 —on the other to a suitable leader and experienced officers. The approach of war between France and Russia, Wellesley noted, might make an opening for a revolt or for a descent on Italy and the ex-Austrian provinces. For all these reasons he now authorised Bentinck to raise an Italian Levy and spend £100,000 for the purpose. He also allowed Bentinck to force the Court of Palermo into compliance: if proof of its 'treachery' came to hand he could take 'the most decided measures.' Bentinck sailed once again to Sicily in November, confident of success. He went amid a chorus of good wishes from nearly all his diplomatic, military, and naval colleagues in the Mediterranean—men who detested Maria Carolina ('the she wicked one') and several of whom looked to a regeneration, first of Sicily and then of Italy. One voice alone preached caution, Wellington's: he advised Bentinck merely to 'maintain our position' in Sicily; as for Italy, 'trust nothing to the enthusiasm of the people'. Yet Bentinck's own chance to become the Italian Wellington seemed at hand. The three British leaders most closely concerned with Bentinck's Italian venture—Wellesley, who authorised it, Bentinck himself, who tried to carry it out, and Wellington, who consistently doubted and opposed it—had all served together in India in the early years of the century. This was more than a coincidence. Many of Bentinck's acts in the Mediterranean can be fully explained only if we bear in mind the lessons he had learned under Wellesley's tutelage (and those he had failed to learn) as Governor of Madras. We must therefore turn back to that earlier period of office and look into the experience Bentinck brought to the self-imposed task of 'regenerating' Mediterranean lands.

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3 BRITISH GREATNESS AND INDIAN H A P P I N E S S : MADRAS, 1803-1807 When Bentinck set out to bring Sicily effectually into the war effort and confer 'happiness' on her people he went to outward appearances as a diplomatic envoy instructed by Wellesley as Foreign Secretary. In his own mind, however, his task was the imperial one of bringing a dependent State into line—the task on which Wellesley as GovernorGeneral had sent many an emissary to outlying parts of India. There are signs that Wellesley shared this view. T h e Sicilian adventure of 1 8 1 1 - 1 4 thus began as an extension to Europe of the forward policy which Wellesley—with full support from the young Governor of Madras—had carried out in India. Sicily was to be dealt with like Avadh or the Karnataka. What neither Bentinck nor perhaps Wellesley seems to have asked himself was whether even a minor European State could in practice be treated like a remnant of the Mughal Empire. Bentinck's attitude was quite conscious. What he was carrying out, he told Wellesley as he once again sailed to Palermo in October 1 8 1 1 , was 'the same enlarged and enlightened system of policy which has already saved another empire'. 1 From the start the Sicilian Court had struck him as 'exactly resembling a native Indian durbar'. 2 At intervals during his mission he was to compare Sicily with the Karnataka, her inhabitants with the natives of India. Wellesley's attitude was less clear. His work as Foreign Secretary was as desultory as his Governor-Generalship had been energetic. Sicily and Italy seem to have engaged only a corner of his mind. He had been reluctant at first to give Bentinck the powers he wanted. Yet he did in the end grant them; when he resigned in March 1 8 1 2 on quite other issues he threw in as an additional reason Perceval's failure to grasp 'the difference between a friendly interference' in Sicily 'for a salutary object' and 'the secret intrigues or open violence of the French'; two years later he still claimed credit for the Sicilian intervention—it had been 'his measure'.3 There was a curious parallel between Wellesley's ostensible reasons for annexing the Karnataka in 1801 and the grounds on which in 1 8 1 1 he allowed Bentinck to use force as a last resort. Both courses turned on 'proofs' of a 'treacherous' correspondence with the enemy—the first time with Tipu Sultan of Mysore, the second with Joachim Murat of Naples. The Nawabs of 123

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the Karnataka, Wellesley had concluded, 'have actually placed themselves in the relation of public enemies to the Company's government'.4 When 'proofs' of Maria Carolina's dealings with Murat came to hand, Bentinck—though he did not himself take them very seriously—found it convenient to use much the same language. Bentinck had in fact been and still was a whole-hearted believer in the Wellesleyan system of paramountcy. This assumed that the Company in India must be supreme and should bind the Indian States with subsidiary treaties under which they paid for a British-led force to 'protect' them. It was an odd beginning for a man who ended as a pacific Governor-General pledged to non-intervention. When Bentinck landed at Madras in 1803 Wellesley was in the thick of the Maratha wars whose cost so set the Court of Directors against his imperial policy. It was natural enough for an inexperienced young man to fall under the autocrat's sway; Wellesley's 'enlarged' views anyhow looked like an extension to India of the all-out war policy which Bentinck supported in Europe. Bentinck at that time hoped to be Wellesley's successor in every sense. If he became Governor-General he too would concern himself with the real task—external relations; mere civil administration was something 'anybody . . . could easily do . . . ' . He concurred entirely— 'what would be considered as high treason in Leadenhall Street'— 'with Lord Wellesley in all his ideas as to the position which the British Government in this country should maintain with respect to the Native Powers'. In particular the subsidiary treaties were 'the cornerstone of the great edifice which we have raised'. Those at home who thought the policy dangerous or expensive did not know what they were talking about: on the contrary, only the establishment of supreme power would bring peace and prosperity. 'What we have won must be kept by the sword.'5 To Wellesley himself Bentinck had made a profession of faith: 'that system of policy' which held out to 'this unhappy country' the hope of redemption from 'anarchy and misery', . . . which could embrace the whole of India, which could comprehend in one bond of mutual defence and reciprocal forbearance the predatory chiefs of this great empire, deserves the admiration of the civilised world. That system, one of the noblest efforts of the wisdom and patriotism of a subject, which has founded British greatness upon Indian happiness, demands, in a particular manner, the thanks and applause of the country.6 124

3 • MADRAS, 1803-1807 'Founded British greatness upon Indian happiness': these words summed up a whole imperial programme. In one sense the programme was Bentinck's throughout his career, not only in India but in Continental Europe. What had changed by the time he became GovernorGeneral were the means to be used and the understood content of 'Indian happiness'; the end remained the same. There was thus a continuity of intent between figures like Wellesley, Ellenborough, and Bentinck whose outward measures were dissimilar and who were sometimes at odds: all of them had the imperial vision of India as an entity whose happiness would be England's glory. 'Happiness' was a key concept in eighteenth-century thought. T h e Encyclopédie set up earthly happiness as a competitor or substitute for heavenly bliss; the Declaration of Independence enshrined the pursuit of it as a self-evident right; Bentham made its exact calculation the basis of social engineering. Its content for eighteenth-century minds took many forms; it oscillated between material wellbeing—often of a balanced, 'reasonable' kind—and an inward state closely bound up with 'virtue'. For its achievement men often relied on a sensationalist psychology and on mechanical or physiological means. There must be explicable steps people could take to make themselves and others happy. Thus, at joking level, Stendhal 'drank a great deal of tea' to get over a love affair; at the most serious level the financier John Law opined that on thirty officials sent out from Paris 'depends the happiness or unhappiness of our provinces, their prosperity or barrenness'. T o promote happiness had become the task of government.7 Once the East India Company took over the government of Bengal the happiness of its subjects became a commonplace of debate. T h e notion recurred again and again, especially in the controversies that preceded the renewal of the Company's Charter in 1783-4 and again in 1 8 1 3 , but also when people discussed important changes in revenue and judicial administration—the two branches, as Bentinck (with many others) came to believe, on which 'depend almost entirely the greater or less degree of happiness and wellbeing of the population'.8 What was meant by Indian happiness was not always explicit. Conservatives held that only if the British left traditional Indian institutions alone could Indians be 'virtuous and happy,' or 'happy in the enjoyment of the fruits of [their] labour'. A private merchant could hold that if the shipping interest in the Company was allowed to have its way 'the industry and happiness of millions will be sacrificed'. Pitt and his henchman Dundas in the 1783-4 debates both made happiness an aim

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of Indian government; Pitt coupled it with 'peace and tranquillity', Dundas with 'prosperity'. Cornwallis as Governor-General, later echoed by Dundas, claimed that his judicial reforms would bring 'happiness . . . to . . . many millions' and 'diffuse . . . prosperity . . Like other clichés, this one held within itself some assumptions too obvious—and some perhaps too opaque—to be made explicit. One assumption, increasingly and openly stated from the 1780s on, was that India was no longer to be thought of as a source of tribute; no one took the further step of supposing that the British taxpayer should help to maintain her, but at least she was to be taxed for her own benefit. 10 A less conscious assumption seems to have been that India was to be acted upon; not her own but British action would bring about her happiness. In the Benthamite James Mill the assumption was made explicit. 11 But this could never satisfy the Evangelicals. For them happiness must be at least in part an inward state, to be achieved only by Christian faith. Indians should therefore be urged to such a community of belief—and hence of interest—with their British rulers as would fit them to act for their country's good. The prospectus of the new Haileybury College for the training of the company's civil servants held out in 1806 the expectation that the college would 'under the favour of Providence . . . be productive of a benign and enlightened policy towards the native subjects . . . improve their moral condition, a n d . . . diffuse the happy influences of Christianity throughout the Eastern world'. 12 The 1813 East India Act, the Evangelicals' triumph, might discriminate against Indian manufactures, but it allowed missionaries into British India, authorised the Government to spend money on 'the revival and encouragement of learning', and laid upon it the duty 'to promote the interest and happiness of the native inhabitants': the Act would—Wilberforce said —affect 'the temporal and eternal happiness of millions; literally, millions on millions yet unborn'. 13 The Evangelical premise—that Indians dwelt in darkness—led ultimately to the conclusion that Indians must step forward as selfdetermining beings into the light. By the time of Bentinck's GovernorGeneralship a full debate was going on in both India and Britain on what should be the Indians' share in their own government; its climax in some sense was 'Lord William Bentinck's clause' in the 1833 Charter Act, which opened all posts in the Company's service to Indians regardless of colour, race, creed or birth. A quarter-century earlier Charles Grant had not gone beyond stating that British Indian 126

3 • MADRAS, 1803-1807 government badly needed 'some common principle with the natives that might attach them strongly to our rule'—the principle was of course Christianity; 14 his son Robert stated in 1813 that British rule was 'productive of happiness' even to the Indian upper classes because of its 'moderation', 'purity', and 'security', but above all to the poor and lowly because the 'equal protection' it gave them would soon encourage them, indeed was already encouraging them, to become more independent—the 'best possible eulogium'. 15 In all these early debates the great absentees were the people of India themselves. During Bentinck's four years at Madras there is no sign that he ever discussed policy with a single Indian. It is not even clear that he met any Indians other than servants, minor officials, and the pensioned Nawab—'ignorant, uninformed, and surrounded by persons not less barbarous'; here—unlike Calcutta—'the society is entirely European, all the servants speak English, everything is done in English . . .'. l 6 T h e Hindu orthodoxy of South India, and the resentment of Muslim ruling groups lately overthrown, helped to keep up this isolation. So utterly was Fort St. George a self-contained European island in an Indian sea that the young Governor's outfit—bought in London in accordance with a standard list—included everything he could possibly need at Madras, down to 'India pickle gherkins' and 'melon mangoes'. 17 Indian happiness might be the aim; British despotic rule was the mode, British agency the sole means. Of this the young Bentinck was thoroughly convinced. His opinion reflected that of many British officials from the 1760s on. Only at the very end of his governorship did he begin to ask himself whether British rulers sitting in Fort St. George could fully understand the country in their charge. The Madras Presidency as Bentinck found it in 1803 had—apart from the district immediately round Madras and the Northern Sarkars (the coastal strip between the Godavari and Mahanadi deltas)—come under direct British rule only within the past eleven years, much of it only within the past three. Nearly everything, it seemed, was still to do—this at a time when a French landing always seemed to threaten and 'no dependence [was] to be placed in apparent tranquillity and superiority'. 18 When he considered new ways of administering what was in effect new territory Bentinck more than once felt the need to go back to first principles. The need sprang from his old Whig inheritance: could despotism be justified? Was it not true that 'whatever tends to impress 127

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men's minds with the feeling that governors may be rogues and subjects ill treated is good'? To be sure—but (he concluded) only 'in a country blessed with constitutional liberty'.19 India was different: It is less evil here that an individual should innocently suffer than that the power of the Government should be lessened for one moment in the eyes of the natives. . . . The English laws are framed in the spirit of liberty for an honest and free people. Here we require a well-regulated despotism. The Government must be all-powerful. The principal object of our legislation is to give to the natives of these climes security of their persons and property— and no further. This is civil liberty. Political liberty would turn us out of India. Why—Burke's disciple could not help asking at this point—had Indians been 'the willing slaves of every conqueror'? The oppression of centuries, he replied, had 'eradicated from their very blood every particle of spirit'. Was there then no chance of national resurgence? . . . is not human nature everywhere the same? Will not the mind become free with the body? When the paramount fears of life and of property cease to engross it, will it not take other direction? Will it not rise from its present servility? Will it not feel its comparative freedom, and, left to the indulgence of the passions implanted in our souls by human nature, vanity, ambition, and the desire of pre-eminence, will it not rise beyond its present apathy? Bentinck, like many of his countrymen, thus wondered whether India could remain forever dependent. But his conclusion was that British rule must be forever despotic—so long as it was also just: It becomes us therefore [he went on], in our ardent endeavour to secure to our subjects the full enjoyment of civil liberty, to take care that we go not an inch further . . . the more strict our laws, while they are just, the more summary our jurisdiction, if well administered, the more vigorous the Government, the more firmly established will be order, tranquillity, and our general security. The British had the means. 'Our situation in this country is entirely changed. We are now the governors and guardians of a great empire.' Their lawgivers, from the collector to the Supreme Government, were 'perfectly independent and unbiassed' by any 'private interest'. Not E

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II • EMPIRE A N D N A T I O N A L I T Y even the British Parliament offered 'a stronger guarantee for the comfort, security and happiness of the mass of the people'. It followed that 'we must treat the people as our subjects and our brethren'. In the administration of justice—the matter immediately at hand as Bentinck wrote—the Government must make no distinction between Europeans and natives; the Madras Supreme Court's exclusive jurisdiction over Europeans should be abolished. If these principles were followed, Bentinck concluded, British rule would rest upon justice in civil government and superiority in military power: 'if they do us justice at home and give us but moderate assistance, the whole world shall not take from us the empire we have won'. 20 Bentinck thus managed to underpin Wellesley's forward policy with Burke's teaching that the sole justification for British rule was the wellbeing of the people. British rule was to be benign, absolute, and glorious—in a word, imperial. Its triumphs would be embodied in institutions. Though Bentinck was, in Europe, an early nationalist, he never came to think of the nation as an organism with its own mysterious inner springs, its own mode of development. His grounding in the assumptions of eighteenthcentury sensationalist psychology was too strong. 'Is not human nature everywhere the same?' he asked at Madras. 'Institutions,' he was to declare in Sicily when his reforming endeavours looked like failing, made men good or bad. Administration of justice had the most influence as well upon national character as upon the tranquillity and good order of society. It was this which alone could rectify the evils of which all complained I f . . . a good judicial system, roads for commerce, and a modification of landed possessions so as to disperse landed property more generally could be settled, more would be done for Sicily in one [parliamentary] session than by all its kings together for the last two or three centuries.21 These words—but for the mention of a Sicilian Parliament in which Bentinck by then placed little trust—could have described his policy at Madras ten years earlier. Benevolent despotism must work through judicial and fiscal reform, on the one hand towards enhancement of the 'national character', on the other towards 'improvement of the country' —and 'no country ever required improvement so much' as India.22 From Bentinck's appraisal of his task flowed several consequences. He treated the East India Company and its servants with marked distrust. He sought to protect Indians from the 'oppressive' acts of British 130

3 • MADRAS, 1803-1807 officials. At the same time he looked upon Indian magnates, Wellesley fashion, as overmighty subjects, and did his best to bring them under control. He extended Cornwallis's Bengal judicial system to the whole of Madras, but saw no contradiction in espousing the raiyatwari revenue settlement preached by a seemingly rival school, that of Thomas Munro. He tried to stimulate 'improvement' by bringing Government financial resources to bear through a new bank. All the same, he stopped well short of violating some of the current taboos. Letting in more Europeans was not to be thought of—'the fewer there are the better'. 23 Nor was giving Indians a share of responsibility. Any step towards instilling in them a 'common principle' with their rulers by educating or Christianising them was to be taken very cautiously. His enlightened despotism still leaned to the 'rigorous', the 'summary', and the 'strict'. Whatever in British practice smacked of commercialism, timidity, and sectional interest must—Bentinck thought—be rejected. He shared to the full Wellesley's contempt for the Court of Directors— what an old friend of the Bentinck family, now Wellesley's military secretary, called 'the tea dealers and linen drapers', ''Lord Sanchay and Baron Bohea'; Bentinck himself thought 'we have more to fear from the bad rule in Leadenhall Street' than from the Marathas. 24 T h e company's civil servants were also to be distrusted. They were 'in general not gentlemen either by birth or education'; through growing up in India from an early age they had never acquired 'the habit of hearing the opinions of sensible men upon all subjects, receiving early impressions from the liberality and gentleness of Christian morality, and at the same time [of] reflection, from being launched out into a well-regulated and enlightened society in which our first principles are confirmed'. Because they lacked either the 'liberality of sentiment [which] we possess in England to a great degree' or the 'familiarity' of the French in Pondicherry (who were much better liked) they treated Indians with 'want of consideration and in many cases . . . abhorrence . . . much violence to humanity and much abuse of power . . . is the consequence'. 25 Madras civil servants in particular were mostly younger, less competent, and less respectable than their Bengal counterparts; the older Madras civilians, products of the corrupt time when fortunes were made from the Nawab's debts—hence still deeply distrusted by men in other presidencies, above all by Wellesley himself—seemed to Bentinck least respectable of all.26 As for the company's military servants, they had 'never known what law was'. 27

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y Irresponsible and illiberal towards their subjects, these place-holders were timid towards their superiors: the governments of India were 'better in any hands' than theirs; 'they dare not act'. 28 Bentinck was therefore reluctant to put a collector's 'absolute power'—fiscal and, until his reforms, judicial—in the hands of most civilians 'when it is known who these individuals are . . .'. 'Humanity is not one of the tenets of that sect': 'realisation of the revenue per fas et nefas [through good or ill]' was 'too much the practice'.2* He took over from Munro—'one of the ablest of the company's servants'—the system of placing a trusted man in overall charge of several districts or sub-districts: he wanted 'check and control', a 'regular chain from the bottom to the top'. Rather than split up the district of South Arcot he put it under the 'humane superintendence' of Munro's disciple J . G . Ravenshaw; he praised Robert Rickards, until lately Principal Collector of Malabar (where there had been an insurrection), for having 'appreciated justly the fair rights of an independent people without making any undue concessions . . .'. 3 0 Conversely, he prided himself on being quick to act against wrongdoing. Near the start of his Governorship he upset service sensibilities (as well as the Court of Directors) by removing, through 'the quick exercise of my own authority' and without consulting the Board of Revenue, the Collector of South Arcot, George Garrow, who had allowed the overassessed revenue to be 'collected by torture'. Later, with somewhat more inquiry, he transferred out of the revenue line the Collector of the vast Thanjavur [Tanjore] district, Charles Harris, who had had Indian complainants flogged; to those who pleaded for Harris he retorted 'our case is the governed'. 31 That Garrow some years later became AccountantGeneral, and Harris Senior Member of the Board of Revenue, suggests something either about Bentinck's quickness to act or about the resilience of the service. How then were the instruments of British rule to be fitted for the task? Education was the answer: Bentinck fully backed the new Fort William College which Wellesley had started in Calcutta—the centre of much controversy with the Court of Directors. Young Madras civilians, he thought, should be sent there on arrival: they could learn South Indian languages as easily in Calcutta as at Madras; he was keen to enforce the new regulation that called on judges and collectors to be proficient in the vernacular. Young officers too would acquire some of this knowledge at the new Madras Military Institution which Bentinck started in 1805 under his Austrian friend Troyer. 132

3 • MADRAS, 1803-1807 The strongest reason for educating new civil servants at Fort William College was, to Bentinck's mind, that they would learn 'right notions of government, the duties of those who rule, and the natural rights of their subjects, the principles at least of the English Constitution, and sentiments of honour and humanity . . .'. With these 'enlightened principles' they would come to understand 'why the natives are degraded, they would feel their claims upon our indulgence, and would be convinced that kindness can alone reclaim them from their state of debasement and make them good men and good subjects'. 32 Bentinck thus became an early advocate of the college which 25 years later he was to emasculate. True, already in 1804 he saw no point in civil servants' learning Sanskrit—a useless dead language. 33 Political philosophy rather than Indian culture was what apprentice rulers needed to absorb; languages were a tool and no more. Yet the 'enlightened principles' Bentinck wished to instil themselves held a contradiction—one which Bentinck had perhaps not resolved in his own mind. Why learn about the English Constitution in a country to which the English Constitution did not apply and, it seemed, never could apply? Did Indians' 'natural rights' mean no more than the 'civil liberty'—that is, rights to 'security' and 'property'— Bentinck thought them alone entitled to? Did they not, under 'the principles of the English Constitution,' include the 'political liberty' that would turn the British out of India? Bentinck seems to have been caught between, on the one hand, the Whig libertarianism he had learnt in the school of Burke (before 1794, of Fox), and on the other the intellectual conviction—shared at this time by nearly all his countrymen—that in India only despotism would do. But might not a humane despotism so improve Indians' 'national character' as to let them one day enter upon their full 'natural rights', self-government included? This was a theoretical resolution on the brink of which Bentinck perhaps hovered; but at Madras he never took the plunge. The British conquest was too recent, the French threat too pressing, East India orthodoxy too strong. The same coexistence in Bentinck's mind of a Whig regard for the rule of law and the separation of powers with a paternalistic desire for efficiency, 'humanity', and 'improvement' led him to take seemingly divergent paths in judicial and revenue policy—the twin determinants, as he saw them, of'Indian happiness'. He extended to the whole of Madras the Cornwallis judicial system; this rested on the assumption that (as Bentinck put it) for a collector to

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II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y pile on top of the power to tax that of arresting, prosecuting, and judging was 'arbitrary government and . . . the exercise of uncontested power. Where is the man to be found sufficiently virtuous not to abuse it?' T o have separated from the executive power the administration of justice—the true guardian of 'the rights of mankind, their happiness, their comfort, security both of person and property'—was 'the best act of Lord Cornwallis's life'. 34 Where Cornwallis had set up district courts throughout Bengal, and Bentinck's own predecessor Lord Clive in the permanently settled parts of Madras, Bentinck in 1806 extended them to all the unsettled districts. It was a decision taken wholly on doctrinal grounds—which Bentinck only pitched a little higher than most contemporaries. T h e Bengal Government fully supported it—it had long wished to extend to Madras the whole of the Bengal system, and worried only about the expense; in Bombay too the Governor, Jonathan Duncan, thought British rule must never overstep the 'sacred boundary' of justice.35 Bentinck for his part rejoiced that the 'oppression' formerly worked by collectors and their servants would be at an end now that they were 'equally amenable with all others' to the new courts. 'There can'—he had forecast back in 1804—'be no collision of authority.' Unfortunately he now had to censure and transfer judges who cancelled the collectors' revenue-farming arrangements and, in one case, goaled the collector's subordinates. But these were growing pains: thanks to his measures 'redress,' previously almost impossible to come by, 'can now be always had, and our native subjects are relieved from all those evils which must be incident to every society not protected by courts of justice.' 36 What actually went on in these courts troubled Bentinck only in the sense that he wished to come down hard on 'lax and slovenly' administration and on 'the most trivial inattention to the regulations'. 37 That British notions of evidence, of adversary trial, and of strict 'attention to the regulations' might damagingly go against the grain of Indian society was something he—like many contemporaries—began to glimpse only much later. At this stage Bentinck even welcomed the discontinuity between the judicial system and traditional Indian culture. T h e new judicial regulations, he claimed when these were under attack, 'affect chiefly what may be termed the international policies of Britain and India'. By this he meant that they had nothing directly to do with 'the domestic or internal relations of the people', did not alter the civil and criminal law then in force, attempt to impose uniformity, or 'in the slightest degree

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3 • MADRAS, 1603-1807 [touch] the manners, the habits, castes, religious prejudices, or even the dress and ornaments of the natives'. On the contrary, the new regulations were 'calculated to control rather the governors than the subjects, and strike upon the latter principally through the improved conduct and corrected principles of the former'. Because it ruled out force except as a last resort—'we acquire no right to rule oppressively by ruling those whom we choose to style uncivilised'—the Cornwallis judicial system was 'conciliatory': 'there is, indeed,' Bentinck concluded, 'no engine of civilisation more powerful than the equitable administration of wise laws'. 38 Bentinck thus managed to use the idea of the nation—seldom long out of his mind—to make out Britain and India as separate nations one of which would 'civilise' the other, it seemed, by mere institutional example, without penetrating or transforming the indigenous culture. Once again orthodoxy was too strong, or his own thought too undeveloped, for him to go beyond this halfway house. Bentinck's decision to adopt Munro's raiyatwari system of settling the revenue direct with the peasant was harder to take. It went against orthodoxy—that is, against the Bengal system of settling once and for all with a superior landlord; Bentinck had to go to Calcutta to defend it before Wellesley. After Bentinck's departure from Madras the system was for a time overthrown; to re-establish it the Munro school had to lobby for several years both in Britain and in India. But—like his adoption of the Cornwallis judicial system—Bentinck's espousal of raiyatwari sprang from his fundamental view of British rule in India. Oppression was once again the e n e m y . ' . . . We have rode the country too hard', Bentinck declared, through overassessment and arbitrary methods of collection: hence 'the most lamentable poverty'.3« Yet it was from the raiyats or peasants that the British drew 120 lakhs of pagodas a year (some ¿4.8m). 'They are the wealth of the State. They are the most obedient subjects in the world, and they cannot be too much protected and encouraged. . . . Our error has always been the killing the hen for her gold.' Raiyatwari, on the other hand, would be 'the great bulwark of the rights of the lower orders of the people . . .'. T o demonstrate this Bentinck appealed both to practice and, characteristically, to first principles. Munro and his teacher Alexander Read had shown in practice that the system worked. What was more, it worked on 'that s u r e s t . . . of all principles of all human action, selfinterest'; by keeping waste land in Government hands until the raiyats

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were prepared to take it up it made for extension of cultivation, 'the only true criterion . . . of the prosperity of the country'. It would leave in the raiyats' hands the means of 'improving' their land, and in the Government's enough of a surplus for it to play its part by building roads, bridges, rest houses, and tanks.40 Bentinck was an enthusiast for raiyatwari—'one of the finest ideas that has ever occurred to an Indian statesman'; he worked hard on it and told subordinates that for him no amount of detail could be too minute.41 Munro also convinced him that raiyatwari under a permanent settlement was the original system of land tenure in South India: to impose it would be in effect to restore the ancient order of things. But Bentinck did not for all that take over Munro's other ideas or share his general outlook. In Madras he was not, like Munro, concerned to preserve Indian rural institutions such as the village headman or the panchayat; nor did he wish to let a paternal collector-magistrate intervene repeatedly in village affairs, or to give Indian officials much scope. Munro's appeal to what he saw as the organic cohesion and value of Indian society meant little to Bentinck. His paternalism worked within a framework of European ideas of law and property. In 1803-7 could accommodate raiyatwari only by supposing that the system could within a few years be made the basis of a permanent settlement—as even Munro at that time more cautiously agreed it could.42 Though Bentinck worked hard on the details of revenue policy his choice was once again at bottom doctrinal. Thanks to Munro he had discovered what looked like a means of at once fostering small landed property and freeing the necessary despotism of British rule from the arbitrary and the oppressive. Near the end of his governorship he ranked the lightening of assessments among the three main benefits he had helped to confer on Madras; it had avoided 'very unwarrantable measures of force' in revenue collection.43 Once again, too, the raiyatwari system seems to have embodied a generalisation from Munro's experience in the dry lands of the Deccan perhaps not much more solidly based on the realities of the South Indian economy as a whole than Cornwallis's judicial system was based on the realities of Indian culture.44 No such doubts, however, then entered Bentinck's mind. Raiyatwari and the courts between them would soon go a long way to establish 'civil liberty'. Just as Bentinck wished to palliate the necessary despotism of British rule by setting up a framework of institutions that would work towards the country's 'improvement', so he was keen to subdue the 136

3 • MADRAS, 1603-1807 company's overmighty Indian subjects and stop what he saw as their anarchy and misrule. In the hills of Orissa and Andhra, in the remoter areas of the Deccan, hundreds of poligars—petty chiefs—had profited from the time of troubles to set up or extend a local sway; they maintained private armies and often paid revenue or tribute only when a few explosive charges had blown open the gates of their mud forts. Munro in 1800-2 had got into trouble with the Court of Directors—which saw the poligars as potential landlords, Bengal fashion—by deliberately raising the revenue demand so high as to force poligars to choose between disarmament and rebellion. Sporadic trouble went on into Bentinck's administration.45 Here he thoroughly agreed with Munro. 'We must conquer our subjects before we can expect to govern them.'46 The 'great object' was to make the chiefs disband their 'armies of plunderers'—but also 'to engage their confidence in our protection'. Of the most 'incorrigible villains' Bentinck more than once blurted out: ' I hope he may be hanged.'47 A task legally distinct but politically akin was that of bringing independent Indian States into Wellesley's 'enlarged' system. Bentinck did his best to uphold the system where it was already at work in Mysore; he extended it to Travancore; he would have extended it to Cochin if, after Wellesley's departure, he had not had to bear in mind 'the temper of our countrymen at home and the particular feeling about the acquisition of territory'.48 On the face of it Bentinck was as eager as any 'enlightened' Minister of an eighteenth-century absolute monarch—say the Neapolitan Viceroy in the Sicily of the 1780s—to establish the integrity of the State by cutting down local and particular concentrations of power: . . . The maxim of our rule must be parcere subjectis et debellare superbos—to keep down persons of power and influence, and to make comfortable the lower orders. . . . As foreigners [we] can never rely upon the attachment of the great, who from the nature of our government must be excluded from all participation in . . . governing. But we may rely upon the tranquillity of the poor, if we will make them easy in their circumstances.49 The Court of Directors' order to restore the poligars dispossessed by Munro was 'most fatal policy'; though it could not 'entirely be overlooked,' still (Bentinck added privately) 'the fewer that can be restored the better'.50 He carried through an offensive against the Chittur

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poligars in the face of misgivings or outright opposition from his Council colleagues, William Petrie and John Chamier.51 Poligars who behaved themselves, he conceded, should be left alone; even then the courts would 'insensibly undermine [their] influence . . .\ 5 2 The great thing was that in asserting themselves as rulers over 'a few worthless and barbarous plunderers' the British were 'also acting (what is ten thousand times better worth fighting for) in defence of humanity and the happiness of a great portion of society'.53 On this fighting stance there were two limitations. One was Bentinck's Whig concern for law; the other was the practical difficulty of enforcing the Company's writ in country often wild and little known. As usual Bentinck wished to uphold the rule of law. This could cut both ways. In Mysore, already a subsidiary State, he removed the British commanding officer at Bangalore for having arbitrarily searched the Raja's palace. In Travancore, though he seconded Wellesley's design of profiting from a mutiny by the Raja's troops to quarter upon the State a subsidiary force—this would be of'great advantage . . . to our general interests'—he feared, a good deal more than Wellesley, 'the possible opinion of the world that the Raja's consent was forced'. S4 When the Madras Supreme Court asserted its jurisdiction over the puppet Nawab of the Karnataka Bentinck thought to get round the difficulty by making the Nawab's palace a sovereign enclave: 'this Government cannot in honour treat that man as a subject whom by a solemn act of their own they have so recently acknowledged and guaranteed as a sovereign'.55 On the other hand a rather similar clash at Thanjavur drew from him a contrary opinion. The Raja, though he had signed away his civil jurisdiction outside his own fort, claimed that the new civil courts had no right to try some of his soldiers who had assaulted a man in one of his 'gardens': the case looked like a trial of strength. Bentinck wished to uphold the Raja's privileges under the treaty, but 'he ought as proprietor to have no exception whatever from the process of the Company's courts'.* 56 So too in the Company's territories Bentinck stood out for the rule of law—was indeed surprised when people failed to think in these terms. The permanently settled Northern Sarkars—where 'calamities and disturbances . . . have existed for so many years to the disgrace of #

There was some doubt about the interpretation of the treaty: Bentinck agreed to release the Raja's servants (arrested by the judge at Thanjavur, F. W. Ellis) as a means of getting him to agree to a restrictive interpretation.

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3 • MADRAS, 1803-1807 the Company's Government'—were specially intractable: all the more reason to show that the law would run its course and the settlement was in truth unshakable. 57 A new, and newly submissive, Zamindar of Golconda naively explained that the hill chiefs and headmen under his overlordship had 'assembled and unanimously elected him to be their raja . . .'. A 'curious case', Bentinck thought it: 'it is evident that the regulations and the relations between the Government and the Zamindar are not understood'. Fortunately for the Zamindar his succession 'will be a matter of right and will not depend upon popular caprice'. 58 That the support of chiefs and headmen might, in terms of actual power relationships, matter more to the Zamindar than the regulations did not occur to Bentinck. Yet there were jolts to be undergone. The rebellious—now dispossessed—Zamindar of Polavaram, Mangapetti Deo, could not be pardoned; it must be made clear that resistance did not pay. All the same, 'policy requires'—Bentinck found a few months later—that Mangapetti 'should not be meddled with as long as he permits the nominal but legal Zamindar to fulfil her engagements to Government'. In other words, Government had not the means to subdue him. Even after Mangapetti's death another relative kept stirring up the tribal 'Reddis in the hills' against the 'nominal but legal' engager. 59 T h e Zamindar of Jaipur in the Orissa hills, Ramchandra Deo, had a warrant out against him for having caused a man's hand and nose to be chopped off. Bentinck wished him and his like to be brought to justice before the new courts; any politic use of mercy should be left to the Governor in Council. Alas, the judge in charge found that 'to seize upon Ramchandra Deo by police officers, while in the heart of his extensive and unhealthy country, and surrounded by his peons and adherents, is quite out of the question'. In such cases one might have to rely on other hill zamindars' forces—and where would that leave the policy of disarming them? It was better to let matters lie for the moment. 60 In the face of such disappointments Bentinck argued that vast anarchic regions, many of them only lately acquired, could not at once be reduced to order and tranquillity. 'But . . . the system is fundamentally good, and just, and if well administered must produce general happiness and satisfaction.' 61 T o this belief the Vellore mutiny came as a great shock. For the British it was one of the traumatic experiences that punctuated their stay in India. Though the Bombay Government in the previous year 139

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had discovered a conspiracy among the Indian troops at Goa 62 no one had seen Vellore coming. The result among the British in South India was panic. Bentinck afterwards likened it to the Popish Plot scare. He quoted Hume: 'like men affrighted in the dark', the British 'took every shadow for a spectre'. 63 'For many nights together shortly after the mutiny' Bentinck and everyone else 'went to bed in the uncertainty of rising alive.' 64 He himself, though he kept cooler than most, came briefly to share in the panic at the beginning of August 1806: that was when it looked as though Vellore had been only the start of a wide conspiracy now spreading throughout the army. On 3 August he wrote off to the Governor of Ceylon that 'no dependence can be placed upon any of our native troops'. Ten days later Cradock, the Commander-in-Chief, pleaded a cold so that he and Bentinck should not both go to an entertainment given by the Nawab—who knew what might happen?65 By October-December officers at various outlying stations had, on no evidence, taken to locking themselves in or to arresting or disarming their Indian troops. 66 When news of the mutiny reached England it caused a sensation: 'symptoms . . . most alarming', Grant wrote, 'and in a great degree new in our Indian history'. 67 With the news came a spate of private letters from Madras: these made out that French emissaries were at work, Indians were widely disaffected, British rule was in danger; six months later Edward Parry, then chairman of the Court of Directors, still thought Madras looked 'very gloomy . . . there is some risk that we may lose our influence on that side of India if not [in] the country altogether'. 68 Vellore disclosed what many had forgotten—that the British in India were a handful of men afloat on a largely unknown sea; their rule was a paradox. T h e mutiny roused not only half-buried memories of slaughter at Indian hands—merely incidental, after all, to the tale of British conquest—but the nearer memory of the violence inexplicably let loose during the French Terror. Even when Bentinck five months later had largely discounted the conspiracy theory and thought the danger was past he still could not 'say positively there is no just ground of a l a r m . . . . We know from experience the impossibility of calculating the exact limits where popular tumult and fury shall stop.' 6 ® What then was left of his confidence that he was helping to 'found British greatness on Indian happiness'? What was this Indian 'nation' on top of which the British 'nation' beneficently rested, not as a disturbing influence but as a teacher working by just rule and institutional example? 140

3 • MADRAS, 1803-1807 Since the 1760s, more strongly still since the 1780s, many British officials had thought they knew the answer. Indians were to be ruled at arm's length. Social intercourse with Indians—where they themselves allowed it—was increasingly suspect. They were not to be trusted with any but subordinate offices. 'Every native of Hindustan', Cornwallis had believed,'. . . is corrupt.' 70 Yet the dread of upsetting Indian 'prejudices' remained strong. The implicit premise was that the British could adequately know the society their rule worked upon without either sharing in it or revolutionising it. This in substance was what Bentinck meant when he said the Cornwallis judicial system touched only British-Indian 'international' relations. Almost throughout his Madras governorship Bentinck shared the orthodox view. It had been difficult enough to promote 'honesty and integrity' among Europeans; 'universal corruption prevails among the natives . . .'. He had 'a very bad opinion of the native servants in general'; power in their hands meant certain oppression; only 'vigilant superintendence' could make them 'act properly'. Munro might argue that only good salaries for Indian officials could ward off corruption; Bentinck applied the same familiar argument to Europeans alone. 71 T o an Evangelical like Charles Grant Indians were indeed wholly corrupt; but he went on to look to Christianisation as the great remedy. Bentinck's later career might suggest that in his Madras years he at least glanced the same way. There is little evidence that he did. Missionary activity in British India was still forbidden. Danish missionaries worked from their own territorial enclave at Tranquebar; Bentinck and especially Lady William were in touch with one of them, J . P. Rottler. 72 T h e Court of Directors had already authorised the Madras Government to grant up to ¿ 1 0 0 a year to schools for Indian children run by these Danes; in Bentinck's time Dr A. H. Kerr, senior chaplain to the presidency, canvassed a plan to expand them. Kerr ran the Madras Male Orphan Asylum—a school for Europeans and Eurasians where one of the 'monitorial' systems of rote learning then in vogue had first been launched; he hoped to spread free monitorial schools under clerical management. But little came of it; there were not enough teachers. 73 For the rest, Kerr, a prudent man well aware that the missionary question was delicate, thought 'the best service to be done for this country would be, if possible, to reform the corrupt habits of the Europeans' by establishing Christianity among them 'not as a formal profession but as a principle which might regulate opinions, 141

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y manners, and moral conduct...'. For obstreperous missionaries he had little use; he tried to keep his subordinates from interfering with Hindus' working on Sundays. His chief concern was so to organise the army chaplains as to do away with 'indecent irregularities'. At most, in these penumbra years when the Evangelical party in Indian affairs was growing but had not yet won, Kerr hinted that under a favourable Government 'missionaries scattered throughout the smaller garrisons' could 'by their pure example and doctrine [instil] those principles, silently perhaps but effectually into the minds of those around them, which alone can produce pure morality and genuine virtue'. 74 Bentinck seems to have gone no further than Kerr: his immediate task as he saw it was to make Europeans, not Indians, virtuous. 75 The most he would do to work direct on Indian culture was to spread 'the blessing of vaccination'. 76 Vellore showed that to make Europeans virtuous was not enough— not when the Indian sea they floated upon, it turned out, could open in sudden gulfs. Bentinck agreed with Minto, the new GovernorGeneral, that there had been a notable failure of communication and trust. True, 'the lower orders are not to be agitated here as in other parts of the world. The raiyat remains tranquil with his plough, and takes no part in the political events which surround him.' All the same, British 'mismanagement' had allowed the soldiers to imagine that their religion lay under threat; British officers had failed to learn the languages or to give Indian officers a 'respectable' place in the service. 77 The two 'nations' were cut off. This discovery seems to have broken gradually on Bentinck after the first shock. From it flowed several effects. On his return home it helped to drive him into the Evangelical camp. Even before then it led him to doubt the foundations of the 'system' he had so confidently endorsed through most of his time at Madras. A disaster like Vellore sent everyone scurrying for explanations—if possible explanations that did not too much damage a man's selfesteem or the policies he believed in. As the panic grew and then waned—as time passed and fresh evidence came in—people's explanations readily changed. Bentinck at various points honestly confessed that he was 'in . . . darkness'—'I do not know. I can only conjecture . . .'. 78 But he too, like most others, finally arrived at explanations satisfactory to himself. The matter was further complicated after the recall in 1807 because the two men recalled, Bentinck and Cradock, had got themselves into positions where they had to wage what lawyers term a 142

3 MADRAS 1803-1807 cutthroat defence: each must defend himself by blaming the other. Men in London like Charles Grant had to fight off attempts to put the blame on the venture they had most at heart, the spreading of Christianity to India. Home politics were envenomed just then by the fall of the Ministry of All the Talents and the bad set of the war in Europe: party could not be kept out. Vellore was no matter for detached judgment. Bentinck finally decided—what he had tended to think most of the time—that the primary cause was the turban and the interference with caste marks, which had roused the soldiers' fear for their religion; a conspiracy led by the Mysore princes and other Muslims could at most be only secondary. This placed responsibility—Bentinck withheld ostensible blame—on the Army, if not on Cradock then on his subordinates. It meant, first, that the Madras Government was no more to blame for having failed to get wind of the mutiny than the British Government had been for not having foreseen the 1797 naval mutiny at home—'the nature of the discontents which issued in the conspiracy was such as to close all the ordinary channels of communication'; secondly, that the mutiny had been a response to a specific grievance, and that after the Government had met the grievance trouble was unlikely to recur. In other words, there was no evidence of general discontent, and no sign that British rule was sick at the root. 79 Cradock, on the other hand, had begun by espousing the Muslim conspiracy theory, put forward by his military committee of inquiry and later discounted as the primary cause by Bentinck's commission. Between August and October 1806 he shifted his ground: in a kind of parody of Munro's ideas he alleged that 'the condition of the people is not so happy as it was' and that this had been the real trouble. 'Their own arrangements and . . . institutions pleased them better than our regulations'; the new courts in particular seemed 'preparatory to greater innovation'; 'the youthful inexperienced judge, or boyish collector,' had been taking over from 'the old experienced [military] officer' whom Indians were used to; missionary influence had been upsetting. The British must look to their own safety; for the rest, 'the people of India must be left to find happiness their own way'. 8 0 In other words, British government under Bentinck had been radically at fault. At home Grant and Parry, the Evangelical leaders at the India House, almost reversed Cradock's shift. Under attack from the majority of Directors who blamed the missionaries, they began by

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II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y blaming the whole system of Indian government as Wellesley and his fellow-governors had run it—a system they had long tilted against. They too complained of inexperienced officials and the spread of the Cornwallis system of courts; where Cradock had looked to 'the old experienced officer' they looked to the old experienced Indian official, too swiftly done away with in recent years. As time went on, however, they fastened more and more on the Muslim conspiracy theory, which provided a simple political explanation: the orders about dress could then be dismissed as the mere occasion for the mutiny; fear of Christianisation need no longer be the issue. By 1809 this version was dominant in Grant's mind. 81 Why did Grant and Bentinck in effect become allies in 1808-9? Both were specifically threatened in different ways by the interpretation which Cradock and the military were putting forward. Growing mutual respect, and Bentinck's independent move towards Evangelicalism, may also have had something to do with it. More broadly—this is conjecture—Grant may have come to see that to attack all innovation in Indian government, as Cradock was doing and as he himself had begun by doing, held dangers. Christianity in India must itself be innovatory: the political conservatism of the Clapham Sect always had this religious double edge. And here was Cradock attacking religious as well as political change. Muslim princely conspiracy was, as an explanation, much easier to fit into a continuing drive to evangelise India. Though Grant and Bentinck still differed on the precise weight to be given to the conspiracy and to the orders about dress, they at least agreed that the soldiers' fear of Christianisation had been unfounded. Though they might differ on the judicial system and the handling of the poligars Bentinck had come to think, like Grant, that British and Indians were too much cut off, Indians too little regarded. Most important, both hoped by different means to 'civilise' India: the Burkeian and Evangelical paths converged. Vellore remains unexplained. That in itself is a large part of its historical significance. The exact causes of the mutiny may yet be persuasively worked out. Meanwhile what is striking is the inability of the British at the time to plumb them. Against the dozens of British voices, angry, troubled, or cocksure, Indian witness was largely silent. At best the British heard from men like the four Indian officers of high caste—two Hindus and two Muslims—who, when the mutiny was still two months off, gave evidence before courts-martial that the turban did not violate religious prejudices: evidence which nearly all 144

3 • MADRAS 1803-1807 the British then swallowed, and some later discounted.* 82 Vellore showed that the British—so lately established—could not foretell what might happen in the depths of the Indian sea, and could not afterwards know for sure why it had happened. Like the rest of the British Bentinck was trying to shuffle off direct responsibility. In the matter of caste marks he was innocent. But when Cradock had appealed to him over the 'cursed turban business' twelve days before the mutiny he—with his Council—had merely upheld the savage court-martial sentences; he had not then looked in detail into the soldiers' discontents. Here was the weak point in his case. Like much else in the acts that led up to the mutiny it marked a failure of imagination; also a failure to cut through bureaucratic routine or to overcome departmental jealousies between civilians and military. It was the work of men out of touch. T h e failure was that of a system and an establishment at least as much as of any one man. Still, Bentinck held some responsibility—and inwardly evaded it: if he ever acknowledged, even to himself, that he bore a share of blame we do not know of it. This may be put down to immaturity. But it also marked a collective reaction. The trauma was too great to come to terms with. As they mustered their explanations the British were also trying to domesticate a happening in itself terrible, and potentially catastrophic, into something they could understand, hence something they could remedy. On Bentinck's mind the shock of his recall a year later seems at first glance to have bitten more deeply than the shock of the mutiny itself. Yet the sudden blow to his hopes of an Indian career may have made it possible for him to start absorbing the earlier trauma. At all events it was only when he had ceased to be Governor and was waiting for his ship that he recorded a view of British-Indian relations profoundly unlike his early belief in the Wellesleyan structure of'British greatness' erected on 'Indian happiness'. T h e Abbé Dubois, a French missionary, by 1806 had spent fourteen years in South India. He lived and dressed like an Indian, was made welcome in Brahmin houses, had become a Sanskrit and Tamil scholar, and had almost nothing to do with Europeans. At this point • It is not the purpose of the present study to investigate the causes of the Vellore mutiny. The endeavour is worth making, though the difficulties are great. The most elaborate recent study, by Maya Gupta, comes down in favour of the Muslim conspiracy theory: it reaches its conclusion by accepting one dubious set of evidence and rejecting another no less dubious. That is not to say that, only seven years after the downfall of Tipu Sultan, a Muslim rising was implausible.

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II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y h i wrote the Erst draft of what was to become a classic study of Hindu society. 83 Through Mark Wilks, the Resident at Mysore, he attempted to interest the East India Company in it. Wilks first tried it on the Bombay Government, whose head, Jonathan Duncan, was the great authority on Indian custom: he sent the manuscript to the philosopher Sir James Mackintosh, then a Bombay judge, but Mackintosh disagreed with some of Dubois's 'speculative' statements and sent it back. Wilks then fell back on Bentinck and Lady William; they were more receptive. 84 Almost Bentinck's last act at Madras was to recommend that the company should buy, translate, and publish the Abba's work; this it did after a nine-year delay. It is an odd confrontation—the young ex-Governor, who in his four years at Madras had had almost nothing intimately to do either with the Hindu society that surrounded him or with the warlike Muslim culture so lately dethroned in Mysore; and the Indianised Frenchman who had been present at widow-burnings and who was ultimately to despair of Christianising India. Bentinck wrote: . . . the Europeans generally know little or nothing of the customs and manners of the Hindus. We are all acquainted with some prominent marks and facts, which all who run may read; but their manner of thinking, their domestic habits and ceremonies, in which circumstances a knowledge of a people consists, is, I fear, in great part wanting to us. We understand very imperfectly their language. They perhaps know more of ours; but their knowledge is by no means sufficiently extensive to give a description of subjects not easily represented by the insulated words in daily use. We do not, we cannot, associate with the natives. We cannot see them in their houses and with their families. We are necessarily very much confined to our houses by the heat; all our wants and business which could create a greater intercourse with the natives is done for us, and we are in fact strangers in the land. 8s 'Strangers in the land': this was to be almost the theme of Bentinck's governor-generalship more than twenty years later. Already in 1807 he had learnt something. Now he had to go. In the next few years he was to try his hand on other 'nations', closer to home than India and perhaps less impenetrable.

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4- T H E Q U E E N O F O U R C O L O N I E S ' : SICILY, 1811-1814 '. . . Much better fun than a mission', Bentinck's young secretary Frederick Lamb wrote when the Sicilian venture had been going for three years—and going badly; 'for I reckon it a government . . . it's highly preferable to have the driving even of such unruly brutes as the Sicilians, rather than to be limited to disputing with the coachman as to the road he is to go.'1 Lamb was right: by 1814 Bentinck was in effect as much Governor of Sicily as he had been of Madras. Through her intervention Britain had established a virtual protectorate over the island. After the breakdown of the new 'English' Constitution in October 1813 Bentinck came forward as a dictator ruling by martial law. Two months later he drew the logical conclusion and, in a letter to the Hereditary Prince, expounded his 'philosophic dream'—that Sicily should become 'the queen of our colonies'. Though nothing came of this, Bentinck's Sicilian venture had at least as much to do with the history of British colonial expansion as with that of international affairs. Bentinck and Wellesley had chosen to treat Sicily like a refractory Indian ally. As British intervention developed the parallel in some ways held good. In the Indian States the issue was often the choice of a dewan (chief Minister) at once friendly to the British and able to impose efficient internal rule. Thus during Bentinck's governor-generalship relations with Avadh were to turn a good deal on the dismissal and reinstatement of the dewan Hakim Mahdi. One of Bentinck's first tasks in Sicily was to persuade the Hereditary Prince Francis (to whom King Ferdinand had nominally delegated power) that he should appoint Sicilian Ministers—three of them from among the barons whom the Court had arrested a few months earlier. This Ministry foundered during Bentinck's absence in Spain; on his return he ended by dropping all pretence and imposing his own nominees. In India the principle of the Wellesleyan subsidiary alliance was that the force raised or paid for by the dependent State must be under British command. So too in Sicily one of the conditions which, with Wellesley's approval, Bentinck imposed on the Court was that he should be made Captain-General of the Sicilian Army. Much of his continuing struggle with the Court 147

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y turned on his attempts to make this unwieldy force—really Neapolitan rather than Sicilian—smaller, more efficient, and capable of taking part in the war. Yet there were differences. An Indian subsidiary State paid the British for its own defence. Sicily, on the other hand, all along received a British subsidy (raised in 1809 to £400,000 a year); even then her antiquated finances were in chaos. Control of the subsidy, which Wellesley put into Bentinck's hands, was the British Minister's chief means of pressure. Bentinck used it often; he withheld loans and advances to force through army reorganisation or to bolster up the Finance Minister, Castelnuovo, a rigidly honest man whom he trusted. The war situation in which Britain and Sicily acted on each other was also different from that of Wellesley's India. There the Company's Government, amid whatever alarms from Tipu and the Marathas, had been dominant throughout; its war policy was centrally directed from Calcutta; the French threat, though people took it seriously, never came about. In Sicily it was by no means clear until Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812-13 that Britain would win the war; the French were across the Strait of Messina; British forces were dispersed under several commands, in the Peninsula and Malta as well as in Sicily; Bentinck, as he found, was not so far removed from London that he could run his own strategy. Where four months' sail from Plymouth to Calcutta allowed Wellesley to do much as he pleased, four weeks' sail to Palermo left Bentinck much of the initiative without letting him fully carry it through. The greatest difficulty was the most obvious. Sicily was after all in Europe. It could not in practice be treated like an Indian State. There were a number of reasons for this. First, during the war British action there had to be subordinated to the needs of the European conflict, in particular to those of the Peninsula. Liverpool, by 1812 Prime Minister, always put these first: Bentinck had not only to send his army to Catalonia in the summer of 1812; because of a series of accidents to its commanders he had to go there himself in May 1813. In his absence the British in Sicily and the first Sicilian Parliament under the new Constitution slipped from his grasp, to disastrous effect: he then had to return, thus alienating Wellington. Secondly, as the war drew to an end in 1813-14 the British Government had to subordinate the Sicilian venture to the needs of its Continental allies and of the coming peace settlement. Its support for Austria in Italy led it to countenance an armistice with Austria's new ally Murat— 148

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II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y a step highly alarming to the Sicilian Court. When peace came Britain simply let the protectorate drop. Liverpool thought Bentinck's 'dream' of Sicily as 'the queen of our colonies' inexpedient rather than immoral: the trouble with it in March 1 8 1 4 was chiefly that 'the Continental States are more jealous of our obtaining power in the Mediterranean than in any other quarter'. Finally, Ministers (other than Wellesley) could not look upon the Sicilian royal family as they looked upon Indian Nawabs. When Bentinck at length forced Queen Maria Carolina to leave the island Castlereagh was genuinely shocked. T o Bentinck he hinted at the need to avoid 'frequent acts of undisguised power'; after the peace he admitted that 'in times of war and trouble very violent measures may be excused, even the moving a brigade of soldiers to force a sovereign from her own dominions'—but now 'the time is happily arrived . . . when we may revert to the old notions of right and wrong, and consider these questions upon abstract principles of justice . . ,'. 2 Had Castlereagh as President of the Board of Control in 1802-6 worried as much about the abstract rights of Indian sovereigns? It seems doubtful. T o Bentinck himself at the outset the chief difference between Sicily and the Karnataka or Mysore was that here was a nation capable of self-government. Burke had looked upon Corsica, another backward Mediterranean island, as a nation; why not Sicily? Sicily had a Parliament; she had a Constitution made up, like Britain's, of ancient precedents; she had an accumulated body of law, in its origins and complexity not unlike the English common law; she had politicians—a few —who knew their Blackstone, Locke, and Montesquieu, and one of whom, Belmonte, struck Bentinck at first as the most eloquent man he had come across since the days of Pitt and Fox. 3 Belmonte and his followers now wished for a new Constitution inspired by that of Britain: only thus—one of them wrote—could Sicily be restored to her former glory, and her inhabitants enabled to cry out one happy day 'We too are a nation!' In India Bentinck had thought 'civil liberty'— the right to property and security—all that the British could grant. In Sicily he unhesitatingly looked for 'political liberty' as well: his 'plan for Sicily' at the start was 'Parliament, Constitution, and national force to protect it'. Those times are past [he told King Ferdinand's Foreign Minister in August 1 8 1 1 ] when personal attachment to a chief or a family was the greatest incentive to human action. At this time the world 150

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is too enlightened not to have discovered that the only security for individual liberty or national greatness is a free Constitution where the interests of the sovereign and his people are happily blended and identified. Yet in spite of these resounding statements there was something ambiguous about Bentinck's view of the Sicilian nation. It never occurred to him to think of the Italians—by which he meant the Northern Italians, whom he had known in 1799-1801—as anything but 'an intelligent people', fully worthy to be a nation. He never compared them with Indians. Sicily was another matter. No one then thought that it might one day be merged into a united Italy. Bentinck's resounding statements were meant for possible publication. In private he noted almost from the start the Sicilians' 'warm and oftentimes absurd spirits . . . they want everything arranged in a moment. Sober English sense is not the blessing of this country.... The difficulties now really begin and the greatest will be their infernal jealousies.'4 'Here as in India,' he wrote a few months later, 'moderation is always ascribed to weakness.' All along there was this dichotomy, not just between his official and his private stance but perhaps within his own feeling. In one grave crisis he complained that the Sicilians 'were all afraid and would do nothing... on the side of the nation and of liberty not a man would stir—we [British] were now completely the principals'. Yet within three days of calling them in private 'this very timid people' he had described them in an official dispatch as 'this great population'. Bentinck's idea of the nation was an abstract one, little if at all dependent on the Romantic search for a people's inborn 'genius'. He may therefore have been able to go on thinking of the Sicilians in the abstract as 'this great population' even when on a particular occasion he thought them cowards. In the end, after the collapse of the new Constitution and the failure of his hopes, he no longer troubled to hide his belief that Sicilians were to be managed only by 'bonbons in one hand and il bastone [the stick] in the other'. He still hoped 'to hold up to Europe a whole nation united in the cause of liberty'—but he would make them do their duty in any case. By the winter of 1813-14 Bentinck had for practical and immediate purposes given up any interest in Sicilian 'political liberty'. All that remained was, Indian fashion, 'civil liberty', to be secured by despotic rule. In Bentinck's endeavour to 'hold up to Europe a whole nation united iSi

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y in the cause of liberty' there were three main strands: his running fight with the Sicilian royal family; his attempt to build up a Sicilian constitutionalist party able to run the country with only friendly support from the British; and his encouragement of a new, truly free and representative constitution, which as time went on he saw more and more as an instrument of agrarian and judicial reform. In all three he failed. This was not just a personal failure, though in his early self-confidence—he had thought Sicilian reform 'plain and easy' and looked forward to devoting himself to the liberation of Italy— Bentinck certainly underrated the difficulties. British intervention was partly provoked by, and itself fostered, a crisis of consciousness within the Sicilian ruling class; this crisis took on its own momentum. The British Government for its part seems never to have fully considered until too late what intervention might imply. The outcome was a tangle and, in the end, a cutting off of many hopes. T h e struggle with the royal family began at once; it went on virtually without remission for a year and a half. From December 1 8 1 1 to June 1 8 1 3 crisis followed crisis, each taking up between four and twelve weeks, each carried on in a flurry of official Notes, private negotiations, and—at times—British troop movements. First the King tried to avoid significantly changing the administration; then, after he had nominally handed over power to his son, he fought a series of delaying actions aimed at preventing the reorganisation of the army and the calling of Parliament; then he tried to hold off the royal assent to the 'bases' of the new Constitution. All this exasperated Bentinck to the point of demanding and, after the customary six-week uproar, getting from the King in October 1 8 1 2 an indirect promise that the Queen would leave Sicily: she had incautiously asked for a frigate to take her away. Bentinck had secured, shortly after his return to Sicily, 'proofs' of her 'treachery'—a confession by an agent of hers that she had intrigued with Murat to give up the island; but what he really feared was her political influence—she seemed to be at the bottom of all the delay and obstruction he met with. This belief was not altogether unfounded. The members of the royal family lived in a state of furiously devoted cross-purposes none too easy for an Englishman to understand. The King was a straightforward autocrat: he was 'displeased at the nation being mentioned . . . it was [he told Bentinck at one point] a new mode which did not exist in former t i m e s . . . his power came from God'. But he had the sense to lie low at his shooting lodge in the hills, made the most of his reputation

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for idleness, and worked through intermediaries. His son the Hereditary Prince Francis—now officially in charge—was frightened enough to wish to conciliate the British. But, as Bentinck only gradually found out, he was too weak either to assert his authority in defiance of his parents or to resign it; he also played into Bentinck's hands by repeatedly asking for a British guarantee when he was called upon to do anything risky. Father and son, together with their retainers, freely used the Queen as a scapegoat: the King (they let Bentinck know) would be quiet if only she were not always stirring him up; they even encouraged him to believe that she had tried to poison her son. The Queen herself, by her continued employment of spies, her ephemeral resolves to withdraw to Catania, to Vienna, even to England, her tirades against the 'wild beast' Bentinck and the new Sicilian 'government of baboons and scoundrels', fed her reputation as an insatiable meddler. It is not surprising that Bentinck spent much energy on securing her removal, only to find that this was no cure for the island's troubles. The final crisis came in January-March 1 8 1 3 . At this point the King tried to resume power: he had never persuaded himself that Bentinck was fully backed by his Government, and he was now encouraged by the Prince of Cassaro, the leader of the more conservative Sicilian barons, who had come to fear the new constitution as a threat to their privileges. Bentinck was at first inclined to let the King resume: Ferdinand was popular; he might prove more satisfactory than the weak and dilatory Prince. But the Queen took the occasion to try to undo the 'promise' her husband had given that she would presently leave Sicily. Nor would the King undertake finally to sanction the 'English' constitution. He insisted, besides, on his right to choose his own Ministers. After negotiations that took many twists and turns Bentinck concluded that the King meant to evade the 'promise' and, with Cassaro's help, to upset the constitution. He therefore raised his terms for letting the King resume and threatened to 'enlever' (kidnap) the Queen: 'this was a trial of strength. It was the first effort of a long and concerted plan to destroy the system of liberty, to which in every part of its progress every impediment had hitherto been thrown, but in vain.' Even then the King defied him. As soon as he managed to pack his wife off to South-western Sicily he drove to Palermo on 9 March and resumed power; Bentinck, he said, would no longer be his 'schoolmaster'. Next day he staged a popular demonstration in his own favour by driving in state to a 7V Deum service at the Cathedral.

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II • EMPIRE A N D N A T I O N A L I T Y Bentinck's immediate attempt to 'frighten' the King by going to see him miscarried: though the King began the interview by crossing himself, and afterwards had to go to bed with an attack of bile, he still held out. When Bentinck stated that Britain would not permit the constitution to be destroyed the King 'took fire "Permit, permit, permit... England has no right to interfere."' It took another 17 days to wear down his powers of resistance. Bentinck twice brought up troops, once to 'protect' the King and avert further demonstrations, the second time to prevent the King from slipping away; he caused the Sicilian Ministers to resign; he sent troops to the south-west with orders to make the Queen embark; he had to issue two separate 24-hour ultimatums. At the critical point he announced that he would use force if the King did not give way. Privately he contemplated deposing the King: 'the principle of the arrangement was to be that we took possession of the country and gave up the right to the nation. The Parliament must nominate to the vacant throne.' In other words, the Prince— whom Bentinck now thought 'infinitely preferable'—would be 'elected' to succeed Ferdinand rather than visibly imposed on the country by the British. After a period of unprecedented tension—the Sicilian constitutionalist leaders, the King's son-in-law Louis-Philippe included, were preparing to take refuge aboard British ships, and crowds turned out to gawp as troops blocked the King's villa—the King at length signed on 28 March a full delegation of power to the Prince; he undertook not to interfere in the government, and not to resume it again without Britain's consent. T h e final step came in June when the Queen sailed away; after many delays she reached Vienna by way of Odessa in February 1 8 1 4 ; seven months later she died of a stroke. It was all— Bentinck had confessed at the height of the crisis—the most awkward passage he had lived through since the mutiny at Vellore.5 This struggle with the royal family was not merely picturesque. European monarchy, even such monarchy as the Neapolitan Bourbons stood for, still kept some of its sacred character in the eyes of men who were fighting the heirs of Jacobinism—not just in Castelreagh's eyes but in those of Bentinck himself and of a good many Sicilian barons. As Wellesley's successor, Castelreagh allowed Bentinck to go on using the language of force; but he repeatedly insisted that the royal family's 'honour,' 'dignity,' and 'security' must be safeguarded. Bentinck had owned at the start that 'an interference merely to carry some British object might not be justifiable'; but 'listening to the call of the whole

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4- SICILY 1 8 1 1 - 1 8 1 4 country, and having no view but their benefit and most of all of the royal family themselves, the British Government will surely be considered by the present and future generations as only fulfilling the duties of a good and great nation'. Though more than once tempted to push Ferdinand to the point of abdicating—in October 1 8 1 2 he rode up to the King's shooting lodge with a form of abdication in his pocket—he never carried it through. His instructions, wide as they were, did not go so far. There was, besides, the awkward example of the abdication into which Napoleon had bullied the King of Spain; it might not have deterred Bentinck from getting rid of some Indian raja, but in Sicily it lay too close to home. 'Bonaparte made kings, England makes nations', he is reported to have said shortly after his arrival at Palermo. The Sicilian nation had to be made in the teeth of a Neapolitan royal family which could not in the last resort be displaced. Bentinck had at first hoped that a Sicilian Ministry could do the job: if Belmonte won the Prince's trust 'we may from that moment date the completion of our work, and the establishment of the liberty and prosperity of this country'. 6 This was to assume that the Ministry would be united and responsible under Belmonte as a kind of Prime Minister, and that the Prince would take its advice; Britain need not then interfere further. These assumptions were all belied by events. The Sicilian barons whom the Prince was with difficulty induced to take as his Ministers were inexperienced and disunited; months went by before they could gain effective control of their departments; they let the Prince treat them in practice as his secretaries; Belmonte as Foreign Minister was not even allowed to read the foreign despatches. Cabinet solidarity was new enough in Britain; it was unknown in Sicily. Though the Ministers and their followers had previously opposed the Court, some of them to the point of going to gaol, they could not build an alternative fount of power when the Court now proved refractory. The upshot was that they very early came to depend on the British Minister to get things done; sometimes they wished him to put pressure on the Prince, sometimes on a fellow-Minister. Even before the Ministers came into office Bentinck had had to conclude that only 'the firm and just exercise of our superiority' would 'secure to this country that better administration from whence its own happiness and greatness and our safety can alone be derived'. Now, though he tried for a few weeks to give Belmonte a free run, the Palazzo Bentinck quickly became the headquarters of what had come to be known as the 'English party'. British indirect rule had begun.

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Yet the Sicilian constitutionalists were not just creatures of the British Minister. They stood for genuine political forces: the baronage, the embryonic middle class—chiefly made up of lawyers, clerics, and land agents—with a leavening of middling proprietors and their attendant lawyers. Their failure embodied the failure of these classes as yet to come to grips with the problems of government, nationhood, and agrarian relations. Belmonte, by far the ablest leader, seems to have had a vision of Sicily as a State working out for itself a new political consciousness. Against opposition from the Prince and from Castelnuovo he persuaded Bentinck that Parliament should be allowed to set itself up as a constituent assembly, so that Sicily could 'spontaneously . . . give herself a constitution, without the interference of any authority, much less that of Sicilian or English bayonets'. At the same time Belmonte was vain and in poor health; he preferred 'lounging and conversation' to business, and soon lost control of his followers. His leanings were aristocratic: the Hereditary Prince, he said, 'could not suppose he wanted revolution and that born to the situation he was he could wish to lower himself to an equality with his groom'. In Cassaro and a growing number of barons this concern for aristocratic privilege was largely unchecked by any real grasp of Enlightened ideas. Now that the Crown was beaten they feared any innovations that might weaken the feudal system; they shortly allied themselves with the King. At the other extreme the inflexible Castelnuovo, a man imbued with the ideals of the Roman Republic, had come to realise that the barons' defence of Parliament involved interests wider than those of their class: they should now 'make some significant sacrifice of their interests and prerogatives for the sake of the nation's general welfare'. Though he feared democracy, Castelnuovo's desire for moderate social change led him to encourage as potential allies the democrats—men some of whom had spent years of exile in revolutionary France. The device blew up in his face: in the 1 8 1 3 Parliament, the first under the new constitution, the democrats refused to vote supply longer than a month at a time; their attacks on privilege—noisy rather than effective—went further than Castelnuovo thought tolerable. Even before this the core of the constitutionalist group had split into 'Belmontists' and 'Villermosists' (so called after Castelnuovo's other title, Villermosa); the rock it broke on was the position of the barons as the ruling class. The 'English party', then, almost from the start were tugged at on both sides by groups for whom a programme of moderate reform on

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4 • SICILY, 1811-1814 'English' lines went either too far or not far enough. The one point on which all agreed was that Sicily should become independent of Naples, though still under a branch of the Bourbon dynasty. Independence was written into the new constitution. The Bourbons never reconciled themselves to it. The conservative barons, on the other hand, held to it when all else had collapsed. What did this separatist feeling amount to? It is difficult to see it as nationalistic—as a positive endeavour to transcend old political forms and attain a collective identity—though a few men like Castelnuovo and Belmonte had glimmerings. In most men it seems to have been little more than the old negative rejection of external rule; it expressed itself in harsh measures against Neapolitan refugees and in an unwillingness to raise a native army—both strongly deprecated by Bentinck. His own position was awkward: the representative of the United Kingdom was not well placed to urge the independence of Sicily from Naples. Nor at first did he think it would suit Britain, Italy, or Sicily itself, though in the end he did urge it as a matter of 'private sentiment' because the Sicilians wanted it. The differences among the Sicilians found play in the working out of the 1 8 1 2 Constitution—notorious as the first attempt to copy the unwritten constitution of Britain. But this aping of British institutions came about partly by accident; Bentinck, far from imposing it, deplored it before he came to acquiesce in it. At first the new Ministers and their friends had intended no more than a return to the old fourteenth-century—heavily aristocratic— constitution, with some changes inspired by the safe example of Britain. A draft by Castelnuovo's friend the Abate Balsamo embodied this; but, because it abolished feudal privileges, it quickly alienated the conservative Cassaro. On top of this the royal family took fright and the Prince put off summoning Parliament. At this point two of the unlikeliest people—Aci, a Sicilian Minister of volatile temper, and Moliterno, a visionary Neapolitan adventurer—proposed that Sicily should adopt the English Constitution in toto, and that an expedition should set out at once to liberate the Italian mainland. Within a fortnight they had won over nearly everybody. The English Constitution, linked with a descent on Italy, fed the Anglomania current in Sicily and elsewhere.*It glossed over the Sicilians' differences; to them it * Cf. the influence of British constitutional practice on Louis XVIII's Constitutional Charter of 1814, on Napoleon's Additional Act of 1815, and on the plan drawn up by Saint-Simon and Augustin Thierry in 1814 for a federal united

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held out the prospect of winning their independence; to the royal family that of recovering Naples; at worst it was 'the devil you know'. The exception to this chorus of assent was Bentinck. He had earlier said that he 'would rather be left out' of constitution-making; 'it was an interference which my Government might not like'. Now he was 'very sorry that they had adopted the English Constitution which no one understood or could d e f i n e . . . . It would cast a ridicule upon their measures . . . ' . Bentinck seems all along to have wanted a constitution, of moderate but liberal cast, which he could hold out to Italy as a rallying-cry, rather than a particular set of reforms. On the mainland in 1 8 1 4 - 1 5 he was to encourage constitutionalism on all sides—in Naples, in Genoa, in Piedmont, in Milan—without ever committing himself to a single model: * so much so that King Ferdinand likened him to Dr Sangrado, 'who wished to bleed everybody whether they needed it or not'. Looking back in 1817, Stendhal wrote that at the end of the wars the chance had come up of forming an independent Kingdom of Italy, 'but one would have had to open the umbrella and talk constitution'.7 Bentinck had seen this. At Palermo in June 1812, however, the proposal for an English Constitution linked with an immediate descent on Italy was particularly awkward. Bentinck wanted nothing so much as to liberate Italy. But by then Liverpool had already committed him to acting in Eastern Spain: in May he had unwillingly sent a first batch of 6,000 men there. Just when the Court was ready to act he could not. After some hesitation Bentinck took a gamble. On the basis of intelligence from Italy—encouraging but flimsy—he countermanded the Spanish expedition. He would go to Italy, but on his own terms. The new expedition must aim at freeing the whole of Italy—not just Naples; 'the choice of a constitution and a chief must be left to the free will of the people'. All he would concede to the royal family was that he would 'do all in his power to persuade the Neapolitans to accept the Hereditary Prince for their sovereign'. The royal family toyed even with these stiff terms, to the point of letting the state opening of Parliament go forward. After three weeks, however, they found the Europe with constitutions on English lines in all member countries: C. Bouglé and E. Halévy (eds), Doctrine de Saint-Simon: Exposition, première onnie, 1829 (Paris, 1924), 15. * At Genoa Bentinck restored the 1797 Republican Constitution, with changes aimed at approximating it to the old aristocratic Constitution of 1576; but this was an ad hoc arrangement of no wider significance.

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4 • S I C I L Y , 1811-1814 terms too much to swallow and rejected them. Bentinck for his part had been getting warnings from his military colleagues—even from Nugent, one of the architects of the Italian plan—against the risk he was taking. He therefore changed his mind once more. The troops immediately sailed to Spain. The royal family, thwarted of their expedition, now tried to put off constitution-making altogether. The King even let it be known that he would yield up to the barons every last inroad upon their power which the Neapolitan Government had attempted since the 1780s; he set about forming an alliance with Cassaro and other conservative barons. All new departures, it seemed, might be wrecked. Bentinck for his part decided that 'fear and nothing but fear' would work. He counterattacked on all fronts; made the Ministers tender their resignations; suspended the subsidy; warned the conservatives that 'the Constitution must be carried—that was my business. It must be done either by the Parliament or by force'; threatened to denounce the alliance and treat the Court as 'an open enemy'. The counterattack worked. Parliament met on 20 July and, in the course of a fervent all-night sitting, passed fifteen fundamental articles or 'Bases' of the new Constitution. These abolished feudal rights, stated that no Sicilian could be deprived of liberty or property without due process of law, established the separation of powers, provided for Parliament to meet annually, and set up two Chambers—Peers and Commons—in lieu of the three estates (nobles, clergy, towns of the royal domain) into which, like the French Estates General, the old Parliament had been divided. Bentinck could see that all this still went with 'a good deal of vanity and egoism among the great'—the barons had agreed to give up their feudal rights only against compensation; but he seems to have been sincere in writing home officially: 'so strong an expression of national feeling is scarcely upon record . . .'. It was all the more notable when 'the two more powerful orders of the State were to give up their preponderancy'—the barons and clergy, besides agreeing to merge, had given up the plural votes drawn from their fiefs—'to confer upon the third an influence which it had never possessed. These things are really honourable to the Sicilians, and the exultation and hope which prevail are universal.' Amherst, when he heard about it, wrote that Bentinck had accomplished without bloodshed 'one of the most complete and important revolutions . . . in . . . our eventful times. There now opens indeed a fair prospect of happiness, as well as of political power, to the

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inhabitants of the rich and beautiful island of Sicily.' It was the high point of Bentinck's mission. The constitution whose 'bases' Parliament had laid in July was further worked out over the next three months; the Council—it included the Prince and the Ministers, with Bentinck attending by invitation—then sat well into 1813 to decide on the royal assent. This constitution emerged formally not unlike the English. But it was subject to the contrary pull of conservatives and radicals, and to the changes that could come about when people looked to Britain's formal institutions rather than to her practice. One cause of conflict was Parliament's decision to vest the Crown lands in the nation in exchange for a Civil List: this the Prince in the end swallowed only under pressure from the Councillors and from Bentinck. Another was the power of the executive: Parliament, led by the more 'democratic' members of the Third Estate, at first tried itself to administer the nation's revenues; though the Crown kept a real power of veto the inexperienced Ministers in practice had little initiative. Again, Parliament freed all but the religious press, lowered the property qualifications for voters and candidates, and freed the municipal councils almost wholly from central control. In all these ways it departed from the 'English' draft prepared for it by Castelnuovo's friend Balsamo. The most significant clash came over the abolition of feudal rights. Castelnuovo in the end persuaded the barons not to claim compensation; but they riposted by abolishing common rights on former feudal lands. A further, far-reaching proposal of Castelnuovo's —the abolition of entail—led to deadlock at every point, in Parliament and Council, as well as to the disastrous split within the 'English party'. Far from dictating at this stage to Parliament or Council, Bentinck often urged compromise. He once or twice lectured the more radical members of Parliament, to little effect; he tried to persuade them that present fear of the Crown ought not to lead them unduly to weaken the executive: 'they were now legislating for posterity . . . though there was now an interest different from that of their nation, that must cease hereafter . . .'. Over the abolition of feudal rights and of entail, he backed Castelnuovo, and tried in vain to mend the resultant quarrel between him and Belmonte. The crisis within the Sicilian ruling class which this quarrel illustrated is examined in Part I I I . During Bentinck's absence in Spain from May to October 1813 it was enough to wreck the constitutionalist 160

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movement. Other causes were inflation—aggravated by Castelnuovo's policy of economic liberalism; the alarming state of the finances; and the inaction or arrogance of the British on the island when the plague threatened to spread from Malta. Only ten days after Parliament had met for the first time under the new Constitution the Ministers panicked in the face of food riots and prorogued it unconstitutionally; shortly afterwards they withdrew both from office and from Parliament itself. Belmonte could think of no remedy except that he and his friends should ride back to power through the use of British force, 'like [Bentinck later commented] the vizir of a Sultan'. His friends, appalled at Parliament's 'democratic' excesses, felt much the same. Constitutional government had gone adrift. Bentinck heard this news at the siege of Tarragona. It was then that he decided to go back and restore order; then too that he rashly asked to be relieved of the mission. If his manifold commitments had not taken him away in the first place there seems little doubt that he would have been able to impose greater unity on the Ministers and on the British in Sicily. Already before leaving for Spain he had come to see that the barons were 'universally despised and hated' and their power '[hung] upon a thread'. Now he blamed the Ministers for always depending on a parade of British force. Parliament's alleged 'Jacobin tendencies' he put down to the inexperience of persons brought up in a country where . . . despotism . . . has established a rooted distrust and perhaps distaste towards all government, where education has been very bad . . . and where the freedom of the press has not impressed upon the minds of the people that knowledge and justness of political principles and reasoning which discriminate the British nation. Much—he might have added—as in Madras. He therefore strongly advised the Prince and the British in Sicily against any resort to force or even to a dissolution. Parliament should be given its head: if it went on refusing supply, as it had been doing, 'there will and must follow a revolution, as the machine of government as established by the constitution will stop'; but this could not be 'active revolution as in France', since the troops were all either British or Neapolitan and the Sicilians had no military spirit. Meanwhile the Government should act with the utmost moderation so as to give 'ignorant but well-intentioned men' time to see their error; it had to 'act for the future as well as for the present time . . .'. F

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By the time Bentinck landed at Palermo in October Parliament had got further out of hand. One or other House had petitioned against the British generals, tried to interfere with the courts, or even to recall the King; though much of this was noise rather than action the Commons were still refusing to vote supply for more than a month at a time. Bentinck at first thought he could 'bring these gentlemen to reason' by 'some bullying and some coaxing': . . . if Sicily was not true to herself—if instead of pursuing with wisdom her own good and the final establishment of the Constitution her representatives chose to be governed by their own passion . . . despotism itself was preferable and as I had been the first to give [liberty] so I should be the first to take it away if I found it to be incompatible with the happiness of the nation. He did try to negotiate with the democratic leaders; the implication of his earlier advice was that they should at least be given a chance. The negotiations broke down on the democrats' refusal to vote supply; they would not believe Bentinck's assurance that he wished them to make sacrifices because he genuinely 'would have them independent both of their enemies and of their allies . . .'. What seems to have most alarmed Bentinck was a coming together of agitation against food prices in the towns with a conflict over land rights in the interior: the new municipal councils here and there had taken to occupying baronial lands. Bentinck at this point seems to have been emotionally committed to 'regenerating' Sicily through the new 'system'; that 'system' could not include direct attacks on property. He therefore followed through his threat to the democrats that 'for the sake of the Sicilian nation of which I was the advocate . . . I was determined to dictate the law to them and I would do so.' After an abortive attempt to carry the Budget in the Commons he made the Prince dissolve Parliament: 'if I had known as much of the general character of the people as I did at present, I do not think I should ever have undertaken the business. I doubted whether these people were made for freemen.' No one would take responsibility for collecting taxes when the Parliamentary grant ran out. Bentinck therefore nominated, with difficulty but without disguise, a new set of constitutionalist Ministers. He issued, in his own name alone, a proclamation; in it he made himself responsible for the safety and tranquillity of the kingdom until Parliament should meet again, and announced that he would court162

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martial 'disturbers of the public peace, murderers, and whatever other enemies of the Constitution may oppose the policy of the Government'. To enforce this he marched troops into the interior. He was now at least as much of a despot as at Madras. Bentinck was still aware of the parallel. While the Sicilian nation was in its 'infancy and weakness', not yet 'true to itself'—he told Castlereagh—'it must be the province of Arcot [i.e. the Karnataka] with its Nawab, which, if not governed by us, will be by our enemy'. Only British 'interference' could save it from 'political convulsions'; but he still hoped that prince and people could be induced to welcome this interference, still consoled himself with the thought that 'in the progress from slavery to liberty, more or less disorder must have taken place', still trusted that the Sicilians would learn a sense of responsibility as the Constitution takes effect and as the liberty of the press and their new institutions make an impression. . . . The country must rapidly increase in wealth and strength—all the obstacles opposed by the feudal system and a bad government to the prosperity of the agriculture and commerce of the country are rapidly removing . . .'. Bentinck was thus thoroughly caught on the dilemma between 'political liberty' and 'civil liberty' which at Madras he had solved by discarding 'political liberty' as unthinkable. The nation could not be 'true to itself' unless it attained 'civil liberty', that is, equitable fiscal, agrarian, and judicial institutions, with the 'improvement' that must flow from them; yet in a European country 'political liberty', however disastrous in practice, could not be so lightly set aside as a long-term ideal. Hence Bentinck went on talking about the Constitution and a new Parliament even when, under his dictatorship, two barons who had violently criticised him were tried and sent to jail, elections to a new Parliament were thoroughly 'managed', and he himself—the Prince was said to refer to him in private as 'His Majesty'—freely threatened the use of'il bastone'. These contradictions he managed to reconcile: 'institutions made men good or bad'; so before the Constitution was written off'we must see the effects of such new institutions' as he proposed 'and of time . . . ' . He 'really thought that as it was difficult for [the Constitution] to go on, so it was infinitely more difficult for it to go back'. 163

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y During his nine months' dictatorship Bentinck did his best to provide 'new institutions'. But time was running short. T h e war and with it the British occupation looked like coming to an end. King Ferdinand would no doubt go back to his Neapolitan base: in that event 'he might if England chose it destroy the Constitution' and all the work of the past three years might be undone; Bentinck by now had few illusions about either the King's or the British Government's readiness to support the 'system'. It was this more than anything that brought forth in December 1 8 1 3 his 'philosophic dream'—the proposal which, if carried into effect, would have made of the island 'after Ireland, the brightest jewel in the British crown'. At this time Bentinck did what he had been unable to do in Madras: he toured the country. The journey, especially through the fertile volcanic lands around Messina, Taormina, and Catania, struck him deeply. As with many travellers in Southern Italy down to the latter nineteenth century, a classical education filtered the evidence of his senses. He could see, if only from the 'horrible road', that Sicily was in a bad way, and he returned much impressed with the need to counter 'prepotenza' (bullying), both royal and aristocratic, in local affairs. But what really mattered—as he told Castlereagh when he came to explain the 'philosophic dream'—was that Sicily, in the hands of Great Britain, would become in a very few years a source of wealth and strength. . . . The capacity of the country exceeds all belief. It is only necessary to have seen it fully to believe all the accounts transmitted by history of its former greatness. But I affix more importance to the character that Great Britain will acquire by the successful establishment of Sicilian liberty than to the value of Sicily as a British possession. I wish Sicily to exist as a perpetual example of the blessings of our friendship, in comparison to that of France; and . . . I would have Sicily become not only the model, but the instrument of Italian independence. Bentinck therefore put his 'traveller's dreams' to the Hereditary Prince. The dilemma that faced them both, he wrote, was that while Sicily was not yet fit to govern herself alone, she would not let herself be reunited to Naples without bloodshed. He therefore proposed that Sicily should be ruled by Britain. Such an arrangement would suit everybody. Sicily would prosper; from a burden to Naples she would turn into a friendly country, whose dependence on a Power without 164

4 • SICILY, 1811-1814 continental ambitions would rule out any conflict between the two kingdoms; the royal family could be compensated either with additional territory on the Continent, or—more likely—with a British subsidy equivalent to the Sicilian Civil List and with military aid. Bentinck's proposal was neither new nor fantastic. In a pre-nationalist age such barters were common. Grenville and Sir John Moore had talked of a permanent protectorate or of annexation. Castlereagh seems to have thought that, given a suitable turn of events on the Continent, the 'dream' was 'feasible and worthy of consideration'. On the Sicilian side the constitutional leaders thought not at all in terms of the modern national State; Belmonte was quite ready to see a permanent British protectorate. T h e Prince secretly considered the proposed compensation; even the Queen had talked in the past of selling the island to Britain. As it happened, Bentinck had misjudged the alarm the 'dream' would rouse at Court; he quickly explained it away as 'the offspring of my disordered brain alone . . .'. The war on the Continent almost at once took such a turn as to ensure that the 'dream' had no practical consequence other than an immediate diplomatic fracas and a conviction, long held by Italian historians, that Britain had for many years had her eye on Sicily. This in one sense was true. British rule over Sicily, direct or indirect, had in 1 8 1 1 been in the air, not as a definite policy but as a possible outcome of the crisis in the relations between the two countries. The imperial measures which Bentinck and Wellesley set in motion had already more than once led to such an outcome in India. Wellesley, however, went out of office early in 1812. The attitude of his successor Castlereagh was curious. He was largely absorbed with the great task of rallying the allies and working out a peace settlement; his right-hand man Edward Cooke was reported 'not to have very exact ideas of Mediterranean polities'. He and other Ministers—Bentinck heard— seemed interested chiefly in hearing 'what had been done next'. Castlereagh later disclaimed all responsibility for the Constitution: I found the whole line of politics with respect to Sicily so completely chalked out upon my coming into office that nothing was left for me to do but to let tilings take their course and to remain a spectator of the experiment which was about to be made, and to give it a fair trial. This though the failure of the 'experiment' was 'perhaps to the full as great as might reasonably have been expected'. 8

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II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y Yet in 1 8 1 2 Castlereagh had instructed Bentinck to go on recommending 'necessary reforms of the Sicilian Constitution'; he had taken the 'proofs' of the Queen's 'treachery' very seriously; to King Ferdinand's ambassador he had reiterated that the Queen must go; he had speeded her on her way by paying her debts and giving her a pension. Knowing as he did that Sicily was far away and Bentinck had to be given great latitude, he seems never to have thought out until too late what the end of the policy he had inherited might be. With the peace he unhesitatingly subordinated it to the grand design of ensuring Austria's sway in Italy: he allowed Bentinck's successor William A'Court to go through tortuous manœuvres—aimed at deceiving the British Parliament—when Ferdinand, restored to Naples, in 1 8 1 6 overthrew both the new and the old Sicilian Constitutions and extended to the island the centralised Bonapartist system which ten years earlier the French had introduced in Naples. Other British onlookers showed little more serious grasp of the issues. British interference and the new Constitution were liked or disliked across party lines. The same generals and politicians who in 1 8 1 1 1 8 1 2 had thought, in Pellew's words, that 'the world may be saved' by Sicilian regeneration turned, when the Constitution failed, against the Sicilians as 'miserable wretches' fît only for martial law. Bentinck was almost alone in his half-developed vision of national independence under British tutelage. His own last hour in Sicily was bitter. After the campaign on the Italian mainland he returned to Palermo in June 1 8 1 4 knowing that his hopes for Italy had failed, that in Sicily he was about to be superseded by A'Court, and that the British Government were letting the protectorate and with it the 'system' drop. Since becoming dictator Bentinck had from time to time denounced Sicily as a 'rotten galley' to which he seemed 'chained . . . for the rest of my life', a 'hotbed of all that is bad'; yet the sight of Bonapartist despotism in action in Murat's Naples made him think better of 'my dear Constitution', which he still hoped to save.® Now he made a last attempt to do so by promoting a coalition between the remaining constitutionalists and the conservative Sicilian barons, who were at least anxious to keep their country independent. It failed. Disunity among the constitutionalists, together with fallacious hopes roused by the example of the Constitutional Charter which Louis X V I I I had just granted in France, led them to call King Ferdinand back to power. The King—anxious at this time to endear himself to the victorious Allies—professed unimpeachable constitutionalism 166

4 - S I C I L Y , 1811-1814 but hastened to rid himself of Bentinck's constitutionalist Ministers. The days of the 'system' were numbered. On this turn of events Bentinck put the best face he could. Among friends in the 'English party' he denounced 'our own littleness, folly, and mismanagement I was heartily disgusted and should be glad to go away.' Though he placed no trust in the King he tried to make out— to Castlereagh, perhaps to himself—that the King's return offered a 'golden bridge' for him to make his exit on; he made one or two last futile attempts to commit Ferdinand and A'Court to support for the Constitution. According to one report he was seen shortly before his departure wandering in dejection through the countryside near Palermo. On 16 July he sailed away. Bentinck never went back to Sicily. For a time he was 'disgusted' with a country that had missed golden chances 'for lack of courage, virtue, and patriotism'. Later he calmed down; in an 1821 Commons debate he tried to make the British Government face its responsibility for Sicilian independence; near the end of his life he expressed regard for some 'real good Siculi' he had known.10 His attempt at nationbuilding had failed. But the movement he had thrust forward to heights beyond its own unaided strength was not spent. After the Bourbons in 1816 had done away with Sicily's separate identity the island twice rose against the Naples government—in 1820 and 1848—with the Constitution at least the ostensible rallying cry. Sicily's many ills in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a good deal to do with the failure in 1 8 1 1 - 1 4 to solve her agrarian problems and attain a collective working consciousness of the State—to make a beginning of both 'civil liberty' and 'political liberty'. Bentinck had, in unfavourable conditions, at any rate seen the need. It was only superficially a paradox that in the end he could see the need fulfilled only through annexation to the British Empire. Liberal imperialism has a long ancestry.

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1811-1815

It is not too much presumption to predict that considering all the circumstances of Italy—its civilisation, instruction, and the military spirit infused into its people by . . . conscription—the national will must sooner or later triumph and at no very distant period.1 167

4 - S I C I L Y , 1811-1814 but hastened to rid himself of Bentinck's constitutionalist Ministers. The days of the 'system' were numbered. On this turn of events Bentinck put the best face he could. Among friends in the 'English party' he denounced 'our own littleness, folly, and mismanagement I was heartily disgusted and should be glad to go away.' Though he placed no trust in the King he tried to make out— to Castlereagh, perhaps to himself—that the King's return offered a 'golden bridge' for him to make his exit on; he made one or two last futile attempts to commit Ferdinand and A'Court to support for the Constitution. According to one report he was seen shortly before his departure wandering in dejection through the countryside near Palermo. On 16 July he sailed away. Bentinck never went back to Sicily. For a time he was 'disgusted' with a country that had missed golden chances 'for lack of courage, virtue, and patriotism'. Later he calmed down; in an 1821 Commons debate he tried to make the British Government face its responsibility for Sicilian independence; near the end of his life he expressed regard for some 'real good Siculi' he had known.10 His attempt at nationbuilding had failed. But the movement he had thrust forward to heights beyond its own unaided strength was not spent. After the Bourbons in 1816 had done away with Sicily's separate identity the island twice rose against the Naples government—in 1820 and 1848—with the Constitution at least the ostensible rallying cry. Sicily's many ills in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a good deal to do with the failure in 1 8 1 1 - 1 4 to solve her agrarian problems and attain a collective working consciousness of the State—to make a beginning of both 'civil liberty' and 'political liberty'. Bentinck had, in unfavourable conditions, at any rate seen the need. It was only superficially a paradox that in the end he could see the need fulfilled only through annexation to the British Empire. Liberal imperialism has a long ancestry.

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1811-1815

It is not too much presumption to predict that considering all the circumstances of Italy—its civilisation, instruction, and the military spirit infused into its people by . . . conscription—the national will must sooner or later triumph and at no very distant period.1 167

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Thus Bentinck at the close of the French wars. T h e 'national will' was in fact to 'triumph' 45 years later—some would say, looking not to political boundaries but to a well-established national consciousness, nearly a century and a half later. As a prophet of the Risorgimento Bentinck made a leap in the dark. National consciousness in countries long fragmented is a slow growth; one can easily argue that Italy in Napoleonic times was nowhere ready for nationhood. It had entered the French wars as a jigsaw of small states where only the educated minority thought in more than local terms. Napoleon had done something for national identity by uniting parts of the north and centre in a Kingdom of Italy, but had then spoilt it by annexing a large slice of the peninsula to France. On the other hand chance and new political alignments can themselves help to foster national consciousness. In 1 8 1 4 they seemed for a moment to favour 'the march of this young people' but then stopped it: what—Stendhal asked shortly afterwards—'will become of the sacred fire of genius and liberty?' 2 The question was not idle. In the closing years of the wars French domination, severe economic strain, and the drafting of young men to die on Russian or Spanish battlefields combined to rouse in many Italians a strong desire for independence; among many of the educated, for some kind of unity. By January 1814 even the beleaguered Napoleon was having to acknowledge the Italians' thirst for independence. Bentinck, then, was not daydreaming. About his Sicilian nationbuilding there might be ambiguities. King Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia, holed up on his island after the loss of Piedmont to the French, might shrewdly make out that the British 'consider me and all the rulers of Mediterranean islands as mere Indians and Nawabs . . .'. 3 But on the Italian mainland Bentinck had no imperial aims, no doubt about reconciling 'civil' with 'political' liberty. 'That great floating force', the Italian people, was valuable for its own sake: The national energy [he told Castlereagh in January 1814] could . . . have been roused, like Spain and Germany, in honour of national independence, and this great people, instead of being the instrument of the ambition of one military tyrant or another, or as formerly the despicable slaves of a set of miserable petty princes, would become a powerful barrier both against Austria and France, and the peace and happiness of the world would receive a great additional security . . . . 168

5 • THE ITALIAN ADVENTURE, 1811-1815 B u t — h e added—'I fear the hour is gone by'. It was. Just when many in 1 8 1 3 - 1 4 woke up to Italy's potential as a united country events came rapidly to a head; the chance was lost. What was ambiguous was the posture of the British Government. Wellesley in October 1 8 1 1 had authorised Bentinck to form the Italian Levy and promote the Archduke Francis's plans for a rising on the mainland. But among politicians of the first rank only he and Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War, took even a casual interest in the project; Bentinck was well aware from the start that 'all their attention was directed to Portugal. . .'. Wellington was and remained decidedly sceptical.4 In London the only wholehearted supporters of the Italian project were minor figures; the most notable was Bentinck's friend Sir Harry Bunbury, then Secretary at War. When in 1813 the Allies were about to engage Napoleon in the great Saxon battles that culminated in the 'Battle of Nations' Bunbury had to confess that among 'our rulers' 'there is no belief of any character or energy among the Italians'. Wellesley himself had, only two months after deciding to let Bentinck go ahead, partly gone back on it: Bentinck must not act in Italy without specific instructions from home. Castlereagh said nothing about Bentinck's wider version of Italian independence under a Constitution until he blotted his copybook by trying to carry it out. Castlereagh was willing enough in 1813 to say, as an inducement to Austria to join the 'war of national independence' in Germany, that 'the people are now the only barrier'. But national risings were to his mind mere expedients, useful until the Allies should take the field. By April 1 8 1 4 'a different and better order of things' had come about: 'it is not [he told Bentinck] insurrection we now want in Italy or elsewhere— we want disciplined force, under sovereigns we can trust'. His whole endeavour to establish Austrian hegemony in Italy as a barrier against France was wholly contrary to Bentinck's notion of united Italy as a barrier against both France and Austria. That Castlereagh wished him to co-operate with Austria Bentinck knew from the moment his troops landed at Leghorn in March 1814. He had previously known his Government to be indifferent; he now forged ahead knowing it to be hostile. Once again Bentinck gambled. Like his enemy Murat in his attempt to bring about Italian independence in 1815, Bentinck acted less from concrete evidence than from intuition and from a desperate sense of opportunity slipping away. But the months from the 'Battle of Nations' 169

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y to Napoleon's abdication, and again from Napoleon's return to Waterloo, were a time for gambling. A quarter-century of European upheaval was fast coming to an end; no one quite knew what might happen. In the first months of 1 8 1 4 Murat, newly allied with Austria, was secretly negotiating with Napoleon and with Napoleon's viceroy Eugène de Beauharnais at Milan; the Austrian generals deeply distrusted Murat; Bentinck distrusted both; none of them knew what the Italian people or the Napoleonic Army of Italy, still entrenched in Lombardy, might do. Even after the war had stopped in April 1814 the seemingly ultra-conservative political philosopher Joseph de Maistre was urging the King of Sardinia to employ former revolutionaries and make himself 'leader of the Italians'. 5 Nearly everyone gambled; only Austria won. Bentinck's gamble was conscious. After his return to Palermo from Spain in October 1 8 1 3 he could see the end of the war coming: it was 'necessary to do something to be beforehand if possible with the old sovereigns and to give the people an opportunity of asserting their rights, liberty and independence'. He experimented with a small-scale landing by the Italian Levy on the Tuscan coast; it failed for lack of popular response. In February 1 8 1 4 he was forced angrily to conclude an armistice with Murat as a by-blow of Murat's new Austrian alliance. Until the last moment he had thought of raising Naples by getting King Ferdinand to promise that he would not restore the old absolutist regime (a vain attempt, this), of letting Austria take Venetia while he proclaimed the independence of the rest of Italy under a free constitution, of himself acting alone in Corsica, then in Tuscany and Liguria. Now the armistice committed him to joint operations with Austria and Murat. He went to Leghorn without a plan but determined to keep faith and 'put ourselves in the way of Fortune'. Yet Bentinck's experience since 1 8 1 1 might have shaken his faith. What evidence he had from the mainland spoke for deep discontent; it spoke hardly at all for a movement of national revolt such as he had witnessed in Spain. He had in fact very little evidence of any kind. Bentinck's hopes fastened on North and Central Italy—the highly civilised and strategically important regions he had known as a young man. Whether the Kingdom of Naples might join a united Italy seems to have been in his mind an open question; it was anyhow secondary. The trouble was that, while communications with Naples were easy enough—there was a fairly steady though inconclusive traffic of spies and agents—com170

5 • THE ITALIAN ADVENTURE, 1811-1815 munications with the North and Centre were extraordinarily difficult. ' I am taught to believe,' one of Bentinck's agents complained in 1812, 'that there is no more communication with Italy than with China.' Worse still, the Archduke Francis's plan for a rising in the North had to be concerted with a British agent in Vienna: with both shores of the Adriatic in French hands letters between Vienna and Palermo had to go through European Turkey and Malta, taking from two to five months each way. French espionage in Vienna and the plague in Malta further disrupted communications: agents who in 1 8 1 1 had been supposed to go and establish links with Italian patriots in North and Central Italy had still not managed to set foot there eighteen months later. A letter sent to Northern Italy to test the credibility of Alessandro Turri—the alleged emissary of the Italian 'party of unity and independence'—brought a cryptic reply after fifteen months. Nor were the means at Bentinck's disposal promising. The handful of British agents who worked with the Archduke Francis, Nugent, and La Tour were nearly all Irish—not a recommendation in English eyes even if one of them, Lucius Concannon, had not been decidedly shady. Concannon and a few Italian or Austrian agents managed to bring information from mainland Italy to Palermo. Concannon's report that the cry of religion, peace, and a British alliance 'would not leave one Frenchman alive in three weeks' served Bentinck in June 1812 to justify his momentary decision to send his army to Italy rather than to Catalonia. Other agents reported that nobles in Tuscany and Venice were prepared to raise insurrections if the British landed. As for Alessandro Turri, the news he had brought in 1811 of a large Italian party ready to rise for independence and unity had helped to persuade Wellesley; soon afterwards, however, he was partly discredited when Wellesley interrogated him in London and concluded that the many high connections he claimed were almost certainly spurious. What neither Wellesley nor Bentinck ever knew was that the real reason for Turri's leaving Italy had been his elopement with a young baroness whom he passed off" as his wife. Turri went back to Palermo; there Bentinck took him on to write propaganda articles—one of them described the Sicilian Constitution as a risorgimento, a raising up of the whole people to a better condition of life. But nothing ever came of his alleged 'party of unity and independence'. All these agents were probably sincere—even Turri, who had at least been in touch with a high liberal Freemason in the Napoleonic administration. Some of the agents risked their lives. But Bentinck had 171

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not the technical or military means to act on their information. On going to Sicily for the second time in December 1 8 1 1 , he had found little evidence that Italy was ripe for revolt; perhaps impulsively, he offered to use his troops for a diversion in Catalonia. This—though he soon regretted it—tied down his army in Spain until the autumn of 1813. The agents' information was anyhow fragmentary and unsatisfactory. Nor is there any positive evidence that Bentinck was in touch with the secret societies on the mainland—either with the Carbonari in the Kingdom of Naples or with other societies in the North and Centre.* It is difficult not to conclude that Bentinck went to the mainland in March 1814 without any effective plan or organisation, and that Italy, drained by high taxes, conscription, and Napoleon's Continental Blockade, discontented but weary, offered nothing like a revolutionary situation. Bentinck himself at times acknowledged this: The trouble [he wrote to the Archduke Francis in October 1812] is that Italy is too much humbled by the French police. She makes no show of that decision without which her cause will never greatly interest the English public. They are discontented no doubt, and might grow powerful against the French. But they are passive. I receive no proposals from Italy—a circumstance that marks neither a very painful anxiety about their sufferings nor the character of greatness of soul shown by the Spaniards. They are the complaints of slaves rather than the murmurs of a magnanimous people who want to conquer or die for liberty and independence.6 As was his way, however, Bentinck regained his buoyancy in spite of disappointments. He even came to accept at least part of Turri's * The question of alleged British connections with the secret societies is discussed at length in 'Progetto italiano', 383-90. It turns largely on how far one is to believe allegations made in the Restoration period. In this work I can only repeat that, while there may have been such connections, the evidence is far from establishing them. The North Italian society with which Bentinck was most persistently linked by informers and by police interrogation of members in the Restoration period was the Gueliia, a moderate constitutionalist group. Rath, The Provisional Austrian Regime, 234-7, writes, controverting my conclusions in 'Progetto italiano': 'there is so much evidence connecting the Guelfs with the British that it is quite likely that the British played at least some kind of role in bringing the society to Italy.' In evidence concerning secret societies, multiplicity is no substitute for trustworthiness. The British may have 'played some kind of role'; but it is not proved, or even 'quite likely'.

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assertions about the 'party of independence and unity,' which, like Wellesley, he had previously doubted. He sent his secretary Frederick Lamb home in April 1813 'to make a violent attack about Italy'.7 By then national resurgence in Russia and Germany gave some grounds for hoping that Italy might follow suit. It is even conceivable that Bentinck was in some sense right—that a strong British descent on Italy (never possible while Britain was fully committed in the Iberian Peninsula) might have rallied support. As it was, the question was academic. Lamb's 'attack' got nowhere. 'In Italy,' he warned Bentinck in March 1814, 'your views have never been at all adopted by the British Government, nor our evidence held to be worth anything. . . . Discard the fancy which I see you still have that the Italian game may be thrown into your hands, it never will, and so you may e'en content yourself.' Bentinck did not content himself. By the time his army landed at Leghorn the 'game' was almost over. Bentinck himself travelled overland from Naples with a small party; they stopped in Rome for one day, 'by all acknowledged to be almost the most interesting we ever spent in our lives':8 a good start, this, for men classically educated who were setting out to restore Italy's lost greatness. They then went on to Leghorn. On 14 March Bentinck's proclamation to the Italians went out. Just over a month later the war in Lombardy came to an end. The armistice came about more by good luck—and through the collapse of Napoleon's power in France—than through good management by the Allies in Italy. Bentinck's army spent the month marching, at times fighting, up the coast from Leghorn to Genoa. In the northern plain Murat's army did suspiciously little, while the Austrians under Bentinck's old comrade-in-arms from the 1799-1801 campaign, Bellegarde, had an indifferent time of it. Bentinck himself spent almost the whole month in a series of stormy negotiations with Murat and Bellegarde at their headquarters in the North. Ostensibly these were about who should occupy Tuscany. Murat was in possession; he needed it to cover his line of communication; in fact—it was part of his endlessly hesitant gamble—he hoped to annex it and a good deal more. Bentinck had previously got an Austrian representative in Naples to agree that the British should have a Tuscan base; he claimed this was essential to the safety and subsistence of his troops, and seems to have been genuinely anxious on the point.' At bottom, however, what was going on was a test of strength between Bentinck and Murat, each the putative liberator of Italy. This

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II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y reached a climax on 25 March when Bentinck threatened to re-embark and take his army away if he was not given the Tuscan base: Bellegarde would have to choose between British and Neapolitan help. In effect this was an attempt to throw Murat out of the coalition altogether and to treat him as what Bentinck—mindful of his secret communications with the French—said he was, an enemy. Bentinck had not meant to re-embark; in the end he went back to the coast and allowed others to patch up an agreement to disagree. Some British troops co-operated with the Austrians, but none with Murat. 1 0 If one looks upon Bentinck merely as a British representative his acts at this time must seem absurd. The Prime Minister, Liverpool, indeed soon came to think him 'mad'. He had already got, and kept getting, a series of increasingly stiff instructions from Castlereagh; the burden of all of them was the same—he was to co-operate with Austria and Murat. As it turned out, Bentinck's stiff-necked attitude at this time—above all his steady refusal to sign a treaty with Murat as Austria had or to recognise Murat's right to Naples— became highly convenient to Castlereagh when, soon afterwards, he too began to see Murat as a 'worthless dog', and to reverse Britain's Neapolitan policy. That, however, is not the point. Bentinck by March 1814 was acting as a British representative only in the widest sense: he believed he was serving Britain's true interests. In Sicily he had not overstepped the bounds of his instructions—wide as those were. On the Italian mainland he broke them outright more than once. He sacrificed everything—career included—to Italian independence. It was a Wellesleyan posture still; in the carrying out it could have done with some of the distance from the home Government which Wellesley had enjoyed at Calcutta. It could also have done with more time. Bentinck had neither. Why did he attack Murat head on? On the face of it both of them wanted the same thing. Murat's Ministers, later Murat himself, hinted that he and Bentinck ought to unite to keep out both French and Austrian influence. Young James Graham, Bentinck's first emissary to Murat during the armistice negotiations, thought Bentinck ought to 'sound him on the question of an Italian kingdom under one head with a free constitution'. 11 Some of Murat's officers afterwards lamented that Bentinck, though honourable and liberal, was 'short-sighted', a prey to 'political and personal prejudices, partly engendered by an aristocratic education and a twenty years' war'. 1 2 Bentinck's immediate reason was that Murat was 'the most per-

*74

5 • THE ITALIAN ADVENTURE, 1811-1815 fidious of Gauls', utterly untrustworthy and bent on self-aggrandisement. This was true enough in the sense that Murat, a deeply divided man in an extremely tricky position, was all along playing (and was known to be playing) a double game in the hope of keeping his kingdom and enlarging it as far as he could: in such a situation it is impossible to say how far Bentinck's 'mismanagement' (as Castlereagh thought) increased 'all the natural dangers of Murat's rascality . . .'. But Bentinck's real motive seems to have been Murat's identification with Bonapartist despotism. Murat's 'whole life had been crime'; he had 'been the intimate and active partner of all Bonaparte's wickedness.. .'. I 3 At Madrid after the 2 May 1808 insurrection against the French Murat had had several hundred people shot in cold blood; Bentinck had arrived four months later when memories were fresh. 14 In Italy Bentinck was prepared to accept former Bonapartist officials and to see the nation-building potential of a Bonapartist measure like conscription. He was not prepared to accept Murat. When he went to Naples to sign the armistice he found that there were Frenchmen everywhere: 'the whole system is French and everything... is mont6 according to the Bonaparte policy. I quite fancied myself in a part of France.' That was enough to make alliance with Murat a 'monstrous connection'. 15 Bentinck rejected Murat at bottom because he had for twenty years been a member of the war party and a disciple of Burke. Murat for his part was torn between his own Bonapartist habits of mind and the need to meet the new liberal-constitutional demands that were being pressed on him. The two men could never find a meeting point. This inner contradiction in Bentinck between his desire for Italian unity and independence, and his horror of the 'despot' who might conceivably bring it about, became fully plain during the Hundred Days, when Murat made his last throw and tried to raise Italy on Napoleon's side under the banner of independence. Bentinck—still in Italy as Commander-in-Chief—believed almost up to the last moment that Murat would succeed: 'every Italian would join him'. He simultaneously urged that 'Murat should be destroyedThe Italians did not join him; the Austrians destroyed him. In April-May 1814 Bentinck's own endeavour was a race against time and the Allied Governments. In the last days of war and the first confused weeks of peace he restored the Genoese Republic; he encouraged the Milanese, who had rebelled against the Viceroy Eugene's Government and hoped to set up an Italian Kingdom, perhaps under

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the Archduke Francis; he sent troops to Corsica on what proved to be an abortive repetition of a British venture there twenty years earlier, when Corsica had briefly chosen George I I I for her king; he wished success to some of the leading Neapolitan generals when they secretly approached him and told him they hoped to force a constitution on Murat. But he was not long to be allowed a free hand. Genoa surrendered to Bentinck on 18 April, two days after fighting had stopped in Lombardy, but before the news was known. A week later Bentinck issued a proclamation restoring the Genoese Republic. He knew, from specific instructions of Castlereagh's, that he was not to restore any of the old sovereigns other than those of Tuscany and Piedmont. In fact he suspected that the British Government meant to hand over Genoa to the absolutist King of Sardinia—'what an animal to set up as the restorer of the lost rights and happiness of mankind'. 16 Bentinck judged, correctly, that 'the union with Piedmont as supposed likely was most of all offensive to the Genoese'; when it was later imposed as part of the peace settlement it left Genoa a continual hotbed of republican and conspiratorial activity. After talking to the leading Genoese Bentinck chose not to make the provisional government subject to the decision of the A l l i e s : ' . . . the most popular would be to make an arrangement as definitive as possible which it would be the more difficult for the Allies to upset. . . . I thought it politic for Great Britain, that is, for her interests and influence, that the wishes of the people should receive her consideration; while it was always in the hands of the Allies to make whatever arrangement they pleased.' In other words, Bentinck hoped, Wellesley fashion, to face the Allies with an accomplished fact which they would not be able to undo. In Milan Bentinck acted at first more cautiously. T h e Regency which took power on 20 April sent to him to say that they wanted independence under a constitution akin to the English. But the war was now over. 'Their act came too late', Bentinck replied; '. . . they could do nothing now . . . they must depend upon the Allies . . . it was a pity they had not begun this before when the British co-operation could have been given and the fate of Italy decided . . .'. He none the less gave them 'countenance' by sending to Milan his second-in-command; he went there himself on 14 May. His coming—an Austrian observer noted—was awaited 'like that of the Messiah who is to establish the Kingdom of God in Italy'. 1 7 By then the Austrians were in control; news had come from Allied headquarters in Paris that LombardyVenetia was to be regarded as an Austrian conquest; there would be no 176

5 • THE ITALIAN ADVENTURE, 1811-1815 independent kingdom under the Archduke Francis or another, no constitution. The presence of a few British uniforms still roused great hopes; Bentinck fed these hopes by suggesting to the Milanese leaders that renewed pressure on Castlereagh might yet work. By then he was hoping for something to turn up. With Napoleon poised on Elba the Italians might yet turn to him in revolt against Austrian hegemony: 'the effect [he told Castlereagh] will only be delayed, and the subsequent overthrow of all the governments in Italy and possibly another general war'. Bentinck was in a sense right; the Italians turned to another Napoleon and overthrew their governments —in 1859. 1 8 Bentinck's last throw came during the emergency of the Hundred Days. He tried to frighten the restored but unreconstructed King of Sardinia—who had asked his advice on the defence of Piedmont— into promising a constitution and meanwhile setting up a responsible government. The Italians, he said, would welcome Napoleon and rise against Austria 'like another Spain'; the Spanish example was, in Bentinck's mind, now turned upside down. The Sardinian Government was discredited: 'the thinking part of the people, who partake with all other Italians in the desire of more liberal institutions, have seen with disappointment the recurrence of ancient prejudices and view with despair the accomplishment of their hopes from the present order of things. . . . T h e Army from the same improvident system is perfectly unfit for war.' But the promise of a constitution would rally Piedmont and even Genoa; it might lead to (what Bentinck was privately urging on the British Government) a new Italian Kingdom centred on Piedmont and uniting most of the north. This was too much for the Sardinian Government. It was also too much for the British Government. Bentinck was summarily recalled from his command while the war was still going on. For the second time he was in disgrace. He thought at first of begging his government not to 'inflict so deep a wound upon the character of a man . . .\ 1 9 In the end he contented himself with a defence, in part sophistical, of all his acts since he had first gone to Palermo in 1 8 1 1 . Privately he was unrepentant. Like Cassandra [he had written shortly before Napoleon's return] I preached in vain. I always thought that Italy alone could have decided the war. . . . I was very much gratified in hearing the other day that Bonaparte himself had said . . . that the British 177

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y Government had never seemed to know its own importance in Italy. He added that we were held in the greatest veneration. T r u e it is that there is no part of the world where the British name is equally respected. It is love and admiration without alloy. They look upon us as the natural friends of independence . . . who from policy and feeling cannot but be always inclined to protect them from internal and external oppression . . . it grieves me to the heart to see our reputation and interest so unnecessarily thrown away. . . . It seems as if we were anxious and in a hurry, as if it was entirely our own act to sacrifice and disregard all national feeling and supposed national rights. . . . That was the end of Bentinck's active share in the Italian nationalist movement. He spent much time in Italy in 1 8 1 5 - 2 2 but—perhaps out of prudence—mingled chiefly with other foreign visitors. T o the restored governments he was deeply suspect; King Ferdinand, just restored to Naples, in September 1815 forbade him to land—an incident over which Bentinck raised a considerable fuss. 20 But he was always welcome in Rome: he had made a friend of the Pope by helping him and lending him money in 1814 at a time when Pius V I I was making his way back to Rome with 'literally . . . four shirts only'. 21 He kept up a friendly correspondence with Sallier de la Tour, who had commanded the Italian Levy and was now a moderate Minister of the King of Sardinia; he did his best to help the former officers of the Levy as some of them tried to eke out a peacetime existence on small pensions, emigrated to South America, or ended up penniless in London hotels. Even at Genoa Bentinck remained on good terms with some of the leading nobles.22 There is a pleasant but unsupported story that when Mazzini was banished from Genoa one of these nobles got Bentinck—then Governor-General—to offer him a job in India such as would send him back to Italy 'rich as a nabob'. Mazzini is supposed to have replied: ' I seek not a fortune but a fatherland.' 23 What Bentinck had sensed in his pursuit of an Italian nation was real; but it was evanescent. At the start of the Hundred Days even the Austrian commander in Milan thought a French invasion would rally all men able to bear arms either to France or to Italian independence.24 Some national feeling there was; but, like many people then and later in the Risorgimento years, Bentinck mistook the aspirations of an active minority for a deeply rooted national movement. Another, more cautious British envoy thought an Italian kingdom, 'seconded by the 178

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most active and able part of the Italians, might for the moment be established, but I doubt its being popular with the mass of the people; its after-details would encounter the greatest difficulties'.25 Bentinck's own aspirations were imprecise. At one time and another he was prepared to accommodate either Austria or Piedmont for the sake of winning some kind of Italian kingdom in North-Central Italy. He had grasped the central issue of nationhood accompanied by 'political liberty'. The rest could be left to the Italians themselves: if the nation managed to drive out the French, 'the power which could accomplish so vast an undertaking would not submit to be dictated to upon subjects so important to their interests'. His notion of united constitutional Italy as a bulwark against both France and Austria might seem a fantasy when measured against his own Government's set purpose. But it had been put forward in 1804 by the Tsar's mentor Czartoryski, a Pole well placed to understand national feeling. We need not suppose a direct link between him and Bentinck.* Such notions were in the air. Men like these were trying to find a moderate, libertarian, and national solution to the European crisis of the revolutionary and Napoleonic years; they had got little beyond the stage of general ideas. These failed; in the settlement of the lands bordering on France the more precise ideas of Pitt, shaped by the habits of mind of a prenationalist Europe, prevailed. Bentinck had anyhow forged some way ahead of his Italian followers. The men who served in his Italian Levy, or who became his friends at Genoa, belonged to the landed and military classes. It was Bentinck who in 1811 persuaded Sallier de La Tour that 'the creation of one Italy is, and will always remain the true great idea'. Yet in 1814 La Tour happily went back to serving the Sardinian monarchy; at most he forwarded the traditional dynastic policy of expansion into Lombardy. La Tour's second-in-command Carlo Catinelli, another partisan of Italian unity who had taken charge of Bentinck's experimental raid on the Tuscan coast in 1813, four years later was back in his native Gorizia and, in no polemical vein, writing 'we Austrians . . .'. Other officers went into the Piedmontese Army and supported the monarchy against the 1821 revolt. A Venetian journalist who from Malta had issued appeals for Italian unity was more intimately concerned with the rebirth of the Venetian Republic. Bentinck's Genoese friends saw • Such a link was however possible in the person of Lord Granville Leveson Gower, Ambassador to Russia in 1804-5 a n d in close touch with Czartoryski; he was a friend of Bentinck and married Bentinck's cousin.

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II • EMPIRE A N D N A T I O N A L I T Y their cause as 'the cause of Italy'—by which they meant in the first place that anything was preferable to incorporation with Piedmont. In all these men the desire for a united Italy was genuine; but it was amorphous, much less intimately and clearly felt than their allegiance to the small State they had grown up in. It was also a product of the war years, when men were displaced and anything might happen. With the peace they slipped back. Bentinck, then, had overrated the nationalist feeling even of his immediate supporters. Yet such errors are common in the history of nationalism. Most nationalist movements, those of Italy and India included, have been the work of active minorities which over the years have changed the consciousness of their fellow-countrymen—if not enough to override old local, caste, or religious allegiances, anyhow enough to win acquiescence in nationhood. Bentinck was always an activist. There was in him much of the pioneer entrepreneur. The pioneer is the man who takes a leap in the dark. In Italy Bentinck took one such leap.

6 - ' N A T I O N A L I T Y ' FOR I N D I A , 1828-1839 Bentinck's predecessors in the Supreme Government—an admirer wrote after his return home in 1835—had been mostly 'occupied in acquiring, in consolidating, and in adjusting the English dominion in India. But it rested with your Lordship first to introduce nationality (if that word suffices) in the system of policy advocated as most fitting for its future prosperity, and for the times.' 1 Bentinck as Governor-General was indeed concerned with urging India on to 'nationality'. He was concerned besides with maintaining and enhancing Britain's Indian Empire, united and paramount. T o us these aims may at first glance seem contradictory. Yet to Bentinck—and to some of his contemporaries, both Indian and British—they seemed rather to be twin aspects of a single endeavour. T o see why this should have been so is to understand something of the development of British rule before the Mutiny, of the beginnings of Indian national consciousness, and of the inner contradictions that worked beneath the surface of both. Bentinck, just because he was not an intellectual but a man who presided over a time of significant change 180

II • EMPIRE A N D N A T I O N A L I T Y their cause as 'the cause of Italy'—by which they meant in the first place that anything was preferable to incorporation with Piedmont. In all these men the desire for a united Italy was genuine; but it was amorphous, much less intimately and clearly felt than their allegiance to the small State they had grown up in. It was also a product of the war years, when men were displaced and anything might happen. With the peace they slipped back. Bentinck, then, had overrated the nationalist feeling even of his immediate supporters. Yet such errors are common in the history of nationalism. Most nationalist movements, those of Italy and India included, have been the work of active minorities which over the years have changed the consciousness of their fellow-countrymen—if not enough to override old local, caste, or religious allegiances, anyhow enough to win acquiescence in nationhood. Bentinck was always an activist. There was in him much of the pioneer entrepreneur. The pioneer is the man who takes a leap in the dark. In Italy Bentinck took one such leap.

6 - ' N A T I O N A L I T Y ' FOR I N D I A , 1828-1839 Bentinck's predecessors in the Supreme Government—an admirer wrote after his return home in 1835—had been mostly 'occupied in acquiring, in consolidating, and in adjusting the English dominion in India. But it rested with your Lordship first to introduce nationality (if that word suffices) in the system of policy advocated as most fitting for its future prosperity, and for the times.' 1 Bentinck as Governor-General was indeed concerned with urging India on to 'nationality'. He was concerned besides with maintaining and enhancing Britain's Indian Empire, united and paramount. T o us these aims may at first glance seem contradictory. Yet to Bentinck—and to some of his contemporaries, both Indian and British—they seemed rather to be twin aspects of a single endeavour. T o see why this should have been so is to understand something of the development of British rule before the Mutiny, of the beginnings of Indian national consciousness, and of the inner contradictions that worked beneath the surface of both. Bentinck, just because he was not an intellectual but a man who presided over a time of significant change 180

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in India and who worked hard to press change forward, makes a good touchstone. Indian history after the Mutiny has accustomed us to thinking, on the one hand of British rule as seemingly entrenched, on the other of nascent Indian nationalism as rooted at least in part in an appeal to cultural, ethnic, or religious tradition, revivified or even reinvented to meet new needs. Neither assumption necessarily holds true for the 1830s. British rule could still seem temporary; cultural revivalism was only beginning to come to the forefront of consciousness. Even the conflicts which historians used to point out in these years—among Indians between modernisers and orthodox, among British rulers between Westernisers and Orientalists, or between expansionists and non-interventionists—are now seen to have been far from clear-cut; dividing lines are blurred, or else run where we might least expect them.2 In studying a crucial figure like Bentinck we need to look at empire and nationality as they showed in the daily currency of thought and action. Just as the early Italian national consciousness which Bentinck helped to shape looks, close up, oddly uncertain, so Indian empire and nationality did not in his day mean what they later came to mean. At Madras Bentinck had followed Wellesley in believing that British rule, despotic in mode, working wholly through European superior agency, in its dealings with the Indian States frankly imperial, would make for India's 'happiness'. British institutions, above all the rule of law, would 'civilise' Indian society without changing its inner structure. Only at the end of his stay had the shock of Vellore led him to see that the British were after all 'strangers in the land'. Since then his Sicilian venture had borne indirectly on his Indian experience, if only by suggesting that to interfere in the workings of a dependent State without in the last resort being able to annex it was to court failure. Italy, especially Northern Italy, had tempted him to try for her national resurgence through both 'political' and 'civil liberty', but had returned an answer at best ambiguous. When Bentinck reached Calcutta in July 1828 he had been out of India for 21 years. Much had changed. Since the final defeat of the Marathas in 1818 British power was unchallenged. Bentinck started from the premise that 'all India now virtually composes one empire'.3 The company was paramount; but for minor troubles here and there —irritants rather than threats—the subcontinent was at peace. The vision of 'one empire' was not particularly original, though the East 181

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y India Company's habits of mind and administrative arrangements by no means as yet embodied it; it was shared at the Board of Control by Ellenborough, for whom Britain's 'great moral duty . . . to the people of India' was not only to enrich them but to establish a permanent government, perhaps directly under the Crown, working in the true interests of both countries.4 What was new in Bentinck's eyes was the opportunity and duty which a prospect of unbroken peace held out of working a fundamental reform. Hence the domestic metaphors he took over from late eighteenth-century usage and sharpened for his own purposes: India was 'a great estate' which he as 'chief agent' must improve; it was 'a large house' to be set in order. 5 T o his mind the 'large house' was, and yet was not, secure. He never doubted that 'British rule is more firmly fixed . . . than that of any sovereign from the time of the first Mahommedan invasion . . .'. T h e one real threat to it lay in its dependence on native troops who would prove weak in the face of external attack, and who might one day mutiny. 6 More fundamentally, the British, though supreme, were still 'strangers in the land'. They could expect in an emergency no cooperation from the people: they were 'the objects of dislike to the bulk of those classes' who had influence, courage, and vigour. Company officials had little of 'the knowledge necessary [to] good government' or of 'that community of sentiments and purpose' with the people in the absence of which there could anyhow be no good government. Hence British rule was bad, ineffective, and unpopular. 7 From this opinion, recorded less than a year after his arrival, Bentinck never shifted. In this too he was not original. His deputy and successor Metcalfe was gloomier still. He, like some other officials throughout the previous half-century, saw the rule of a handful of British over the Indian deep as a paradox which must have an end—perhaps soon. Macaulay, when he came in 1834, concluded that 'we are strangers'; 'a serious check in any part of India would raise half the country against us'. Holt Mackenzie, the leading intellectual among civil servants, admitted that 'we still know . . . little or nothing of the great body of the people . . . the moral mass of India is, to almost all of us, an absolute blank . . .'. Jacquemont thought the socially aloof British 'completely alien from the people they rule'. Bentinck's military secretary wondered why the Russians in their empire seemed to have 'a magic wand whose touch makes everything Russian' whereas the British in India were still 182

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strangers after a hundred years. Another experienced officer, William Sleeman, thought that amid the many relics of past empires there was no more to show for British rule—security apart—than if India had been 'governed by police officers and tax-gatherers from the Sandwich Islands . . .'. H. H. Wilson, the great Orientalist, thought the rule of foreigners lacking in 'identity of interests or reciprocity of feeling' with Indians 'unnatural', its faults 'inherent and irremediable'.8 Such thoughts, before the Mutiny made them unthinkable, were common. Vellore—less overwhelmingly traumatic than 1857—had enabled Bentinck to share a sense of isolation and lack of ultimate grasp which to some of his shrewdest contemporaries needed no proof. What then was the conclusion? 'All British subjects,' a Calcutta Anglo-Indian wrote in 1829, 'live here by sufferance.... A legitimate claim to the sovereignty of a single foot of soil cannot be established except on the ground of good government.' If the British did not make 'the happiness and improvement of the people' their 'first and last objects' they had no right to rule.9 This was a common opinion. It also became something of a cliché that (as Charles Trevelyan, echoed by others, was to say) Bentinck had been the first Governor-General to '[place] our dominion in India on its proper foundation, in the recognition of the great principle that India is to be governed for the benefit of the Indians . . .'; though (Trevelyan added) 'the laws of God are so happily adjusted that, in benefiting the natives, we also benefit ourselves . . .'. I0 Bentinck, however, did no more than steadily make explicit an aim held by some of the more thoughtful Anglo-Indians even before his arrival. It was the old aim of 'founding British greatness on Indian happiness', already current in his early years at Madras, but now more generally held, more widely discussed both in Britain and in India, above all transformed and made more dynamic through changes in both countries. It had not struck Burke that India was a civilisation of less worth than Europe. Bentinck at Madras had seen it as 'degraded' almost solely by its inheritance of political oppression. By the late 1820s, however, belief in Indian 'degradation' had deepened, and with it the urgent need which reformers felt to make it good. For this there were many and complex reasons, not to be summed up in the spread of Evangelical and Utilitarian ideas, though these mattered. There was the securing of India as 'one empire', which invited men to reflect on the conditions in which that empire's subjects

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II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y lived and were governed. There was the pressure from British merchants to end what was left of the company's monopoly. There was the failure of India's traditional exports and the growing invasion of her home market by Lancashire textiles. There was the evident success of Europe, of Britain in particular—far more obvious in 1830 than in 1800,—in using the resources of science and technology to master the environment and to make it yield steadily greater wealth, bringing with it a growing belief in men's capacity to better their institutions, their welfare, their understanding, and their freedom of action. On all these grounds critics could find Indian society, and the company's rule over it, wanting; often they went on confidently to press remedies. Analysis and cure varied with the observer. T o a hot Evangelical like Trevelyan, as to the missionaries, India's 'degradation' lay in her lack of Christian enlightenment; a contemporary who denounced British neglect of Indians' 'happiness' complained that 'we indulge the Hindu in the free and unrestrained exercise of his absurd customs and religion'. 11 For Trevelyan belief in the Christianisation of India as the remedy intertwined with belief in 'improvement': on the one hand Christianisation, together with English education, would 'subserve the designs of Providence' throughout Asia; on the other hand railways (he was to say later) by breaking down caste barriers would prove 'the greatest missionary of all'. 12 At the other extreme a thorough traditionalist in matters of Indian government and social policy like Sir John Malcolm, the Governor of Bombay, worked as hard as anybody to give India the benefit of steam navigation. T o a Liberal Free Trader India's 'moral degradation' was a matter not of 'natural depravity' or ineradicable custom—Indians were 'capable of every virtue, and of every acquirement that can adorn the human mind'—but of oppression, above all of a crushing tax burden that stood in the way of improvement: remove the obstacle and Indians would progress as fast as 'the most civilised and enlightened nations'. 13 On the Indian side the most vocal—though not the most representative—groups at Calcutta responded to these urgings. The great Hindu reformer Rammohan Roy and his friends on the one hand, the Westernised students of the new Hindu College on the other, both admitted that Indians were 'degraded' in that as officials they were unavoidably corrupt. 14 They looked for a remedy to institutional and educational reforms inspired by the example of Europe, as well as, more generally, either to a 'pure' version of Hinduism or to a rejection 184

6 • 'NATIONALITY' FOR INDIA, 1828-1839 of it. They were joined in 1828 by most of the rich Indians of Calcutta in a protest against the unparalleled 'state of political degradation' which allowed them only a minimal place in the jury system; the protest widened into an argument for giving Indians the 'employments of trust, dignity, and emoluments' from which they were shut out—an argument with which some of the most responsible among the British at home and in India were in sympathy. 15 The remedies canvassed for Indian 'degradation' all had one thing in common; they were to be drawn from the example—institutional, political, scientific—of Europe. It did not follow that those who looked to that example wholly dismissed the value of Indian civilisation—as Macaulay was to do when in his 1835 Minute on Education he blinded himself (and many later historians) with his own courtroom rhetoric. But, in the quarter-century since Bentinck had looked to 'civil liberty' as Britain's necessary gift to India, the felt relationship between Europe and India had become more dynamic: the divergence between them seemed greater, the need to make it up more pressing. At the same time, thanks both to the spring tide of liberalism in Europe and to the inner needs of Indian government, 'political liberty'—some measure of Indian self-rule—was now a more urgent question. Bentinck reached Calcutta at a time when all these issues were a matter for lively debate both there and, because of the coming need to renew the company's Charter, at home. He came as a man pledged to retrenchment—the iron frame within which his government had to work throughout. His contribution was not so much an original analysis or policy as a steady lead given to men many of whose aims he shared. He tried to carry forward the redemption of Indian society through European example, not indiscriminately but with fewer inhibitions than his predecessors. In two ways his share in the endeavour was notable. First, unlike any previous Governor-General he came forward selfconsciously as an 'improver' who had shared in British agricultural and industrial enterprise and who now wished to see India developed by the only means he thought adequate—European capital and skill. A kind of decalogue of India's ills which he drew up early in his governor-generalship opened, not by chance: 'Is it not true that the great body of the people is wretchedly poor and ignorant?' 16 The attempt to do something about it ran through his rule. Secondly, Bentinck—thanks in part to his experience in Sicily and Italy—developed a vision of India's future for which 'nationality' is

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II • EMPIRE A N D N A T I O N A L I T Y probably the best term, though in a sense which for him did not conflict with British rule but enhanced it. 'Nationality' meant that India should be united, great, imperial, rich, enlightened, perhaps one day self-determining. The vision was embodied in a series of attempts some of which came to nothing and all of which, it can be argued, f e l l — because of the fetters and contradictions of British rule within which Bentinck was working—well short of the goal. Bentinck sought to shift the capital of British India to a position in the North which he saw as imperial. He wished British entrepreneurs to settle in India, for the sake both of development and of'nationality'. He tried to maintain British paramountcy in the subcontinent, found himself extending it, yet all the while tried to avoid interfering closely in the affairs of the States. He grew steadily more critical of the company's rule, in particular of its civil service, and steadily more eager to man the higher reaches of administration with natives of the country— who might in future be British as well as Eurasian and Indian. At the same time he tried to set a new tone of equality in dealings between Indians and British. In an attempt to give Indians 'the blessings of the European condition' he decided that official patronage should go only to education carried on in English and the vernaculars rather than in the classical Indian languages; English became the medium of administration; he tackled head on one Hindu custom by abolishing sati [suttee], though he was notably cautious about others and how far he believed in the Christianisation of India remains a puzzle. He sought both to unite the Indian Army and to increase its European element. He launched a new revenue settlement and a reformed judicial administration in what he saw as the proper seat of empire, the Gangetic plain. He ceaselessly pursued 'improvement' in agriculture, in manufacture, in communications, and worked even beyond the end of his official career for what by then seemed to him the 'great engine' of Indian redemption, steam navigation. Some of these attempts are dealt with in Parts III to V. We are here concerned with those ventures which most clearly embody a vision of 'nationality', however unsuccessful: the proposed shift of capital; European settlement; increasing reliance on 'native agency'; social and educational reform; and subcontinental policy. Bentinck, through the seven years of his government, became both steadily gloomier about the effects of British rule and more deeply convinced that what India needed to redeem her from 'degradation' were 'the blessings of the European condition'. This was only superficially a 186

6 • 'NATIONALITY' FOR INDIA, 1828-1839 paradox. The evils in British rule which he denounced were largely the evils which European Liberals had denounced in Europe—in a word, privilege. Ultra-Toryism [Bentinck wrote fifteen months after his arrival] prevails here in its purest state, and is professed by the great majority of the company's servants, who, like all the old governments of Europe, like things as they are, and fear any poaching upon their monopoly of places and government. The sooner however that some old-fashioned principles are thrown overboard the better . . In his private letters, even in his official papers, the same key words recurred to the point of weariness: 'exclusion', 'monopoly', 'patronage'. Exclusion by the company of European entrepreneurs; civil servants' monopoly of jobs and money at the expense of Indians and of the country's improvement; rule of patronage that made for incompetence, inefficiency, and insubordination: these were the enemy. The GovernorGeneral who looked for some kind of Indian 'nationality' was the European Liberal who had supported Catholic Emancipation and Economical Reform, who was to welcome wholeheartedly the 1832 Reform Act, and who had tried to unite Italy against 'the old governments'. He himself saw the parallel: now and then, in pressing the reforms he thought essential, he warned a home Government fresh from the Reform Bill struggle against the danger of delaying until 'irresistible necessity' compelled. 18 Bentinck's gloom about European rule as it was and his confidence in it as it might become were thus complementary rather than contradictory. Both deepened as time went on. In part this was a move from reticence to frankness: in the latter half of his government, with sympathetic Whig Ministers at home, and above all in 1834-5 when he had already resigned, Bentinck felt more secure in speaking his mind and acting on it. But the change was also real. There seem to have been two main reasons for it. One was sheer experience—the day-to-day traffic of government, especially on Bentinck's tours of the interior; during his two-and-a-half year tour ot the North and Centre in 1830-3, which coincided with a severe agrarian depression, his criticism grew more radical year by year. The other was deepening Evangelical conviction. This cannot be precisely documented; but his opinions, of Indian society and culture in particular, certainly took on a more thoroughgoing Evangelical tinge in the 187

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latter half of his rule. It is probably not a coincidence that these were the years when he was in close touch with Charles Trevelyan, the last of the son figures in his life—as Bentinck told Macaulay, 'the ablest young man in the service, and the most noble-minded man he had ever seen'. 19 If Bentinck saw existing modes of British rule as bad because privileged and incompetent, was he thereby at all identified with Indians? It seems not. True, there was a great change between Madras and Calcutta. At Madras he had lived in a world apart. In Calcutta some of the British were already on sociable terms with 'Indian gentlemen'. About every three months Bentinck asked some forty or fifty of these Calcutta notables to an evening party 'for the natives' at which he and Lady William put themselves out to be affable; he regretted that different manners and habits made it impossible to ask 'our native brethren and subjects' to the King's Birthday Ball. In March 1829 he made a great stir by asking 'all native gentlemen, landholders, merchants, and others' as well as Europeans for suggestions towards the improvement of British India. Some Calcutta notables he saw in private audience; in North India he interviewed Indian landholders and officials.* 20 He was, as will be seen, much taken with small groups of Indians—Westernised students of Hindu College, and one or two North Indian landholders; he tried to bring some of them forward in the administration. All this in a Governor-General was new; as Bentinck intended, it made people feel that a new dispensation had come. He himself stressed the need for 'the most friendly intercourse' in the army and elsewhere. He set the example of tolerance: when Ranjit Singh at their famous meeting repeatedly kept him waiting he wondered whether to be annoyed but decided that the cause was merely 'their ignorance of time—their lazy and loitering habits. I took no notice of it.' 21 All the same, this was a willed friendliness unlike the intimacy, for both good and ill, of Warren Hastings's and earlier eighteenth-century times. British India was already the land of the memsahib. Eurasians were fast hardening into the sad social position familiar from later times; it took the successive efforts of Bentinck and the Commanderin-Chief to win, against official resistance at Calcutta, commissions for * The guests at Bentinck's 'native' parties—a pretty unvarying list—included rajas and nawabs, vakils representing the Indian States, and leaders of the rich Calcutta intelligentsia such as Rammohan Roy, Radhakant and Gopimohan Deb, and Dwarkanath Tagore. For many of these food taboos were a real barrier.

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the famous Eurasian irregular soldier James Skinner and his son.22 Though the record of Bentinck's dealings with individual Indians is scant he appears to have seen them far less often than he did the company's British servants; there is no sign that he had with any of them the kind of intimate relationship he had had with Belmonte in Sicily. 23 This was no doubt inevitable when as Governor-General he sat at the heart of a far-flung bureaucracy engaged in pumping out paper. By 1834 he was willing to say that 'from the people themselves, the main objects of his care', a member of the Supreme Council could 'learn nothing. They are not consulted, and . . . have no means of making themselves heard.' Government had to go on in a sort of twilight, its records 'a very imperfect index either to the feelings of the people or to the effect of our laws and regulations . . .'. It was the old lesson of Vellore: the British were 'strangers in the land'. But now the conclusion was that to close the gap Indians must 'be more mixed in their own government, and become responsible advisers and partners in the administration'.24 Even then almost Bentinck's last word on the matter spoke for extreme gloom. British rule so far—he told a Commons committee in 1837—had been worse even than Muslim: 'cold, selfish, and unfeeling; the iron hand of power on the one side, monopoly and exclusion on the other'. At the same time 'this eastern world, India, China &c' was a 'great space where the human mind has been buried for ages in universal darkness'. It was characteristic of Bentinck in his last phase that he should have painted the blackest picture of India under British rule, and that at the same time he should have buoyantly looked for her redemption (with a respectful passing glance at Christianity) to 'knowledge', above all to steam.25

7 - A B R I T I S H M U G H A L EMPIRE Bentinck's vision of Indian 'nationality' found its fullest expression in his pursuit of two aims one of which came about only in 1 9 1 1 , while the other, though theoretically attained as early as 1833, never yielded what he had hoped from it. These were the transfer of the seat of government from Calcutta to the North, and the opening of India to British settlers who would be freely allowed to hold land. From these twin measures, Bentinck thought, would grow a British 189

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the famous Eurasian irregular soldier James Skinner and his son.22 Though the record of Bentinck's dealings with individual Indians is scant he appears to have seen them far less often than he did the company's British servants; there is no sign that he had with any of them the kind of intimate relationship he had had with Belmonte in Sicily. 23 This was no doubt inevitable when as Governor-General he sat at the heart of a far-flung bureaucracy engaged in pumping out paper. By 1834 he was willing to say that 'from the people themselves, the main objects of his care', a member of the Supreme Council could 'learn nothing. They are not consulted, and . . . have no means of making themselves heard.' Government had to go on in a sort of twilight, its records 'a very imperfect index either to the feelings of the people or to the effect of our laws and regulations . . .'. It was the old lesson of Vellore: the British were 'strangers in the land'. But now the conclusion was that to close the gap Indians must 'be more mixed in their own government, and become responsible advisers and partners in the administration'.24 Even then almost Bentinck's last word on the matter spoke for extreme gloom. British rule so far—he told a Commons committee in 1837—had been worse even than Muslim: 'cold, selfish, and unfeeling; the iron hand of power on the one side, monopoly and exclusion on the other'. At the same time 'this eastern world, India, China &c' was a 'great space where the human mind has been buried for ages in universal darkness'. It was characteristic of Bentinck in his last phase that he should have painted the blackest picture of India under British rule, and that at the same time he should have buoyantly looked for her redemption (with a respectful passing glance at Christianity) to 'knowledge', above all to steam.25

7 - A B R I T I S H M U G H A L EMPIRE Bentinck's vision of Indian 'nationality' found its fullest expression in his pursuit of two aims one of which came about only in 1 9 1 1 , while the other, though theoretically attained as early as 1833, never yielded what he had hoped from it. These were the transfer of the seat of government from Calcutta to the North, and the opening of India to British settlers who would be freely allowed to hold land. From these twin measures, Bentinck thought, would grow a British 189

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y empire not only enriched and enlightened through European 'knowledge,' but one with a 'national' cohesion and identity akin to those of the Mughal Empire. Indeed a hankering after Mughal glories seems to have lain behind his proposals, especially after Bentinck had seen those glories for himself at Delhi, Agra, and Fatehpur Sikri—just as a hankering after Sicily's classical greatness had lain behind his 'dream' of the island as 'the queen of our colonies'. Not that Bentinck at first put forward his proposals in these terms. His vision grew as he went on. He was anyhow an unsystematic thinker, apt to bend argument to the needs of the moment. As Governor-General he had to be cautious: his first steps towards moving the capital and helping European settlers, both made within eight months of his arrival, dismayed the Court of Directors and nearly provoked his recall at the behest of the Wellington Government. The home authorities forbade him to shift the capital, even (as he had proposed) temporarily; the Directors begrudged him the personal tour of the North and Centre which was all he could manage. Bentinck none the less asked them both privately and officially to reconsider; on getting news in 1834 of the Charter Act—which opened India to British settlement and set up a new Agra Presidency—he returned to the charge, elaborating old arguments and putting forward new ones. Only in 1837, safely back in England, did he speak his full mind. 1 Both measures could be argued in practical terms—the shift of capital on grounds of administrative convenience, European settlement on grounds of social and economic policy. Bentinck did so argue them; but from the start more far-reaching aims were in his mind. Both measures involved a break, the first with the old 'commercial associations' of the company, which Bentinck as Wellesley's disciple had always despised, the second with the old prejudice against European 'interlopers', which Bentinck had fully shared at Madras and still shared in 1828; he recorded his conversion after he had spent some months in the new surroundings of Bengal with its lively European press and its community of European and Eurasian indigo planters and other entrepreneurs. Bentinck began in February 1829 by proposing to take his Council with him on tour to the North and base it temporarily on Meerut—a notion that had been put to him soon after his arrival by the Secretary for the Territorial Department, Holt Mackenzie. At the same time he developed an argument for moving the government permanently. T h e place he argued for varied in later years—Delhi, then (as a concession 190

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INDIA

Kabul

in the 1830s

Bentinck's Tours 1829 1830 -1830-33 1834 British or British Protected Territory

600kms

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to those who argued against too exposed a site) Allahabad, finally Agra. The choice of city as well as of region was significant. It was imperial. This came out when Parliament made the Upper Provinces of Bengal into a new Agra Presidency on an equal footing with Madras and Bombay. Bentinck showed plainly that he wished the GovernorGeneral to control North India either direct or through a mere deputy governor with strictly limited powers; another subordinate government should do the routine business of Lower Bengal (with which the Supreme Government was still saddled). The Governor-General, he wrote, would never willingly agree to give up, with Agra, 'the brightest jewel of his crown'; its position 'amid all the scenes of past and future glory, where the empire is to be saved or lost', gave it 'a charm which will soon burst through the cloud of old commercial associations and prejudices in favour of Calcutta'. The Supreme Council ought to sit on 'the imperial throne of Agra'. 2 By this time the seat of government had become for him 'that cardinal p o i n t . . . on which the earliest reduction of all the discordant, incongruous, and diversified particles of which our great empire is composed into one harmonious whole essentially depends'.3 In other words, India might be 'virtually one empire' politically; in some deeper sense it was not yet one. The 'imperial throne', with all that that implied, was wanting. Holt Mackenzie had originally seen the move as a means to centralisation, both geographical and administrative; he had pointed to the distance, longer by 600 miles since the cessions and conquests of 1 8 0 1 1805, from Calcutta to the frontier; he had wished the Supreme Government to be accessible to the Indian States and to 'men of rank and influence from all parts of Hindustan' rather than to mere 'Calcutta babus and vakils [lawyers] of no consideration'. Malcolm at Bombay had wished all the Governors to get away from the commercial and bureaucratic life of the ports; he suggested an imperial capital at Aurangabad or Ahmednagar, where the Emperor Aurangzeb had thought of establishing it.4 Bentinck took over all these arguments (substituting Akbar's throne of Agra for Aurangzeb's) and gave them a military bent. British India, he urged, needed to be defended—if at all—in the north-west. That was where an external threat might come; where the army—the only potential internal threat—needed to be concentrated; where most of its soldiers came from; where relations with the States were 'numerous and intricate and the more closely inspected and 192

7 • A BRITISH MUGHAL EMPIRE controlled by the Supreme Authority the better'. He repeatedly asked what would be thought of a European empire stretching as far as Warsaw and Vienna but governed from London or Dublin. Perhaps most important, North India was 'where we have a brave population'— twenty millions of them, 'the strength, the courage and independence' of British India; whereas Lower Bengal (Bentinck declared in the most blatant of several like statements) in comparison was 'a mere flock of sheep good only for their valuable fleeces, and having no political or military character whatever'. He more than once drew a parallel between North Indians and Italians, though an inconsistent one: at one time he likened the North Indians to his admired Piedmontese ('the finest race of men in Italy'), a year later to the Neapolitans who had fought well under the French. #s Did Bentinck then herald, like Malcolm, the kind of later British administrator who liked best to deal with rough, brave, safely traditional 'martial races'? Not altogether. He had set out with little respect for Rajput chiefs—'like your old Highland clans [he told Malcolm], brave plunderers, with all the weakness, conceit, and vanity of Asiatic communities'; they needed to be kept in order.6 True, as he moved about North India, he seems to have appreciated its landed classes more, and correspondingly depreciated the Bengalis even beyond the routine British contempt for their 'submissiveness'. But Bentinck could never, like Malcolm, admire the 'rude and unproductive'.7 If they were brave they should go on being brave while becoming educated and productive . . . Civilisation', he said (declining to read a report on Central Asia), 'alone interests me, and I would rather see the improvement and happiness of America than all the rest of the world beyond the limits of Europe.'8 North India with its brave men was the proper seat of empire; but it must be an empire Europeanised. Indeed among the reasons Bentinck kept pressing for the shift of capital was the need to develop North India—'as it were a new country', 9 —to set in order its muddled revenue arrangements, to reform judicial administration: that is, to establish 'civil liberty' and foster 'improvement'. • In 1834 Bentinck argued that Italy and India were both peninsulas ringed to the north with high mountains; in both the population degenerated 'in stature, in character, and in courage as you go southward'; in Italy both the French and the Austrians had rightly chosen for their capital the advanced position of Milan. His point in 1835 was that though wanting, like the Neapolitans (and Portuguese) in 'physical strength and moral energy', the North Indians could be got to fight well under British direction. Cf. Marx on the parallel between India and Italy, Marx and Engeli on Colonialism (Moscow, 1968 ed.), 35. G

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This called for first-hand knowledge and control. The knowledge would in the first place be knowledge of poverty. I wish [Bentinck wrote bitterly to Ellenborough when orders from home had for a time cut short his North Indian tour] you could see the wretchedness and poverty of this country from one end to the other, and thus could form your own opinion whether the Government is quite justified in sitting down quietly at Calcutta, in a state of perfect complacency and self-satisfaction that nothing is wanting to be done for the welfare and improvement of the country.10 If the country was to be improved something else, to Bentinck's mind, was needed besides vigorous rule from an 'imperial throne': that was European settlement. Unlike the shift of capital, European settlement was already a matter for debate both in Britain and in India. This was a time when British people were crossing the sea in numbers to settle in North America. Schemes of 'colonisation' in Australasia offered not only a ground for theoretical debate but a chance to make a reputation, perhaps a fortune; in 1829-35 Edward Gibbon Wakefield was arguing for a middle-class empire as a product of individual enterprise and a means of 'enlarging the field of employment for British capital and labour' which—he argued—could find no outlet at home: Britain should therefore 'lay hold of foreign fields'.11 When it came to India representatives of the merchant and planter interests argued before the Select Committees sitting on the company's charter in favour of opening up India and Indian landholding to British settlers. The company's monopoly by then amounted to little; but it still included the power to license and deport unofficial Europeans. This—the free trader Robert Rickards argued—prevented an influx of European merchants who would develop the country. In India the Bengal Hurkaru, the planters' paper, urged free European settlement. So did Rammohan Roy and the great businessman Dwarkanath Tagore as leaders of the free trading interest. In 1829 they publicly defended the indigo planters as benefactors of India; Dwarkanath looked forward to 'further advantages . . . from the unrestricted application of British skill, capital, and industry to the very many articles which this country is capable of producing . . .'. Rammohan argued that 'the greater our intercourse with European gentlemen, the greater will be our improvement in literary, social and political affairs'.12 194

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How far Bentinck was influenced by Rammohan, Dwarkanath, or the 1,595 unofficial Europeans in Bengal 13 is not clear. One indigo planter was a respected friend from Spanish days, Colonel José de Hezeta; Bentinck visited him and saw him at work. Belief in European settlement was anyhow a collective movement, an understandable product of a time when British enterprise and exports had begun to lead the world. Together with the Council Bentinck made a modest start in February 1829 by allowing indigo planters the 60-year leases in their own names which sugar and coffee planters already enjoyed; this was the step that nearly led to his recall. Three months later he recorded his full conversion to European settlement. When the Home Government strongly disapproved the leases (allowing them none the less to run, but for 21 years and revocably) Bentinck defended himself; for the rest he bided his time until Parliament—influenced by his own, Metcalfe's and Holt Mackenzie's arguments and by the merchant lobby —did away with restrictions on settlement in 1833. Bentinck put forward as self-evident the usual social and economic arguments: 'the diffusion of European knowledge and morals among the people of India' was 'essential to their wellbeing'; 'the development of the natural resources of the country depends mainly on the introduction of European capital and s k i l l . . . ' . He was clear that what ought to come about was not 'colonisation' by large numbers (impossible anyhow in the Indian climate) but an influx of'capitalists'—landholders, mill-owners, planters: these would do for India what the likes of them at home had, by ruining her textile industry, already done against her. One such entrepreneur—Bentinck took care to point out that he held land freehold—was already building a large steam mill for the spinning of cotton twist with a newly improved strain of Indian cotton. Others might exploit improved strains of tobacco to compete with the United States. 14 Economic arguments like these did not go unchallenged in London even among the less hidebound 'old Indians'. Mountstuart Elphinstone, the former Governor of Bombay, doubted whether capital would flow to India on a large scale; Bentinck's old associate Ravenshaw, now on the Court of Directors, thought it never would 'as long as it can find a fair chance of employment either in Europe or America'. 15 But the question was also seen as highly political. The old dread of rebellious colonies was not spent: Ellenborough thought settlers might in the end 'renounce England'. He, Elphinstone, and several of the Directors feared what would today be called poor whites: they would

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prevent Indians from rising in the administration; they would breed more Eurasians; they would, Elphinstone said, as in 'all regular colonies' foster 'contempt and dislike for blacks'. 16 Some of this was instinctive conservatism, amenable to 'the spirit of the age': in 1829 the East India Company's secretary had been sure that in India British produce 'wants a market and not competition'; four years later he talked encouragingly of a developed India's 'becoming a still more productive source'. 17 Bentinck from the first had seen the argument as political. He had put it with a curious mixture of the brutally frank and the oblique— perhaps because his full meaning was too unorthodox for him to state it clearly. T h e root of the argument—he put it only in private—was that India must become a British empire rather than a set of territories administered, nominally on behalf of a puppet Mughal sovereign, by the company. Prompted by Ellenborough's statement that Britain had a moral duty to give Indians a government united, British, and permanent, and an economic duty to make them rich, Bentinck wrote: British supremacy cannot be too strongly and too decidedly declared, by an assumption of all the attributes of sovereign power, by a coinage bearing the British arms, by a British code, and by encouraging the acquisition of the British language, the key to all improvement.... T h e form of home government (king or company) mattered little; what did matter for Indian purposes was the form of Indian government. 18 How did European settlement fit in? Bentinck's public argument was a total indictment of company rule. 'Now, what is the actual state of the country?' Were not the bulk of the people wretchedly poor, landholders extortionate, gangs of plunderers abroad, 'several revolting and brutalising practices' still prevalent, agriculture mostly 'conducted with a beggarly stock and without skill or enterprise', manufacturers 'generally in a degraded condition', their products ('excepting those which Europeans have improved') inferior to those of other countries, credit scarce and dear, trade 'spiritless and ill informed', international exchange threatened by the loss of textile exports? Were not British officials unpopular, ill-informed, and out of touch, the courts defective, hence making for 'lamentable demoralisation in the people', Indian 196.

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subordinates corrupt, the police oppressive, 'community of sentiment' wanting? Far from British institutions containing 'the seed of selfimprovement . . . has it not rather been found that our difficulties increase with length of possession?' The key that would 'call forth the vast productive powers of the country now lying inert from the want of adequate encouragement' could only be an influx of European entrepreneurs; the only real danger was that not enough of them could be induced to come. These settlers would not work in isolation. They would lead Indians to secure 'various and important national advantages' through the influence of 'national character . . . on national wealth, strength, and good government'. As in other British possessions 'community of language, sentiment, and interest between the Government and the governed' would strengthen a formerly precarious British rule." Though these arguments were not all original—Metcalfe put some of them—one needs to ask what Bentinck meant by 'national character' and 'national advantages'. Which nation had he in mind— Britain or India? The answer (he did not spell it out) seems to be both. In Madras Bentinck had called the Madras general survey—a British venture to India's benefit—'a great national undertaking'.20 In Sicily he had seen no contradiction between British tutelage and national greatness for the pupil country. Now India would attain nationality by becoming British. This came out obliquely in his demolition of the alleged obstacles which Indian society put in the way of settlement. 'With strong local attachments', Indians had 'no feeling of patriotism to excite their enmity to strangers or to bind them together in one common enterprise. Their paternal village is dear to them. The name of country in a large sense is unknown.' He pointed to 'the facility with which [the Hindus] have submitted to the successive conquerors of the country'. The old landed classes had often turned Muslim (surely an unspoken hint that they might "yet turn Christian); even within Hinduism sects multiplied; English education, even medical education, was thriving; Indians and Europeans showed 'mutual confidence' in trade and banking; Indians followed Europeans in planting indigo. All this 'powerfully contradicts] the notion that there is something immutable in their sentiments and condition'. In the administration European settlers would, without displacing Indians, be a 'cheap and excellent substitute for much of the existing 197

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y expensive and inefficient establishment'. An increase in the number of Eurasians need not be looked at askance: though now often unhappy they were, and increasingly would be, identified with Britain. European settlers' demand for English law (a great bugbear) could be met, not indeed by generalising the Supreme Court's English legal forms, but by establishing what Bentinck had called for since Madras days—a unitary Indian law and judiciary. As for the 'rebellious colony' argument—the danger that settlers might unite with Indians against Britain—this assumes . . . a vast change . . . such as can scarcely be looked for in centuries to come. I might almost say a vast improvement, which would imply that the time had arrived when it would be wise in England to leave India to govern itself. For assuredly, if we suppose the distinctions of tribe and caste to have ceased, and conceive these rich and extensive regions to be filled with an united people, capable of appreciating and asserting political freedom, we must complete the picture by imagining that England has (voluntarily or involuntarily) ceased to withhold privileges she has taught them to exercise. Short of such a consummation, the presence of British settlers would 'render the people more conscious of their rights, and better able to understand the duties of their governors'. 'Even community of faith and language, or of language alone, w i l l . . . tend to bind the possessors of it to our interests (if we do not utterly neglect theirs) by a tie stronger than that which connects the Hindus of different castes and sects, and will, if [the settlers and their descendants] be numerous, greatly strengthen our hold of the country.' 21 Had Bentinck fully worked out in his own mind the implications of all this? One does not know. We can at least guess at his drift from his much more explicit statement in 1837. After another devastating indictment of British rule and Indian 'darkness' he added that India, whose 'sad lot' it had been to suffer the rule of successive Muslim invaders, should have won a 'happy change' from conquest by an enlightened Christian nation: in fact she had gained little besides tranquillity and at least the chance of improvement. 'In many respects the Mohammedan[s] surpassed our rule; they settled in the countries which they conquered; they intermixed and intermarried with the natives; they admitted them to all privileges; the interests and sympathies of the conquerors and conquered became 198

7 • A BRITISH MUGHAL EMPIRE identified. Our policy . . . has been the reverse of this; cold, selfish, and unfeeling; the iron hand of power on the one side, monopoly and exclusion on the other.' 22 What Bentinck was driving at all along was surely just what Ellenborough and other conservatives feared—a kind of Indian Canada or United States, where British settlers would give Indians a lead towards 'civil liberty' and 'improvement,' perhaps in the end towards 'political liberty' and independence; where through Europeanisation the 'interests and sympathies' of British and Indians, perhaps their blood, would 'become identified'; and where a firm, enlightened rule from the 'imperial throne' would knead India's multiformity into 'one harmonious whole'. Already in 1829 his defence of Eurasians hinted at intermarriage, his veiled mentions of Hindu adaptability at gradual Christianisation or anyhow at thorough Europeanisation ('community of faith and language, or of language alone'). Bentinck thus united with his own belief in capitalist enterprise the aims of the two men who in his youth had contended over the destinies of British India—the imperial drive of Wellesley and the elder Charles Grant's belief in Christianisation and English learning as the bringers of light; for that matter Grant himself had seen the improvement of India as 'this imperial work'. 23 T o look to an India Europeanised and ultimately independent on the American model was not eccentric. That was what Macaulay was getting at in his famous 1833 speech on the Charter, when he concluded: 'to trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages'. His brother-in-law Trevelyan was much later to draw the specific parallel between an independent India and the United States, and to describe such a separation (made good by an 'immense trade') as 'very happy for both parties'. Rammohan Roy, writing in England just after the triumphant passage of the 1832 Reform Bill—and speaking in his character as international Liberal rather than as Hindu reformer—had already drawn the very same parallel; but he had suggested that India, enlightened and made prosperous by the example of European settlers, would be content with Canadian status.24 True, in their public statements these men, like Bentinck himself, descried independence so far off that it could be little more than a talking point, But in 1833 Trevelyan, writing pseudonymously, had thought British settlers would insist on 'no taxation without representation' and would influence Indians to demand responsible government: 199

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y he fully expected to see in his lifetime 'a representative body composed of deputies from every zilla [district] of Gangetic India assembled' in the 'natural' capital, Allahabad. Even Sir Charles Grey, Bentinck's Chief Justice—'a bit by bit reformer', in his own words—thought that 'twenty years hence . . . there might be an Indian House of Lords and in twenty more some representatives of towns . . .'. 2S Bentinck in 1837 still thought Indian government must be arbitrary though paternal. But he had wished the Governor-General to have the power of appointing any native of India—Indian, European, or Eurasian—to the upper stratum of the civil service or of sending him to Haileybury for training; he complained that even in its watereddown form 'Lord William Bentinck's clause' in the 1833 Act—it opened the service to all natives of India but left them to enter in England—had remained a dead letter.26 He also went further than anybody in implying that British and Indians would do well to intermarry. Bentinck's vision of India developed by British enterprise was—if we take his implications to their full stretch—of a tropical America haloed with the glory of a regenerated Mughal Empire. It may now seem absurd. Bentinck, like many others, underrated the toughness of Indian culture. He largely ignored the Muslims. He underrated British conservatism and colour prejudice; he could not shake the British governing classes' hold on Indian administration as a provider of jobs and 'competencies'. As he had feared, British investment in India on an American scale never came about; nor did a significant group of British settlers identify themselves with India. But in the spring tide of liberal reform many possibilities had seemed open. Thus Sleeman thought capitalist industry—'the prevailing cause o f . . . free institutions' in Europe—might in India bring Christianisation: a number of large factories modelled on Ashton's of Hyde, near Manchester, would make 'thousands of converts' besides creating a much-needed middle class. 27 A generation later the Liberal politician Charles Dilke saw as the mission of the Anglo-Saxon race the beneficent domination of the globe, as the instruments that would establish it America, Australia, and other British-settled territories, as the blessings it would impart free institutions and transmitted governing skills. 28 In their years of steady expansion between 1820 and 1867 the British had less inducement than ever to cultivate or even to grasp the nationalism of 'blood and soil', intent upon the flowering from ancient 200

7 • A BRITISH MUGHAL EMPIRE roots of the nation as a mystic entity sharply cut out against its fellows. Bentinck stood close to the line of British liberal expansionists, believers in a universal human nature which British ways could everywhere endow with British virtues. But he brought an original contribution: thanks to his experience in Spain and Italy he came to strive for an India that would be 'one harmonious whole', not just through the influence of British ways but through the efforts of all its inhabitants and the example of its imperial past. We may therefore call him, in India as in Italy, a forerunner of nationalism.

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Bentinck has gone down as the Governor-General who took decisive steps to make Indians, in his own words, 'responsible advisers and partners in the administration'. Yet all he did in practice was to take a number of steps along a road which British rulers in India had trodden before him; they were, as he himself came to feel, little enough. British rule had always rested on 'native agency'at subordinate levels. It could be conducted in no other way when 'respectable' Europeans were to be had only at exorbitant salaries. Even Cornwallis in the 1790s, at the lowest point of distrust towards Indian officials, had in the end had to set up Indian judges to deal with small causes. Among the papers of British administrators, even the highest, the odd marginal scribble in Urdu, Bengali, or Tamil brings to mind the often anonymous Indian thousands who kept the system going; one study has shown that at district level Indian officials could sometimes be the effective rulers. 1 Hence the brisk debate that went on in Bentinck's time over the principle of native agency had about it something unreal. The real question was how far up the ladder Indians should be able to go and how fast. The real obstacles were not so much those of principle or systematic distrust—though they were raised—as of vested interests in the covenanted (British-manned) service and the Court of Directors; in the Army, however, fear of the unknown remained a genuine bar.2 In promoting Indians Bentinck took the prevailing view. At Madras he had thought native agency inevitably corrupt. Traces of this prejudice still showed in his first months in Bengal. But he quickly joined 201

7 • A BRITISH MUGHAL EMPIRE roots of the nation as a mystic entity sharply cut out against its fellows. Bentinck stood close to the line of British liberal expansionists, believers in a universal human nature which British ways could everywhere endow with British virtues. But he brought an original contribution: thanks to his experience in Spain and Italy he came to strive for an India that would be 'one harmonious whole', not just through the influence of British ways but through the efforts of all its inhabitants and the example of its imperial past. We may therefore call him, in India as in Italy, a forerunner of nationalism.

8-'RESPONSIBLE NATIVE

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AND

PARTNERS': NATIVE

AGENTS

Bentinck has gone down as the Governor-General who took decisive steps to make Indians, in his own words, 'responsible advisers and partners in the administration'. Yet all he did in practice was to take a number of steps along a road which British rulers in India had trodden before him; they were, as he himself came to feel, little enough. British rule had always rested on 'native agency'at subordinate levels. It could be conducted in no other way when 'respectable' Europeans were to be had only at exorbitant salaries. Even Cornwallis in the 1790s, at the lowest point of distrust towards Indian officials, had in the end had to set up Indian judges to deal with small causes. Among the papers of British administrators, even the highest, the odd marginal scribble in Urdu, Bengali, or Tamil brings to mind the often anonymous Indian thousands who kept the system going; one study has shown that at district level Indian officials could sometimes be the effective rulers. 1 Hence the brisk debate that went on in Bentinck's time over the principle of native agency had about it something unreal. The real question was how far up the ladder Indians should be able to go and how fast. The real obstacles were not so much those of principle or systematic distrust—though they were raised—as of vested interests in the covenanted (British-manned) service and the Court of Directors; in the Army, however, fear of the unknown remained a genuine bar.2 In promoting Indians Bentinck took the prevailing view. At Madras he had thought native agency inevitably corrupt. Traces of this prejudice still showed in his first months in Bengal. But he quickly joined 201

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those who, like Holt Mackenzie, had come to think it 'essential that the natives should be trusted more and paid better' and who put down the failures of British rule to 'the exaggerated opinion entertained of the merits of our own countrymen . . ,'.3 At the Board of Control Ellenborough, supported by his junior, Lord Ashley, declared that as Indians anyhow did most of the work 'they should act ostensibly, with the honour, the responsibility, and the emoluments of office. We cannot govern India financially without this change of system. We cannot govern it well without it, and we do not deserve to be permitted to govern it at all without it.'4 Bentinck now wholly agreed, and even persuaded himself that he always had.5 Within the company's service principled opposition to extending native agency seems to have been confined to the 'Christian bigots' who thought Indians too depraved to be trusted unless 'well superintended', and to a few authoritarian Benthamites who, much like James Mill, thought it 'most dangerous Hindophilisiri to try 'to make individuals chosen from among the most proverbially unprincipled race in the world honest by a government order'.6 But there were arguments from expediency and inertia as well. When past over-recruitment and present economy cuts made 250 Europeans redundant H. T. Prinsep, a Secretary to Government, joined other high-ranking civilians in arguing that Indians should be brought in 'only for so much as the Civil Service cannot perform'; even a young European was as a rule preferable to any Indian.7 The Bengal Hurkaru, the junior official's and subaltern's paper, carried vulgar attacks on Indians' immorality and 'constitutional listlessness'; it frankly declared that economy went too far when it threatened European jobs and salaries—Europeans had not come 15,000 miles to a bad climate merely to subsist.8 On the Indian side Hindu College graduates could be equally frank in asking that English education should lead to responsible Government jobs.® Economy was the main reason why the Court of Directors had since 1810 been urging greater use of Indians, why the Chairman was still pressing it 'in preference to the expensive services of Europeans',10 and why Indian judges had step by step had their jurisdiction extended, so that at Bentinck's coming some of them could hear suits involving up to Rs 1,000 instead of Cornwallis's Rs 50. It was Bentinck's contribution to give a lead in changing the tone; he invested this utilitarian trend with 'national' significance. Even then he worked within strict constraints. Bentinck opened to Indians new jobs and higher salaries in the 202

8 • N A T I V E AGENCY AND NATIVE AGENTS revenue and judicial services; these are discussed in more detail in Part I I I . At Trevelyan's suggestion he 'reduced to a system' the granting of titles to Indians, not just to magnates but to officials." From a very different source, the paternalist Malcolm, he took the notion of an Order of Merit for Indians in the company's army. He wished—but failed—to see Indians appointed to the Legislative Council set up by the 1833 Charter Act. The kind of Indians he himself favoured and, when he could, promoted, suggests the India he looked forward to. Bentinck's grounds for promoting Indians were, first, that to do so was to promote merit and efficiency; secondly, that it would elevate 'national character'; lastly—a note heard increasingly often as he saw more of the country—that for Indians to run their own country was 'natural' and British rule in its existing form correspondingly unnatural. In all this the enemy was, once again, privilege—embodied in the company's rule of patronage. Bentinck was moving towards a civil service chosen on competitive entry and promoted on merit—the ideal which his disciple Trevelyan helped to put into practice in the reforms of 1853, though by then Trevelyan was more disposed to 'make great allowance for . . . conservative feeling' and the service was opened to British university graduates rather than, as Bentinck had wished, to the inhabitants of India. 12 In Bentinck's day such reforms were already spreading piecemeal through the British home administration; it was part of the general movement towards rationalising institutions by replacing standards of personal and hierarchical dependence with others seemingly universal and objective. But nomination to the East India Company's service, like Melbourne's Garter, still had 'no damned merit' about it. A few months after his arrival Bentinck contrasted the products of Hindu College and their 'truly astonishing' acquirements in European knowledge with those among the company's greenest young British recruits (the 'writers') who idled their time a w a y : ' . . . with the natives, office follows qualification, in England with the writer it precedes it. Herein consists the whole secret of failure and success.' 13 The most the British could attempt, he soon concluded, was 'control'—supervision; even at this they were 'very inefficient'.14 When in 1831 H. T . Prinsep and others opposed his promotion of Indians in the judicial service with the argument that even young Europeans would do better he retorted: 'It is difficult to conceive how a young 203

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man can become a good judge, collector, or magistrate only by the repetition of his own bad decrees, by making bad settlements, or by unjustly flogging and fining unfortunate prisoners.' 15 In spite of this outspokenness there were limits on what Bentinck could do; indeed the limits that chafed him help to explain the outspokenness. There was economy—itself the original motive for promoting Indians; though Bentinck quadrupled the salaries that the highest Indian Judges could earn (to Rs 400 a month) they were still, he complained bitterly, getting no more than 'your wretched incapable writer'. He wished to pay them Rs 1,000, with the lower grades raised in proportion, and to give them the running of virtually the whole judiciary and police. Then there was the strong negative element in Bentinck's criticism: the root of it was alienation from the company's system rather than self-identification with Indians. T o him Indians remained largely abstract, even more than Sicilians in 1 8 1 1 - 1 4 . Yet his alienation gradually moved him to think of Indian agency as 'natural'. After a long outburst to the new Whig President of the Board of Control, Charles Grant the younger, against the 'miserably inefficient' and expensive civil service (which Bentinck would have liked to abolish or at least reduce to a small cadre), he pointed out as the cause of the evils India suffered from 'the monstrous absurdity of committing the government of sixty millions of people to less than 400 strangers and . . . the still more monstrous rapacity of seizing for the benefit of this incapable few all the honours and emoluments of the administration, to the exclusion of the native and natural agency of the country . . .'. l 6 If native agency was 'natural', could it not also be a means to 'national' resurgence? But here too there were limits he could not overstep. These came out when, as part of his projected unification of the Indian Army, he took up Malcolm's idea of an Order of Merit for Indian soldiers. His motive was threefold: he wished to raise Indian soldiers on a par with Indian civilians; to combat the 'paralysing effects' of the army's seniority rule; and to elevate the soldiers' 'character'. The Order was to be a substitute for what the soldiers lacked: they had 'no patriotism, no national applause, a connection wholly mercenary, admitted and as it were privileged inferiority in strength and courage, no congeniality of sentiment, and exclusion from all high honours, emoluments, and commands'. At this point, late in his term, Bentinck was keenly aware that peace and modernisation were 'tending rapidly as well to weaken 204

8 • N A T I V E AGENCY AND N A T I V E A G E N T S the respect entertained for the European character and the prestige of British superiority as to elevate the native character, to make these men alive to their own rights and more sensible of their power'. T h e answer was not to reject modernisation but to provide an 'antidote for the evils which the increasing conviction of their own undeserved degradation and inferiority must produce on the native mind'. How strong an antidote, though, was the Order of Merit (for valour) or its suggested companion Order of British India (for faithful service by commissioned officers)? The committee whose report Bentinck endorsed hoped the Order might give its holders 'moral influence'; but 'care must be taken' not to give Indian officers 'any additional power or influence over the native soldiery, which might be injurious to the authority exclusively vested at present in the European officer'. Even the extra pay the Orders carried with them was in part 'clipped' by the Court of Directors. Distrust of the Indian troops was too strong to make the measure intended to bridge it—'to confirm and strengthen', as Bentinck had said, 'their attachment to the British Government'— much more than an anodyne. 17 So too the joined forces of conservatism, Benthamite doctrine, and the Directors' continuing hold of patronage made 'Lord William Bentinck's clause' opening the covenanted service to the natives of India a dead letter; so too the new Legislative Council contained no Indians. '. . . Deeply do I regret the total exclusion of the natives', Bentinck wrote. Council membership he saw not as a demand which Indians were pressing but as a 'most acceptable' and unobjectionable benefit that might have been conferred on them. T h e greatest beneficiaries, though, would have been the British rulers: once again Bentinck described himself and his fellows in the words he had often used since Vellore. 'Never mixing with the population . . . in utter darkness as to their habits and feelings . . . unable to say beforehand whether the best intended law will work more for good or evil', the British remained 'strangers in the land'. 18 What did Bentinck see as the right kind of native agency? First, he saw it—too easily perhaps—as made up of native Europeans and Eurasians as well as Indians. Bentinck seems at all times to have had little or no colour prejudice; against the tide of British opinion, he particularly favoured Eurasians. At Madras he had strongly defended Thomas Warden (a Eurasian whom he made Principal Collector of Malabar) against service prejudice; in Bengal he several times went out of his way to call indigo planters—an unpopular group some of whom 205

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were Eurasians—'respectable'. But the tide had moved on: soon after his arrival he seems to have been advised that it would not after all be prudent to take on, as he had thought of doing, a Eurasian lieutenant as his aide-de-camp.*1» Among Indians he appointed Calcutta notables to committees dealing with educational reform: sometimes these were leaders of the socalled orthodox group like Radhakant Deb and Ramkamal Sen, perhaps chosen on tactical grounds—if such men approved of, say, European medical training for Indians an important point would be gained.20 With Rammohan and the moderate reformers he had scattered dealings, but Rammohan struck him as 'slow and timid' in speech and unimpressive on paper;! 21 perhaps there was something too ambiguous about this Unitarian who was yet a Hindu revivalist of sorts. The Indians Bentinck was really interested in fell into two groups: those who were enthusiastically profiting, or who might profit, from European education; and North Indian landholders who gave evidence of administrative ability. The first group were mainly Bengali students of Hindu College, then in the flush of enthusiasm for Europeanisation which their teacher Henry Derozio had stirred, soon followed in 1830-1 by the beef-eating and other excesses which led to the young Eurasian teacher's dismissal, and to severe inward crises for some of his pupils. Here the automatic British contempt for Bengalis did not apply. Bentinck's military secretary was a member of Derozio's debating club. Bentinck himself was 'very much delighted' with Hindu College; the pupils, he thought, did as well as any in England; he and Lady William 'used to come there frequently, without any ceremony or form, to witness the working of the classes, and even to ask questions of the boys'. 22 Bentinck also gave out the prizes; at one prizegiving two future leaders of the reforming intelligentsia, Ramtanu Lahiri and Madhusudan Sen, acted a scene from The Two Gentlemen of Verona—not without letting some gestures stray in from the narrative vocabulary of Indian dance.23 Bentinck kept himself informed of English examination results at the • The man Bentinck had thought of as a possible aide-de-camp was Lieut. Ahmuty, son of a civil servant and an Indian woman. Twenty years later Dalhousie did take on as aide-de-camp Metcalfe's Eurasian son—presumably commended by his father's illustrious name: E. Thompson, The Life of Charles Lord Metcalfe

(1937), 412-

t All the same, Bentinck was one of only nine British officials who subscribed for a memorial professorship at Hindu College after Rammohan's death: James Young to Bentinck, 11 May 1834, BP/PwJf/2390.

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college and of the troubles that beset Derozio's pupils; he also kept in touch with the Muslim college, the Madrasa. He wished to take several young Bengalis with him on his tour of the North: one from the Madrasa apparently did go (his name is not known), but of two exHindu College students whom Bentinck had had in mind Kasiprasad Ghose had lapsed back into Hindu ways and Harachandra Ghosh could not come 'owing to the opposition of his mother'. 24 Kasiprasad, the first Bengali Hindu to write English verse, had written a review of Mill's History in which he maintained that ancient India had had constitutional monarchs; Bentinck later wished to make him one of the first Indian honorary magistrates.25 Harachandra was to rise up the judicial ladder and to bring up Kristo Das Pal, a leading figure in late nineteenth-century élite politics. There was thus a personal link— perhaps limited to an avuncular word or two, though even that could be significant in India—between Bentinck and some of the new, partAnglicised Calcutta intelligentsia. So too there was a reciprocity between Bentinck's opening to Indians of higher grades in the service and the scattering of Derozio's pupils into the interior as judges and deputy collectors: each answered the other. On his tours Bentinck kept an eye out for promising men. These might include a hard-working young man who carried on a large Marathi school at Sagar, Krishna Rao—Bentinck had him sent to Calcutta to see the best educational methods for himself—or Lakshman Das, who, after having been agent to a great superior landholder, had himself bought land in Saharanpur district. Bentinck offered to appoint Das to the new higher grade of Indian judge and, when he declined, recommended him for the equally new post of deputy collector. Das had earlier upheld the rights of superior landholders against the alleged hereditary tenures of village communities and cultivators: he may have struck Bentinck as that Indian rarity, an improving landlord. 26 It was, however, Hindu College with its mixture of English and Indian learning which to Bentinck's mind would do most 'to regenerate this degraded population'. 27 Bentinck fully joined in Malcolm's desire 'to share the aristocracy of office with the natives' as a means of keeping up the 'good tone of the empire.' 28 Unlike Malcolm he had no interest in the old landed classes just because they were old. For him the ideal builder of the new India would no doubt have been a North Indian landholder, possibly of recent origin and mixed ancestry, with a martial bearing, an improving disposition, and a largely European 207

II • E M P I R E AND N A T I O N A L I T Y schooling. A s a contemporary remarked, he evidently wished 'to raise a middle class of native gentlemen': the way to do that in India had always been through 'the offices men held in the public establishments of the state'. 2 »

9 • N A T I O N A L I T Y AND C U L T U R E : R E L I G I O U S , L I N G U I S T I C , AND EDUCATIONAL POLICY If India was to become a British empire invested with the virtues of nationality, what religion, what customs, what habits of mind was it to live by? What kind of education was to instil them? What language should it cultivate? Bentinck's governor-generalship was marked by two acts that appeared sweepingly to discard Indian tradition and to set in its place, if need be by authoritarian means, European standards. In 1829, after a thorough inquiry, he prohibited sati. On the eve of his departure in 1835, more abruptly, he launched the policy of concentrating existing Government funds on English higher education. Other acts of his seemed to point the same way: he set going drastic measures to supress the T h u g s ; he overrode Hindu customs of inheritance to help Christian converts; he cut down Fort William College, Wellesley's foundation where company servants were trained in oriental languages, to the point (a recent historian has claimed) of doing away with much of its value as a renovator of Indian, especially Bengali, culture; English replaced Persian as the official language of the courts. Y e t in still other ways Bentinck resisted missionary pressure to do away with Indian custom or dissociate the Government from it: he would not abolish slavery, which he saw as, in India, a social device for meeting extreme poverty rather than a traffic in human chattels; nor would he stop the company's troops from officially attending Indian religious ceremonies, or approve of Metcalfe's trying to make Indian subordinates work on Hindu and Moslem holidays, or (except under direct orders from home) abolish the tax that indirectly subsidised places of pilgrimage. 1 He also resisted pressure from the new Church of England establishment in India for a greater share of money and importance. 208

II • E M P I R E AND N A T I O N A L I T Y schooling. A s a contemporary remarked, he evidently wished 'to raise a middle class of native gentlemen': the way to do that in India had always been through 'the offices men held in the public establishments of the state'. 2 »

9 • N A T I O N A L I T Y AND C U L T U R E : R E L I G I O U S , L I N G U I S T I C , AND EDUCATIONAL POLICY If India was to become a British empire invested with the virtues of nationality, what religion, what customs, what habits of mind was it to live by? What kind of education was to instil them? What language should it cultivate? Bentinck's governor-generalship was marked by two acts that appeared sweepingly to discard Indian tradition and to set in its place, if need be by authoritarian means, European standards. In 1829, after a thorough inquiry, he prohibited sati. On the eve of his departure in 1835, more abruptly, he launched the policy of concentrating existing Government funds on English higher education. Other acts of his seemed to point the same way: he set going drastic measures to supress the T h u g s ; he overrode Hindu customs of inheritance to help Christian converts; he cut down Fort William College, Wellesley's foundation where company servants were trained in oriental languages, to the point (a recent historian has claimed) of doing away with much of its value as a renovator of Indian, especially Bengali, culture; English replaced Persian as the official language of the courts. Y e t in still other ways Bentinck resisted missionary pressure to do away with Indian custom or dissociate the Government from it: he would not abolish slavery, which he saw as, in India, a social device for meeting extreme poverty rather than a traffic in human chattels; nor would he stop the company's troops from officially attending Indian religious ceremonies, or approve of Metcalfe's trying to make Indian subordinates work on Hindu and Moslem holidays, or (except under direct orders from home) abolish the tax that indirectly subsidised places of pilgrimage. 1 He also resisted pressure from the new Church of England establishment in India for a greater share of money and importance. 208

9 • NATIONALITY AND CULTURE What is at stake is, first, the inner significance for both Indians and British of the Europeanisation of Indian society; secondly, Bentinck's share in forwarding what have always been seen as the crucial changes that took place, especially in Bengal, in the 1820s and 1830s. Both have been as much obscured as clarified by past controversy. At least we can now see that what was happening in Bentinck's time was not, either on the Indian or the British side, a straight clash between traditionalists and modernisers: all agreed in looking to some kind of modernisation, to be achieved in part through European example. This was to be expected at a time when European arms, industry, and trade were so plainly in the ascendant. What was at stake was how far and how fast Indian society should modernise itself; how far it should discard its own tradition or, on the contrary, find there a means of self-renewal. 2 Bentinck's role has so far remained unclear. British writers of the Victorian period, even those most pungently critical of him, nearly all united in hymning his social and educational reforms, above all the abolition of sati.3 True, the English education policy had always had its critics; among British administrators they become more vocal with the diffusion of nationalism in India and, at home, of a more organic (often a more authoritarian) view of society; the burden was that English education had produced unemployed intellectuals, rootless and troublesome. More recently the use by historians of anthropological concepts has led some to see Bentinck's reforms as crucial in a sense very different from the Victorians'. In one work Bentinck appears in effect as the villain whose coming ended the 'golden age' of experiments in 'cultural fusion' between new European standards and Indian tradition, drove orthodox Hindus back into a defensive revivalism, and generally opened for the Bengali intelligentsia 'a highly disruptive, confusing period . . . marked by a crisis of identity . . .'. 4 According to another 'it is generally acknowledged' that abolition of sati 'did more to arouse Indian antipathy than decades of economic exploitation'. 5 Yet much of the evidence on which these strikingly confident judgements are based remains fragmentary; we still do not know clearly enough what Indians thought and felt, let alone why. Much work is still to do. We can at least make a start by disentangling as far as possible what Bentinck's motives were, what constraints he acted under, what he did and did not do, and what was the significance of his acts. Bentinck's motives are scarcely to be understood unless one keeps 209

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y in mind, first, his vision of a British Indian empire invested with 'nationality', and secondly the kind of Evangelicalism that ruled his thinking. The imperial vision framed all that Bentinck had to say on the need to Europeanise India. This was true even of the strongest denunciation of Indian 'darkness' which he wrote as Governor-General. After receiving the Charter Act he rejoiced that Our character is no longer the inconsistent one of merchant and sovereign. . . . Our future care is that of a vast territory cursed from one end to the other by the vices, the ignorance, the oppression, the despotism, the barbarous and often cruel customs that have been the growth of ages under every description of Asiatic misrule—the moral regeneration of this immense mass of our fellow-creatures—the communication to them [of] the blessings of the European condition, in knowledge, in domestic comfort, in security of person and property, in independence, in morals. These constitute the first duty of the Imperial Government. The point of this minute was to argue yet again that India's 'large house' should be governed from imperial Agra; that the Supreme Government should be in direct touch with North Indians; and that Indians should sit on the Legislative Council. It looked not just to 'civil liberty' and 'improvement' but to the beginning of 'political liberty'; it drew the comparison between India and Italy. 6 Bentinck certainly saw Europeanisation as the key, and had little interest in Indian tradition other than empire itself. But single measures doing away with 'cruel customs' or favouring 'European knowledge' were to him part of a constellation of measures aimed at enhancing 'national character' and urging India towards substantial self-rule. The trouble was that while some of the single measures could be enacted the wider 'nationalisation' of India failed to come about, then or for many years later. How far in all this was the Evangelical urge to Christianise India at work? The 1830s in England were a high point of missionary fervour. Macaulay in 1834 described 'the religious party in England as almost too strong to resist'. 7 Men like Trevelyan and William Astell, a chairman of the Court of Directors in these years, believed that European education would Christianise India. 8 Bentinck's public attitude, on the contrary, was always that 'Hindus may learn our language and science without changing their religion or diminishing their respect for their 210

9 • NATIONALITY AND CULTURE institutions and their parents'. 9 This could have been no more than company policy, reinforced by a caution particularly apt in a man who had earlier got into trouble over violations of Hindu custom. Yet there seems to have been, behind Bentinck's solemn appeal to the Hindus in his minute on the abolition of sati, a genuine feeling. He had admitted that sati was in practice a part of Hindu belief, and that to forbid it would 'inspire extensive dissatisfaction'. He had come down in favour of an open ban, 'resting altogether upon the moral goodness of the act and our power to enforce it'. He concluded: T h e first . . . object of my heart is the benefit of the Hindus. I know nothing so important to the improvement of their future condition as the establishment of a purer morality, whatever their belief, and a more just conception of the will of God. The first step to this better understanding will be dissociation of religious belief and practice from blood and murder. They will then, when no longer under this brutalising excitement, view with more calmness acknowledged truths. They will see that there can be no inconsistency in the ways of Providence, that to the command received as divine by all races of men, 'No innocent blood shall be spilt', there can be no exception; and when they shall have been convinced of the error of this first and most criminal of their customs, may it not be hoped that others which stand in the way of their improvement may likewise pass away, and that, thus emancipated from those chains and shackles upon their minds and actions, they may no longer continue, as they have done, the slaves of every foreign conqueror, but that they may assume their first places among the great families of mankind? I disown . . . any view whatever to conversion to our own faith. I write and feel as a legislator for the Hindus, and as I believe many enlightened Hindus think and feel. 10 What lay behind this appeal was, first, the eighteenth-century belief in 'natural religion', and secondly a call to national resurgence. T h e phraseology ('great families of mankind') is nationalist; the summons not to go on being 'the slaves of every foreign conqueror' matches word for word Bentinck's outcry over the Italians in 1814. Bentinck's other acts were consistent with this one. In standing out against the demands of the missionaries and their friends for an end to the pilgrim tax and other condonations of Hindu practices, he declared that a Government ruling over Hindus and Muslims ought to show 211

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y 'a friendly feeling and . . . afford every protection and aid towards the exercise o f . . . harmless rites', not contrary to 'the dictates of humanity and of every religious creed'; among such he numbered the worship of Jagannath at Puri, the bugbear of missionaries who denounced the company as 'dry-nurse to Vishnu' and 'churchwarden of Juggernaut'.11 Bentinck's private feeling is not known. He was in these years at his most devout, his tone at its most Evangelical. In embarking on the sati inquiry he felt 'the dreadful responsibility hanging over my happiness in this world and the next' if he let the practice go on 'for one moment longer, not than our security, but than the real happiness and permanent welfare of the Indian population rendered indispensable'.12 This seems to have been perfectly sincere. Yet over Christianisation—a live issue at the time—all we know him to have said, even after the end of his rule, amounted to mere passing hints, a good deal over-shadowed by his calls for material and educational improvement and an end to European 'monopoly'. In practice he warned missionaries against the evils of Christian intolerance, openly disliked the setting up of episcopacy in India, and several times held off the new Bishop of Calcutta (the enthusiastic Evangelical Daniel Wilson), who vehemently insisted on trying to expand and control the company's chaplaincy service and to dictate the religious instruction at an important new school, La Martiniere. Over such matters Bishop Wilson's predecessor too had got to the point of threatening to resign and warning Bentinck not to flout the power of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge at home. Bentinck's objection to paying for a proposed new church was revealing: I have always been opposed to the scheme of the Protestant Establishment in Ireland and I am anxious that we should not fall here into the same error. I cannot think it just to make Hindus pay for an Establishment, and a very costly one too, for Christians who, infinitely richer, will not contribute themselves a doit towards their own spiritual comfort and instruction. The solution reached for La Martiniere after three years' 'hard struggle'—an interdenominational school bringing in even Roman Catholics, with teachers chosen by public examination—was clearly after Bentinck's heart. 13 At home he had worked with Dissenters in the Bible Society. In India, he told the zealous new President of the Board of Control, 212

9 • N A T I O N A L I T Y AND C U L T U R E Charles Grant, 'it is Christianity, the whole Christian Church, whose cause in this heathen country we are to cherish'; he commended an earlier Bishop of Calcutta, Heber, who had entertained Catholics and Armenians and ('do not be horrified') had dissolved religious differences with claret and champagne. 14 Near the end of his term he suggested to a missionary that true Christianity would have consisted in improving India instead of monopolising her best jobs and her surplus resources: 'We do not do as we would be done by. We profess but do not practise Christianity, and know that charity best which begins at home.' 15 There seems little doubt that with his eighteenth-century belief in the 'general law' Bentinck, though hoping for ultimate Christianisation, was in practice highly tolerant of a Hinduism 'enlightened' by European example, even now and then by fiat. Bentinck's view of Hindu society, for all his Evangelical recoil from its 'darkness', may thus be allowed a certain breadth and generosity. But—like nearly all the British in his day—he worked under strict constraints: lack of intimate knowledge; a universalist ethics and psychology according to which 'institutions made men good or bad'; a pervasive classical education; perhaps most important, the company's economy drive, which (though Bentinck approved and enforced it) necessarily maimed any attempts such as he wished to make at a comprehensive policy of national 'regeneration'. British ignorance and universalism were well illustrated by the abolition of sati. That Hindus who, like the Calcutta notable Radhakant Deb, had shown lively interest in European education would suffer a profound cultural shock from the ban on sati, and would be driven into a defensive revivalism, did not cross Bentinck's mind any more than it did most of his colleagues'. They did not think in these terms, or see Indian culture as an organic growth no part of which could be lopped off without damage to the developing whole. British orientalists had helped Indians to rediscover, indeed partly to reinvent, India's ancient and medieval past. But sati was too tough a bone for the missionaries among them to do other than reject utterly; their influence in India and at home did most to change the climate of opinion so that by 1829 abolition seemed inevitable. Even the great orientalist H. H. Wilson argued from expediency that an outright ban would set up lasting distrust of the Government's purposes. For the rest, the British argued the matter on two levels: absolute morality; and the danger of immediate disturbances, especially among the troops. It says much for their 'strangeness' that until Bentinck's

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II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y inquiry no one seems to have grasped either that sati was uncommon in the North Indian areas most of the soldiers came from, or that the reason why it specially prevailed in certain Bengal districts was the custom of carrying the dying to the banks of sacred rivers. 16 T h e petition which many Hindus signed against Bentinck's act led to no disturbances; many of the signatories had not themselves practised sati. This was enough for Bentinck and others to dismiss their motives as opportunistic. Even Wilson two decades later concluded that alarm had been 'dissipated'. 17 All the constraints already mentioned were at work in the educational reforms of the 1830s. Much the most important was the economy drive. It was the main reason for the cutting down of Fort William College. It was the only reason why the Government in 1835 had to cut down subsidies to Oriental learning if it was to expand English higher education: the Court of Directors had repeatedly ordered it not to exceed the Rs 4 lakhs a year then being spent on education in the whole of British India; even this meagre sum was four times the amount allowed by the 1813 Charter Act. Economy, again, was the main reason why for many years talk of helping vernacular education remained little more than talk. It was the main reason why, from the mid-i82os on, all the leading officials concerned accepted the 'filtration theory' according to which knowledge imparted to the 'higher classes' alone would of itself percolate down to the population as a whole; even if the contemporary British distrust of State interference in education had not held most of these men back they had not the money to try anything else. Bengal Government grants made through the General Committee of Public Instruction reached, in 1 8 3 1 , just over 3,000 Indians—against some 8,000 in missionary schools and an unknown but much larger number who were being educated by traditional Indian methods, not necessarily in schools at all. When one keeps such figures in mind the solemn, categorical assertions of East India officials in favour of this or that educational principle look at times unreal.' 8 Other constraints were sometimes unconscious. Men whose own education had been largely classical assumed that an ancient literary language distinct from the vernacular must stand at the heart of all but elementary education. Which language this ought to be was the real issue between the most committed leaders of the Anglicist and Orientalist factions: Macaulay and Trevelyan saw English as the Greek and Latin of India; their arch-opponent, H. T . Prinsep, cast Arabic, 214

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Persian, and Sanskrit in the same essential role. 19 Men from a country where a single language was both the literary and the spoken tongue tended to assume that India needed a 'national language' to shape its learning. Yet England was itself (like France) an exception in a Europe where the inhabitants of Prussian, Venetian, Catalan, or Wallachian towns as a matter of course used several different languages for different purposes, just as many Indians did and do to this day. Where Bentinck looked to English to fulfil 'national' purposes (unifying India, qualifying Indians for responsible jobs, and bringing in European knowledge) Orientalists like his friend Troyer and H. H. Wilson also looked to 'a national language' to reform and enrich the country—though what the national language might be was not altogether clear: Troyer wished to Sanskritise the vernaculars (here 'national' meant unifying); Wilson hesitated between this and 'the literary use of the spoken languages at once' (here 'national' meant locally rooted).20 On both sides the search had begun that still baffles India—for a language that would not merely embody but, on a subcontinental scale, transform and transcend social relationships. Finally, the British by and large assumed that, in India, 'it is to the Government that the population must mainly look for facilities in the acquisition of improved learning'.21 In this they have been followed by most historians. Yet much Indian education in its 'constructive simplicity' did not depend on buildings, institutions, or Government aid. 22 Education is anyhow an intangible process, not to be fully gauged by the volume of expenditure or the records of institutions. The assumption that as Government chose to encourage them so Indians would learn lent the debates of the 1830s a heat which neither the real differences between the contestants nor perhaps the outcome fully justified. Bentinck's own view of Indian education and the language it should be conducted in is clear .We have seen that as early as 1829 he looked to 'the British language' as one of the agents in making a united, regenerated, imperial India. By 1833-4 he had in his mind a 'plan of national education' for India. 23 Always moving from the premise that 'our rule is bad', that to correct it Indians needed something approaching 'political liberty' ('the means through knowledge to represent their grievances and to obtain redress'), and that meanwhile 'their own habits, morals, or way of thinking are inconsistent with their own happiness and improvement', he concluded that they must be helped to overcome their errors 21S

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through 'the means provided by our greater intelligence'. 'General education is my panacea for the regeneration of India. The ground must be prepared and the jungle cleared away before the human mind can receive, with any prospect of real benefit, the seeds of improvement.'24 This might suggest a thorough Anglicising policy of the kind Macaulay summed up when he looked to see 'a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect'.25 Macaulay's notorious Education Minute, however, misrepresented not only the Orientalist but also the main Anglicist position; its fame speaks chiefly for the power of rhetoric over nineteenth-century minds. 'National' education such as Bentinck advocated meant, to contemporaries, above all the education of the poor—in England pursued by voluntary bodies like the British and Foreign School Society, which Bentinck supported. This for India meant in turn vernacular education. Anglicists like Bentinck, Trevelyan, and Sleeman saw English higher education and vernacular elementary education as closely bound up together; British officials, they thought, should concentrate on mastering the vernaculars. Their aims were clear communication'and the exchange of 'useful' knowledge in the cause of good government.26 The Indian classical languages they did not necessarily despise (Trevelyan kept a soft spot for them and was still spouting Sanskrit and Persian at a Parliamentary committee in 1853); but they saw them as an encumbrance to government, a subject best left out of institutions that were meant to train the country's future rulers, whether British or Indian. Bentinck had long encouraged the study both of the vernaculars and of Indian society. At Madras he had insisted that officials should master the local languages; he had applauded Wellesley's setting up of Fort William College and had thought of starting a replica at Madras under the Orientalist John Leyden;27 he had caused the Abbé Dubois's book to be published—no light service to Indology. As Governor-General he encouraged the publication of a Thai grammar and a Tamil dictionary.28 One of his motives for reforming Fort William College was that the training of young officials in 'the languages of the country'—the chief purpose of the college—was 'of too great importance to our efficient administration to be trifled with'.2« But to him 'the languages of the country' meant (as they had not meant for Wellesley) first of all the languages in daily use. 216

9 • N A T I O N A L I T Y AND CULTURE There is no evidence that, like Macaulay, he set out with a positive contempt for classical Indian literature. Back at Madras he had shown interest in Leyden's work on Persian and Arabic; in reforming Fort William College in 1828 he wished to grant a longer stay to students 'who aspired to greater distinction in Oriental literature'. 30 His onesentence endorsement of Macaulay's 1835 Minute was probably a tactical move. All the same, the culture which the classical languages embodied seems to have meant little to him. As his gloom about the condition of India grew more radical what really moved him was evidence that 'the mind of this country is receiving a new impulse and excitement. . . . Three thousand boys [he wrote in 1834] are learning English at this moment in Calcutta, and the same desire for knowledge is universally spreading.' This was progress: 'we must keep pace with it'. 31 By this time for medical students to study ancient languages and works (or Western works translated into Arabic or Sanskrit) seemed a positive time-wasting nuisance and a source of error; what was needed was the study of Western science through the medium of English and of 'the native languages which are in general use, Hindustani and Bengali'. 32 Bentinck's outlook was thus utilitarian, not in a doctrinal sense (James Mill had disapproved of English education for India), but in the sense contemporaries had in mind when they pursued 'useful knowledge'. There was a nation-building job to be done: only Western knowledge, English, and the vernaculars could do it. At a time when even the Orientalists admitted the 'inferiority' of Eastern culture the premise was thoroughly Europe-centred; the purpose was 'national'. Even then Bentinck was, as usual, caught between the vision of India as European influence might make it and the reality of European rule as it was. On the one hand, like some Englishmen at home, he wished for a system of 'national education' to be built partly through State help. On the other hand—he wrote when he launched a thorough inquiry into vernacular education—'I think it very likely that the interference of Government with education, as with most of the other native institutions with which we have too often so mischievously meddled, might do much more harm than good.' He tried to resolve the contradiction by hoping that Government might help without meddling and that Indian institutions might be fitted into a future 'improved general system'. He espoused the filtration theory—as head of a government committed to economy he had no choice; he hoped 217

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y that if vernacular teachers could be trained 'true knowledge' would gradually make its way 'without any further effort on the part of the Government'. 33 Here as elsewhere India under company rule sharpened the Liberal dilemma between the need for purposeful reform and distrust of State action. Of the steps taken during Bentinck's rule the shift from Persian to English as the company's official language was possibly the most significant—less as a cause than as a symptom of change. T h e cutting down of Fort William College was, in intention, a straightforward piece of 'economical reform' such as was steadily being carried out in England. The English education policy of 1835—conceived as an English-and-vernacular policy—promised more than, for many years, it could perform. Famous landmark though it is, its immediate effects were slight; what mattered most about it for the future was its uniting of a resounding purpose with internal contradictions that marred its carrying out. The shift from Persian to English was the measure Bentinck had least to do with, though he helped it along by, for instance, deciding to write to Indian princes in English with a Persian or Hindi translation attached. It came about piecemeal during the 1830s. Persian as the official language had been nothing out of the way in a plural India where 'nationality'—whether Indian, British, or Bengali—meant little. But it had been bound up with the culture of Muslim rulers: that it had lasted so long was a measure of British conservatism. T o give it up was to promote not only English but the vernaculars; it was also to meet the wishes of the new Calcutta Hindu élite who, in these years, were pressing for its abandonment, and who were to man much of the new high-ranking 'native agency'. 34 The cutting down of Fort William College can be looked upon in two very different ways. T o Bentinck and the British in his day—even to the Orientalists—the purpose of the college was to train civil servants fresh from Haileybury; the aim of reform was to rationalise it b> saving money, promoting efficiency in language learning, and enforcing good order within the service. T o a recent historian, David Kopf, the college matters as a 'pivotal social unit for cultural change' in Bengal: by the 1820s especially—a 'golden age of British Orientalism in Calcutta'— its mixed Bengali and European faculty were the chief agents in reviving Indian culture, both classical and vernacular, and in working out a syncretic 'fusion' between it and Western culture; by this and other means the Bengali intelligentsia were moving towards a 218

9 • NATIONALITY AND CULTURE modernisation that would transmute, rather than damagingly root up, their own inherited values. 35 T h e Court of Directors had never liked the college. In 1827 they directed Bentinck to abolish it. The college had been in trouble since the early 1820s. There are signs that as a teaching institution it was in decline, partly because a new generation of students were coming out, less open than their predecessors to Oriental culture. These students were often undisciplined; they failed their examinations; they ran up large debts which plagued some of them throughout their service. According to Holt Mackenzie, a former student who in 1825 had wished to abolish the college, the trouble with it was much the same as had brought down upon many institutions at home 'economical reform'—a combination of high cost, laxity, punishments so excessive as to be unenforceable, and lack of a clear chain of authority. Possibly —as in Britain—this state of things was, rather than new, newly seen as irrational and reprehensible.36 Bentinck's contribution was to save the college, though in a form so diminished as to make it a 'phantom'. The College Council was divided. The Court of Directors, though they had originally allowed Bentinck to suspend abolition, later reiterated their order. According to their secretary they were determined to do away with the college and its 'expensive drones'; they were backed in 1832 by the Commons Select Committee. T o keep the college in being at all Bentinck cut down expenditure by nearly two-thirds. He had begun by enforcing greater discipline; in 1830-1 he abolished the staff appointments, handed over the bulk of the library to the Asiatic Society, and let off the rooms. This still left young writers to study in Calcutta under private tutors and be examined by an official board, instead of—as the Court had wished—picking up the languages in the interior. But the reformed college led a half-life; it was finally abolished in 1854. Bentinck's motives had little to do with classical Indian culture— which, in a detached way, he was prepared to encourage—and everything to do with efficiency. If he kept the college in being it was partly because of his 'old prepossessions . . . strongly in favour' of Wellesley's foundation, but above all because he did not think young civilians could properly study and be examined in the vernaculars away from Government supervision in Calcutta. What really roused him was the 'intolerable' cost to the Indian taxpayer—£660 a year for each student—of maintaining young men some of whom stayed on for years, steadily failing their examinations; that, and the indiscipline 219

II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y civilians easily fell into when they expected high salaries as of right and knew they could not in practice be got rid of. It was 'utterly absurd and ludicrous to a military man like m y s e l f . . . that for 25 years a few writers have held at naught all the authority of the Supreme Government'. Though Bentinck seems to have been sincere in wishing the college to be spared—he even overrode Metcalfe and the Council to this end— his reform sprang from his habitual view of the company's 'bad', wasteful, 'monopolising' rule through privileged British civil servants. Mackenzie, in proposing abolition in 1825, had also called for the Indianisation of the service; Bentinck was moving the same way. Bentinck's role was thus a combination of the 'economical reformer' and the believer in strong, semi-military government, with a bias against the European privilege which the college seemed to embody. 37 T h e 1835 education policy is famous for the aim forthrightly set out in the Resolution of 7 March 1835: 'the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India, and . . . all the funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed in English education alone.' Yet the conflict that led up to it was clear-cut only from September 1834, when the General Committee of Public Instruction reached deadlock after years during which several members had hesitated or changed their minds. Nor were its immediate eifects far-reaching. Macaulay had wished to cut off funds to Oriental learning. Bentinck, more cautious—as often before—in deeds than in words, declared his 'entire concurrence' but then saw to it that the Resolution went little beyond a general statement of aims. It cut off funds for the printing of Oriental works (already suspended) but left existing institutions like the Sanskrit College and the Muslim Madrasa untouched. True, it threatened them with a run-down of staff and grants in the future; but it remained, rather than a fully worked out policy, a gesture which could be (and later was) qualified. There had been in its making something of the coup. Bentinck, Trevelyan, and Macaulay were in close touch—the first two from 1833 at least. Bentinck was clearly anxious to get the thing done before his departure; he stopped a protest by the leading Orientalist, H. T . Prinsep, from coming before the Council. But it does not follow that Bentinck was swayed by Macaulay and Trevelyan or fully shared their partisan enthusiasm. He played his cards unusually close to his chest; it may well be that he had thought an Anglicist majority might of itself 220

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emerge in the G C P I , and was provoked into action only by the 1834 deadlock. His intentions have to be deduced from his acts. 38 On the principle of English higher education Bentinck let Macaulay fire the rhetorical big guns while ensuring that vested interests suffered little actual damage. True, in the contest between the Orientalist policy of 'engrafting' Western knowledge on Indian classical culture and the Anglicist policy of concentrating on English works—a contest a good deal narrower and more blurred to most of those taking part than the gladiatorial Macaulay-Prinsep combat suggests—Bentinck had clearly sided with the Anglicists over Indian medical education. At the end of January 1835 he led the Council in deciding to replace the existing institutions—dedicated to 'engrafting'—with a new medical college: this was a measure aimed at enhancing 'native agency' in the company's medical service, encouraging the vernaculars as well as English, and concentrating on Western science. At the same time he had launched what might have developed into an important arm of his education policy—the inquiry into vernacular education under the Unitarian missionary and syncretic Orientalist William Adam. Over the next three years this was to give the Government the first solid information it had ever had on how most Indians were or were not educated. T o Bentinck this inquiry clearly mattered, especially now that 'education upon the largest and most useful basis' was an urgent concern. ' A true estimate of the native mind and capacity cannot well be formed without it'. Among other things it would show up 'the dreary space, if any, where the human mind is abandoned to entire neglect'. 39 Although he had reservations about the part the Government could play under company rule the inquiry, much more than the Resolution of 7 March, heralded the 'plan of national education' which Bentinck had in mind. It could have led to the kind of purposeful State action to forward the schooling of the poor which the educational pioneer James Kay was to attempt in England a few years later. Bentinck still hoped that the settlement of European entrepreneurs might rapidly transform the country and that it might soon be governed largely through its native inhabitants of all colours. He also had reason to hope that the surplus his economy measures had at length produced might be applied to 'improvement'. The Adam inquiry could have been the first step towards educating the people at large to take part in their own 'regeneration'—in agriculture, in industry, in the lower reaches of administration. 221

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That the inquiry would help to bring about all these blessings was— we may reasonably conjecture—Bentinck's hope. If so the hope was insecurely based. Bentinck had left the inquiry very late; he could not follow it through. A policy of helping vernacular education presupposed an end to the economy drive; but, even if the company had been willing to use the surplus for the large-scale development of India, the surplus was quickly swallowed up in the Afghan War: Auckland as GovernorGeneral decided in 1839 that India was too poor for the Government to do anything about elementary education.40 It presupposed a new British influence outside the company's 'monopoly' (and probably subversive of it) which did not come about. It presupposed a willingness rapidly to advance all natives of India in their own government which British rulers did not for many years evince. Little was officially done to help vernacular schools until the 1850s or often, in practice, the end of the century. This left English higher education a lone agent of cultural change among the élite, divorced from all the measures of national 'regeneration' which Bentinck, Trevelyan, and others had looked for to accompany it—hence, by the 1860s, an agent of frustration and of a new kind of nationalism very different from the North American model which the Liberals of the 1830s had had in mind. 'Beware! . . . "Knowledge is power" ', the Liberal Robert Rickards had warned the British Government. Through European knowledge 'a light is now rising in the East, destined to attain meridian strength and splendour . . . ' The choice lay between eventual revolt 'which 300,000 British bayonets will be unable to control' and 'cooperation with the natives in the government of themselves'.41 But the implied American model, once again, fitted neither the toughness of indigenous Indian culture nor the means which Britain now had of holding India through a fundamentally conservative rule. At a time of rapid and hazardous change at home Bentinck indeed seems to have underrated above all the ability of the classes still dominant in British politics to maintain their position, and the continuing distrust of purposeful government. The fate of the Englishand-vernacular education policy ran parallel to that of Edwin Chadwick's 1834 New Poor Law, which, within a few years, was shorn both of strong centralised administration and of the 'collateral aids' (early measures of social welfare) Chadwick had envisaged.42 British society of the thirties and forties could support, whether at home or in India, measures aimed at rationalising institutions; it could seldom 222

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tolerate obvious and prolonged State intervention for purposes of social engineering, especially if it cost money. Men like Bentinck and Rickards, with their large vision of what Indian government might achieve and their distrust of Indian government as it was, themselves embodied the contradiction. T o resolve it they looked to India's 'civilisation' (not a state but a process) by a free, energetic entrepreneurial class on the American model. Such imaginings were vain. In its aborted form the 1835 education policy did—from the 1850s —do much to transform the Indian élite through English-medium universities fed by English schools. Should we agree, though, with Kopf that even in the 1830s Bentinck's social and educational measures dealt such a shock to the Bengali élite as to precipitate it away from attempts at cultural 'fusion'? K o p f ' s central conclusion is that the élite's 'almost unanimous disapproval' of the abolition of sati in 18291830 tended to polarise it into pro-Western and anti-Western camps, and to build in the Dharma Sabha a proto-nationalist movement, still modernising in many of its procedures and aims, but defensively ranged round a reconstituted Hindu tradition. Then, because Bentinck's education policy did not allow the experiments in cultural fusion to go on, an intelligentsia which had previously been open to modernisation reacted, many of them, by turning to a revivalist nationalism. 43 K o p f ' s thesis is valuable. It brings out the vitality of the experimental 'fusionist' renaissance of 1800-30. Its account of the immediate revulsion against the 1829 ban on sati is persuasive, though how intense and lasting the effects were is not clear. Radhakant Deb and his family in April 1830 declined an invitation to Government House; by 1835, during and after the launching of the education policy, he and other socially conservative leaders—Ramkamal Sen and Rasamay Dutt— were willing to serve on official education committees and even to give Bentinck a rousing send-off. By the late 1830s the Dharma Sabha was in decline. 44 T h e thesis, however, has weaknesses. It postulates a 'golden age' of fusion—in historical explanation always a dubious concept, implying a stable process which might not or ought not to have been deflected. It seems to suppose that Bengal might have escaped a defensive cultural nationalism at a time when many societies, European as well as colonial, were going through a similar phase; true, this was most marked in societies like Germany, Russia, or Bohemia where national 223

II . EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y identity had to define itself against non-national institutions or cultures, but the phenomenon was too general to be explained wholly in terms of colonial 'encounter'. 45 The thesis underrates the commitment of British Orientalists, the missionaries in particular, to Christianising India, hence to rejecting a large part of her culture. Above all it stands Macaulay on his head by taking as immediately effective for ill the official acts which Macaulay thought immediately effective for good. Education is not to be measured by official acts. Few can now suppose that Indians learnt English or took to Western learning because British officials decided that they should. The 12-year-old Ramtanu Lahiri, who ran for several days beside David Hare's palanquin so that he could be admitted to Hare's school and learn the ruler's language, can be matched many times over among Bengalis. Bentinck's '3,000 boys learning English in Calcutta' were not all in Government-aided institutions. Radhakant and other conservatives took the lead in building up Hindu College and distributing increasing numbers of English books. The English tide had set in.46 True, some Orientalists maintained that Indians took to English merely as to a key that opened government jobs. 47 But did it follow that because their aim was practical none of them was going to read John Stuart Mill, officially encouraged or not? There was a half-truth in the Anglicist claim that 'English education was in a manner forced upon the British Government. . .'.48 Kopf in effect accepts this; he argues that what Indian needs and . desires did not force upon the British—what on the contrary was forced upon Indians by a new British ethnocentrism—was the repudiation of India's heritage as a touchstone for modernising her culture. Men like Bentinck, Trevelyan, and Holt Mackenzie, though less extreme than Macaulay, did stand for a new impatience with the Indian heritage as a means to national 'regeneration'; but what was new about them was less their ethnocentrism—their philosophical assumptions were still universalist—than this very impatience to reform and rationalise, and, in Bentinck, a desire to see India 'one harmonious whole' endowed with 'nationality'. The English-and-vernacular education policy of the 1830s, again, did ultimately shape the relationship between British rule and Indian nationalism, though some twenty years late and in maimed form. But it takes great faith in the influence of institutions to assume that the pensioning off of the Fort William 224

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College faculty in itself blasted the experiments of the Bengali intelligentsia with cultural 'fusion', or that a 'phantom college' with the great scholar Iswarchandra Vidyasagar as its head teacher was culturally null. We need more study of Indian cultural life in the middle decades of the century before we can conclude that Bentinck's acts had an immediate and drastic effect. Bentinck made a new start; but, in part because he misunderstood the historical situation that shaped his acts, it was a largely abortive start. How and why important consequences followed for the growth of Indian nationalism in the late nineteenth century must be studied through the continued working out of the British-Indian relationship after his time.49

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India at Bentinck's coming might be 'virtually one empire'. It was not yet 'one harmonious whole'. Even within British India much was wanting, as Bentinck saw it, to make for imperial unity and greatness. But a large part of the subcontinent was still fragmented among the princely states. From the Sutlej to the Brahmaputra, and from the Himalayan foothills to Cape Comorin, these states were indirectly subordinate to the company as paramount ruler. They were no longer allowed to run their own external relations. Nine of them, under Wellesley's system of subsidiary alliances, paid the company to maintain troops quartered on their territories. But what was to be done about their internal affairs? Should they be left alone on the grounds that, as the elder Charles Grant had maintained, British power had reached its 'optimum spread'?1 Ought British rulers, on the contrary, to make themselves responsible for order and good government in the states? Were there even grounds for expanding British paramountcy or direct rule to the subcontinent as a whole, above all to the strategically important northwest beyond the Sutlej? Bentinck's governor-generalship, a time of peace, has not gone down as crucial in the story of British expansion. Yet it prepared the way for the annexation of Sind and the First Afghan War. It marked a further step towards the annexation of Avadh in 1856. It saw the annexation of Coorg and of two small Assamese states. Bentinck took over the administration of Mysore, though he took care not to annex it; Mysore H

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College faculty in itself blasted the experiments of the Bengali intelligentsia with cultural 'fusion', or that a 'phantom college' with the great scholar Iswarchandra Vidyasagar as its head teacher was culturally null. We need more study of Indian cultural life in the middle decades of the century before we can conclude that Bentinck's acts had an immediate and drastic effect. Bentinck made a new start; but, in part because he misunderstood the historical situation that shaped his acts, it was a largely abortive start. How and why important consequences followed for the growth of Indian nationalism in the late nineteenth century must be studied through the continued working out of the British-Indian relationship after his time.49

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India at Bentinck's coming might be 'virtually one empire'. It was not yet 'one harmonious whole'. Even within British India much was wanting, as Bentinck saw it, to make for imperial unity and greatness. But a large part of the subcontinent was still fragmented among the princely states. From the Sutlej to the Brahmaputra, and from the Himalayan foothills to Cape Comorin, these states were indirectly subordinate to the company as paramount ruler. They were no longer allowed to run their own external relations. Nine of them, under Wellesley's system of subsidiary alliances, paid the company to maintain troops quartered on their territories. But what was to be done about their internal affairs? Should they be left alone on the grounds that, as the elder Charles Grant had maintained, British power had reached its 'optimum spread'?1 Ought British rulers, on the contrary, to make themselves responsible for order and good government in the states? Were there even grounds for expanding British paramountcy or direct rule to the subcontinent as a whole, above all to the strategically important northwest beyond the Sutlej? Bentinck's governor-generalship, a time of peace, has not gone down as crucial in the story of British expansion. Yet it prepared the way for the annexation of Sind and the First Afghan War. It marked a further step towards the annexation of Avadh in 1856. It saw the annexation of Coorg and of two small Assamese states. Bentinck took over the administration of Mysore, though he took care not to annex it; Mysore H

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II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y was restored to its old ruling family in 1881. At the same time Bentinck avoided intervening in strength in the troubles of several Maratha and Rajput states; in Avadh, shortly before his departure, he withheld a take-over which the Court of Directors had authorised.2 Ever since the financial shock of Wellesley's conquests of 1799-1805 the Home Government had by and large pursued a policy of nonintervention. 'No further acquisition of territory', it had concluded, 'can be desirable'. 3 Interference short of war had several times led to annexation: it should therefore be avoided. T h e policy assumed that the British had a choice. Later historians have often made the same assumption. Some British historians, especially since the Mutiny, have seen the non-intervention policy as inconsistent and futile, and have implied that a policy of avowed interference (not necessarily of annexation) would have done better.4 For an eminent Indian historian, on the contrary, Bentinck's limited annexations 'fairly illustrate the policy of aggressive imperialism which was the order of the day' even under 'a man of pacific disposition'.5 T h e political configuration of India in Bentinck's day was not unlike that of many former times—a paramount Power whose writ ran with varying strength in different parts of the subcontinent, and, in a few outlying areas, did not run at all. A great Power is likely by its needs, expectations, and sheer presence to be in a dynamic relationship with small states that touch on its concerns—whether it moves towards dominance or recedes away from it. Men of Bentinck's generation had seen notable examples. In India by 1828 the question was not so much whether British policy was noninterventionist or aggressive as whether a dominant Power like the company could in practice avoid being drawn into the affairs of the states. T o the usual irritants of border troubles, escaped criminals, and the like was added the increasing belief among British officials that the company had a duty to maintain 'tranquillity' and stop the worst kinds of 'oppression' within its area of paramountcy. There were also tensions over trade, especially in opium, though economic motives for interference were seldom evident except in the opening up of the Indus valley, outside the paramount area. Principled upholders of the non-intervention policy tended to be conservatives who thought the Indian states at least as well governed as British India and disliked a governess-like 'mawkish morality'. 6 Others at the East India House upheld non-intervention not because they thought it practicable in the long run—Bentinck's friend Raven226

10 • THE EXPANSION OF EMPIRE shaw expected all the states within the paramount area to fall into British hands after a long tale of muddle and impoverishment—but because of the overriding need for economy.7 Interference might lead to war; war was expensive. A company engaged in trying to overcome its deficit and reduce its debt—both the product of former wars—had no choice but to insist on non-intervention, whatever the cost in muddle and inconsistency. A Governor-General like Bentinck whose mission was to enforce economy had still less choice. It is doubtful how far he ever believed in the non-intervention policy. In his Madras days he had fervently adhered to Wellesley's expansionism. In the first few months of his governor-generalship he veered between saying that the states should 'feel all advantages of independence' other than that of waging war, and forecasting that through internal dissension some of them were likely in the end to be absorbed into British India. On the one hand the British should not meddle in internal affairs with anything but advice; on the other hand their paramount power, 'exercised with judgment and forbearance', must lead not only to 'order' and 'tranquillity' but to 'the general welfare and prosperity of both princes and people'. In practice he applied the non-intervention policy by restoring to Nagpur, under a new treaty, control of the subsidiary force; he tried to do the same in Hyderabad. At the Board of Control the interventionist Ellenborough—overriding, as was his right, the protests of the Court of Directors—vehemently censured the first move and stopped the second. Yet Ellenborough's interventionism was no less selfcontradictory than Bentinck's attempts to show non-intervention as both feasible and beneficent; he thought the British could keep military control of the states without touching their civil administration, and 'respect all native states' rights' while seeing in 'misgovernment . . . the only necessary cause for interference'. 8 There was a clear parallel between the problems raised by a number of the Indian states and those which Sicily in 1806-15 had raised for its British defenders. The commonest problems were dissensions within the ruling family, or between a ruler and his dewan (chief Minister), often accompanied by charges (which the British believed) that one or other party had oppressed the people by taking outrageous bribes, ordering arbitrary arrests and executions, or raising taxes under duress. Sometimes the British became committed to a particular dewan who was supposed to reform a bad administration, as Bentinck in Sicily had become committed to the constitutionalists. If the dewan fell from 227

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favour the British might become further embroiled: this happened twice in Avadh during Bentinck's term. Again as in Sicily, some British Residents and officers complained that because the subsidiary force might be used to suppress revolts the company was tarred with the brush of local misrule. This could be an argument for withdrawal; it could equally be an argument for intervention. On Metcalfe's advice Bentinck made a start of withdrawing civil control from Hyderabad (where the British had been conducting the revenue settlements) and would have withdrawn military control if he could; yet the seeming involvement of the British in misrule led him to threaten a take-over in Avadh and to take over the administration in Mysore. Bentinck in the 1830s was well aware of the Sicilian parallel. Even if he had not been, there were some to remind him: John Briggs, the headstrong commissioner whom he sent to Mysore, and who promptly got into a factional struggle with other British officials, asked him in self-justification to 'look back on Sicily'. 9 But the memory of Sicily was bitter. What it did for Bentinck was to make him suspicious above all of'double government'—effective but not ostensible rule by a British Resident who worked through local Ministers and officials. That was what Bentinck had attempted in Sicily for two years until he had had to make himself dictator; even then he had not been able to set aside King Ferdinand and all had shortly been lost. He had become answerable for Sicilian 'regeneration' but had not until too late, after long and damaging conflict, been able to get his hands on the levers of government. Now, in India, he was determined not to repeat the mistake. Though the Residents 'all like [d] to play the king' he tried to see that British influence was either confined to paternal advice or else, if need be, exerted openly and in strength. There must be no equivocation this time. 10 Though he was 'determined' to reform the administration of Avadh he warned the Resident in 1830 that this must be done 'by the royal authority exclusively. Direct interference, which is in fact nothing more or less than the transfer of the government from the King to the Resident, is, as far as my observation goes, the very worst course . . . ' . If advice and remonstrance failed it would be best 'at once to set aside the King, either by governing in his name, or by placing a more efficient substitute in his place'. Six months later Bentinck himself visited Avadh and solemnly threatened King Nasiruddin with the loss of his kingdom if he did not mend his ways. 1 1 In Mysore, where the Nagar district had revolted, the British Resident and his immediate superiors 228

10 • THE EXPANSION OF EMPIRE in the Madras Government urged a limited intervention: they wished to take over Nagar temporarily and to insist on a new dewan. Bentinck, however, overrode them and preferred an 'open and avowed' take-over of the whole administration: there must be no 'appearance of an insidious character'—whatever the British did 'should not seem as if adopted as a step to something else'.12 About Mysore and Avadh Bentinck was particularly sensitive: they had caused him 'more annoyance and embarrassment' than anything else he had had to deal with as Governor-General.13 Indeed the old Sicilian troubles dogged him, particularly the slowness of communication. From Mysore to Simla, where Bentinck was in September 1831 when he decided to intervene in the state, dispatches took six weeks; he still had not received a report which the Madras Government had promised in April. His decision was not as hasty as has sometimes been made out—he was briefed on past history and precedents—but it was based on wrong information that the Raja of Mysore was behindhand with the subsidy; his choice of Briggs as commissioner was also based on inadequate knowledge. Bentinck had cause to regret both. Briggs set up an 'English party' in conflict with a rival 'English party' supported by the Madras Government; a committee of inquiry reported in 1833 that the situation in Mysore had been misrepresented—the chief cause of trouble had been not so much misrule as the fall in revenue because of agrarian depression and low grain prices. Over Avadh too it took nearly four years to get from the Court of Directors authority to take over the state; by that time the reforming dewan set up in 1831, Hakim Mehdi, had long since fallen. None the less Bentinck had learnt a new caution since Palermo days. When he understood his mistakes over Mysore he transferred Briggs and set up an administration of conservative stamp, run largely through Indians and aimed at making it possible at any time to restore the state to the Raja; early in 1834 he met the Raja, was favourably impressed, and recommended that the company should do just that. Though restoration took another 47 years he had saved Mysore from being annexed. In Avadh he did nothing after Hakim Mehdi's fall; nor, at the very end of his term, could he bring himself to act on the Court's discretionary permission to take over the state. It would, he said, have been 'odious', particularly as there had of late been no gross maladministration. Possibly he did not wish to go down as the man who had twice proposed to take over a small state with a long-standing, 229

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equivocal dependence on British power—first Sicily and then Avadh. He left Avadh to stagger on, in effect under 'double government', for another 22 years. 14 Bentinck's stance, in fact, was as self-contradictory as the nonintervention policy itself. In his private letters up to 1830 he supported the policy—'one uniform intelligible principle'—which ensured that any extreme measures would come only after the Government had used the greatest possible forbearance; true, he was rather more enthusiastic about it to the Directors than to Ellenborough. 15 How far he was sincere is not known; the question, touching as it did on economy, was sensitive. After 1830 Bentinck grew more impatient about this as about everything else, particularly as Avadh and Mysore came to 'plague' him. B y 1832 he was willing to dismiss non-intervention as 'the temporising and unsatisfactory policy hitherto pursued'. 16 He was also willing in private to talk of annexing part or the whole of troubled states like Jaipur and Gwalior: ' I should be well pleased if [Gwalior] fell into our hands. A Maratha mob and army like that can never be useful, and in adverse times might be a great annoyance.' 17 In 1834 he did annex the small mountain state of Coorg, on the grounds that the Raja had been monstrously cruel to his subjects and insolent to the company; it took 'a little war'—the Coorgs defended themselves well for three weeks—but, Bentinck wrote to his brother, 'we have happily bagged the Raja and there is an end of it'. He had previously tried to use conciliation and, even during the campaign, had thought of merely deposing the Raja; but the Raja turned out to have killed off his legitimate heirs, and the British agents on the spot urged the value of Coorg as a strong military position. 18 Even when Bentinck urged the restoration of Mysore to its prince he wished to annex Bangalore and two other districts—largely because he was then more taken up than ever with his notion that India ought to be governed from 'centrical' positions: Bangalore seemed a splendid place from which to run the Madras Presidency. 19 All this might suggest that Bentinck's natural bent was little less expansionist than it had been at Madras, and that whatever he might say in public (he once quoted Aristotle and Vattel on the sovereignty inherent even in protected states)20 he had scant regard in practice for the princes' right to run their own affairs in traditional ways. One might draw the same conclusion from the drastic measures taken to suppress thagi in Central India: Bentinck allowed Sleeman to pursue thags on to the territory of a neighbouring state like Gwalior, over the 230

10 • T H E EXPANSION OF EMPIRE protests of the British Resident.21 Yet, when it came to annexing important states like Avadh and Mysore, Bentinck drew back. The reason was perhaps not so much the need to go on paying lip-service to non-intervention as the familiar conflict in his view of British rule. I f , as he kept saying, British rule was 'bad', why subject the states to it —short of the total misrule he thought to find in Coorg? Even over the districts he proposed to detach from Mysore in 1834 Bentinck seems to have been divided between the chance of making something of them under direct rule and the feeling that it might after all be better to let Indians get on with the job. 22 He resolved the question, like so many others, by urging his favourite nostrum—imperial rule from the 'throne of Agra'. Among the reasons he advanced for it in his 'one harmonious whole' Minute of 1834 w a s the need for the Governor-General to deal at close quarters with the princes: in the previous three years his tour had enabled him to meet many of them face to face; this, he thought, had removed much distrust and given them 'more comfortable and satisfactory notions of their forced relation with the paramount Power'.23 The same imperial motives led him to avoid meeting the last of the Mughals, the puppet King of Delhi: he wished 'to pay to this respectable descendant of an imperial dynasty every possible respect'—had indeed removed a Resident for quarrelling with the King over points of etiquette; but even after the steps which Bentinck's predecessors had taken to put themselves on an equal ceremonial footing with the King he would have had to acknowledge himself the King's nominal vassal—'a monstrous absurdity and very bad policy'. Bentinck also took the occasion of a currency reform to take the King's name off the coinage.24 Once again the remedy for bad British rule was better British rule: a Governor-General no longer hundreds of miles away and forced to depend on residents who 'liked to play the king', but instead able to keep the princes in line through his own firm yet benevolent authority. Not that this was likely to be more than a transient phase. Bentinck seems to have thought the states would in the end wither away— as they were bound to do if his other hopes came about and India approached 'the happiness of America'. Non-intervention was always likely to be a relative term within the circle of the company's paramount rule. It was a different matter beyond the Sutlej. The states to the north-west were independent in fact. The Panjab, while Ranjit Singh lived, was a strong military state. Sind and Afghanistan were locked away behind deserts and mountains. 231

11 • E M P I R E AND N A T I O N A L I T Y Little in the inherent momentum of British rule in India seemed to make it inevitable that they should come under company rule, direct or indirect.* The impulse to a forward policy in the north-west came not from India but from Europe. Bentinck was at first sceptical, then acquiesced in it, finally—though still in guarded fashion—became its advocate. Bentinck's governor-generalship coincided with the first of several great Russian scares which punctuated British Indian policy through the rest of the nineteenth century. From 1828 on, Russia's success in overawing Turkey and Persia led both Tory and Whig Governments to see a Russian threat to India. It was a by-blow of the Eastern Question; the threat, potential rather than actual, seemed more imminent than it was to men in London who saw Central Asian geography foreshortened. The first notable step taken to counteract it was Ellenborough's secret dispatch of January 1830. He called on Bentinck to open up the navigation of the Indus: the aim was, first, to '[repel] the Russian commerce from Kabul and Bokhara by carrying our goods directly' there by water; secondly, to establish British influence in Central Asia. The pretext was to be the dispatch to Ranjit Singh of a present from the British Government—six dray horses. The horses were to go through, if need be, over the objections of the Amirs of Sind. It was a grand though imprecise design for the spread of British influence as well as for steam navigation to North India; it was the first link in a chain that was to lead to the First Afghan War. 2S Bentinck was at first doubtful. Ranjit, he wrote, was very suspicious, the Amirs very unruly. He guessed—correctly, though he was soon to go back on it—that the Indus would turn out impracticable for steamer traflic. As for the drays, they would 'cut but a sorry figure on the plains of Hindustan. [Ranjit] will probably look upon them as elephants.. ,'. 26 Until then he had pooh-poohed the Russian threat; he had wanted as little as possible to do with Persia, especially if it meant spending a great deal of money on what he thought illusory benefits; he thought Russia would have great trouble in reaching Bokhara. The threat might come one day, but—he told the despondent Metcalfe—'in my time the storm will not gather . . . ' . As late as 1835, when, in one of his very last Minutes, he presented the Russian threat as grounds for reorganising the Indian Army, he still maintained that there was 'no * Bentinck and, in the Secretariat, Macnaghten however thought that the Panjab would willy-nilly fall into the British lap after Ranjit's death: Jacquemont, Correspondance, I, 227-8; Macnaghten to Bentinck, 26 Dec. 1831, BP/PwJf/1354.

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10 • T H E E X P A N S I O N OF EMPIRE ground for any present alarm'; a threat along the Bokhara route was 'a very distant speculation', though there might be a real danger from an advance through Persia to Herat. 27 He went on being sceptical into 1 8 3 1 ; none the less in the autumn of that year he took steps to start applying Ellenborough's plan in earnest. There were two main reasons for his change of mind. One was a persuasive but overconfident report from Alexander Burnes, the young lieutenant who had got the dray horses past the Amirs of Sind, that the Indus was fully navigable.* The other was Bentinck's celebrated meeting in October with Ranjit Singh, which established cordial relations. A further reason may have been the spread from Britain of the Russian scare. In November Bentinck sent an experienced officer, Henry Pottinger, off to open with the Amirs what turned out to be the first of a series of negotiations: from one haggle to the next these went a long way to undermine the independence of Sind. From then on Bentinck took the Russian threat seriously even if he did not think it immediate; after the change of government at home he objected to Grant's watering down of Ellenborough's instructions (Grant wished to achieve the same ends but without the ultimate use of force); he even came to think—here we see the 'great game' starting up—there were Russian spies in Calcutta. By now Bentinck's aims and methods were the same as Ellenborough's. He wished, first, to make Sind and the Panjab 'good allies in time of need'; and secondly to 'convert the great resources which commerce and civilisation might derive from the free use of the rivers of the Panjab'. These aims he saw as defensive against Russia, indeed 'purely commercial, unaccompanied by any project of ambition and aggrandisement'. He tried to stiffen Grant by pointing out that any risks were 'the unavoidable consequence of extensive dominion. From this position we cannot recede . . .'. He was sure it could all be done by persuasion; but to establish 'our power as protectors and mediators upon the Indus' he was prepared to use the threat of force, ultimately force itself. After all, 'where is the native Power . . . that listens to the voice of reason?' 28 This remained Bentinck's attitude for the rest of his term. Pottinger in 1832 secured a limited treaty with the Amirs opening the Indus to • Norris, First Afghan War, 54, denies that Burnes's report on the Indus was over-optimistic. Burnes did mention some of the difficulties; his main point, however, was that 'steamboats could ply' if they drew no more than 4 ft when laden. Flat-bottomed steamboats with less than this draught were by then being built for navigation on the Ganges.

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shipping on payment of reasonable tolls; almost at once—because of trouble with customs and bandits—he started asking for more. While the Amirs step by step tried to defend their precarious isolation— rather as King Ferdinand had defended his prerogative in 1 8 1 1 - 1 3 — Bentinck tried to keep the dictatorial envoy to the language of forbearance; he cautioned Pottinger against interfering with Sind's internal trade, and wished him 'only to put forth the effectual argument of your strength as the very last resource'. All the same, in a letter he drafted in February 1834 he went on to say that since the Amirs acted only out of fear ' I have always contemplated as an inevitable consequence the employment of military force and eventually perhaps the occupation of the country to establish the free and uninterrupted navigation of the Indus'. Free passage for riparian states was a 'natural right' which Bentinck was 'quite prepared to enforce'; but first it was best to 'use every possible means, short of war, to induce these barbarians to fulfil their compact'. Bentinck drafted this letter just before coming down with his most dangerous illness so far; it was not sent. Ill health perhaps accounted for what one may call either its frankness or its irritability. After his recovery, however, Bentinck did authorise Pottinger to threaten 'measures of coercion'.2« They were not needed just then: the Amirs made further limited concessions on tolls; war remained too expensive to contemplate. The course Bentinck had set, all the same, led within a few years to the forcing of a residency on Sind, to subsidiary treaties, to conquest. In Afghanistan Bentinck's share in the steps that led to war was passive. The problem about establishing 'identity of interests' in the north-west that Ranjit Singh was at feud both with the Amirs of Sind and with the Barukzai clan who for the moment held the leadership in Afghanistan. This could be used as leverage against the Amirs; but in Afghanistan there was a temptation to let the rival claimant Shah Shuja, now an exile on British territory, set up a friendly government. Bentinck in 1833-4 did nothing to stop Shuja from going off in an attempt to recover his kingdom; indeed he allowed him to take four months' advance of pension. Officially he was neutral. In private he thought—correctly—that Shuja, a man with 'no energy of character', would find no support. 30 He was even prepared a few months later to try to open commercial relations with the 'enlightened' Dost Muhammad, the Barukzai leader at Kabul. 3 1 Because he let Shuja take his chance it does not follow that he was preparing war on behalf of

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10 • THE EXPANSION OF EMPIRE Shuja's claim. But he was playing with possibilities in the far northwest. The 'indifference' he had to profess as Shuja went forward encouraged Ranjit Singh to seize Peshawar from the Afghans—another step that helped to bring on the war. What in all this were Bentinck's real motives? H. H. Wilson, writing soon after the disaster of the Afghan campaign, thought the opening of the Indus had been a mere commercial front and the real motives had been political.32 This was a misreading. T o Ellenborough, after a while to Bentinck, to many of the subordinate actors (with Metcalfe, thoroughly opposed to all forward policies, the great exception) commercial and political motives went hand in hand. These men did have visions of the north-western rivers dotted with steamers carrying British and Indian goods and spreading 'improvement'; at the same time they thought the resulting 'identity of interests' would cement a defensive alliance against Russia. They were not bent on conquest; theoretically they disapproved of it; but in the end they were ready to conquer if that was the only way. The 'imperialism of free trade', especially in its beginnings, often expressed the needs of men in whose minds gloom about the present worked intertwined with boundless trust in future possibilities. Gibbon Wakefield foresaw in Britain diminishing returns on capital and immiseration of labour; but he wrote glowingly of what could be expected from the opening up overseas of new 'fields of production', if need be by rough and ready means. T o Bentinck British rule was bad, India neglected and sunk in 'darkness'; yet he saw British enterprise and 'knowledge' making for an India united and emancipated, morally and economically, perhaps in the end politically; within and without the circle of paramountcy he grew steadily more impatient to draw into the expected benefits the surviving Indian states. Ellenborough saw the Russian threat as urgent; but he thought it could be swiftly countered by a commercial and political advance into Central Asia. Both fears and hopes were often overdrawn; but fears and hopes rose fittingly in men from an England at grips in the 1830s with severe social and economic crises, which yet was engaged in building up an industry and a trading capacity till then unmatched, and where a newly selfconscious middle class sfeemed to combine economic vigour with political virtue. In Bentinck's mind as in Ellenborough's to expand production and trade (Indian as well as British), to advance Indians in the running of their own country, to weld the subcontinent into a united British empire and to secure it if need be by the sword—all this

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II • EMPIRE AND N A T I O N A L I T Y seemed an urgent need; it meant breaking out of dangerous constraints —the threat of poverty, of misrule, of war. What made Bentinck singular among rulers of British India was that with his share in the early stirrings of Mediterranean nationalism he made out, even though dimly and in a curious form shaped by the expectations of his time, the outline of India as a nation united and free.

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PART III

The Pursuit of Equity 1 • FROM CERTAINTY TO D O U B T '. . . the more one sees of revenue systems and practice, the more reason one must find to distrust all opinions upon this subject.'1 Bentinck wrote this towards the end of his governor-generalship. After thirty years' pursuit of Indian 'happiness' through institutional engineering it was his final wisdom. That it was wisdom some modern historians of India would agree. The British in India often saw as their crowning achievement the patient effort to set in order, at once equitably and efficiently, the land revenue—the fiscal system through which all Indian governments had drawn the bulk of their resources from the tiller of the soil. Side by side with this went the no less strenuous effort to establish security of life and property through efficient police and impartial administration of justice.2 The young Bentinck at Madras had had no doubt that on these twin efforts depended 'the happiness of millions'. Just as Bentinck much later came to see these efforts at least in part as 'the pursuit of imaginary perfection',3 and to doubt the confident assertions he himself among others had made about their effects, so too modern historians have come to look upon British revenue and judicial administration with a more critical eye. This need not mean a devaluing of the tasks the British set themselves. The effort issued in a notable intellectual and political achievement, carried on over generations, often selflessly and in adverse circumstances. But historians have started asking new questions. The growth of economic history and anthropology has led them to inquire how far British administrative measures really affected economic relations on the land and social relations in the village. The development of Indian society stands in the foreground of inquiry; British administrative efforts are subordinate. From this point of view the immense records of British revenue and judicial administration, the endless discussions of highly technical 237

I l l • THE PURSUIT OF EQUITY matters, can seem at times baffling, almost irrelevant. In the early nineteenth century such discussions often assumed, first, that British institutional arrangements were what mattered, and secondly that Company officials could fully understand and control the workings of Indian society. T o historians who doubt both assumptions—who try to follow the course of prices and markets, of power, labour, and caste relationships, a course in part independent of British action—the records of British rule can be at once an indispensable source and an obstacle to understanding. Bentinck's work in India was closely bound up with two of the three main revenue systems which, according to the classic view,4 the British over the years worked out. These were, in South India, the raiyatwari or settlement with individual peasants; and, in the Western Provinces (the present Uttar Pradesh), the mahalwari or settlement with the village community as a whole. In judicial matters Bentinck was concerned, first, with introducing into much of Madras the Cornwallis system of district courts, and later with thoroughly revising this system in the Bengal Presidency. It was during his governor-generalship that the first Law Member, Macaulay, took his seat on the Supreme Council and set going the long effort to codify the law of India. W e cannot here deal except at a tangent with the vast subject of Indian economic and social history, or even with the no less tangled history of British Indian institutions. Part I I I of this book studies one man's effort to come to grips with the complex Indian society he had to rule; it asks how far he came to understand that society, why he acted as he did and what was the discoverable outcome of his acts. Since Bentinck in Sicily was also taken up with agrarian relations and judicial reform it treats this part of his career as relevant to Indian no less than to European history.

2 - A P P R E N T I C E S H I P IN MADRAS . . . T h e husbandman in India is the most industrious, parsimonious creature in the world; a stranger to vice, thinking of nothing but cultivating his field, maintaining his family, and paying the sarkar rent [Government revenue]. . . . T h e raiyat [peasant] is the man who feels, as it were, married to his field. What an effect the sense of a property in the soil would have upon

238

I l l • THE PURSUIT OF EQUITY matters, can seem at times baffling, almost irrelevant. In the early nineteenth century such discussions often assumed, first, that British institutional arrangements were what mattered, and secondly that Company officials could fully understand and control the workings of Indian society. T o historians who doubt both assumptions—who try to follow the course of prices and markets, of power, labour, and caste relationships, a course in part independent of British action—the records of British rule can be at once an indispensable source and an obstacle to understanding. Bentinck's work in India was closely bound up with two of the three main revenue systems which, according to the classic view,4 the British over the years worked out. These were, in South India, the raiyatwari or settlement with individual peasants; and, in the Western Provinces (the present Uttar Pradesh), the mahalwari or settlement with the village community as a whole. In judicial matters Bentinck was concerned, first, with introducing into much of Madras the Cornwallis system of district courts, and later with thoroughly revising this system in the Bengal Presidency. It was during his governor-generalship that the first Law Member, Macaulay, took his seat on the Supreme Council and set going the long effort to codify the law of India. W e cannot here deal except at a tangent with the vast subject of Indian economic and social history, or even with the no less tangled history of British Indian institutions. Part I I I of this book studies one man's effort to come to grips with the complex Indian society he had to rule; it asks how far he came to understand that society, why he acted as he did and what was the discoverable outcome of his acts. Since Bentinck in Sicily was also taken up with agrarian relations and judicial reform it treats this part of his career as relevant to Indian no less than to European history.

2 - A P P R E N T I C E S H I P IN MADRAS . . . T h e husbandman in India is the most industrious, parsimonious creature in the world; a stranger to vice, thinking of nothing but cultivating his field, maintaining his family, and paying the sarkar rent [Government revenue]. . . . T h e raiyat [peasant] is the man who feels, as it were, married to his field. What an effect the sense of a property in the soil would have upon

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2 • APPRENTICESHIP IN MADRAS him! . . . We talk a great deal about the happiness of the people; how can we increase the happiness of the bulk of the people so much as by making their possessive, [a] proprietary right, and giving them all the advantages of property and permanency? 1 T h u s William Thackeray, an official whom Bentinck had sent on tour through parts of Madras. His ostensible task was to measure raiyatwari against its main rival, the permanent zamindari (settlement with large landholders at a perpetual fixed revenue) already consecrated in the Lower Provinces of Bengal and in the Northern Sarkars. Thackeray's language tells us a good deal about the values and assumptions that ruled the argument through which raiyatwari in the end became established as the dominant mode of settlement in Madras. We can study the beginnings of raiyatwari in two ways. One is to search out the actual effects of the system on South Indian rural society. Here a good deal of work is still to do. We can, however, see that raiyatwari as its leading advocate Thomas Munro developed it in the 1790s (settlement with the individual peasant at a revenue fixed on each field cultivated) was for many years only very patchily applied. We may also argue that in spite of its supposed atomising effects it did not in practice go far in changing power relationships, caste hierarchies, or economic differentials within villages; or at any rate that such changes were, until the late nineteenth century, potential rather than fully worked out. 2 T h e other way is to look at what British officials thought they were doing, and at the values and assumptions—sometimes unconscious— that informed their acts. The adoption of raiyatwari in Madras came about only after a long struggle between rival schools—indeed between rival lobbies—of British officials. Bentinck almost from the start committed himself to the Munro school; he left Madras too soon either to work the final success of the school or to have much influence on the carrying out of its policy. His own work there was significant chiefly because it formed the detailed experience he brought to his later work —much more solidly grounded—on the settlement of the Western Provinces in the early 1830s. Why then did Bentinck arrive in 1804-7 at a view of Indian rural society, and of Government's relationship to it, which he was later partly to discard? Few human phenomena are harder to disentangle than pre-industrial agrarian societies. In such societies much is taken for granted rather than explicitly set out; horizons are local; the same terms for

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Ill • THE PURSUIT OF EQUITY tenures, measurements, or classes may mean different things in villages a few miles apart. Few observers could have been less aptly equipped to understand Indian society at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with its further complexities of caste and its recent history of political upheaval than the British. Their own agriculture was already the most highly commercialised in the world; it was steadily moving towards industrial modes of production and distribution; their intellectual formation and their whole experience at home led them to assume the rule of law, the rights of property, the market economy, the prevalence of contract, and the literal truth of official accounts as universals which, if they were not manifest in India, ought to be and probably had been manifest in a less corrupt past. At the same time many of them were aware that Indian society was toughly traditional and did not wish to upset it. The 1793 Permanent Settlement of Bengal can be documented as in part the outcome of ideological debate, a step deliberately aimed at setting up large proprietors and leaving them the means to maximise production.3 The debate over raiyatwari in Madras is less easily unravelled. Calcutta was a capital, Madras a backwater; the men who argued over raiyatwari were most of them not ideologues but soldiers or civil servants who had left Europe at 16. In practice these men drew a great deal on their experience of the districts where they had worked —scattered, short-handed, at grips with unsettled populations whom they could know only imperfectly. Thus Munro seems to have generalised from his work in the newly acquired parts of the Deccan—mostly dry and thinly populated lands where shifting small-scale tenure prevailed: one of his leading opponents, John Hodgson, from the irrigated, more thickly settled alluvial lands of Thanjavur, where hereditary leading cultivators (mirasidars) controlled the distribution of tenures in a variety of ways. 4 The debate could none the less be highly abstract. Hodgson could quote Coke and Blackstone as well as Adam Smith on the evils of close Government attention to land values.5 Munro seems to have started out with an ideal in his mind of what a just and prosperous rural society ought to be like: 4a crowd of men [he wrote in 1797] of small, but of independent property, who, when they are certain that they will themselves enjoy the benefits of every extraordinary exertion of labour, work with a spirit of activity which would in vain be expected from the tenants or servants of great landholders'.6 What—other than his work in the Deccan—lay at the root of 240

2 • A P P R E N T I C E S H I P I N MADRAS

Munro's ideal? Possibly a classical model: at a time when Sparta and Republican Rome were in fashion Munro had been a youthful reader of Plutarch's lives of Lycurgus and Numa.7 In immediate British terms the ideal was familiar. It was the yeoman farmer, a highly controversial and emotive figure in the Britain of the enclosure movement; Munro's disciple Thakeray for one saw the parallel and was at pains to show that in South India it need not apply.* Indeed much of the debate over the need to maintain, introduce, or keep out of Madras rural society 'intermediaries' between Government and peasant assumed a British ideal model: the intermediary or zamindar was the great landlord, the raiyat the yeoman or potentially thriving tenant farmer. The model might not fit the society; it took virtually no account of caste relationships—something Munro in his early days chose to ignore; men identified as raiyats could in practice function as 'intermediaries', with authority or economic advantage over the rest of the village, because they were members of locally dominant lineages.8 What seems beyond doubt is that Munro's initial impulse was a preference for 'a bold, sturdy set of fellows, [who] would spurn . . . being made dependent on any mesne lord'—for the man who, with 500 acres, might sublet 450 and plough the remaining 50 himself, 'rather from simplicity of manners, and an honourable habit of industry, than from necessity'.9 Munro thus joined many contemporaries in praise of the sturdy independent farmer, from Wordsworth with his Westmorland shepherds to Malthus, who in the later editions of his Essay on Population found reasons of this sort for giving special praise to Norwegian and Swiss mountaineers.10 Bentinck, the son of one of the greatest landlords in England, lost no time in joining up with Muriro. Little over a year from his arrival in Madras he had espoused raiyatwari: it would give 'the animation of interest to every individual'. Like many other British officials Bentinck hoped—and went on hoping—that it could be made into a permanent settlement; reserving waste land in Government hands would, in contrast with Bengal, ensure that 'the future interests of Government . . . kept pace with the general prosperity of the country'.11 By May 1805 his time was 'wholly taken up' with 'this grand question.'12 Soon afterwards Bentinck made, to the annoyance of the Court of * He explained that whereas at home enclosures and 'great estates' might make for improvement, in South India the raiyats 'have carried agriculture to the requisite degree of improvement' and anyhow could not be turned out like English cottagers: report to Bentinck, 29 Apr. 1806, Pari. Papers (1812), VII, 913-19.

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Ill • THE PURSUIT OF EQUITY Directors, a special trip to Calcutta; there he dissuaded Wellesley from enforcing any more zamindari settlements on Madras—what he later called 'an unnecessary creation of the class superborum [of the high and mighty]'. He lobbied Charles Grant in the Court of Directors; he sent out questionnaires to all the collectors which assumed permanent raiyatwari as the goal, and proposed later to visit them all himself. His line was that the Bengal Permanent Settlement, though regrettable, had been necessary and embodied admirable principles; but it would not help to improve Madras, in most of which no large landholders were to be found. 13 If Bentinck had stayed on he would clearly have enforced raiyatwari; on his return to England he formed part of the Munro lobby which pushed it through, first within the Home Government and then on the ground; for all his strictures on Madras civil servants in general he kept a high esteem for Munro's immediate disciples—Ravenshaw, Thackeray, H. S. Graeme, J . M. Macleod—and, during his governorgeneralship, entrusted some of them with important jobs; in 1828-30 he confessed to strong 'Madras prejudices', wished to bring Graeme into the work of settling the Western Provinces, and still thought raiyatwari the best system; from time to time he went on quoting Munro as a self-evident authority.14 So closely had he adhered, back in 1805, to the Munro gospel that he could not altogether approve when Munro himself made a temporary settlement with village headmen— 'a departure from the true principles of the raiyatwari settlement'.15 Why did Bentinck so commit himself? There was, to begin with, the personal influence of Munro, an impressive figure who could rouse deep loyalty; soon after getting to know his work Bentinck thought him the ablest of the Company's servants, fully worthy of the 'appointment of the greatest trust in the country'. 16 There was also the negative example of the Northern Sarkars, where the auctioning off of estates under the new permanent zamindari settlement had 'exhibited a gambling scene . . . of mad competition' and the resulting overassessment was said to be 'ruinous to every class of landholders'; true, some of this evidence came in when Bentinck had already made up his mind. 17 Bentinck seems anyhow to have shared from the start Munro's admiration for 'bold, sturdy' independent cultivators. Munro in Kanara—where he thought he had discovered the original form of Indian landed property—had been susceptible to the mountainous country 'where every spot, before it can be cultivated, must be levelled with great labour by the hand of man'. 18 Bentinck had seen such places —so illustrative of Locke's teaching that property originated in labour 242

2 • APPRENTICESHIP IN MADRAS — a few years back in Piedmont; ten years later an Italian disciple was to justify Bentinck's restoration of Genoa on the ground that States like the Italian maritime republics, 'based not on conquests or marriage treaties but in a sense on the creation of the soil inhabited by their peoples', deserved special respect.1» This helps to explain the intellectual excitement with which Bentinck greeted Munro's 'discovery' of small private property in Kanara. By 1805 he had joined the Munro school, but 'without knowing that Kanara was exactly the model. . . offering practical and positive proof of what might otherwise have been considered as vague theory'. 20 Now Kanara 'became the great landmark by which I hoped to trace out those principles and regulations which might be applicable to the unsettled districts where permanent tenures are to be introduced'. The 'hereditary right to cultivate certain lands, and to reap the benefit', which Munro had found widely distributed among men most of whom paid less than ten pagodas (about £4) annual revenue, 'seems to be nearly one and the same thing with the right in the land, called property'. Might it not be 'the original constitution of landed property' traces of which appeared elsewhere in South India under the name of mirasi right? Had it not probably once existed all over the peninsula and been obscured only by 'the oppression and avarice of despotic authority'? Might it not now be restored, or at any rate introduced elsewhere?21 T o a man of Bentinck's time and stamp Kanara held a double appeal. It offered the chance of a return to original, 'pure' institutions, as though a man should stumble upon a fragment of the early Roman Republic amid the 'corrupt' late Empire; and those institutions—a form of transferable small property—most happily offered 'the animation of interest to every individual'. Munro during his brief administration of Kanara (1799-1800) had himself felt something of this appeal. The fragmentation of holdings, the fixity of tenures, and the lack of territorial magnates were a matter of evidence. But for a man who set much store by practical experience Munro had been quick to use legalistic criteria and a priori reasoning; his reports are in part puzzling and contradictory. He took literally the assertion by the Kanarese that the pre-Muslim governments had collected only a standard revenue (shist) laid down in the Shastras; yet he seemed to admit that the actual revenue might have been lower than the theoretical one. He accepted local accounts, some of them alleged to be 400 years old or more; yet he soon afterwards thought many accounts had been falsified. He thought 'the alienation of land' (or

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I l l • THE PURSUIT OF EQUITY rather of tenures) had originally been 'unrestrained'; yet in practice he found most land rights were unsaleable—there was no land market. Munro's own key to these contradictions was that before the Muslim conquest of Kanara by Haidar Ali 'all lands were private property, and the rents [revenues] were fixed and moderate'; the rest was the outcome of Muslim oppression and overassessment.22 His reports, the fruit of hard work in difficult unfamiliar country, now seem to beg many economic and anthropological questions; they took virtually no account of caste, and very little of complex local forms of superior and inferior tenure; they postulated a golden age of easy yeoman tenure—a myth common in agrarian societies, but not one to be taken on trust, or on the evidence of the Shastras.23 Bentinck's own grasp was, at this early stage, still more superficial than Munro's. This is clear from his supposition that the mirasi tenure might be a vestigial form of independent property. In Madras this tenure was found chiefly in irrigated areas such as the Thanjavur delta, where crops and farming conditions fluctuated heavily from season to season and from field to field, and where rents were commonly paid in kind; mirasidars were most often members of a group—probably a dominant lineage—who, in a variety of ways, shared out the right to arrange subtenures, collect rent, and pay revenue. Mirasi seems to have been a form of communal superior tenure that was partly breaking down into tenures in effect individual, but still as a rule expressed in terms of shares in a joint right rather than of titles to particular fields. The 'wet' lands where it prevailed lent themselves neither to a fixed cash revenue assessment on each field nor to settlement with the individual cultivator: hence British officials with experience of such lands tended to stand out against raiyatwari, to which both arrangements were central.24 Even Thackeray, a disciple of Munro, was partly aware that raiyatwari might not suit the wet lands.25 Another disciple in charge of a 'wet 'district, the Collector of Tirunelveli [Tinnevelly], confusedly wished to settle with individual cultivators and yet could not help recognising the leading superior landholders as 'the proprietors of the soil'; he wished to aim at a permanent settlement of the revenue in cash and yet—because there was, except in particularly good years, no grain market on which the cultivators could sell their produce—thought the Government would have to take some of the revenue in kind. Bentinck had been all for settling direct with the raiyats in cash: the superior landholders seemed to him mere 'contractors'; he assumed a market economy which did not exist. 26 244

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He and his subordinates were much of the time groping for intellectual handholds in a complex social and economic reality that seldom fitted their preconceptions. Bentinck at all events saw the need to check his initial belief in the Munro system by seeing for himself what was going on in the districts. Vellore supervened; hard upon it followed the worst of a famine that kept the Government busy organising the importation of rice. Bentinck's share in the agrarian history of South India remained a gesture—a doctrinal commitment to the belief that 'the attention of Government should begin [with] and be principally turned to the raiyats'. 27 By this he helped the Munro school to its ultimate though, in practice, qualified triumph.

3- A P P R E N T I C E S H I P

IN

SICILY

Four years after his departure from Madras, Sicily struck Bentinck as a good deal like India. There was some justification for this. Sicily was a society not only pre-industrial but largely pre-capitalist, heavily dependent on agriculture, dominated in much of the interior by large landholders who, under the feudal system, enjoyed local tolls, monopolies, and cesses, maintained their own jurisdiction, and could consign people to their own prisons. It was not too difficult to see such magnates as the Mediterranean equivalents of rajas and zamindars. As in India, a government dedicated to 'regenerating' the country had to extract from the land the resources needed to maximise both agricultural and industrial production; to this end it must reform fiscal and judicial institutions. In so doing a reforming Government was bound, as in India, to ask which classes or groups in rural society were most likely, given institutional backing, to carry through the task of improvement. Beyond this there were many differences. Not only was Sicily a Christian culture (though subject to Islamic influence in the past), with an inheritance of law and custom which an Englishman could recognise as akin to his own. It was also formally an independent European State. British control of the Indian provinces under the Company's rule might be imperfect, in part illusory; it was theoretically absolute. Bentinck at Madras had been able to draw on an administrative apparatus, however inadequate, staffed by his own countrymen, with its own routine and momentum. At Palermo he had to work through 245

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APPRENTICESHIP IN SICILY

He and his subordinates were much of the time groping for intellectual handholds in a complex social and economic reality that seldom fitted their preconceptions. Bentinck at all events saw the need to check his initial belief in the Munro system by seeing for himself what was going on in the districts. Vellore supervened; hard upon it followed the worst of a famine that kept the Government busy organising the importation of rice. Bentinck's share in the agrarian history of South India remained a gesture—a doctrinal commitment to the belief that 'the attention of Government should begin [with] and be principally turned to the raiyats'. 27 By this he helped the Munro school to its ultimate though, in practice, qualified triumph.

3- A P P R E N T I C E S H I P

IN

SICILY

Four years after his departure from Madras, Sicily struck Bentinck as a good deal like India. There was some justification for this. Sicily was a society not only pre-industrial but largely pre-capitalist, heavily dependent on agriculture, dominated in much of the interior by large landholders who, under the feudal system, enjoyed local tolls, monopolies, and cesses, maintained their own jurisdiction, and could consign people to their own prisons. It was not too difficult to see such magnates as the Mediterranean equivalents of rajas and zamindars. As in India, a government dedicated to 'regenerating' the country had to extract from the land the resources needed to maximise both agricultural and industrial production; to this end it must reform fiscal and judicial institutions. In so doing a reforming Government was bound, as in India, to ask which classes or groups in rural society were most likely, given institutional backing, to carry through the task of improvement. Beyond this there were many differences. Not only was Sicily a Christian culture (though subject to Islamic influence in the past), with an inheritance of law and custom which an Englishman could recognise as akin to his own. It was also formally an independent European State. British control of the Indian provinces under the Company's rule might be imperfect, in part illusory; it was theoretically absolute. Bentinck at Madras had been able to draw on an administrative apparatus, however inadequate, staffed by his own countrymen, with its own routine and momentum. At Palermo he had to work through 245

Ill • THE PURSUIT OF EQUITY Sicilian Ministers and officials whose concerns could be his only at one remove. Even when he became in effect despotic governor in 1 8 1 3 - 1 4 , his control was shadowy and his tenure brief. All the same, the situation of the British Minister at Palermo as he sat in the Sicilian Council puzzling out the intricacies of the law of entail was not unlike that of the Indian Governor, unravelling in the Madras Council the details of raiyatwari settlement. Bentinck's work in Sicily continued in another setting his work on behalf of the Munro school: to enhance production by encouraging independent middling landholders, and by equitably taxing agriculture through a scientific survey, was once again the aim. 1 To most Sicilians in the early nineteenth century the rule of the barons—or, often, of their land agents—was the everyday reality. Three out of five Sicilians lived on feudal lands formally subject to the barons' jurisdiction.2 Successive Governments had been largely content to purchase the barons' acquiescence by leaving their privileges untouched and exempting them from paying tax. Yet the feudal system was so eroded from within that, in the course of their intermittent conflict with the Neapolitan Government, the barons first, in 1810, voted to impose a 5% tax on the income from all land, their own included, and then, in July 1812, to abolish all feudal rights. Bentinck, aware as he was of the persisting 'egoism among the great', took seriously the barons' magnanimity in giving up their privileges. But their gesture at once came under hostile scrutiny, both from the Court and from the nascent democratic movement; Bentinck himself was soon to take up an increasingly critical stance. The abolition of feudalism raised two main questions. What would it do to the concentration of property, hence of power, in the hands of a few? Secondly, would be barons now effectually take up their share of the tax burden? On the first point the majority of the barons themselves soon showed that they meant to defend, if anything to extend, their 'preponderancy'. As a counterpart to abolition they insisted on doing away with common rights on feudal lands—customary rights in trees, in grazing, and the like. Just as the booming agricultural market of the war years encouraged enclosure in England, so in Sicily it provided a spur to doing away with these limitations on the economic use of land. Hence some of the agrarian conflicts in the interior that alarmed Bentinck to the point of imposing martial law in 1813. A further proposal, the abolition of entail, was more ambiguous. The Minister who put it forward, Castelnuovo, foresaw that it would lead 246

3 • APPRENTICESHIP IN SICILY to an increase in small property and the rise of a new class of middling landholders, like the English gentry the pillars of the Constitution; this meant the partial break-up of great estates. He had the support—in the end more enthusiastic than he liked—of members of the democratic movement, themselves middling proprietors or land agents or lawyers who stood to benefit. Many barons too, burdened with debts and mortgages, might have welcomed a chance to alienate their lands at a time when values were rising; Castelnuovo's proposal formed part of a consistent, indeed doctrinaire policy of economic liberalism aimed at establishing a market economy. On the other side the conservative barons thought they saw at stake their own survival as the exclusive ruling class; their leader, Cassaro, hoped Bentinck 'would not permit the nobility to be destroyed'; the majority—unlike the other two Houses in the 1 8 1 2 Parliament—voted against the abolition of entail, less (so Castelnuovo's lieutenant Balsamo thought) from 'private interest' than from 'class considerations or prejudices'. The dispute ran on into the meetings of the Council on the Royal Assent to the Constitution, with disastrous results for the 'English party'. Throughout these meetings Bentinck supported Castelnuovo. He had at this stage little use for doctrinaire economic liberalism: he objected to Castelnuovo's removal of the traditional controls on the price of bread, which led to riots, and himself later allowed them to be reimposed. But he agreed that doing away with entail should bring forward 'respectable commoners', the best support of constitutional government. By the time the dispute over entail blew up Bentinck had come to be aware, on his trips away from Palermo, of the inequity of the tax burden. This had long fallen most heavily on consumption, above all on the peasants' consumption of grain, their staple food. Even three years after the introduction in 1810 of the new, universally applicable land tax the grain tax brought in half again as much. There was, besides, no survey of land liable for revenue, though such a survey had been since the 1780s the pet project of Neapolitan reformers, as of enlightened absolutists elsewhere: the tax had to be assessed on landowners' declaration of the rental value of their land, actual or potential —a system that lent itself to widespread evasion.3 After he had been in Sicily for a year Bentinck became convinced that the barons were 'universally despised and hated'. When LouisPhilippe demurred he asked 'how it could be otherwise with the general oppression exercised by the [barons] and their refusal at all 247

Ill • THE PURSUIT OF EQUITY times to contribute to the public burdens'. He could do little about it besides grumble until his personal dictatorship put the levers of government directly into his hands. Here was a suitable challenge to a disciple of Munro. Bentinck installed at the Ministry of Finance a hard-headed lawyer, Gaetano Bonanno, who carried out a thoroughgoing purge of local officials and set about preparing a revenue survey. The method proposed—it is not clear whether Bonanno adopted it—was very much in the Munro line, an elaborate assessment of all cultivable fields by expert official valuers.4 Bentinck kept in close touch with Bonanno; on his trip through Sicily in December 1813 he made no bones about recommending to the Minister local supporters who deserved promotion to official posts. The same trip convinced him that Sicily's real need was not so much 'political liberty' as an effective means of combating 'that system of prepotenza [bullying] by which the country had so long been oppressed—from the sovereign downwards, by every agent of every baron, and by all the agents of every government'. Though there is no evidence, it seems most likely that Bentinck worked closely with Bonanno on the revenue survey as well. Within a few months the Restoration and Bentinck's departure cut the venture short; the survey came in only in 1854. Sicily might thus have been an unexpected proving ground for some of Munro's early ideas—this at a time when Munro himself was becoming more cautious: a few years later he wished to uphold entail on Madras zamindari lands so as to 'keep up a class of native nobility and gentry, and preserve those gradations in society through which alone it can be improved . . .'. He also proposed to give zamindars police jurisdiction. Munro's fear was that the Company's rule had been 'too much calculated to facilitate the minute division of property, and the descent of society to its lowest level'.5 In Sicily no one need have feared that. Great landholders were and remained dominant. Experience of the island left Bentinck with a deepened distrust of 'the class superborurrC and a stronger conviction that if so backward a country was to be set on the road to improvement there must be 'a modification of landed possession so as to disperse landed property more generally'.

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4-DISILLUSION AND FULFILMENT: THE WESTERN PROVINCES, 1829-1833 By the time Bentinck returned to India in 1828 a great deal had changed—in the experience he shared with other Englishmen at home, in his own outlook, in the solidity of British rule in India, and in what the company's servants looked to achieve there. The improvement of the agrarian economy, above all in the great Gangetic plain, was now uppermost in Bentinck's mind. In 1830-3 he spent many months in the Western Provinces,* seeing for himself and discussing revenue matters with British and Indian officials. The outcome was the so-called 'mahalwari settlement' of 1833, probably Bentinck's single most notable achievement as Governor-General and one that bore his personal stamp. The experience Bentinck had accumulated since leaving Madras a quarter-century earlier helps to explain why he now moved a long way from the certainties he had imbibed in the school of Munro. True, he never quite shook off his 'Madras prejudices'; near the end of his term he was shocked to find that Madras revenue officers were departing from the strict Munro doctrine.1 But he did not apply the doctrine to the Gangetic lands! Confident assertion gave way to fundamental doubt, above all of British officials' ability to know the economy they were attempting to control; for the doctrinal fervour of his Madras days was substituted a 'rough empiricism.' 2 When Bentinck left England in January 1828 the country had gone through seven years of relative social peace and prosperity. 'Improvement' was a favourite catchword; British industry clearly led the world. Even agriculture, after the distressed post-war decade, had from 1824 seen a notable upturn in incomes; there was now capital available for investment both in farming itself and in the kind of drainage and road works Bentinck had promoted in Norfolk. Confidence in the future was a suitable note to strike, the improving landlord a suitable figure * The area now called Uttar Pradesh was, in the nineteenth century, first known as the Ceded and Conquered Provinces, then divided between the Western and the Central Provinces, finally (1829) reunited and known successively as the Western Provinces, the Agra Presidency, the North-Western Provinces, and the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh [Avadh]. For convenience' sake I have called it the Western Provinces throughout. In Bentinck's day it did not include Avadh and Jhansi; nor, for purposes of revenue settlement, did it include the old permanentlysettled Banaras province in the extreme south-east. 249

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to bear it out. For twenty years Bentinck had known such landlords, had been one himself, and had seen what might with patience be achieved. Hence no doubt his total reversal of his old Madras belief that war and diplomacy were the true imperial task while mere civil administration was an easy job anybody could do: when in 1 8 1 9 he refused the offer of a second spell as Governor of Madras the temptation he acknowledged was the chance of carrying through the raiyatwari settlement—he 'would rather not have had my mind diverted from my civil duties'.3 Hence perhaps too his readiness in 1832-3 to admit the place of great landholders—'the class superborum'—in the agrarian economy, even against the urgings of men he respected. The British India he returned to was also different from the Madras territories, many of them newly won, of 1803-7. British rule was clearly settled. War nowhere threatened. Round the Governor-General were men like Holt Mackenzie, Charles Metcalfe, Alexander Ross, W. W. and R. M . Bird, who—whatever Bentinck's complaints about the service as a whole—brought to the complex task of working out revenue policy a considerable weight of learning and experience. The job could be thought through. This was not to say that the British were in full control of the agrarian economy in the vast Gangetic plain. When these provinces came to them by conquest or cession in 1801-5 they had gone through decades of war and political upheaval. In many areas large landholders —rajas, talukdars, big zamindars—claimed a superior tenure; they enforced it when they could through armed retainers, caste kinsmen, and the possession of mud forts; they paid revenue often enough only after a show of duress. In the early years British policy, though often changed by orders from Calcutta or from home or by the men on the spot, had on the whole been to pacify the country and to settle the revenue with the leading men in the countryside, whether magnates or village headmen, some of them recognised as 'proprietors', some as revenue farmers; though hopes of making a permanent revenue settlement, as in Bengal, were never quite discarded the Government went forward with a scries of temporary settlements, each running for three, four, or five years. Conflicting schools battled it out in the Board of Control, the Court of Directors, and the Bengal Government; in 1 8 1 1 1817 more and more officials began to realise that the country offered peculiar problems, that they did not know enough about it, that earlier British acts had tended to recognise exclusive property rights where none existed, and that this, together with the policy of forced sales 250

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for arrears of revenue, had worked an unwelcome upheaval in rural society.4 The 'village community' or brotherhood in particular seemed threatened with disintegration. This consisted often not of all the inhabitants of a village but of the dominant lineage group, theoretical or actual; like the mirasidars of Madras its members shared out in a variety of ways the control of subtenures and enjoyed differential revenue rates on their home plots (sir). To some of the British the discovery of the village community brought an emotional commitment such as the discovery of independent individual tenure had given Munro. Metcalfe, generalising from his experience of the Delhi territory as Munro had generalised from Kanara, was memorably to hail the village communities as 'little republics, having nearly everything that they want within themselves . . they seemed 'to last where nothing else lasts'; their 'union' all over India had done more than anything else to safeguard its people 'through all the revolutions and changes which they have suffered' and to make for their happiness, freedom, and independence.5 In 1819-22 Holt Mackenzie, a subtler mind than Metcalfe, as Secretary in the Territorial Department guided the Bengal Government through an attempt to solve the land question in the Western Provinces by means that would at once preserve the village community and bring to bear all the resources of European 'scientific' understanding. In one sense he did little more than codify the experience and the reservations of the preceding twenty years. But Mackenzie—'our Chancellor of the Exchequer', Bentinck called him, 'by far the ablest of the company's servants',6 a man capable of summing up mountains of paper in minutes themselves 700-odd paragraphs long—was a pioneer social scientist; he had a quick grasp of current economic theory; was open to Utilitarian arguments, deeply interested in the illunderstood phenomenon of caste, and above all convinced that 'all difficulties as to property rights will. . . disappear when we consent to investigate them upwards from him whose plough is in the fields . . . and condescend to think that the people whose interests are at stake are not wholly without the capacity of stating in what they consist'.7 Mackenzie's proposals, embodied in Regulation VII, 1822, therefore united a declared conservative purpose—he wished to preserve ancient rights, especially the rights of village communities—with a moderate bias against superior landholders and a highly elaborate statistical inquiry: this last had as its aim, in the words of one historian, to

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Ill • THE PURSUIT OF EQUITY 'enable the Government to understand the agrarian structure in all its details', from existing rights in land to caste distribution, from the productive capacity of different soils to the number of bullocks in each village. 8 How far was Mackenzie's proposed settlement influenced by Utilitarian teaching and by Ricardo's theory of rent? So far as these doctrines were influential, what was their practical effect on the agrarian economy? These questions are still controversial. According to Ricardian theory, the landlord's rent was the economically sterile net produce left over after deducting from the gross produce the cost of labour and the ordinary profit on the capital invested. For James Mill, who at the East India House was writing the revenue dispatches, this confirmed that in India the State was the sole proprietor of the soil, entitled to collect the whole of the rent and use it for the 'general happiness'. Government should if possible settle with the raiyat; if it felt any need to acknowledge the big zamindars or talukdars—what R. M. Bird called the 'host of unproductives'—as revenue engagers it should severely limit their profit by fixing the raiyat's rent payments to them for a term of years and allowing them only a 1 0 % collection fee. Since rent must keep pace with production Government should, in settling revenue, ascertain potential rather than actual produce; it should avoid a permanent settlement. According to Eric Stokes, with whom the modern controversy began, British action springing from this doctrine—first tentatively under Holt Mackenzie's impulse in the 1820s, then, after Bentinck's 1833 'settlement', in more thoroughgoing fashion under the revenue administration of R. M . Bird and James Thomason—worked an anti-aristocratic 'social revolution'; this in turn partly explained why the Mutiny took on 'something of the character of a general uprising in this region'. 9 This interpretation has drawn criticism; Stokes himself has since qualified it. 10 There is as yet no consensus; historians may perhaps come to agree that the 'social revolution', if revolution there was, worked unevenly and that many local variables need to be taken into account. The stakes are at all events high." There remains the question: how far did it matter in practice that British officials filled page after page with doctrinal argument? What in fact happened when they or their subordinates made revenue settlements? Which groups on the land suffered or benefited? If some of them were impoverished or driven out, what were the causes? Here we are at a disadvantage. Research on the course of the economy has so far 252

4 • THE WESTERN PROVINCES, 1829-1833 been patchy. Much of the time we can give nothing like a full answer. It is however clear that right through Bentinck's governor-generalship British officials were unable in practice to carry out a revenue policy based on rent theory and Utilitarian doctrine even when they understood it and explicitly endorsed it. Elaborate calculations filling thick files masked a failure, not just to apply the criteria ostensibly adopted (ascertained net produce and actual rents paid by the raiyats), but even to use the older method of working out the gross produce, making various deductions, and roughly halving the result to arrive at the revenue demand. Collectors can be found making 'a sort of enlightened guess, or estimate... arrived at on general considerations, and . . . afterwards justified to the controlling authorities by various calculations'.12 They can also be found disregarding the rights in land which they were supposed to uphold. It is at any rate possible that such practices went on in some districts into the latter 1830s and 1840s; there is evidence that as late as the 1860s settlement work could fall a long way short of official theory. In Bentinck's day there were three main reasons for this discrepancy. First, officials had not the manpower or the technical resources to carry out Holt Mackenzie's detailed survey; that ambitious scientific endeavour was a near-total failure. By 1832 Government had been unable to confirm a single settlement under Regulation V I I , 1822, in any but five districts; in some areas the job was thought to require another 60 or even 150 years; Bentinck, looking back in 1835, thought it would have called for five times the number of officials available. Secondly, collectors had to get the information of prices, rents, and rights on which they based their revenue settlements from Indian subordinates whom some of them partly, others deeply and systematically distrusted. In districts for which we have detailed evidence officials are found again and again denouncing their subordinates for 'entire want of honesty and public spirit', for 'scandalous and daring mutilations' of the records which led to misstatements and embezzlement, for corruption and nepotism. Yet the same officials on other occasions accepted as a reliable basis for settlements data provided by the 9ame subordinates. No doubt they had little choice. Europeans were few; Indians, by many thought unreliable as a class, had in practice to be relied on, and therefore from time to time to be called reliable. But the record speaks for a deep ambivalence, perhaps for a sense of powerlessness among 'strangers in the land' which vented itself in sweeping accusations. At one extreme the young Acting

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Principal Assistant of Sirhpura could write in 1833: ' I really am not sorry to see a little enmity amongst the native officers, it is when they pull well together that corruption is most likely to flourish'. Not everyone went so far. But when such attitudes to the workings of British administration in its lower reaches were possible, even common, how could revenue officials be confident of making settlements based on a realistic ascertainment of rights, boundaries, rent payments, or produce? In parts of the Western Provinces—especially in remote, sparsely populated areas, much more widespread then than in the late nineteenth century—there were many limitations on attempts so to settle the revenue. This was the final reason for the gap between theory and practice. According to mid-Victorian service belief the early 1820s had on the whole marked 'the transition from the misrule of violence to the reign of law'. But it is plain that some groups in the countryside could still, through obstruction, intimidation, or claims on traditional loyalties, prevent others—identified by the company as proprietors or chosen as revenue engagers—from establishing themselves. In some areas a kind of war of attrition went on through the first half of the century between entrenched groups and the collector; it could go sometimes one way, sometimes the other. 13 Where cultivation was marginal, rights uncertain, and villagers ready to flee if pressed too hard the engagement to pay revenue might be less a right which the collector conferred on a deserving claimant than a duty with which he tried to saddle anyone who could be persuaded. Collectors, besides, were sometimes driven by the need to extend cultivation and bring in the revenue into overriding what, under the regulations, should have been acknowledged as rights. These were the years of the economy drive Bentinck had been sent out to enforce— when the collector's own allowances were being 'clipped' and when his superior might pull him up sharply for spending Rs. 1 7 - 3 - 1 0 on punkah coolies to fan him in temperatures above body heat. They were also, from 1828, years of deepening depression and falling grain prices; the real value of the Government revenue demand—already rising in absolute terms—is estimated by 1834 to have gone up by 22%.'* Yet most of the officials whose practice we can follow put down arrears of revenue—short of natural calamities like total crop failures—to the 'supineness' or 'wilful negligence' of the engagers, to the malfeasance of Indian subordinates, or to the easing of harsh methods of collection; they went on trying—as British notions of contract anyhow inclined

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them—to collect the full demand. Though everyone was always theoretically in favour of moderation those were—Holt Mackenzie was to recall in old age—'times when the hard demands of the exchequer left little room for tenderness in maintaining the rights of the Government'. 15 Little perhaps too for a clear sight of what was happening to the agrarian economy. The story of Bentinck's achievement is that of his growing awareness of this state of things, and his growing determination to cut through all the detail and uncertainty to a simple workable policy. Two months after his arrival at Calcutta Holt Mackenzie persuaded him that the Supreme Government should bring its best resources to bear on the Western Provinces, if need be by itself moving there; imperial considerations were foremost, but revenue settlement came into it as well. 16 At this time the Government was still trying to push through Mackenzie's 1822 plan for a statistical survey; it was sending out instructions with a marked bias in favour of the village community and against superior landholders and revenue farmers. 17 As time went on Bentinck became more and more impatient of the hindrances that kept him 'nailed down' in Calcutta—the uproar over the half-batta order, and the Court's prohibition on his taking his whole government with him. He had wished from the start, as 'the best means of being useful', to visit 'every part of the provinces'. He regarded himself as 'the chief agent' of 'a great estate' whose job was 'to improve the condition of the tenantry and to raise the income, not by rackrenting and subletting, but by bringing into play, by judicious management and encouragement, all the resources which its soil and circumstances abundantly offer'. He compared himself to the man who had brought to the remote Scottish county of Sutherland 'noble improvements': 'India, more backward than Scotland two hundred years ago, can only be brought forward by the same means.' After a year in India Bentinck, by then more familiar with the revenue system in the Western Provinces, was 'particularly anxious' to subject it to a 'strict investigation'; by the time he reached Gorakhpur on a brief trip in February 1830 he thought the region with its 20 million people 'by far . . . the most interesting portion of the British territories'. He was already clear that the revenue settlement there was a 'jungle', 'most discreditable and injurious', though he was as yet 'at a loss to know how to extricate the Government' from it. That it needed 'rescuing' remained a fixed conviction: after nearly thirty years 'here we are, having made miserable progress in this work, and

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I l l • THE PURSUIT OF EQUITY retarding by our unlucky arrangements the general prosperity of the country'. Bentinck's task would be to put that right. 18 How could he set about imparting 'all these blessings of which so much is said and so little done'? Bentinck wished ñrst to see for himself, and then to draw upon 'the wisdom and ability of our best officers'. 19 He set up, and took with him on his grand progress in 18301833, a Sadr [Superior] Board of Revenue on Deputation for the provinces under inquiry, so that he could have at hand all the records of past and current practice; it consisted of William Fane and R. M . Tilghman, experienced rather than brilliant officials. Bentinck was irked at having, through delay, missed the chance of taking along Holt Mackenzie, who was going home. 20 He called in H. S. Graeme as Munro's intellectual heir, and R. M. Bird—who was later to supervise the carrying out of the mahalwari 'settlement'—as the best informed and most energetic of the new divisional commissioners. From Calcutta he got advice, often vehement from Metcalfe, more sceptical from the Supreme Court judge, Sir Edward Ryan. In April 1831 he had a detailed questionnaire sent out to revenue officials asking for information of existing local rights and economic arrangements and of the methods and progress of settlement work; this time the questionnaire did not anticipate the replies. On his tours he talked to the company's British servants 'without the least pomp or parade . . . more as fellowcolleague in office than as a ruler'. 21 What was more, he took direct evidence in his camp from Indians—not only from subordinate officials but from landholders, some of them residents not of British India but of comparable Indian States like Avadh and Gwalior. It speaks for the thoroughness and openess of the proceedings that some of the summaries of evidence are in Bentinck's own hand, and that more than one Indian official witness complained of overassessment— 'the British Government show no indulgence'. By 1832 Bentinck was probably as well informed of the complexities of North Indian revenue and tenure as any official, and as most modern historians.22 Finally, Bentinck drew upon all this store, as well as upon the revenue experience of Madras, Bombay, and Central India, to write in January and September 1832 two lucid and, for their matter, concise minutes. A three-day conference of officials at Allahabad in January 1833 agreed to take the second minute as the basis of future policy; later in the year such legal changes as this called for were enacted in Regulation I X , 1833. The resulting 'settlement' governed North India for twenty years—with changes, for much longer. The whole 256

4 • THE WESTERN PROVINCES, 1829-1833 exercise was a model of Bentinck's administrative generalship in the cause of reform: decisive yet thorough. He had 'mastered the complex, boring, and awesome problem of land settlement, and [shown] the way to tackle i t . . ,\ 2 3 Whether, in the words of the historian just quoted, Bentinck showed 'genius'—whether his achievement was unsurpassed 'by any British administrator before or after him'—is another matter. Technically the achievement was real. What did Bentinck achieve in substance? Our interpretation must hang on what we take to have been important in determining the course of Indian agrarian history. Older historians, bred in the Indian Civil Service tradition or influenced by it, tended to assume that what mattered was what the British had chosen to do, particularly about the revenue. They sometimes wrote as though each of the great revenue 'settlements' had sprung fully effective from minutes and regulations and had quickly changed the face of the country. Yet no attempt to control traditional agriculture can be thus precisely dated. Orders and regulations went out; what British officials did, even when it was within their power, how far and how soon their acts had the effects intended— all this is something else again. Policies were years in the working out; often they were applied no more than patchily. Holt Mackenzie's 1822 'settlement' has been written down as a failure; R. M. Bird's carrying out of Bentinck's intentions has a better name. Yet Bird himself threw an odd light on it when he claimed in retirement that it had at once preserved the village community and ( facilitate[d] the sale of land to a degree which never existed before' by 'giving a good title, and removing the obstacles to voluntary transfers . . .'. 24 Since voluntary sale is now generally recognised as a chief agent in breaking up the nineteenth-century village community the relation in Bird's work between intent and outcome is, at the least, a puzzle. A further, fundamental question is how far agrarian change came about through acts documented in the revenue records, how far through causes that appear there incidentally or not at all—through price and market movements, through caste mobility, through officials' needs and unconscious assumptions. For all the hard work (and it was hard) of Bentinck and others, what moved the agrarian society of the Gangetic plain may turn out to have been less the changes they put into effect than those which came about independently of British rule or which were its by-blows. What Bentinck achieved in 1830-3 was threefold. He settled longstanding theoretical questions concerning the village community, the I

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Ill • THE PURSUIT OF EQUITY rights of landholders, the nature and extent of the Government revenue demand, and the position of raiyats. He worked out a practical programme for recording rights and estimating revenue. He called into the task more skilled personnel—Indian deputy collectors and a professional survey. His aim was simplicity and practicality : . . . no time should be further lost in the pursuit of imaginary perfection in the security of the rights of the people and of the just claims of government through forms and surveys that your servants are utterly unable to execute, but we should immediately proceed to ascertain, at best we can, by the simplest plan, and those means ordinarily adopted by all native governments, the real resources of each village, and to give a long lease upon a moderate rent. 2 ' Or, as he put it officially, and more politely, 'the time has arrived for acting upon the knowledge we possess'.26 Bentinck's theoretical discussion of rights and principles took up most space and has most exercised historians. Yet the judgments it embodied probably mattered least among the decisions reached in 1832-3. Its importance was largely negative. Bentinck in effect decided that no purpose was to be served by trying any longer to rake up the past, that rights existing in practice should be upheld and, where they conflicted, as far as possible reconciled; the rule should be—in the long war of revenue schools as in some European wars—uti possidetis: where you are in possession, there you stay. Not that he had shaken off the obsession with pure historical origins that had held him and Munro in Madras, that had influenced Holt Mackenzie, that still influenced R. M. Bird, and that was to move officials as late as 1872. 27 Bentinck committed himself to the view that 'traces of the natural state of property' were to be found in India, generally among 'the immediate occupants of the soil'; the fixed tenure by a lineage group who shared out the right to control subtenures and appropriate the surplus produce after satisfying the Government demand (in North India called pattidari) was 'the original and natural tenure of all the lands in the country'; large superior tenures (zamindari or talukdari) were 'adventitious and artificial'. But he did not go on, like Bird, James Mill, or (more cautiously) Mackenzie, to discriminate against large landholders. On the contrary, he allowed that there might by now 'unquestionably exist' such large'proprietary tenures . . . to the 258

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preservation of which every attention is due'; nor did it matter if documentary proof was wanting. What did matter were 'circumstantial and traditionary evidence . . . , actual possession, and prescriptive usage', as well as the actual state of institutions in villages to which large landholders laid claim. Even if talukdars were excluded from direct management they should be allowed a percentage on the collections and their rights should be defined.28 In dealing with the rights of raiyats Bentinck was both influenced by R. M. Bird and yet capable of disregarding Bird's conclusions. Bird's views were a curious amalgam of passionate dogmatic assertion with knowledgeable awareness of the historical process. He could, in one paper, simultaneously show that raiyats varied from settled tenants to 'mere labourers' hired for the harvest, and yet that all raiyats without distinction shared certain rights; that customary tenure was an expectation formed within a few years of the start of tillage rather than a consciously asserted right, and yet that 'according to Indian immemorial usage the real right of permanent occupation is that of the husbandman to his land'. What really fired him was a desire to '[protect] the weak against the strong', and to do it—as Mill and Mackenzie advocated on more theoretical grounds—by fixing for the duration of a settlement the raiyats' rent payments to the revenue engager. * 29 Bentinck took over from Bird and from other sources the analysis according to which there were various grades of raiyat and customary tenure was a matter of prescription tending to become hereditary; he generalised it as a threefold division of raiyats into effective proprietors, customary tenants with 'a prescriptive right of occupancy at fixed rates', and 'mere contract cultivators'; but he decisively rejected the notion that because some raiyats had a prescriptive right to pay fixed rents all raiyats, even outsiders who had for years gone on cultivating at the landholder's discretion, must have their rents fixed by Government. Once again the thing to do was to discriminate between existing usages, not to create new ones.30 Bentinck's final views on the principles of revenue assessment have * Bird doubted whether there had been a halcyon age when pattidari was the rule, and was aware that communal tenures historically tended to break down through subdivision: to Sadr Board of Revenue on Deputation, 29 Oct. 1829, Board's Proceedings, 1 July 1831 (no. 39), U.P. State Archives, Allahabad (where perhaps misdated: I have been unable to trace this paper in IOR). Yet when he was arguing for fixing raiyats' rents Bird was capable of asserting that historically nothing had existed between the raiyat and the sovereign and that the raiyat's right to have his rent fixed was 'the only right recorded'.

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caused much ink to flow. He upheld soil assessment of a simple kind as the criterion rather than estimated value of gross produce—'lands equally productive should be equally taxed' so as to encourage production of 'the richer articles'; yet 'the safest guide is the actual produce and collections of former years'. 31 He used the language of rent theory, equating, in orthodox fashion, the 'gross rent' or net produce with the under-cultivators' actual rent payments and with the maximum theoretical revenue demand; he set the Government share of this at about 70 or 7 5 % after deduction of allowances and expenses which could in theory vary from 5 to 3 5 % ; yet he immediately afterwards called land revenue a tax, which implied variability on grounds quite other than rent, and drew down the displeasure of Mill at the India House. 31 Much of this makes sense only if we look at it not in isolation but together with the more important part of Bentinck's 'settlement'—the practical arrangements he set in train for working out the revenue. In his later phase Bentinck was often ready to bend doctrine to the practical needs of the moment. Under the system launched, anyhow in intention, by the decisions of 1832-3 the settlement officer was to work down from the whole to the parts—in the jargon, from aggregate to detail. He was to assess a mahal (revenue-paying unit) on his ascertainment of the aggregate cultivated area and his 'general acquaintance' with its peculiar circumstances. This acquaintance might take in soils (simply divided into two or three categories), the state of irrigation, actual rents paid, past produce and collections, village accounts, caste differences—in fact anything relevant; the whole underpinned by a professional measurement and survey and made firm for coming years by an official well-publicised record of existing rights and payments. The officer was to settle with the village community, where it existed, as a whole, leaving it to share out the revenue demand internally. He was no longer to attempt 'interminable investigation into produce, price, and minute classification of soil'. He was not to interfere without some special reason with 'existing institutions . . . and prevailing systems of village management'. Indian deputy collectors would bring to bear their closer knowledge and experience. Each settlement thus worked out should run for 15 or 20 years (later amended to 30). The whole arrangement embodied an opting out of ambitious attempts at a knowledge of Indian society for which the company had neither the human nor the technical resources—what Sleeman called 'mapfping] the waves of the ocean'. It acknowledged 260

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that what revenue officials had been up to under the welter of forms and statistics was 'enlightened guess or estimate', and consciously invited them to go on doing it in a more open and 'enlightened' way. In his more sanguine moments Bentinck trusted that, thus simplified and given a fresh impulse, 'the great work of revenue settlements' would ('as the Americans say') 'continue really to progress'.32 Some of Bentinck's theoretical arguments therefore need to be taken with a grain of salt. He had become deeply distrustful of 'all opinions' on revenue matters. His arguments from historical origins were subordinated to the need to get the work of settlement going without further upsetting the structure of agrarian society: he had come a long way from Kanara. Though he talked rent theory he is reported to have said in private that 'he never could ascertain satisfactorily what proportion the rent in England bore to the gross produce', let alone the rent in India.33 He was prepared to argue openly against Mill and in practice to go against Benthamite and Ricardian doctrine—as when he came down against fixing all raiyats' rents. On the same point he used laissez-faire theory: 'there seems . . . no reason why the Government should interfere to regulate the wages of agricultural more than that of any other description of labour'.34 This accorded with his general belief: but he seems to have been moved at least as much, first by his sense that questions about raiyats' rights were 'not easily answered in the abstract', and needed 'evidence to be adduced in each individual case';35 secondly, and perhaps most important, by his unvarying concern with improvement through capitalist enterprise: Much has been said of late as to the inutility of the class of persons who are rent-owners in contradistinction to the cultivating community, but where, as in India, there is so little general intelligence and foresight, and so much poverty, were large classes of men thrown entirely on their own resources, and removed from all connection with their superiors, to whom they had been accustomed to look up for aid, the consequences might be very prejudicial to their own interests as well as those of Government. What surplus the land could produce should not be '[frittered] away . . . among a multitude of needy cultivators'.36 Bentinck's scepticism about fixing rights in the abstract was probably more soundly based than his hopes of improvement through landholders' investment of the surplus. In areas of sparse cultivation where custom, mutual dependence, and the raiyat's willingness to move had 261

I l l • THE PURSUIT OF EQUITY a good deal to do with determining agrarian relations fixed rents were not necessarily prevalent or welcome. The problem changed in the late nineteenth century through increasing pressure on land and through the growth of an agrarian market economy—a growth which Bentinck had deliberately encouraged by making rights more readily identifiable (hence saleable) and, after initial doubts, by coming down in favour of making new settlements in cash rather than in kind. 37 Bentinck's scepticism, in fact, might have gone a little deeper even than it did. He was ready by the 1830s to condemn as ill-based and damaging nearly all that the British had done to Indian agrarian society. In the Western Provinces he sought to get back to 'those means ordinarily adopted by all native governments'. But was he not himself the prisoner of British needs and of their consequences for the Indian economy? The natives [he wrote in 1834 to an author of dialogues on British rule intended for Indian readers] understand and appreciate the advantages of their own village system, and so they would the system of British government, if there was any system at all in it, and if as you say 'They (the Government) are trying every day to make the assessment lighter'. Better than all the dialogues would be the act and fact of much more moderate assessment. The great curse of our rule has been a constant interference with the long established native systems of Indian society, and . . . the introduction of our own fancies and schemes, which, coupled with our own ignorance, have desolated, more than any Maratha invasion, some of the finest provinces of our empire. . . . I think we had better reform our system before we attempt to describe it, and the real secret of such reform, applicable to all circumstances and to all varieties of tenure, is great moderation—more consideration for the natives and less for ourselves.38 This was eloquent, no doubt heartfelt. But did it go far enough? Bentinck had after all come out as the man pledged to make good the company's deficit by ruthless economy measures. 'The hard demands of the exchequer left little room for tenderness.' The Bengal Government had set up in 1828, just before Bentinck's arrival, special commissioners to speed up disputed resumptions of revenue-free grants in Lower Bengal. This step increased the annual revenue by nearly Rs 30 lakhs in the ensuing 18 years. It was defended 262

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at the time by Holt Mackenzie as by and large just, came under attack from the Directors on grounds of old-fashioned Permanent Settlement ideology, and rallied against it both orthodox and reforming Calcutta notables; ultimately it led to the setting up in 1837 of the Bengal Landholders Association, the first secular Indian political group; later still it was blamed as a cause of the Mutiny.3» Resumptions of revenue-free grants were an important cause in increasing the revenue of the Western Provinces; partly through this means the revenue of Gorakhpur nearly trebled in 1819-42. 40 Such resumptions—if not necessarily on such a scale—were recurrent in India, as in many traditional societies, European and other, where important religious, military, or economic groups were granted rights in land in return for services, but where governments from time to time tried to make up lost revenue. What was notable about the resumptions of Bentinck's time was that they coincided with a severe agrarian depression. At a time when the price they could get for their grain was falling by more than one-fifth some landholders and cultivators were confronted with new revenue demands. Others had to start paying revenue in cash at a fixed rate instead of giving in a fixed proportion of their depreciated crop. Others again saw an existing cash revenue demand increased in absolute as well as in real terms. This was a classic deflationary crisis. Among its causes were longterm changes in India's pattern of trade, in particular the slump in her old cloth exports in the face of Lancashire competition, and the collapse of the speculative boom in indigo. But the crisis also stemmed from the company's deficit and the steps taken to remedy it: the cuts in Government expenditure in India; the export of bullion from the Western Provinces to Calcutta and thence to England; the closing of the North Indian mints as an economy measure and the resultant shortage of coin.41 For all these steps Bentinck was necessarily responsible. Revenue officials at district and divisional level with some exceptions blamed arrears of revenue in the bad years on 'calamity' or negligence. Even higher up it took some time for the fact of depression to break through. When the depression had been under way for at least two years R. M. Bird still saw a 'perpetual tendency of corn to increase in value compared with silver'—and proved it by a comparison with Akbar's settlements some 250 years before.42 Bentinck, like many British officials and historians since, freely blamed overassessment for Indian agrarian distress. Bundelkhand in 263

Ill • THE PURSUIT OF EQUITY 1830, a disastrous year, had been 'positively ruined by ill-judged and excessive assessment'.43 Often he widened the blame to take in the whole of the company's needlessly expensive establishment and its 'monopoly service' of Europeans bent on putting by a fortune (as he was himself). Sometimes he put forward an early version of what was to be the 'drain theory' of late nineteenth-century Indian nationalists: 'The Europeans consume all the disposable resources of India, and in some respects the return of good made by them is very inadequate to the cost.' 44 Land revenue provided most of the 'disposable resources': it was, Bentinck admitted, 'undoubtedly very burdensome'. 45 But, having admitted it, he could go little further. Back in Madras he had already thought the Government share too great—but ' I cannot, indeed I dare not, meddle with the amount.. ,'. 46 Now, as Governor-General, he could not possibly go all the way with free-trading Liberal Reformers like Robert Rickards and John Briggs, with whom he was otherwise a good deal in sympathy, and who denounced the 'land tax' as an inheritance from Muslim oppression, a violation of property, a drain on the country, and a bar to capital accumulation and improvement.47 All he could say was that no other source of revenue would support even a moderate expenditure; all he could offer as a means of relieving the people was to enforce the greatest economy. ' When the receipts exceed the disbursements' and debt was partly paid off it might be possible to reduce the assessment.48 Meanwhile he was willing to urge, as an argument against taking payment in kind, that to do so might cut down the revenue. 49 By the cold weather of 1832-3 Bentinck had come to understand what was going on. Wherever he had gone in the North, Agra excepted, 'all is poverty . . .'. Credit was very bad; prices had 'everywhere fallen'. He was 'quite satisfied the land revenue cannot be kept up at its present standard'. He still blamed bad settlements in the past, but also the vast bullion exports to England that were still going on; the Government, he thought, had been running down its debt too fast. 50 He was well aware that in such circumstances the Government pressed down on the collector, who pressed down on the tahsildar, who in turn forced the villager into dependence on the moneylender—at interest rates of 5 or 6% a month. The moneylender underpinned the whole edifice of British rule. 51 It was not to be expected that a Liberal of the 1830s, brought up on Economical Reform, for whom retrenchment was a positive virtue, should have gone on to try to counter depression with deficit financing 264

4 THE WESTERN PROVINCES, 1829-1833 —still less when he was pledged to make good the deficit already incurred. Bentinck was in fact uncommonly willing to invest the company's money, even in the midst of his economy drive, in public works and the promotion of enterprise. But about the steady pressure to keep up or increase the revenue he could do little other than to denounce it now and then in words perhaps the more bitter for being futile, and, in the worst years, to grant remissions and advances on no great scale. Nearly everyone preached moderation; the company's needs were inescapable. Bentinck might conclude that British rule was bad; of that rule he was himself prisoner and agent.

5 THE SHEPHERD AND THE WOLF: J U D I C I A L REFORM, 1805-1835 By the time Bentinck had travelled about North and Central India for two years he was convinced that British civil rule was 'miserably i n e f f i c i e n t . . . in every branch . . . revenue, judicial, and police, it has sadly failed'. Without Indian help, attempts at equitable administration of justice must be 'utterly futile'. Public feeling was well shown by the popularity of a recent regulation which stopped the police from inquiring into any robbery unless at the request of the person robbed: 'the shepherd is a more ravenous beast of prey than the wolf. Can there be a greater satire upon the system?' 1 When Bentinck wrote this he had already put through an important series of reforms in the Bengal judicial system. These—marked out and enacted in 1829-31—substantially changed the Cornwallis dispensation which he had so eagerly introduced into the unsettled parts of Madras in 1806. The changes fell under three heads. They raised the status and pay of Indian judges and widened their jurisdiction. They set out to establish greater control over both revenue and judicial officers, and greater uniformity in their practice, by setting over them divisional commissioners. They took away the magistracy (and with it control of the police) from the district judge and handed it over to the collector. At the same time, throughout Bentinck's governor-generalship and beyond, company officials and men at home concerned with Indian affairs were intent on working out for British India a unified judicial system and a codified law applicable to all those living in it. 2 265

4 THE WESTERN PROVINCES, 1829-1833 —still less when he was pledged to make good the deficit already incurred. Bentinck was in fact uncommonly willing to invest the company's money, even in the midst of his economy drive, in public works and the promotion of enterprise. But about the steady pressure to keep up or increase the revenue he could do little other than to denounce it now and then in words perhaps the more bitter for being futile, and, in the worst years, to grant remissions and advances on no great scale. Nearly everyone preached moderation; the company's needs were inescapable. Bentinck might conclude that British rule was bad; of that rule he was himself prisoner and agent.

5 THE SHEPHERD AND THE WOLF: J U D I C I A L REFORM, 1805-1835 By the time Bentinck had travelled about North and Central India for two years he was convinced that British civil rule was 'miserably i n e f f i c i e n t . . . in every branch . . . revenue, judicial, and police, it has sadly failed'. Without Indian help, attempts at equitable administration of justice must be 'utterly futile'. Public feeling was well shown by the popularity of a recent regulation which stopped the police from inquiring into any robbery unless at the request of the person robbed: 'the shepherd is a more ravenous beast of prey than the wolf. Can there be a greater satire upon the system?' 1 When Bentinck wrote this he had already put through an important series of reforms in the Bengal judicial system. These—marked out and enacted in 1829-31—substantially changed the Cornwallis dispensation which he had so eagerly introduced into the unsettled parts of Madras in 1806. The changes fell under three heads. They raised the status and pay of Indian judges and widened their jurisdiction. They set out to establish greater control over both revenue and judicial officers, and greater uniformity in their practice, by setting over them divisional commissioners. They took away the magistracy (and with it control of the police) from the district judge and handed it over to the collector. At the same time, throughout Bentinck's governor-generalship and beyond, company officials and men at home concerned with Indian affairs were intent on working out for British India a unified judicial system and a codified law applicable to all those living in it. 2 265

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Like revenue policy, judicial reform can be studied in various ways. One can follow older historians in assuming the successive shifts in British policy to have been in themselves central to modern Indian history. One can study the currents of thought that shaped policy, and in particular try to see how far Utilitarianism influenced a branch of government with which Bentham had from the first been concerned. One can examine how British rule, 'by its indirect and for the most part unintended influence . . . metamorphosefd] and dissolve[d] the ideas and social forms underneath it':3 that is, now British notions of abstract justice, evidential proof, adversary trial, and contractual relationship worked against the grain of a society organised in multiple hierarchies, where justice had been bound up with status and decisions often arrived at by a 'rhetoric of compromise.'4 Finally, one may see the growth of British judicial administration in India as part of a process, not always conscious, through which Western societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sought to make their institutions more uniform, more accessible, cheaper, and speedier—in a word, to rationalise them: this at a time when rapid commercial and industrial growth made such qualities increasingly valued. This process can be traced at home in a multitude of sometimes unrecorded decisions, as when early nineteenth-century Army Lists switched from putting officers and regiments in unindexed order of seniority to listing them in alphabetical and numerical order. So too in India the Court of Directors in 1830 insisted that officials should write separate letters on separate subjects and annex a short abstract of each; while Bentinck instituted in all the political residencies a system of keeping a 'diary' or daily abstract of all proceedings which later inspired Charles Trevelyan to reform the procedure of the British Treasury.5 One of the starkest facts of Indian government, Bentinck found, was that 'it is impossible to get through even the reading of the details of [the Bengal] Presidency'.6 To explain changes even in the judicial system one need not always invoke Utilitarian doctrine, though the doctrine had much to say on the subject and was often present to men's minds. Bentinck's judicial reforms of 1829-31 were, more than his work on land revenue, a bureaucratic exercise. Most of them were hammered out in Calcutta before he went on his grand tour of the North and Centre. Members of Council (W. B. Bayley and Metcalfe) contributed to it; so did Holt Mackenzie and the qualified Utilitarian judge Alexander Ross; so did long-standing pressure from the Board of 266

5 • J U D I C I A L REFORM, 1805-1835 Control at home. Bentinck drew these voices together and added a good deal of his own. What moved him seems to have been, first, the need for efficiency and economy; as a consequence, but also as an end in itself, the advancement of Indians to places of greater trust. At the same time he sought to establish closer hierarchical supervision of civil servants' work. Finally, like other thoughful men of his day he looked to a legal system suited to 'the condition and circumstances of the whole population, black and white, native and European'; after Macaulay's arrival in India as the first Law Member of Council, Bentinck—greatly impressed—went further and called for the inspection of courts in the interior, not by 'mere English lawyers,' still less by prejudiced civil servants, but by 'men well acquainted with the science and philosophy of law, who . . . might be able to point out how the modern improvements of Europe could be brought to bear upon the Indian system'. 7 Men, in fact, like Macaulay himself. None of this showed any great change in Bentinck's outlook since his Madras days apart from his new belief that 'native probity and talent may immediately be found' further to man the courts. 8 Nor did it speak for much more than a side-wind of Utilitarian doctrine, mediated chiefly by Holt Mackenzie. Bentinck went on upholding the independence of the judiciary, an elaborate appeals system, and the notion that several heads are better than one in matters requiring deliberation as against swift decision; in all this he went against Bentham, and remained a child of Burke. At Madras Bentinck in 1806 not only generalised the Bengal system of district courts but followed Wellesley in separating from the Council the superior court (Sadr Adalat). If he had had his way he would have gone further and abolished the Madras Supreme Court with its anomalous English law and jurisdiction over Europeans in the interior: when 'our subjects' were 'our brethren . . . there ought to be no distinction'.* 9 What fired him was the desire to establish the rule of law and do away with the collector's 'absolute power'; but the Cornwallis system also aimed at regularity and uniformity in districts supposedly of rational size. * Bentinck's plan for the abolition of the Supreme Court (supported by the Chief Justice, Sir Thomas Strange) was turned down by the Home Government. His regulation of 14 Mar. 1806 separating the Sadr Adalat from the Council still left the Governor (as in Bengal) nominally presiding over it. He wished to go further and (as was done shortly after his departure) separate the judiciary wholly from the executive by appointing a presiding judge. 267

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The same general aim informed the pursuit of judicial reform in Sicily, where the 1812 Constitution overthrew the many particular and local jurisdictions without putting anything in their place. The constitutionalist leader Castelnuovo, helped by the Anglophile Abate Balsamo, worked out a plan to divide Sicily into 23 districts, each with its own court, sheriff, and other officials. Bentinck fully agreed that reform was called for: he complained of 'the total impotence of the laws, venally administered, giving no protection, and therefore imposing no check upon the lively imaginations and warm passions of the people'—more murders, he thought, were committed in Palermo than in the rest of Europe put together, Sardinia and Corsica excepted. But although he approved the general principle of Castelnuovo's plan he thought the 23 districts—something like Bentham's small 'judgeshires'*—would prove cumbersome and expensive. In the Sicilian Council he urged that it would be more effective to have half the judges proposed and pay them well—advice he later followed in Bengal when, against the Benthamite principle of multiplication of tribunals, he halved the number of munsifs (the lowest grade of Indian judge) and paid the survivors a salary at least twice as much as those discarded had been getting in fees. Castelnuovo's plan ran into heavy weather from vested interests. Though Bentinck during his dictatorship made a start of planning judicial reorganisation, and had a committee of Council sitting to work out new codes, once again time was short: nothing was done until the Restoration period, when Bentinck was gone. 10 Bentinck was therefore well versed, long before his governor-generalship, in the pursuit both of a uniform legal code and of a rational system of courts. At Madras, again, Bentinck had thoroughly approved 'the principle of general superintendence'—by which he meant putting several collectors or sub-collectors under one experienced superior." This was an idea of Munro's. Bentinck carried it out in Bengal by setting up divisional commissioners. It does not follow that he shared Munro's paternalist outlook. A simpler explanation is that both he and Munro were soldiers, accustomed to the chain of command and responsibility —what Bentinck called 'check and control'—at a time when much civil administration both in Britain and in India was split up into autonomous, even conflicting units. Bentinck as Governor-General— * Bentham wished Bentinck as Governor-General to do away with all but summary justice accessibly delivered in small 'judge-shires': to Bentinck (drafts), 19, 20 Nov. 1829, University College London, Bentham MSS, X, ff. 179-85.

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supported in this by Ellenborough and the Directors—again and again urged the need for 'subordination' and 'discipline'; he deepened civil service resentment by appointing soldiers to civilian jobs, as Munro himself had been. 12 Although Mackenzie advocated the setting up of commissioners to oversee both revenue and judicial officers with Benthamite arguments for the union of powers in unsettled districts, Metcalfe with arguments drawn from the paternalist tradition, and Bentinck himself with the example of Munro, there were for making the change reasons of plain executive efficiency. As anyone may see who looks through the proceedings of the boards of revenue for 1828— when collectors were still reporting everything to them direct—something had to be done to filter the paper tide. Reasons of efficiency also dictated changes in the courts, magistracy, and police. By the end of 1829 some 126,000 suits were pending in the Bengal courts—slightly more than had been pending five years earlier.13 Though Indian judges already did the bulk of the work European judges were swamped. The attachment of the Bengal service to the separation of powers meant that even though collectors had at length been allowed to decide suits on revenue matters the suits had first to go before the judge. Held down by paperwork, judges could not get about to supervise the police. By 1829 Bentinck thought everyone would admit the system to be 'greatly defective, slow, expensive, and unsatisfactory to the people'. 14 Bentinck's 1831 reforms dealt with the problem by giving Indian judges nearly all original civil jurisdiction, raising the maximum value of the suits they could hear to Rs. 5,000, creating a new grade (principal sadr amins) at a salary of Rs. 400 a month—four times what Indian judges had been able to earn before,—and inserting them into the system in place of the European 'registers'. The reforms also enabled collectors to hear revenue suits from the start, and transferred to them the judges' functions as magistrates. A partial reordering of the appeals machinery, and the setting up of a new Sadr Adalat for the Western Provinces at Allahabad—carefully kept apart from the executive,— completed the measure. All these reforms are best seen as a stage, though a decisive one, on the long road between the squeezing out of Indians from all high administrative posts in the late eighteenth century and the effective opening of nearly all such posts to them in the twentieth. Bentinck himself quickly came to think of it as a halfway step. He had approved the transfer of the magistracy to the collector— 269

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something he had dreaded at Madras—because there seemed, within the straitjacket of European prejudice and the Company's economy drive, no other way to relieve the judges while maintaining 'control': under Holt Mackenzie's influence the committee chiefly concerned with putting through the economy drive had considered having Indian magistrates (who would have been cheap) but had come down against it. The raising of Indian judges in pay and status, a virtually inescapable step if the system was to work at all, still did not give them even civil jurisdiction over Europeans and Americans: that was left for Macaulay to push through, amid European recrimination, in his 'Black Act' of 1836, though Bentinck's Government had prepared the way. All the same, the reforms as a whole shaped the judicial system well into the 1860s; the setting up of divisional commissioners influenced British colonial practice for much longer. 15 As Bentinck's tour went on he became more and more impatient to move on from the stage judicial reform had attained under his rule. By late 1832—we have seen—he wished Indians to run the whole judicial and police system. But although Bentinck now thought the shepherd 'more ravenous than the wolf' he did not go back on the endeavour to instil into Indian society the European notion of the rule of law. Quite the contrary: what were more than ever wanted were 'the modern improvements of Europe', based on the kind of universal 'science and philosophy of law' which Macaulay was so confident of being able to propound. Into this framework 'the ablest and most virtuous' Indians were to be inserted; 16 there is no sign that Bentinck expected them to do other than make it their own. He had not, after all, come far from his old view of the administration of justice as a matter of 'international' relations between Indians and British. Instead of lying with their social institutions intact beneath a rule of law conferred and worked by the British, Indians were now to work the rule of law themselves on British terms. The obstacles Bentinck saw lay not in Indian culture but in the British monopoly of the Indian surplus. This it was that left the police— Bentinck ever since Madras days had been prepared to see them used as a positive arm of the executive—in the charge of officers paid Rs 25 a month; on the eve of the Mutiny a Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal was still echoing his words about shepherd and wolf.* 17 * Bentinck at Madras had wished to set up a police force for Madras town under the Governor-in-Council, with advice from the Chief Justice, and had justified it against the usual British distrust of a police under executive control with the argu-

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Yet in revenue matters Bentinck despaired of European 'improvements'—all but the professional topographical survey and the accurate recording of existing rights, whose importance he may not have fully gauged. He wished to fall back on 'those means ordinarily adopted by all native governments.' Why this discrepancy? Why was the Indian agrarian economy not to be fully apprehended with the European means at hand, whereas Indian culture raised no bar against the working of European notions and modes of law? We can only speculate. Bentinck, a pragmatic thinker, had on his tour seen revenue administration closer up than he had seen the workings of the courts. The land revenue in India, where clear property rights became, with experience, ever harder to identify, where the State appeared historically as universal landlord, and where anyhow this source of income could not be dispensed with, was something foreign to British ideas, to be approached circumspectly. As Bentinck's mildly Liberal Chief Justice remarked, the view that the whole of the rent should belong to the Government and that this would make for the national happiness 'must have surprised the gentlemen of England'; yet it might after all be true of India.18 The rule of law, on the other hand, was central to good government as the British understood it— an absolute not to be compromised. The alleged substance of Hindu and Muslim law, or some of it, might have to go on being worked, but modes of fair trial and of evidence, concern with ascertainable law, with its limits, with judicial independence—these were seldom questioned; until a later generation they were not seen as themselves historically determined and, to Indian society, culturally disruptive. Hence even the Bentham-influenced—Holt Mackenzie and Alexander Ross—kept in varying ways a high regard for the rule of law despite the authoritarian elements in Bentham's thought. Hence too Bentinck, though he prized 'subordination' and at times grew impatient of law when it got in his way, throughout his career upheld the independence of the judiciary; he has a fitting monument in the Allahabad High Court, descendant of his 1831 Sadr Adalat and nursery of later Indian nationalists well versed in a law European-inspired. ment that under an intrinsically weak foreign rule 'any form of constitution which tends to lessen the authority and respect of the Government is . . . radically false': to Minto (private), 20 Oct. 1806, BP/PwJb/726. In Bengal he still wished the police to 'watch and control. . . conduct' rather than negatively to protect 'property and persons': Memorandum, no date but c. 1830-1, ibid. PwJf/2682/xiii.

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IV

Steward of a Great Estate 1 •THE RIFT

IN T H E

DARKNESS

T o its British manager the silver mine in Nostromo was 'that little rift in the darkness' which held out hope for the redemption of Costaguana. 'Material interests' moving in from richer parts of the world would bring to that remote and tormented society 'law, good faith, order, security'; the task was worth great sacrifices. Conrad's novel, so prophetic of the crises that have beset twentieth-century minds, presents the mine and all it stands for with deeply ambiguous irony. But in the heyday of the Industrial Revolution belief in ¿he power of 'material interests' to redeem distant parts of the globe could be unqualified. Bentinck was of the same breed as Conrad's manager. He was only one of a number of early nineteenth-century British rulers who put India's development at the head of their concerns. More than any of them, he worked at a time of seemingly great opportunity, unhampered by war and buoyed up by public opinion; yet this was also a time of great effective constraint, summed up in the agrarian depression and the economy drive that helped to deepen it. The silver of the mine might (and did at times) prove tainted; great difficulties stood in the way of extracting it at all. Not the least was the prevalent belief— which Bentinck, though impatiently, shared—that development was a job for private enterprise to do and the role of government correspondingly limited. The single greatest problem in British Indian history is how and why a society which in the seventeenth century had been perhaps as developed as a good many in Europe came to be, by Bentinck's governor-generalship, 'deindustrialised', and to remain for many years chiefly a supplier of raw materials. The question is intensely controversial; even how far India really was deindustrialised is not agreed.1 What is certain is that by 1830 India's traditional exports, of textiles especially, had dwindled to the point where the company's 'investment' 272

1 • THE RIFT IN THE DARKNESS in them could no longer meet even the administrative 'home charges' incurred in Britain.2 It had become a commonplace that the Indian 'manufacturer' was ruined: thanks to machinery, Lancashire could now 'undersell the native weaver in his own market'; in Dacca 'a million of human beings are sinking with poverty . . .'. 3 One possible response was to accept India's new status as a raw material supplier, complementary to the needs of British industrial exporters, and to bring resources to bear on the development of her agriculture. Bentinck, it has been said—like the great Calcutta businessman Dwarkanath Tagore, like the British merchants who opposed the company's monopoly—wanted 'free import of capital and skill from Britain for further development of raw material resources'; his one original contribution was supposedly his attempt to open up Indian land-owning to private British capital.4 Bentinck's vision, however, was much more wide-ranging than this. It aimed at nothing less than India's comprehensive development. Among British rulers of India in the previous half-century the governors-general Cornwallis and Shore had set out to encourage capitalistic agriculture; Wellesley and, in the 1820s, the civil servants John Adam and Holt Mackenzie had helped British private traders and investors, sometimes in defiance of the monopoly interests within the company. Wellesley, Bentinck's first master, had sought 'improvement' within the drive to empire. Bentinck followed in the wake of all these men. What was new about his rule was, first, that he set out to present 'improvement' as the chief task of Indian government; and secondly that he stressed the need to industrialise India by bringing in modern technology. He was a child of the steam age: after his return home he spent his last few years as a promoter of steam navigation to India, which by then he saw as 'the great engine' for rescuing Asia from 'universal darkness'. Like his friend Louis-Philippe with his deliberately bourgeois ways and his slogan 'enrich yourselves', Bentinck went to a good deal of trouble to make 'improvement' the keynote of his administration. When in 1829 he called for suggestions from British and Indians alike the aims he listed were 'to promote any branch of national industry; to improve the commercial intercourse by land and water; to amend any defects in the existing establishments; to encourage the diffusion of education and useful knowledge; and to advance the general prosperity and happiness of the British Empire in India'. 5 On his tours Bentinck made public gestures to the same end. When

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he came upon the excellent new road from Jabalpur to Mirzapur he pulled out his stopwatch, timed the commercial traffic, and exclaimed: 'Who, after seeing these things, could question the advantage of wellmade roads in India?' By the new iron bridge near Sagar he took care to point out 'what genius and perseverance can produce out of the resources of a country, even in the rudest state of industry and the arts'. 6 He made a point of rewarding Indian landholders or merchants who had built tanks or other public works at their own expense; he set up district committees to spread the practice and published lists of works completed. 7 He wished to make presents to the Indian princes of model steam engines; some had asked for them and they might 'awaken the attention of great men to the arts and sciences'.8 This was anyhow a time when some British and Bengalis in Calcutta shared in the contemporary European craze for 'useful knowledge'. The Agricultural Society was experimenting with samples of American cotton seed; leading civil servants were publishing a journal of miscellaneous scientific and technological information; Hindu College boys were translating into Bengali Brougham's Discourse on the Advantages and Pleasures of Science. Bentinck too wished to interest people in the 'statistics, topography, natural history, and meteorology of India'; he even thought of letting the public inspect the official records for purposes of inquiry.® His 'Pennsylvania Quaker' style of dress— though it was not put on for the occasion,—his regular steamer voyages up river to the Governor-General's country house, helped to present the ruler of British India as the sober, modern-minded 'chief agent' to 'a great estate'. In using that phrase to Ellenborough Bentinck had started from the premise that India was poor, lacking in 'knowledge', yet rich in untapped resources and waiting only for European enterprise. Like Ellenborough he saw the task of development as imperial: it was 'to secure and improve the condition of all classes, to bring into life the vast dormant resources which undoubtedly exist, and to found a British Empire in India not less solid or less worthy of admiration by all Asiatic nations than Britain has been to the European world'. 10 But where Ellenborough wished to make Indians rich so that they could become 'consumers of the manufactures of England,' and to concentrate on agricultural development (cotton, silk, tobacco), Bentinck gave industry equal place: not only the improvement of agriculture by European settlers but the introduction of European teachers, 'moral management', manufactures, and the use of machinery would 274

1 • T H E R I F T IN T H E

DARKNESS

add up to 'one of the greatest benefits that can be conferred upon this country. In all these arts India has made no improvement. She is as she was, ages ago . . Where some thought mechanisation could enrich India only at the cost of 'misery and starvation in Spitalfields and Manchester', Bentinck maintained that 'in proportion as the resources of India are fostered, encouraged, and brought forward, so will Great Britain profit by the connection'; the old notion that Britain could prosper at India's expense was 'as miserable as it is false'.12 This was not just an official sentiment. Writing more frankly to his brother about the initial success of 'the first cotton manufactory upon the English fashion, with machinery and steam engines' (presumably the Bowreah Cotton Mill for the spinning of cotton twist, built by one Patrick at Fort Gloucester, west of the Hughli), Bentinck said that the mill was underselling the British product: 'There is every appearance of India recovering her cotton manufacture. . . . It will if successful prove an immense loss to England, but it will probably be made up in the demand for some other article of manufacture.' Meanwhile the mill provided him with one more argument for urging an influx of British entrepreneurs.*13 Bentinck was thus a genuine enthusiast for development of every kind, mechanical industry included, at whatever immediate cost to British exporters. Within the conservative establishment of the East India Company he acted as a propagandist, chivied Metcalfe for his 'old Indian' lack of interest in roads, helped to persuade his closest connections at the India House that India might after all be made more productive, told the chairman that neglect of India's resources was 'a positive scandal and disgrace to our government', and added that nowhere else in the world would steam power produce 'a greater multiplication of the existing means of national wealth and strength'.14 By the end of his rule, when he no longer had to worry about the company's susceptibilities, he could say in public that whatever had been done to develop India was 'exclusively due to the skill and enterprise of individuals'—entrepreneurs such as he wished to settle in the country: Every indigo and coffee plantation, the Gloucester mills, the works of every description that are moved by steam, the iron foundries, * Briggs in the same year thought four 'steam engines for manufacturing Indian cloths' in each presidency would 'ruin the Glasgow and Manchester weavers, and you and I may live to see England purchasing Bengal muslins again as of old': Bell, Briggs, 109.

275

IV • STEWARD OF A GREAT E S T A T E the coalmines worked after the European fashion, and the other great establishments that we see around us in Calcutta, are so many great schools of instruction, the founders of which are the real improvers of the country; it is from the same sources that we must expect other schoolmasters of new and improved industry. Add to this steam communication, which would encourage Indians to go to Europe to 'study in the best schools of all the sciences', and you had the true means of redeeming India from 'darkness'. 15 Propaganda and declarations of faith were one thing, action another. Bentinck repeatedly pointed out that his zeal for Indian 'improvement' grew out of his own experience in Norfolk. That experience had done something to benefit the Fenland as a whole; it had nearly ruined Bentinck himself. His attempts as Governor-General had a still more doubtful outcome. In Bentinck's time the Bengal Government took steps to help the indigo planters; it made a start towards launching the Assam tea industry; it set going a number of civil engineering works, especially roads; it helped forward steam navigation both inland and between India and Europe; it started inquiries which led to a standardised currency, a unified postal service, and the abolition of internal transit duties on Indian goods; some of its servants were prospecting for coal and iron; others joined with private traders in trying to set up savings banks and a life assurance scheme. All this at a time of retrenchment, depression, and financial crisis which led in 1830-3 to the collapse of the Calcutta houses of agency—the chief source of investment credit—in spite of the government's attempts to save them. Much of this activity had started up before Bentinck's arrival; much bore fruit only after his departure, some only many years later. T o estimate Bentinck's share is difficult. First, by showing tireless interest in 'improvement', in interviews and correspondence as well as in official papers, he encouraged people in whom 'the spirit of the age' was already at work; he set the tone. Secondly, in some matters he gave a direct lead, sometimes against opposition from the Council or the Court of Directors. Thus he overrode the Council in 1835 to finance a scientific expedition to Assam which confirmed the presence of indigenous tea plants on an unexpectedly large scale. The ventures he was most closely concerned with were civil engineering, steam navigation, help to indigo planters, and—both at Madras and in Bengal—attempts to establish public credit through a govern276

1 • THE RIFT IN THE DARKNESS ment bank or to bolster up private credit through the houses of agency. We shall now examine these attempts to stimulate development; we shall ask what Bentinck saw as the role of government. We shall finally inquire how far his stewardship may have fallen short of the goal and why. 1 6

2 - B R I T I S H RULE A N D I N D I A N DEVELOPMENT, 1803-1839 . . A colony and not a colony . . . in which the only real capital is in the hands of individual small accumulators who scrape it up and take it finally away.' 1 This account of India, written at a point of crisis by Bentham's Calcutta correspondent James Young, was not quite complete—it left out of account the traditional Indian banking system—but it summed up what a Governor with a mind to Indian development was likely to see as the root problem. Government collected a vast revenue but had to meet obligations at least as vast; more often than not it was in deficit and had to raise credit through treasury bills and loans, held in the main by its own servants. These servants' savings in turn made up a large part of the private capital held by the houses of agency which gave credit to entrepreneurs like indigo planters and colliery developers. Both the company's servants and some of the partners in the agency houses hoped ultimately to remit their capital to Britain. Capital investment in a country subject to the fluctuations of world trade thus rested on a slender and precarious base. T o Bentinck in his last phase the problem was particularly acute: the houses of agency, already overextended and hit in 1826-7 by depression in the indigo trade, were heading in 1830-3 for their final crash. The system appeared to him a 'monstrous fabric': the company's servants through their high salaries monopolised India's surplus resources, and the agency houses monopolised their use. Yet, he a s k e d , . . where else is there any capital?... The Government itself is everything, sovereign, landholder, trader, banker. Playing all these parts it is incumbent upon it to do its duty . . .'. This meant that he twice, in 1830 and 1833, felt impelled to defy the orders of the Court of Directors by trying to keep the remaining 277

1 • THE RIFT IN THE DARKNESS ment bank or to bolster up private credit through the houses of agency. We shall now examine these attempts to stimulate development; we shall ask what Bentinck saw as the role of government. We shall finally inquire how far his stewardship may have fallen short of the goal and why. 1 6

2 - B R I T I S H RULE A N D I N D I A N DEVELOPMENT, 1803-1839 . . A colony and not a colony . . . in which the only real capital is in the hands of individual small accumulators who scrape it up and take it finally away.' 1 This account of India, written at a point of crisis by Bentham's Calcutta correspondent James Young, was not quite complete—it left out of account the traditional Indian banking system—but it summed up what a Governor with a mind to Indian development was likely to see as the root problem. Government collected a vast revenue but had to meet obligations at least as vast; more often than not it was in deficit and had to raise credit through treasury bills and loans, held in the main by its own servants. These servants' savings in turn made up a large part of the private capital held by the houses of agency which gave credit to entrepreneurs like indigo planters and colliery developers. Both the company's servants and some of the partners in the agency houses hoped ultimately to remit their capital to Britain. Capital investment in a country subject to the fluctuations of world trade thus rested on a slender and precarious base. T o Bentinck in his last phase the problem was particularly acute: the houses of agency, already overextended and hit in 1826-7 by depression in the indigo trade, were heading in 1830-3 for their final crash. The system appeared to him a 'monstrous fabric': the company's servants through their high salaries monopolised India's surplus resources, and the agency houses monopolised their use. Yet, he a s k e d , . . where else is there any capital?... The Government itself is everything, sovereign, landholder, trader, banker. Playing all these parts it is incumbent upon it to do its duty . . .'. This meant that he twice, in 1830 and 1833, felt impelled to defy the orders of the Court of Directors by trying to keep the remaining 277

IV • STEWARD OF A GREAT E S T A T E agency houses afloat with Government loans of Rs 50 lakhs and Rs 24 lakhs. But what was needed was a 'foundation of real capital'.2 Nearly thirty years earlier Bentinck as Governor of Madras had tried to build a 'foundation of real capital' by taking an unusually bold step: without the agreement of his Council colleagues or of his AccountantGeneral, and with the bare toleration of the Supreme Government, he had set up in 1806 a Government Bank. In this he was far ahead of his time. A central bank in which the Government was more than a minority holder was, as one of his colleagues wrote, 'novel beyond precedent' 3 —so much so that the Court of Directors in the following year ordered its winding up: though this was not in fact done the bank led a half-life until a Presidency Bank on a more orthodox model was founded in 1843.4 For several years past, largely because of the Mysore and Maratha wars, both the Bengal and the Madras Governments had suffered a grave shortage of specie. In the rudimentary financial system of the time this caused perpetual problems; it helped to shake confidence, so that to official interest rates of 8 to 1 2 % were added discounts that brought the effective cost of credit as high as 1 6 , 1 8 , or 20%. In Bengal the Accountant-General, H. StG. Tucker, was struggling in 1801-4 to bring down interest rates and set up a Bank of Bengal which would issue paper, establish confidence, and control fluctuations; he was, however, clear that if the bank was to win trust it must not be seen as 'an engine of state'. When it was set up Government played a negative, minority role.5 In Madras at Bentinck's coming the trouble was even worse. Unlike Bengal it was normally a deficit Presidency; the financial market was far smaller; Government loans at 8% were doubtful starters; shortterm Government paper was issued to officials by what amounted to a 'forced loan' and circulated at 5,6, or even 8% discount. The Government had been virtually in the hands of two private banks whose paper it had to accept; in 1804 had to tide itself over with a loan from an agency house, Harrington & Co. In a European community so small as Madras there was always the suspicion that high company officials might as private lenders have an interest in keeping this state of things in being. Yet there are also signs that the private banks themselves were short of capital and were being outbid by 'monied individuals' who found they could lend at still higher rates. In May 1805 Harrington's and the private banks tried to form a 'coalition . . . for the establishment of a general bank'; but this failed because the merchants were 278

2 • BRITISH RULE AND INDIAN DEVELOPMENT 'completely disunited in opinion'.6 It was a classic situation of scarce credit, lack of a trusted medium of exchange, and a government with its autonomy in jeopardy. Discussion on a government paper currency had started in 1798, but had failed to bring agreement. When private attempts to start a general bank failed in 1805 Bentinck set up a Committee of Finance to look into a Government-supported bank; when the committee, with arguments from Montesquieu, reported against such a bank Bentinck overrode it. The new bank opened in February 1806, under Government control, with a starting capital of 8 lakhs of pagodas (about ¿320,000) and power to issue notes up to £ gold cover. Bentinck realised that this act laid him open to attack. Central banks were still suspect. He disposed of Montesquieu by a bit of verbal sleight-of-hand and presented the bank as a wartime emergency measure. His fundamental argument stood his opponents on their heads. They said that investors would distrust government control; he claimed that in Madras (unlike England) only the Government could provide good security. Shortly after the bank had opened he asserted that though he had acted against 'almost the unanimous opinion of the whole settlement' opinion had since 'entirely changed'. Discount rates were falling and the bank had the confidence of all except those who had previously speculated in Government paper. The Government would no longer be at the mercy of the private banks and agency houses; the boot was now on the other foot. . . . A source of great wealth and of pecuniary power (if I may so express it) will have been given to the Government without adding a single farthing of impost upon the people. Fair commerce will receive much more extensive assistance in proportion as the resources and credit of the Government are superior to those of any individuals.7 Bentinck's move was thus based a good deal on sheer assertion—a method that can sometimes work in financial policy, and sometimes not. Presumably he hoped to save the bank from its critics by showing that Government security did in practice work. He realised that by bringing down local interest rates the bank would alienate the company's servants and give rise to 'private misrepresentation'8—this at a time when other measures of his were bothering the Court of Directors. What is striking is his readiness, here as at several other points in his 279

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career, to bend economic doctrine to whatever he thought needed doing. A year earlier he had drawn the sarcasm of Tucker's successor as Bengal Accountant-General by proposing to attract capital to Madras from 'Europe . . . America . . . Asia', through the simple expedient of offering high interest rates. At that moment, a particularly desperate one for the Madras treasury, when he needed to get hold of specie by whatever means, he argued as if the world was a perfect market economy and capital like any other article of 'merchandise', to be attracted by a high rate of profit. In fact it was an argument for being allowed to give Madras lenders 1 0 % interest— something the Supreme Government was still denying him.« By late 1805, when he opted for the Government bank, the Maratha wars were almost over and a policy of retrenchment in train: the task now was to cut outgoings and get control of the financial market. In carrying it out Bentinck was not going to be held back by Montesquieu or Adam Smith. By the same token he was not, like some of the Directors, opposed to the houses of agency root and branch. He wished the Madras Government to be no longer dependent on them; but he secretly offered to help the agency houses when they were in trouble, and risked his personal bond to save one of them, Tulloh & Co. In so speculative a market as Madras he genuinely thought Government funds 'the only safe place for the deposit of money'; but—there as, later, in Calcutta— he was reluctant to see any source of capital closed up. 1 0 That was why Bentinck as Governor-General from 1828 tried to help the agency houses, 'hollow and dangerous' though the system appeared to him. 'Real capital' would come only with the settlement of European entrepreneurs (who presumably would not be in a hurry to send it home again). Meanwhile the houses underwrote two-thirds of the indigo crop, lac and sugar plantations, the Fort Gloucester mills, the Burdwan collieries, two-thirds of the vessels in the Calcutta port—in fact, apart from Government enterprises, all 'schemes in agitation or in progress for the improvement and extension of the manufactures and agriculture of India'. For all the houses to founder would be a 'national calamity': Government must therefore do what it could to '[fill] up this dreadful chasm'. 11 Even then, though Bengal's public and private resources in the 1830s were far greater than those of Madras in the 1800s, Government could do nothing near enough. The agency houses' chief commitment—it was also the chief cause of their downfall—was to the indigo planters. Bentinck did his best to 280

2 • BRITISH RULE AND I N D I A N DEVELOPMENT shore up this, as he asserted, 'respectable' body of entrepreneurs: in 1829 he allowed them leases in their own names; a year later Regulation V, 1830, deliberately weighted criminal and civil procedure in the planters' favour and against the Bengali raiyats who contracted with them to grow the crop. Both measures brought down censure from home; the Court of Directors threw out those parts of Regulation V that 'effectively bound the raiyat to indigo cultivation' by making defaulters liable to summary criminal trial and imprisonment. 12 British administrators through much of the nineteenth century kept trying to promote cash crops. Bentinck too sought to encourage in the Western Provinces the growing of 'the richer articles'. Much of this came of a straightforward desire to enhance agricultural wealth (and Government revenue) through commercialisation. But in the early part of the century indigo held a particular attraction: as one of the few Indian agricultural products readily marketable in Europe it served as a British medium of remittance. Hence a strong tendency to overproduce a crop which was anyhow liable to fluctuations in demand. By Bentinck's arrival in 1828 the trade had just been through a speculative boom and collapse. The hundreds of planters scattered through the interior of Bengal were most of them men without capital, unable to hold land in their own names, dependent on credit, and themselves having to advance money to sub-contracting raiyats who were neither their tenants nor their employees. What had come about was not a plantation economy but the insertion of speculative entrepreneurs into a rural society itself disturbed and subject to tension and violence. T h e planters were in every sense insecure—legally, financially, personally; the common charge against them was that they in turn forced indigo growing on the raiyats, whether through debt slavery or through plain bullying by armed retainers. 13 Bentinck on the other hand maintained that the planters' misdeeds had been greatly exaggerated. There may have been something in this. Many planters were Irish Catholics, Continentals, Eurasians, or otherwise qualified for snobbish dislike by company officials. If they were rough diamonds so were many early entrepreneurs. A man intensely critical of the company's rule of patronage, who at home had worked happily with Dissenters and with a self-made engineer like Telford, might well sympathise with the planters. Bentinck went further. The indigo factory, he argued, was 'the centre of a circle of improvement'; if the planters were given legal tenure and security they would be encouraged to 'improve' the country further; their presence would 281

IV • STEWARD OF A GREAT E S T A T E 'civilise' Indians by diffusing the 'arts and sciences' and stimulating an interest in commerce, in luxury articles, in European education. He also argued the need to prop up the agency houses by propping up their debtors, and to keep up the flow of remittances. For all these reasons he not only gave the planters leases; he prevented the raiyats—even where they were not defaulters—from giving up indigo cultivation unless they could prove at law that their contracts had expired and they had paid up their balances. For the sake of getting out the crop, it has been said, Bentinck 'overlooked the industry's violation of the principles of laissez-faire and condoned its shameful dependence on forced labour'. 14 The second half of that judgment is undeniable. Like some other rulers bent on swift economic development Bentinck subordinated to it the welfare of producers who had nothing to defend them but their awkwardness. Nor was this a new departure. At Madras he had upheld, over the protests of two judges, the enforced cultivation of betelnut in the Thanjavur delta—another cash crop which the collectors had leased to revenue farmers.15 His acts in 1829-30 bore some responsibility for the oppression that led to the Bengal 'blue mutiny' of 1859-62 —though intervening changes in the industry's structures played their part as well. It seems doubtful, all the same, whether Bentinck deliberately overrode the principle of laissez-faire. In his view the principle was already set at naught by the company's 'monopoly', which forbade the planters to own land and made them liable to deportation. As in the search for a 'foundation of real capital', a pure market economy worked by unfettered 'capitalists' would no doubt have been best. Failing that, in a country where 'the Government is itself everything' Bentinck was quite prepared to throw the power of government behind the men he saw as the only available 'improvers'. What of the Government's own role? Should it not itself act as developer? In one department Bentinck had no doubt that it should. This was civil engineering. If he visibly set his mark anywhere on India it was on her roads. Bentinck had long been eager to build roads as channels for commerce—in Madras, in Sicily, in Norfolk. Since 1815 he had been concerned with drainage and bridge-building as well, in the company of the leading British engineers of the day. After that experience India seemed 'almost virgin land'; to one of the engineers he had worked with he wrote: 'we very much want experienced civil engineers in this country'. 16 The problem was twofold: how to organise public works 282

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within the company's system of government; and how to pay for them at a time of severe retrenchment. Public works were run either by the Military Board, a body of officers not necessarily qualified, or else by ad hoc committees. Bentinck did his best to reorganise the inefficient Military Board under such 'scientific officers' as were available; but he really wished the Court of Directors to depute 'a very good civil engineer' from Britain to take charge as executive officer—'no greater boon could be conferred on India'. Meanwhile he asked that plans for the drainage of Calcutta should be submitted to his old associates Telford and the younger Rennie. 17 It does not seem that anything was done to supply the kind of professional expertise Bentinck wanted; Indian government still had to depend on the patchy knowledge to be found among Army officers until Dalhousie as Governor-General some twenty years later set up the Public Works Department. Cost was a still more daunting problem. How was the Government to find money for new public works when it was sending out circular after circular telling its officials to save envelopes and observe other cheeseparing practices? Bentinck him&If, in a moment of particular alarm, declared that it was not enough 'to ask whether it be desirable to maintain this or that thing'—the Government had to cut its coat according to its cloth. The Court of Directors did its bit by ordering the Bengal Government not to undertake without its sanction public works costing more than Rs. 10,000. 18 Within the company the gospel of improvement had anyhow made little headway; even liberal-minded friends of Bentinck like Metcalfe and Ravenshaw doubted whether India could provide enough traffic to justify new roads.1» It was uphill work. Bentinck solved the problem as best he could by a variety of expedients. A lottery paid for the improvement and watering of Calcutta streets; he proposed to add to the fund by letting off the pasturage on the Maidan. 20 T o pay for a pontoon bridge over the Yamuna at Agra— costing more than the forbidden Rs 10,000—he sold off some marble lumber from a ruinous bath in Agra Fort, and had the Great Gun of Agra (a Mughal weapon reputed to have once fired a shot to Fatehpur Sikri 24 miles away) melted down: this started a long-lived canard that he had wanted to sell off the Taj Mahal.* 21 In the permanently settled * The Great Gun had to be blown up before it could be melted down: this greatly alarmed the inhabitants of Agra—some five or six thousand were said to have fled the city the night before—and probably accounts for the persistent rumour about the Taj, which was still current in 1949. See below, p. 324.

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areas, where the land revenue could not be increased, he hoped that zamindars and merchants might, like English country gentlemen, have 'sufficient perception of their true interests' to contribute 'spontaneously' to road-making; but in practice ferry tolls did the job. There and elsewhere he had roads built by convict labour on a system partly drawn from Australia. In the Western Provinces, finally, he picked up an idea already tried out in one district and had i % of the revenue raised in all new settlements devoted to roads. 22 The projects Bentinck was most interested in were the drainage of Calcutta and the Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Delhi. He hoped to drain the Salt Lake to the east of Calcutta by methods he had seen used in the Fens, so that the ground could be used for cash crops. 23 This, however, was no more than a gleam in the unending tale of Calcutta drainage; the lake is only now being filled in for housing. The Grand Trunk, still one of the most notable roads anywhere, was much more clearly Bentinck's work. At his coming there was a bad stretch from Calcutta to Banaras via Bankura—without ditches or bridges, much of it readily flooded—and a good stretch from Banaras to Allahabad. Bentinck had the first stretch rerouted via Burdwan, along higher ground; in 1831 he made a start on the Allahabad-Delhi stretch through the great northern plain. The result by the 1850s was 'a first rate embanked, thoroughly drained, and well-metalled road, 837 miles in length, and . . . probably not surpassed in any part of the world . . .'. It was everywhere 1 ft 6 in. above the highest flood level; at Bentinck's instance trees were planted 60 ft apart. Away from the Grand Trunk Road his 1 % revenue levy was said to have paid in Azamgarh district by 1851 for 638 miles of road made, repaired, or bridged, in Bareli for 77 bridges and 372 miles of avenue planting in five years. The modern traveller who drives across the Gangetic Plain in the shade of great trees has something to thank Bentinck for. 24 Bentinck himself saw what he was able to do as no more than an inadequate start. He set out from the premise—and demonstrated it with figures—that 'in India the whole rural economy is upon the lowest and most miserable scale imaginable': the country was worse off, not just than Britain, but than Spain or such agricultural parts of Germany as Württemberg, Baden, or Saxony which yielded eight or ten times India's per capita revenue. In such a state of things Government help was essential to get the economy moving. The new 1 % levy on the revenue still struck Bentinck as 'miserable' and 'ludicrous' when measured against the job to be done: still, it was something. 25 284

2 • BRITISH RULE AND INDIAN DEVELOPMENT When a seemingly great need runs into a great want of funds there is often a temptation to find a short cut. Bentinck found his short cut to Indian development in steam—not as yet in railways, which were just getting under way in Britain, but in steam navigation. It was his last word on the subject. Steam in the 1820s and 1830s exerted a spell not unlike that of jet or even space travel today. At the India House the novelist and official Thomas Love Peacock, so opposed to newfangled ideas like competitive entry to the service, delighted in messing about on the Thames aboard experimental steamboats. The Bishop of Calcutta hailed steam navigation as 'the universal agent and recipient; the highway cast through the wilderness of waters; the entrance and forerunner of all missions, education, commerce, agriculture, science, literature, policy, legislation, everything'. 26 Passengers put up with the soot, heat, and noise of small inefficient ships much of whose deck space had to be given over to coal. Bentinck had several times travelled by steamer since 1822. One of his first acts as Governor-General was to experiment with steam navigation on the Ganges. At the end of his life he was still trying to promote a regular steam service from Calcutta to London via Suez; it began, under the Peninsular and Oriental Company, in 1843, four years after his death. One of the first P & O steamers was called the Lord William Bentinck. 1822, the year of Bentinck's first steamer trip (from Holyhead to Bangor), also marked the beginning of serious interest in steam navigation to India. It took twenty years to establish a regular service. In between came a complex tale of technical failures, rival routes, rival groups of promoters, mushroom companies formed and dissolved, Government intervention offered and withheld. In all this Bentinck played a leading though not a determining part. Conservative resistance or disbelief had little to do with putting off the coming of steam. The civil servant James Prinsep, who in 1835 neither expected nor wished to see a steam service via the Red Sea 'until the year 1920', three years later was a member of the Bengal Steam Committee. 27 Enthusiasm ran high: 'this all-monopolising subject', a Calcutta newspaper wrote, 'scarcely spares us a moment to think about anything else. The whole press of India is blowing off steam.' 28 When a letter from Europe reached the South Indian hills via Suez in just under twelve weeks Bentinck exulted:'steam has gained a signal triumph over sails'. 2 » 285

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What then were the obstacles? They were of four main kinds— technical, parochial, doctrinal, and economic. The technical troubles were those that attended most pioneering ventures. Seas were uncharted; steamers broke down. Years went by while the Home Government—in part for diplomatic reasons— experimented unsuccessfully with a route through Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf in preference to the Red Sea. Then the very slowness of communication which steam was meant to overcome made for misunderstanding and estrangement among the various interested groups. Calcutta merchants and officials for years backed the traditional Cape route while Bombay preferred the nearer Suez route; from 1830 part of the Calcutta group became converted to a 'comprehensive' service via the Red Sea (calling at all three Presidency towns) but Bombay hoped to keep a monopoly. All the steam committees in India were at a disadvantage in trying to influence what went on in London, cut off from it as they were by at least four months' sail. The doctrinal problem—should a steam service be opened by Government action or left to private enterprise?—was really an aspect of the economic problem. As in many early industrial ventures the question was at bottom how to mobilise capital and skill solid enough to establish a service which in its early years was likely to meet setbacks and to prove unremunerative. It has been said that, as in the building of Indian railways in the mid-Victorian years, the job was at length given over to private investors, with Government action limited in effect to guaranteeing the profits: 'the enterprise was called private but the risk was made public'. 30 That sums up the result; but the run up to it in the 1830s was too confused to be put so neatly. There were false starts and optimistic schemes; there were pressures brought on the Court of Directors, through the Board of Control or through Parliamentary committees, to subsidise early experiments, but also counter-pressures by the Court to avoid subsidising those merchant groups that had taken the lead in attacking the remnants of its trading monopoly. The promoter of one mushroom company, Charles Tennant, was a member of the National Colonisation Society and a supporter of Gibbon Wakefield—a reminder that hopes of Indian profit could go hand in hand with schemes of European settlement.31 Other promoters were former officers or pilots without capital but with special knowledge and enthusiasm; one of them hoped to launch a £ 1 million 'Bengal, Madras, and Agra General Steam Navigation and Rail Road Company' to run all steamers within India and branch out to 286

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South-East Asia and Australasia.32 It was a world compounded of the visionary and the crass, whose French equivalent in these years has been unforgettably ñxed by the novels of Balzac. The common theoretical bent ran against permanent Government control. 'The sooner the steamers are carried on by private speculation the better', the Bengal Chief Justice wrote—but, he added, in India 'it is necessary for the Government to show the people what can be done before they can hope that private enterprise will. . . embark on such undertakings.'33 In London too promoters looked to the Home Government to run the early experimental steamers direct, or else, if they thought the time was ripe for private companies to take over, asked for subsidised mail contracts. In all this greed played a part; but so did genuine uncertainty about costs. Bentinck's view varied. He had at first thought that a steamer route to India could not succeed 'as a private speculation'; it would work 'only . . . under the immediate and direct management of the Governments at home and in India'. By 1830 he thought that if the Suez route became 'well established and . . . regular . . . large steamers will soon be provided by private speculation'. Three years later he still thought the Government could do the job 'at a trifling cost compared with the advantages'; but—because, as usual, he thought Indian Government expenditure inflated by the demands of 'European patronage and interests'—for private enterprise to do it if it could would be 'the better plan'. Finally, in 1838, when he was no longer Governor-General but was instead connected with one of the more substantial and hopeful joint-stock companies, he drew a strong contrast between 'the activity of a private adventure' and 'the inertness inherent in a public establishment', not to mention the 'unsuitableness of a public administration combining commercial with political purposes'. This, however, was a knock at the Court of Directors, which was being uncooperative; it did not prevent Bentinck from asking the Directors to grant his company for seven years two-thirds of the money they had been spending on their own steamer service.34 There is little point in asking what Bentinck's doctrinal position really was. He wanted an efficient steamer service to come in as soon as possible, thought it should ultimately be run by private enterprise (especially while the company's 'bad' rule lasted), but meanwhile was prepared for all sorts of expedients, Government agency included. This came out clearly in his acts. On his arrival at Calcutta in 1828 the situation he found was this. The 287

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Bengal Government owned several British-built steamers, one of them the Enterprise, a relic of a discouraging pioneer voyage round the Cape in 1825; two others had been intended for communication with remote Assam. On the west side of India the Bombay Government had been running experimental steam voyages to Suez; it was building a special steamer, the Hugh Lindsay (with engines from Maudslay's in England) —unfortunately on 'erroneous principles' which made the ship almost incapable of carrying passengers or running at full speed if she was to carry enough coal.35 Such steam navigation as went on to or in India was thus, apart from a few Calcutta tugs, wholly under Government control. At the same time there existed a private Bengal Steam Committee with a fund and remaining hopes of doing something on the Cape route. Bentinck had long been interested in communication with India, particularly through the Red Sea—perhaps since his stay in Egypt in 1801. He had made careful inquiries about it before setting out. 36 He came up the Hughli, symbolically, on board the old pioneering Enterprise. One of his first acts was to take in hand the existing inland steamers. Characteristically he rerouted them, no longer to Assam but up the Ganges to the imperial and strategic North. It was two years before he did anything about overseas communication. By then Calcutta opinion, with Bentinck's strong encouragement, was swinging towards the Suez route. From 1832 on he tried, largely in vain, to bring Bombay and Calcutta together in a 'comprehensive' service from Suez to all three Presidencies; this comprehensive plan—to be filled out with a coordinate service from Britain to Alexandria—occupied him for the rest of his life. In 1828 Bentinck sent one of the Calcutta steamers on an experimental voyage to Allahabad. Later voyages followed, some of which literally hit snags; on two of them in 1830 Bentinck himself took steamer as far as Banaras. His motive was imperial and 'national': the British had 'an empire of vast extent, with hardly a road that is carriageable to any extent, with a river, admirably circumstanced in point of direction, but hardly available as a communication from its rapidity in the wet and its shallowness in the dry season'. T o master the Ganges by steam would bring 'great national benefit (I mean Indian)'. 37 By sail and oars the Calcutta-Allahabad trip took from three weeks to four months, according to season and direction. The experimental steamers could do better; by 1830, however, they had proved inade288

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quate—too small, too deep in draught, too underpowered—and so had the technology available at Calcutta to improve on them. Bentinck therefore sent the steamer captain J. H. Johnston, whom he had put in charge, home to secure better equipment. Through the combined efforts of Johnston and Thomas Love Peacock the Court of Directors took to the novelty of iron steamers; it ordered eight of them for the river service. The first, the Maudslay-built Lord William Bentinck, was relaunched on the Hughli in 1834; she drew a mile-long line of carriages and a dense Indian crowd, but only 22\ in. of water. By the end of 1836 a regular three-weekly service on the Ganges was running under Government control.38 Ocean-borne steam communication was a much trickier matter; the Court of Directors, taken up during Bentinck's term with the Mesopotamia route, was more reluctant to spend money on it. Only in 1835, under pressure from the Commons and the Board of Control, did it decide to expand the Bombay Government's steamer establishment on the Suez route; this was to work in with Admiralty steamers plying between Malta and Alexandria. Pressure from British-led groups in India had some share in this decision; but it became gradually clearer that they were too cut off, too parochial, and could call on too little capital themselves to take the lead. Bentinck from 1830, like part of the Calcutta group, opted for the Suez route. He spent much time in trying to get Bombay and Calcutta to share out between them Supreme Government financing of experimental voyages to Suez: this was a 'campaign' much like those he had waged in the Fenland to bring conflicting interest groups together, and he used much the same tactics—a deliberate overbid in Calcutta's favour aimed at forcing monopoly-minded Bombay to compromise. But although he did secure agreement, and a steamer reached Suez from Calcutta in 1834-5, ^ technology available in India could not avert repeated breakdowns. By then Bentinck had reached two conclusions. First, a permanent steamer service must be 'comprehensive': it must reach all parts of India, not just Bombay. Secondly, private capital in India could not— for all the hopes still entertained there—do the job: it must be done either by the Government or by 'the merchants of England interested in the trade to China and India'.3® The 'merchants of England' themselves were becoming more active. Bentinck's return home coincided with the last push towards commercial running of steam navigation to or in India. In 1836-40 at K

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IV • STEWARD OF A GREAT E S T A T E least six companies tried to enter the field. Bentinck was in touch with all six, as well as with the Government, the Court of Directors, and the India-based steam committees. In 1837 he headed a Select Committee of the Commons and used it to keep up interest in the comprehensive service. Steam was his business—at least as much as his new parliamentary seat in Glasgow. His role is not quite clear. T o some extent the company promoters wanted him as a noble figurehead. But his correspondence, full of calculations of distance, tonnage, and engine power, shows that he was not just that. Whether he put money into any of the companies—as he did into the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway—is not known. So far as doubtful health and Continental residence allowed, he seems to have attempted what he had done in Norfolk—to act, in the midst of contending groups, as a catalyst hurrying forward change. Four companies tried to start a comprehensive service to India. Steamship engineering was making great strides—Brunei's Great Western, off to America in 1838, was often cited as the example: even the East India Company's new, uncomfortable Suez-Bombay steamers were growing modish. In 1836 an East India Steam Navigation Company promoted by C. F. Head, an ex-officer, hoped to start a service— limited at first to Bombay. It got no Government help and vanished. In 1838-9 a company with the same name, headed by T . A. Curtis, a City businessman, made a strong bid to start a service with the backing of the Calcutta Steam Committee; a breakaway group started up in rivalry to it. Finally, the Peninsular, with existing capital and fifteen years' experience of sailing to Portugal and the Mediterranean, from 1838 began to move into the India business. In 1840, reorganised as the P & O, it won Government mail contracts and East India Company subsidies to start the service for which it was to become famous down to recent times; after long wrangles it absorbed the losers. Indian inland navigation was attractive too. In 1838 an East India Inland Navigation Company, promoted by Charles Tennant on behalf of a group of City merchants, hoped to get a monopoly on the Ganges. But there was a plan for a rival company to be financed by the great Calcutta businessman Dwarkanath Tagore. Ganges navigation, however, remained in Government hands until 1846. 40 Bentinck's relationship with these business groups varied. To Head's 1836 group he seems to have been a mere benevolent channel of communication with Government.41 Tennant's inland company was launched after a series of meetings in Bentinck's London house; but 290

2 • BRITISH RULE AND I N D I A N DEVELOPMENT Bentinck declined to be president, and Tennant himself soon withdrew —apparently because the company was ill found. 42 With Curtis's unlucky oceangoing project Bentinck had much closer links. As far back as the 1825 speculative boom he had been involved with Curtis in an abortive plan to breed silkworms and weave silk by machinery in Sicily. 43 Now he apparently agreed to be president of Curtis's company; he corresponded with the Court of Directors on its behalf; when the Court proved obdurate—they would neither work a comprehensive service themselves nor subsidise the Curtis group to do it—he tried to force the issue in his characteristic way: he proposed that the group should build two large steamers and, as a demonstration, use them to compete on the Calcutta-Suez route with the East India Company's Bombay-based steamers. Characteristically, too, he had wider visions of a single great company running to the Mediterranean, from Suez to India, and to the Cape as well as on Indian rivers—with the inland establishment a 'nursery of engineers and artisans' for the other routes.44 Yet Bentinck was also interested in the Peninsular (so soon to gobble up the Curtis group): he approached it for information, praised its shipbuilding record in contrast with the East India Company's 'inertness', and is alleged to have first suggested to it that it might enter the India service. 4S Whether or not he hoped to profit from one or other company his driving motive in all these transactions was almost certainly the urge to see India attain, by whatever means, the blessings of steam. What were these blessings? They had something to do with commerce, but not very much; for bulk freight, steam was still uneconomic. T o Bentinck's mind the advantages were, as always, imperial and 'national (I mean Indian)'. He listed them to his Select Committee of 1837. Steam could take troops quickly to most parts of India; a quarter of the present force could hold it. If Egypt allowed them through, British troops from Malta could reach Bombay in five weeks. 'All this is power exercised in its most imposing character.' Steam could take British civil servants home to acquire 'liberal notions . . . of improved administration'; by speeding communication it could impose discipline on Army officers. Most important, steam would enable more Europeans to go to India, and Indians to come to Europe. Not only would the Europeans develop India (it was here that Bentinck hymned their Indian mills, mines, and plantations as 'so many great schools of instruction'); they would 'rouse the shameful apathy and indifference 291

IV • S T E W A R D OF A G R E A T E S T A T E of Great Britain' to Indian misrule. The Indians would 'bring their complaints and grievances before the authorities and the country'. Steam would therefore tend 'to place the security of our empire upon the only solid foundation, the general goodwill of those we g o v e r n . . . . Our government, to be secure, must be made popular, and to become so it must consult the welfare of the many, and not of the few . . .'. Above all, steam, by enabling Indians to acquire European 'knowledge' at Erst hand, would rescue the Asian mind from age-long 'universal darkness'. This was the occasion for Bentinck's most thoroughgoing attack both on India's 'degeneration' and on the East India Company's rule—on the one hand a society unequalled anywhere for 'quickness of intellect . . . eager thirst after knowledge, or . . . aptitude to acquire it', yet in all the sdences and arts, painting and music included, sunk (a few individuals apart) in 'primitive rudeness and ignorance'; on the other hand a monopolistic rule, 'cold, selfish, and unfeeling', its fortunehunting European officials 'totally incompetent to the charge', its civil administration in all its branches 'a failure'. Steam navigation, 'the great engine of working [India's] moral improvement', would in the end take care of all that: 'in proportion as the communication between the two countries shall be facilitated and shortened, so will civilised Europe be approximated, as it were, to these benighted regions; and in no other way can improvement in any large stream be expected to flow in'. 46 Much of what Bentinck said was echoed in less lurid terms by an Orientalist like William Macnaghten and a moderate like Mountstuart Elphinstone, who thought steam-powered visits to Europe would usefully weaken Indians' 'national prejudices and religious enthusiasm', while 'a taste for popular government' would improve their 'character'. 47 Bentinck's strongest profession of belief in the 'better mousetrap'—in homo faber's mastery of his environment—was also his strongest statement of the need for India to attain the virtues of nationhood as Britain's imperial child. An old man two years from death, he was borne forward, like many in the 1830s, on the belief in the limitless possibilities of mankind as 'civilised Europe' with its factories and its two-Chamber Parliaments, its newspapers and its scientific academies, had first disclosed them.

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3 - D E V E L O P M E N T FOR WHOSE BENEFIT? Bentinck was all for development. He seems never to have asked himself whether two indigo plants where one had grown before, or a road or a steamer service where camels or palanquins or country boats had been the carriers, would really benefit India. They obviously would. We have ourselves only just come out of a period when nearly all development was thought good. In Bentinck's time the widening gap between Indian poverty and Western prosperity was becoming clear, and with it the chance of bridging it through deliberate investment. Bentinck with his comparisons of per capita revenue in Bengal and Württemberg was among the first to act systematically to this end. That he fell short is not surprising. T h e question worth asking is what in his historical situation made for error and waste. Bentinck himself saw much that was wrong. He persistently denounced what would now be called British exploitation of India. Like some others, both British and Indians, to be found almost throughout the period of British rule, he held the 'drain theory'. T o his mind—as we have seen—the British creamed off the 'disposable resources' of India through a high land revenue, an exorbitantly costly administration, and remittances home; they had besides destroyed India's traditional manufactures. By the 1830s Bentinck thought they had given little in return other than 'tranquillity'. In 1838, just before his death, he joined some Glasgow Quakers in calling for a series of measures to help India; these included not just the usual 'improvements* but free grants of waste to settlers and an end to British tariff discrimination against Indian produce. Britain, he said, should put aside 'mere personal gain and selfish commercial prosperity', which had too much ruled her policy; she ought 'to carry out, by more than merely verbal expression, measures for the improvement of the immense population —our fellow subjects be it remembered, from whom we collect a tribute of nearly three millions sterling per annum—of British India'. Through 'monopoly and ignorance' India had made shamefully scant progress: there was a 'great moral obligation' to 'redeem the indifference of the past, and to render the British connection a real blessing . . .'.' Like most 'drain theorists' Bentinck worked from a crude financial reckoning rather than from an economic argument. There was some-

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IV • STEWARD OF A GREAT E S T A T E thing in it none the less. British rule was expensive. As Bentinck almost said—the words are those of a French consul later in the century— 'the expenditure of a European government had to be defrayed by the budget of an Asiatic one'.2 If, besides, we follow a persuasive and sceptical recent analysis, any drain India may have suffered through unilateral transfer of resources was perhaps at its worst in the early nineteenth century (when 'the stimulus to overall economic development . . . was probably less') rather than in, say, the 1890s (when the question was most strongly agitated); the drain was certainly bad in the early 1830s, when there were actual bullion exports to Britain.3 Bentinck was thus on to something. Yet it was Bentinck's own government that exported the bullion and helped along agrarian depression; it was Bentinck himself who insisted in 1830-1 on remitting to London about a crore ( £ 1 million) so that the Court of Directors, at a moment when its charter hung in the balance, could meet the home charges.4 It was Bentinck's Government which, far from putting through the abolition of the discriminatory inland transit duties on Indian goods (it had been discussed in 1823), was forced by the economy drive to keep them up and even to enhance some salt duties; true, as the deficit eased towards surplus Bentinck and Trevelyan prepared the way for final abolition in 1835-6. 5 It was Bentinck's Government, finally, which resumed lands and by and large kept up or enhanced revenue collection in bad years, and whose economy measures worsened the deflationary crisis. T o apportion blame would be idle. Given the company's needs, the financial notions of the time, and his own pledge to economy Bentinck could do no other. A development-minded ruler could spare hardly any funds for development; instead he had to preside over, almost to enforce, a depression, and to hand on a surplus for his successors to fritter away. The irony of this situation may have obscurely moved Bentinck to his scathing attacks on British rule, and driven him to look for cure-alls like European settlement and steam. What of these cure-alls? How far did they benefit the Indian economy? Was it true that—as Bentinck claimed of steam communication with Britain—they 'would be cheaply bought at any price'?6 A problem that has recently exercised development economists is 'dualism'. Some investment in poor countries appears to call forth the production of goods and services which scarcely touch or benefit the local economy, but which instead benefit other, already developed economies. What looks like enhanced output really works in a closed 294

3 • DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOSE BENEFIT? circuit and may even be distorting. There can be little doubt that some of Bentinck's efforts promoted duali&n. This is particularly true of indigo. Investment in this export commodity was swollen to meet the contingent needs of Europeans—to serve as a medium of remittance and to enable planters and agency house partners to take fortunes home. Much of it ran to waste. Costs of production were high. A Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal reckoned, after an inquiry in i860, that for the raiyat to cultivate indigo rather than other crops embodied a negative preference—that is, he lost income (Rs 7 per bigha) by so doing. That was one reason why indigo production often rested on force.7 It may be that the indigo factory— Bentinck's 'centre of a circle of improvement'—brought some countervailing benefits of a less visible kind. But on the whole Bentinck's measures aimed at binding the raiyat to indigo cultivation seem likely to have done harm. Other undertakings of Bentinck's may, anyhow for a time, have diverted resources to services on a European standard which did not suit the needs of the Indian economy. The unification of the postal service, which he set in train and which came about in 1837, seems at first to have disrupted an existing, cheaper, and, in Indian terms, satisfactory array of local services.8 A more striking example is steam navigation, especially on the Ganges, where it was at first developed wholly with Indian resources. The Ganges steam service was for years a luxury, used mainly to carry European passengers, Government revenue, bankers' remittances, some perishable and expensive goods, and European-managed export crops. Freight rates, at first eight times those of country boats, as late as 1849 were still half again or even twice as high. There is thus a likelihood that in its early years steam mainly benefited Europeans, and scarcely touched the Indian economy; against this it may have done something to promote growth by stimulating coal prospecting and development, and perhaps by speeding up financial transactions.9 In the long run steam river transport must have brought growth, at a lower investment cost than the mid-Victorian railways whose real benefit to the Indian economy is still a matter for controversy. The question is whether Bentinck did well to launch an expensive European technology in the poverty-stricken 1830s—just as one may ask today whether a country at an early stage of development does well to launch a jet airline. The same question may be asked—was in effect asked at the time by 295

IV • STEWARD OF A GREAT E S T A T E Metcalfe and Ravenshaw—about Bentinck's roads. The cost of building the Grand Trunk Road was estimated by the 1850s at about £500 per mile exclusive of large bridges, the annual cost of maintaining that mile at £50—roughly equivalent to the annual revenue paid by a village. Against this the road was said to have cut down the cost of transporting goods by two-thirds. 10 The significance of these figures has yet to be worked out. It seems hard to believe that Bentinck's roads did not almost from the start promote growth; all the same, the wellmetalled Grand Trunk may have been built to a standard expensively high for the low-level economy it served. As for ocean-borne steam communication, that was largely a matter of British rather than Indian investment. Though the Indian peasant ultimately paid for most of the early experiments the first substantial investment was made by the P & O, which drew the bulk of its capital from the British Isles and started with a mere £20,000 Indian annual subsidy." We may still ask whether, at that early stage in the development of steam, alternative forms of British investment in India itself would not have benefited the subcontinent more. All such sums are hard to draw with the materials at hand. Bentinck was anyhow concerned with more than sums. He repeatedly made it clear, first, that separate improvement measures would work together to India's benefit; and secondly that the benefits would be at least as much social, cultural, and political as economic. In his way—a way very unlike that of people today who have far more experience behind them—he pursued a vision of India's total development. On the first point we may say that his development policy was indiscriminate. It seemed to anticipate a rapid industrialisation which did not for many years get under way. The Gloucester mills, the collieries, and the other modern industries in which Bentinck placed such hopes were almost certainly mere specks on the Indian economy. The Gloucester mills closed in 1837; the early iron industries of Porto Novo and the Damodar Valley seem to have been, by mid-century, a failure; the 'inexhaustible supplies' of coal in the prospecting of which Bentinck took such interest 12 were not mined on a large scale till the fifties; nor until then did permanent jute and cotton mills get under way. Even that was only a beginning. 13 Bentinck with his roads and steamers was trying to build an infrastructure for industrialisation. If he was to succeed quickly he needed to mobilise capital for investment at the same time in most branches of the economy, industry itself included. In Indian conditions this meant mobilising Government resources. 296

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Bentinck, with his cavalier attitude to laissez-faire ideology when it suited him (as over the Madras bank, Sicilian bread prices, North Indian land rights), might not have baulked at the job. But in the conditions of British rule at the time it was unthinkable. Bentinck's second point—that development would bring far wider than economic benefits—lands us straight in value judgments on the whole of British Indian history after his time. His vision of India Europeanised and developed into imperial nationhood was not singular in his day. It grew out of the historical situation. But so did pressures which ensured that the vision would be carried into effect only patchily, that development would be slow and the outcome unlike what the gloomy optimists of the 1830s had looked for. Bentinck's 'great engine' of redemption, steam, which was going to 'approximate' India and Britain and make all things well, brings to mind the steamer which in 1888 took the young Gandhi from Bombay to England. The path to nationhood ran in part along the Grand Trunk Road, the steamer services, the later railways; its end was not the tropical America of the 1830s imagination. Bentinck often misjudged a situation he could do little about. He worked at a time when rapid economic growth was, even in Britain, an experience new and little understood. What marked him off from many of his contemporaries and successors was less his grasp of Indian poverty than his eagerness to put India's total development at the front of policy, and to uSe modern technology to do the job. Against the grain of much British rule (though not of some British rulers) he had the sense of urgency.

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Governor 1 • THE WHEEL OF A D M I N I S T R A T I O N Bentinck spent fourteen years as governor or virtual governor of overseas territories. T o assess his historical role we should look not merely at his ideas or his measures but at his performance as head of an administration. At Madras (1803-7) Bentinck was head of a subordinate presidency, in many ways semi-autonomous and in separate communication with London, yet also subject to the rule of the Supreme Government at Calcutta—for part of that time under the imperious Wellesley. In Sicily (1811-14) Bentinck started out by working, in effect, a 'double government' such as British residents at Indian princely courts sometimes attempted, but was finally driven in 1813 to act for a few months as sole head of the administration. In Bengal (1828-35) he was himself head of the Supreme Government; he became in 1834 first to bear the title of Governor-General of India. His last government was historically much the most important: a discussion of Bentinck as administrator must centre on it. Old-fashioned histories of British India dealt a great deal in the acts of individual governors. Lord A achieved this reform, Mr. B committed that error. Yet the role of the individual, always an historical problem, is a particularly baffling one in the East India Company's administration. This was in its day one of the most remarkable bureaucratic governments in the world, an administration of the written word rivalling Austria's in its ponderousness, so shaped by a variety of influences— eighteenth-century British distrust of centralised rule, the company's commercial origins, Indian distance, climate, and mortality—as to make even the imperfect translation of will into act a matter of years or decades. The two-headed form of the Home Government, ambiguously balanced between political direction and corporate vested interest, ensured that, so far as it could influence at all what went on in 298

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remote India, its voice spoke often after internal tension and long delay. In India itself the system of councils, boards, and committees, all of whose members might record their opinion at length, saw to it that little could be done in a hurry. At Calcutta the Supreme Council met twice, often three times a week forfiveto seven hours to discuss papers which its members had spent much time in reading beforehand.1 Vellore was not the only occasion when, in Bentinck's words, 'the papers [were] too voluminous to be perused' by a busy Minister at home.2 Then, in an administration whose members depended on the patronage of superiors far away, the private letter oiled or distorted relationships; it was, according to one of the Directors, 'the greatest enemy a governor-general has to encounter'.3 The most urgent realities in the life of a high administrator were—besides health and climate—pen, paper, files, committee meetings, and the arrival and departure of the 'Europe fleet'. Indian administration we may look upon as a great slow wheel with its own inner pace, its ostensible heads as men who alighted on it for a few years, took up tasks already under way, and left others for their successors to see through or botch. This need not make them mere flies on the wheel; there was some room for energy and initiative. But we must beware of claiming too much. Because the company's administration was so much based on the written word its inner workings are uncommonly well documented. We can as a rule know who held which opinion, who won the argument, and why. This has its importance. But one can be overimpressed by documents just because they exist. Holt Mackenzie, himself no mean bureaucrat, had few illusions on this score.'. . . I fear', he wrote, 'the peace and plenty of nations have little to do with the winged words that take their flight from the pigeonholes of a Secretary's office.'4 This is a warning against supposing that because the Court of Directors and the Board of Control worked out elaborate dispatches to India therefore things happened, or that policy worked out in Calcutta fully determined the course of land tenure in the interior. Bentinck drove his pen to influence the Home Government as best he could; but he thought that for most practical purposes the effective ruler was the Government in India. Before the coming of the telegraph this was broadly true. Even then Bentinck grew more and more despondent about the effectiveness of the administration he led. What, to a man with Bentinck's record, was overwhelmingly important about the Home Government was its power of recall. The 299

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recall from Madras in 1807 had affected Bentinck's whole life, driving him to justify himself and, by ill-timed enterprise, almost to bankrupt himself. His appointment as Governor-General had just squeaked through. A woman who saw him shortly after his arrival in Bengal described him as 'a very plain-looking old man'.5 He was just 54. In India that was old. He himself felt at times that 'at my age I have no time to spare.. .'. 6 As Governor-General he sometimes acted like an old man in a hurry. Yet a certain canniness—evident through most of his career, except at moments of great exasperation like his quarrel with Murat—had deepened with age. He had learnt to dissimulate when there was need, and to put off for a time daring measures that might land him in trouble. Bentinck's age, health, and finances did much to shape his governorship. He had originally thought to spend only four years or so in India. 7 At first he felt borne down by Calcutta's 'abominable climate of steam' and the 'overwhelming load of uninteresting business'.8 T w o years later, after he had suffered a couple of bad falls from his horse and as many fevers, and had made himself deeply unpopular with the British through his economy cuts, Lady William's French maid exclaimed: Miledi avait beaucoup vieilli—et Milord, beaucoup beaucoup—et moi aussi, she added, je n'ai rien de reste [Milady had got much older—and Milord much, much older—and I too have nothing left]—and [Bentinck added] effectivement [in fact] she is skin and bone. I rather think this authority is tolerably good. I do not think we could go on to the end of our intended term without going for a time to a better climate. My situation is far from pleasant. Much discontent, and a load of business that completely overpowers me.» Yet this was his mood only after bouts of ill health—the recurrent dyspepsia and constipation which his doctors treated with alarming doses of calomel, the occasional fevers which meant an almost annual bleeding, the one attack of the stone he suffered in 1830 (worrying because his father had died of it), and, from the following year, the circulatory trouble that made for bouts of giddiness. In spite of these ailments his body remained fundamentally strong. By giving up wine— a resolve he broke, though he had to acknowledge that wine 'sorts not with my constitution,'—by taking to sago and arrowroot, by spending hot seasons on the heights of Simla and Utakamand, he got better. At 300

1 • THE WHEEL OF ADMINISTRATION such times, especially after the coming of the Whig Government at home, when he felt more secure, he repeatedly declared himself happy in his work and quite ready to go on. Another important reason for staying was that—probably because of low agricultural prices at home —his debts had not melted away as fast as he had hoped. In 1831 he decided to stay on until January 1 8 3 4 — ^ he could live so long and if the Whigs chose to keep him: he offered to resign, but Grey and the new President of the Board of Control, Charles Grant the younger, pressed him to stay; his going, Grant wrote, would be 'a serious calamity'. 10 By the time January 1834 came round 'public concerns go on so satisfactorily', Bentinck said, that 'it would be painful to leave them'. He thought of staying on even beyond 1835. T w o months later he suffered at Bangalore 'the narrowest of my escapes'—a combination of 'blood to the head,' fever, and total constipation which was cured only by 'the severest of my treatments]', 60 grains of calomel and the loss of 50 to 60 ounces of blood. As soon as he recovered he decided that he could stand no more such shocks and sent in his resignation. He then spent a year busily working on a series of reforms before sailing home in March 1 8 3 5 . " At nearly all times he got through a great deal of work. All the same, he was not as fit as he needed to be, or as young. This probably accounts for the impression he gave some people of suspiciousness and snappishness, even while he struck others as perfectly 'gentlemanly'. T h e stories that went the rounds among hostile civil servants—to an officer who advised him to appoint a road superintendent he was supposed to have snapped back 'Some friend of yours being just ready for the place'—were uncharacteristic but probably true. They suggest a man under strain. 12 T o try to give the wheel of Indian administration a fresh momentum called in these conditions for a prolonged act of will.

2 - H E A D OF T H E SERVICE An Indian Governor in the early nineteenth century could be an alien twice over—alien to India, and (some exceptions apart) alien to the corporate bodies that ran the administration, whether at the company's Leadenhall Street headquarters or in the Indian services. In a self-consciously hierarchical British society a member of the 301

1 • THE WHEEL OF ADMINISTRATION such times, especially after the coming of the Whig Government at home, when he felt more secure, he repeatedly declared himself happy in his work and quite ready to go on. Another important reason for staying was that—probably because of low agricultural prices at home —his debts had not melted away as fast as he had hoped. In 1831 he decided to stay on until January 1 8 3 4 — ^ he could live so long and if the Whigs chose to keep him: he offered to resign, but Grey and the new President of the Board of Control, Charles Grant the younger, pressed him to stay; his going, Grant wrote, would be 'a serious calamity'. 10 By the time January 1834 came round 'public concerns go on so satisfactorily', Bentinck said, that 'it would be painful to leave them'. He thought of staying on even beyond 1835. T w o months later he suffered at Bangalore 'the narrowest of my escapes'—a combination of 'blood to the head,' fever, and total constipation which was cured only by 'the severest of my treatments]', 60 grains of calomel and the loss of 50 to 60 ounces of blood. As soon as he recovered he decided that he could stand no more such shocks and sent in his resignation. He then spent a year busily working on a series of reforms before sailing home in March 1 8 3 5 . " At nearly all times he got through a great deal of work. All the same, he was not as fit as he needed to be, or as young. This probably accounts for the impression he gave some people of suspiciousness and snappishness, even while he struck others as perfectly 'gentlemanly'. T h e stories that went the rounds among hostile civil servants—to an officer who advised him to appoint a road superintendent he was supposed to have snapped back 'Some friend of yours being just ready for the place'—were uncharacteristic but probably true. They suggest a man under strain. 12 T o try to give the wheel of Indian administration a fresh momentum called in these conditions for a prolonged act of will.

2 - H E A D OF T H E SERVICE An Indian Governor in the early nineteenth century could be an alien twice over—alien to India, and (some exceptions apart) alien to the corporate bodies that ran the administration, whether at the company's Leadenhall Street headquarters or in the Indian services. In a self-consciously hierarchical British society a member of the 301

V • GOVERNOR landed aristocracy stood out from a Court of Directors still taken up with mercantile interests, as well as from civil servants and company officers, most of them of lower social origins, whose shared experience and interests were not his. Even in the late nineteenth century, when the company had been swept away, one Viceroy after another complained of the I C S ' s lack of intellectual and above all of social distinction; 'the most commonplace'—one high authority wrote in 1876— 'and the least dignified of second and third class Englishmen'. 1 If such sentiments were common after the second and even the third Reform Act they were stronger still before the first. ClasS difference sharpened the tensions inherent in the diffuse constitution of British Indian government. With the Home Government Bentinck's relations were at most times uneasy. As Governor of Madras he had been virtually imposed on the Court of Directors by Pitt. Soon after his arrival he came forward as a disciple of Wellesley, the bugbear of the dominant group in the Court. Under Bentinck's predecessor Lord Clive the faction-ridden Madras Government had been a battleground on which Wellesley and his Leadenhall Street opponents fought each other.2 Between the autocrat at Calcutta and the Court the squeeze would have been difficult for a more experienced man to cope with. Bentinck started out by trying to obey the Court's orders—in particular by procuring the 'investment' of Indian cloth at fixed prices: this, with some disagreements over specie which both governments desperately needed, brought Wellesley crashing down on him in formidable and 'entire disapprobation'. Bentinck expressed 'very considerable pain', and defended his right of independent judgment; it was all very well for Wellesley (who was leaving) to tell him to flout the Court, but others had to stay on and face the consequences. After that all went smoothly: Wellesley could be a genial driver if one did as he wished.3 But Bentinck had fallen under the great man's spell: suffer the consequences he did. In 1805-7 Court found reason to censure him on one count after another. Much of this was a carry-over from the conflict between Wellesley and the dominant group. The burden of complaint was that Bentinck, like Wellesley before him, was spending too much money and acting too independently, even insolently. Thus he had raised some salaries and allowances, gone to see Wellesley without permission, refused to dislodge on the Court's orders the Eurasian Thomas Warden from the principal collectorship of Malabar, and continued to favour the Munro school (already under fire from the Court in his prede302

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cessor's time). Bentinck, in other words, was censured for what he thought his best acts, his pursuit of raiyatwari in particular. A further count against him was the Government Bank, and so were quarrels in the Madras Council with their train of private letters to friends in the Direction. Even before news of Vellore arrived the Court was on the verge of recalling Bentinck.4 He for his part somewhat naively found the repeated charges of partiality and disobedience 'most discouraging and mortifying', 'not pleasant to the feelings of a gentleman', called on the Directors to remove him if they chose, and—when the Board of Control was in friendly hands—appealed to its President for support against 'private misrepresentation'.5 Even before the shock of his dismissal over Vellore it is clear that Bentinck, Wellesley-like, had very little use for 'the bad rule in Leadenhall Street'. In after years he concealed his feelings: his reappointment and then his survival as Governor-General depended on the Court. In 1828-35 he was at pains to butter up the 'Chairs': in his private letters he paraded his obedience to orders (especially about economy) and upheld the Directors' 'perfect acquaintance with passing Indian affairs' as essential to good government.6 But although Bentinck was on good terms with individuals at the East India House he had long thought the company's form of government by junta lacking in vigour.7 In 1810 he had advocated a change in the two-headed Home Government such as would make for 'active and powerful control', as well as for the union of the King's and company's armies in India.8 At the end of his life he came out openly against the Court as an irresponsible body riddled with patronage; he called for it to be amalgamated with the Board of Control into one department with a Secretary of State at its head and 'a competent board like that of the Admiralty, possessing local experience and information'.9 In this too Bentinck's real sentiments placed him in the line of imperial-minded men—Dundas, Wellesley, Ellenborough—who wished by one means or another to put British India under firm political direction: a step which conservatism and the fear of centralised control of power and patronage delayed until 1858. As governor-general Bentinck none the less had to be extremely careful. The danger now came less from the Directors—though he was nervous of them—than from the British Government. The Directors were an essentially conservative body. Even Bentinck's friend Ravenshaw thought, as Charter renewal approached, that things could go on much as before; he took fright at Bentinck's early measures and warned

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him 'you are marching too fast'. Still, so long as Bentinck enforced the economy drive the Court could not well let him go. 10 The Government was another matter. The Wellington Cabinet had come into office in January 1828, just before Bentinck's departure. Not only was it prevailingly Tory—altogether so after May, when Huskisson's withdrawal left Bentinck anomalously as the last of 'Mr. Canning's friends' still in office; Wellington himself was deeply prejudiced against Bentinck. He had never got over Bentinck's record in the Mediterranean in 1811-14—especially his having neglected Catalonia for the sake of nation-building in Sicily and Italy. He said freely that Bentinck was 'wrongheaded', 'cross-grained': 'when he is right, he is very right, but when he is wrong—and it is always a hundred to one that he is wrong—there is no setting him right again'. 11 Ellenborough, who as President had a free hand, sent Bentinck much seemingly cordial and enthusiastic advice; in their imperial vision the two were in some ways alike. But the dictatorial Ellenborough was furious when Bentinck anticipated him in proposing to move the capital to the North; he was just as angry over Bentinck's leases to indigo planters and over the withdrawal of military control from Nagpur (made in pursuance of the company's non-intervention policy). Several times in 1829-30 Ellenborough urged Bentinck's recall. But the Directors, though alarmed by the leases and the proposed shift of capital, saw to it that censure fell short of dismissal.12 Bentinck had been well aware that the Wellington Government was unfriendly and might be glad of a chance to get rid of him. 'I have seen', he wrote,'. . . so much of the vicissitudes of this low world that I am prepared for all events.' 13 He tried to use caution and was genuinely surprised at the uproar over his early measures. Even then he stood his ground. But it was a great relief when news of the Whig Ministry came in. From then on his dealings with the Home Government were fairly plain sailing. The new President, the indolent and dilatory Grant (known at the India House as 'the late Mr. Grant'), 14 wrote vaguely, briefly, and seldom, mostly to press missionary causes. The Directors now and then bridled; one elderly chairman was particularly incensed at Bentinck's spending so much time in the North instead of attending to the counting-house in Calcutta.15 But Bentinck's private letters, always polite, suggest that he now felt reasonably confident of being able to jolly them along. Even then he left several controversial measures till the last moment or even beyond. Like many officials in the subcontinent throughout the period of

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2 • HEAD OF THE SERVICE British rule he felt that at home 'nobody cares': the discussions between the Government and the Court about Charter renewal included 'not a word . . . as to Indian internal administration. Dividends, power, and patronage rank first'.16 Governorship remained a lonely job. How obedient a public servant was Bentinck? The question is not so simple as it has at times appeared to historians who have looked at it through the eyes of an exasperated Foreign Secretary or Chairman of the Court of Directors. In all his important jobs slow communications with London meant that the envoy or governor had to be more than an executant. In India there were further complications. At Madras obedience to Wellesley was virtually incompatible with obedience to the Court. Bentinck followed his natural bent and opted for Wellesley. He kept up a Wellesley-like stance after Wellesley had gone. When the Directors peremptorily ordered him to revoke some of his appointments (as they had ordered his predecessor in the course of their struggle with Wellesley) he thought it would be 'an act of dishonour not to take upon myself the responsibility of disobedience'. 17 This was foolhardy. In Sicily the situation repeated itself. Bentinck went out as Wellesley's emissary with full powers to carry out an interventionist policy. Wellesley then resigned; Castlereagh was content to wait and see 'what had been done next'. In effect he let Bentinck go on acting as proconsul. Bentinck took on great responsibility; but he flouted instructions only in his desperate attempt to raise Italy in 1814. This was sheer gamble. As governor-general Bentinck, at length taught by hard experience, was more careful. Even then he could not obey the Court without getting into trouble with Ellenborough over the Nagpur treaty. He twice ran foul of the law—first over his attempt to take the Council with him to the North, which the Court's advisers thought illegal (though the Bengal Chief Justice and Advocate-General had given a different opinion), 18 and then over the proclamation of the new Charter in 1834, which first set up a Government of India. For complicated reasons to do with Metcalfe's appointment as Governor of Agra and his own convalescence in the South Indian hills Bentinck faced 'a choice of illegalities': he suspended part of the Act and later had to be indemnified. 19 But although Bentinck treated the law with some impatience he no longer played the proconsul. His gambles—like the education policy—were now, so to speak, posthumous. Ironically, Bentinck's most notable act of obedience to the Home

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Government—if anything over-zealous—got him into worst trouble with the company's servants in India. This was his enforcement of economy, above all through the half-batta order. An Indian governor spent a large part of his time dealing with the few hundred European civil and military officers who held the higher posts in the company's services—their promotions, allowances, movements, and furloughs. Bentinck never got on well with the services as a whole, though he won the respect of individuals and the friendship of a few. For this there were several reasons: his own stiffness; the constitution of British Indian government; Bentinck's unfavourable view of the services; most important, his historical role as the bringer of modern concepts and methods of administration—among which economy was only the most salient and the most widely resented. Bentinck in his last years saw himself as 'an old soldier with the art of managing mankind'.20 This was not everyone's opinion. Macaulay thought 'the art of conciliating was one of the few parts of an excellent ruler which were wanting to my friend Lord William'—but for that 'he would have been incomparably the best governor that England ever sent India'.21 The Bentinck family aloofness which at first put off James Graham in Sicily later put off Charles Metcalfe at Calcutta22; it probably put off others. Yet these two saw through it: a man who could command their loyalty and affection as well as that of Charles Trevelyan, and who worked on terms of cordial cooperation with Munro, Holt Mackenzie, and William Sleeman, cannot have lacked some of the gifts of leadership. To those who admired him his gifts were honesty, courage, and disinterested hard work. Trevelyan thought him 'the most honest man I ever met with'.23 Even a civil servant who thought him suspicious and 'unfeeling' acknowledged the strength of mind with which he had borne obloquy.2* Bentinck's own way with subordinates he thought well-intentioned but incompetent is illustrated by his handling of a young man of good family whom he tried to get rid of as his secretary of legation at Palermo. Privately Bentinck thought him 'a very great blockhead', diligent but self-satisfied and good for nothing but copying. When the young man remonstrated he answered: You have never been disposed to give credit to the sincerity of my wishes for your welfare—but I have never said anything to you that I did not mean. I am fully impressed with your good qualities and shall always be happy to hear of your wellbeing. I certainly 306

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did not wish for your return to Palermo, because I conceived that it required more weight and power to make things go well—and this opinion I told you that I had already given. If you take the world quietly and do not form extravagant pretensions you will do well. If otherwise you will only be disappointed and unhappy. Remember this opinion.25 This kind of directness did not work with everybody—certainly not, at Calcutta, with an able but difficult man like H. T. Prinsep, whose 'irritability of temper' Bentinck, like others, found trying 26 ; Prinsep felt wounded by Bentinck's treatment of him in the education controversy, and stayed wounded. On the other hand Bentinck in his last years could show notable tact in handling men he respected like Malcolm and Metcalfe: he flattered Malcolm (who badly wanted to govern Central India as well as Bombay) with praise of his 'powerful mind and superior talents', took some of his advice, and kept him reasonably happy; he could apologise delicately to Metcalfe for an untimely 'effusion' against civil servants 'of which . . . I ought rather to be ashamed . . . ' . " His later praise of Metcalfe—'he never cavilled on a trifle, and never yielded to me on a point of importance' 28 —suggests the quality that kept some of the best men in India loyal. But there seems no doubt that Bentinck lacked ready charm; some people never got past the barrier of reserve. Governors are sometimes judged on their ability to appoint the right men to the right jobs and to fire them with zeal. On this test—always subjective—Bentinck was not outstanding. He made a number of respectable appointments and one glaringly bad one—Briggs's as special commissioner for Mysore in 1831. There were two things wrong with this: one, the division of responsibility between Briggs as the Supreme Government's envoy and a second commissioner appointed by Madras, flowed from Bentinck's new caution—he fought shy at first of taking the whole job away from Madras; the other, Bentinck's slight acquaintance with Briggs's record, was the result of the GovernorGeneral's isolation at Simla.29 Bentinck, however, since Madras days had always '[looked] at all . . . public acts as past which cannot be blotted from the records', and thought that 'statesmen should take advantage either to correct or improve': 30 after a long tale of muddle he took Mysore in hand; in Mark Cubbon he found the man to preserve its integrity. 307

V • GOVERNOR Bentinck, however, gave a more general reason for the unsatisfactory appointments he had to make. T h i s was that 'monstrous absurdity', company servants' 'monopoly' of places, honours, and high salaries 'to the exclusion of the native and natural agency of the country': If this monopoly service were constituted from the best talent and matured experience of England they would singly be unequal to the task. What then must be the competency of those, selected by no regard for qualification, possessing appointments, like an estate, as a matter of right; secure of promotion, because there are no competitors; and secured in their possession by the powerful patrocinium with which they are supported. T h e administration of patronage is my daily and painful duty; painful from the number of men totally inefficient that I am compelled, from the limited choice of individuals, to nominate to most important offices. 31 Bentinck in effect saw himself as a prisoner of the 'bad' system of British rule—though one who was struggling to do his job in its despite. What was the significance of this gloomy view? W e need first of all to distinguish those problems that sprang from the two-headedness of British rule, and those which were inherent in the company's own services. Just as the Home Government worked in uneasy balance between Court and Board, so Commanders-in-Chief in India were liable to assert their autonomy of the company's government, to lean to the King's in preference to the company's army, to try to introduce to India the spirit (even the letter) of King's Regulations, and to see everything from the point of view of the Horse Guards. S o too Supreme Court judges, royal appointees administering English law in the Presidency towns, tended to assert their jurisdiction in defiance of the government. Conflicts of this sort were so c o m m o n — f r o m the days of Warren Hastings and Elijah Impey to those of Curzon and Kitchener—that Bentinck's own disputes with commanders and Supreme Court judges probably had little to do with his abilities as a 'manager of mankind'. T h u s during his governor-generalship the governments of Bombay and Penang were in conflict with their K i n g ' s judges; while not only Bengal but Bombay and Madras found themselves at loggerheads with their commanders-in-chief, usually over appointments, allowances, or troop 308

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dispositions. 'All commanders-in-chief'—his friend Ravenshaw complained — ' s e e m . . . to go out in ignorance of the constitution of India.' 32 This was really to say that that constitution with its haphazard version of the separation of powers had conflict built into it. The extraordinary pepperiness of so many early nineteenth-century Englishmen, generals in particular—not much helped by the Indian climate and an unsuitable diet,—did the rest. If the phenomenon had not been so general Bentinck's complaint, in his early days at Madras, that he had been 'very unlucky throughout with the individuals with whom I have had to deal' 33 might sound like sour grapes. There he had a protracted row with Sir Henry Gwillim, a judge of the Supreme Court who seems to have been more than a little mad, and a series of engagements with the Commander-in-Chief, Sir John Cradock. The Gwillim affair had its origin even before Bentinck's coming in the usual jurisdictional disputes. It came to a head in 1805-7 when the Council bypassed the Supreme Court to set up a town police force. In open court Gwillim repeatedly denounced the police as 'military despotism', Bentinck as 'this ill-advised young lord', a 'spurious changeling . . . palmed o f f ' upon 'the noble blood of the Cavendishes' to contaminate it, and told the Advocate-General 'You deserve to be kicked out of your profession'. He was in the end suspended and recalled. So far as Gwillim's attack was more than a personal fugue it probably expressed the resentment of private traders, shopkeepers, and other independent Europeans against the hardening of company rule; 1,006 of them presented the fiery judge with a valedictory address. 34 'Constant collision between the civil and military authorities' troubled Bentinck at Madras—quite apart from Vellore and its consequences. Cradock, a likeable but hot-tempered officer given to 'tantrums' and repeated resignations, quarrelled with the rest of the Council over Army patronage and allowances and then, at the end of the Maratha wars, over economy cuts. Before Vellore he could not see why everything should not be done as in 'His Majesty's service "out of India"'; after Vellore he (and his successor MacDowall) were all for military rule. 35 There was more of the same kind of trouble a quarter-century later with three successive Bengal commanders-in-chief, Lord Combermere, Lord Dalhousie (father of the future Governor-General), and Sir Edward Barnes. Combermere, an easy-going man said to be in the hands of his military secretary, appeared at one time to condone the

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V • GOVERNOR officers' protests against the half-batta order (which Bentinckhad issued while Combermere was away in the North and before he could comment). Dalhousie fell ill the moment he set foot in India and detested the country on sight; his illness drove him to something like temporary paranoia. Barnes became so 'violent' against Metcalfe and the Council in his pursuit of fees on commissions that Bentinck at one point thought of suspending him, then thought better of it for fear of some really 'violent proceeding'; on the same grounds he put off his own projected trip to Mysore in 1833 until Barnes—recalled by the Home Government for his insubordination—was safely out of the country. Bentinck then himself became Commander-in-Chief as well as Governor-General. He had wished to unite the two offices at Madras; in Bengal he thought at first that it would mean too crushing a burden of work—but it now seemed easier than trying to keep turbulent soldiers in order. On the whole he handled these generals with some military fellowfeeling. At Madras he had tried to pacify Cradock by letting him have the patronage unofficially. When Barnes was obviously riding for a fall Bentinck tried to warn thim: 'I do not like to use the term back out, because it seems to imply defeat, but still i f . . . you could bring yourself to do so, I do not think your judgment would hereafter disapprove the concession . . . to overwhelming necessity even the Duke [of Wellington] himself has been obliged to bend . . .'. 36 Nothing availed. The 'tantrums' of commanders-in-chief were potentially dangerous because these men stood at the head of an army whose European officers had more than once mutinied—most recently at Madras in 1809. In 1828-35 both the company's military and civil services were at a high pitch of discontent. The immediate cause was Bentinck's 'clipping' of allowances. But this was a token of a deeper transformation which, in India as in Britain, had for some years been under way. Through most of the second half of the eighteenth century India had been for the company's servants a bonanza from which, with health and luck, they might pluck fortunes. Even after the introduction of high salaries for civil servants and the gradual suppression of their private trade most of the British regarded Indian service not as a career but as a means of saving up a 'competency' and, if they survived, enjoying it at home. There as in Britain the sense of the State or the community as a master requiring dedication in service, economy and probity in administration, and uniformity in practice was extremely weak. T h e reason in India as in Nottinghamshire was not that men were wickeder 310

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than usual but that the real sinews of the society were ties of family, personal and hierarchical dependence, and 'interest'. Bentinck in 1803 had come upon the small British society of Madras at a time when its tone and assumptions were just beginning to change. We have seen that the older servants appeared to him 'not so respectable either by birth or education' as their juniors. Madras—'this most scandalous of all places' 37 —was riddled with faction, often edged with hints of corruption. It was a world where one civil servant was suspended after charges (perhaps trumped up) that the Custom House in his care had for years been 'one continued scene of impudent frauds', where suspect claims and counter-claims over the Nawab of Arcot's debts were still going on, where company servants at large begged for preferment and showed themselves extremely prickly about rank and seniority.38 Imputation of mean motives ran all the way up to the Council. There Bentinck was on uneasy terms with two of his colleagues, John Chamier and William Petrie (both of whom Wellesley thought suspect), but, amid many disagreements, kept up a working relationship. Trouble came with the appointment to the Council of Thomas Oakes, a veteran of Madras faction fights whom Bentinck had previously passed over. They quarrelled, over a job for Oakes's son, and went on quarrelling over many other matters until, with Bentinck's anger 'unabated', they were not on speaking terms; Oakes, Bentinck was sure, had taken the lead in undermining him with the Directors. 3 ® Bentinck's first introduction to these 'old Indians' with their doubtful past and 'low' tone— Oakes at one point accused Petrie's French mistress of treasonable correspondence—probably coloured his lifelong view of the service. When he returned 21 years later a great deal had changed. This time there were no factional disputes in the Supreme Council; the calibre not only of Metcalfe but of less brilliant councillors, and of secretaries like Holt Mackenzie, William Macnaghten, H. T . Prinsep, and others, was vastly unlike that of the old Madras crew. In Britain the movement subsumed under the name Economical Reform—a general, piecemeal advance towards both economy and rationalisation in government— had been under way for some forty years. Bentinck, the ex-sinecurist Clerk of the Pipe, had joined in it. But had it been fully echoed in India? He thought not; in this he was not alone. He accordingly tried not just to 'clip' allowances but to apply to the company's services the tests that were gradually being applied in Britain: administration should be efficient, uniform, accountable, subject to a clear chain of authority 3"

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—in a word, rational. Since Indian service was still widely thought of as a penance made bearable only by rupees, and nearly every step towards rationalisation hit some vested interest, his acts stirred an outcry and left a trail of resentment. There was a further difficulty. When a colonel protested that a cut in allowances 'degraded' him Bentinck asked whether 'rupees and rupees alone' really 'constitute[d] the shadow of honour' in India; if his own salary were cut by half he would not think it a disgrace.'40 He was no doubt sincere. Yet he was in India partly for the money. His role, like that of many reformers—Burke among them,—was ambiguous: he was operating on something he was himself part of. Bentinck's view of the company's servants was, we have seen, deeply critical. As in his early Madras days he thought them wanting in 'liberality', 'education', unformed 'by the continual discussion, [the] direct contact and collision with a large enlightened society' through which 'the human mind in England has undergone such rapid changes.'41 From 1828 this broadened out into an attack on their expensiveness, their lack of qualifications, their 'monopoly' at natives' expense. The civil service especially was a corporation of equals—boys were as good as men and 'no one will show up his brother servant'42; its main defects were 'the absence of all official subordination' and 'the individuality, if I may so say, of every public functionary'. 43 Nobody [Bentinck confided in private] that does not see closely this machine can have an idea of the degree in which feeling for individual interests domineers over those of the public. Possession of place, under whatever disqualification, has more the validity of an hereditary tenure than the character of a public trust. This feeling is universal.44 Others in England shared this view of an outpost which, as outposts will, had slipped behind the times. The agent of a previous governorgeneral, Lord Hastings, pointed to the service's excessive 'esprit de corps'. The East India Company's secretary, together with some of the Directors, thought all their servants had got 'above themselves'. Ellenborough wished Bentinck 'to re-establish the full authority of the Government': there had crept into the services 'a relaxed tone of moral feeling'.45 It might have been truer to say that there had crept into British society at home a stiffened tone of moral feeling, and into British administration a new sense of public trust. Even then Bentinck's new broom swept ahead of much British as 312

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well as Anglo-Indian sentiment. The tests he applied came as a shock; nor would the Court of Directors help him to do much besides save money. His attitude was well shown in his handling of officials whose claims he thought unfounded. To an officer who wished to dodge an upcountry posting he said 'there should be no drones in the hive if I could help it'. When a civil servant pressed for a job to which he had no obvious title Bentinck asked 'what have you done?'46 He was always on the lookout for corruption among residents at princely courts. Not only were flagrant offenders got rid of—Mordaunt Ricketts from Lucknow and Sir Edward Colebrooke from Delhi; Bentinck transferred men whom he thought honest but who had laid themselves open to suspicion—W. B. Martin from Hyderabad and, again from Lucknow, Herbert Maddock, a future Lieutenant-Governor and Council member.*47 It was this kind of thing that prompted civil service complaints: Bentinck 'had adopted the idea that almost all the Government officers . . . were in league to deceive him and to avoid doing their duty'; he seemed to think 'that men may be treated like machines, and subjected to control and movement as if they had not the feelings and passions incident to human nature'.48 A new impersonality was being brought to bear on a service long used to 'individuality': it hurt. The company's military and civil services shared with many other British institutions a lack of uniformity and of what would now be called systematic personnel management. Both presented a thicket of grades, pay, and allowances that had grown up over the years; these varied from presidency to presidency and from station to station. Between soldiers and civilians there was one great difference: the trouble in the officer corps was slow promotion by seniority which left many, sometimes for decades, in low-paid ranks; whereas civilians could expect within a few years to earn ten times as much as a subaltern. In both services the pay structure—if such it could be called—drove men to seek continual transfers instead of attending to the job at hand. In the army, because of disagreement in the Military Finance Committee, nothing could be done until near the end of Bentinck's term apart from the bald enforcement of the half-batta order. But the Civil Finance Committee under Holt Mackenzie worked fast. Through his * Maddock had accepted the King of Avadh's offer to make him his agent in Britain and had then thought better of it. Bentinck had great difficulty in persuading him that this made it impossible for him to go on as Lucknow resident, and that he had better transfer to Katmandu.

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and Bentinck's efforts the Government tried not just to cut expenditure but to rationalise structure. It drew up new uniform salary scales (which meant raising some salaries); it introduced a 'rule of service' (whereby salaries were to increase with length of service up to a maximum in each scale); it proposed to divide grades into classes, with promotion from one to the next on merit. Finally, in 1834, Bentinck's 'Merit-Fostering Minute' sought to establish that no one, whatever his seniority, should be promoted except on merit; the test was to be a man's all-round competence, knowledge of the vernacular, and 'pre-eminently, his disposition and behaviour towards the people, high and low, with whom he is brought into official contact': this was to raise standards of efficiency 'to a level with the just demands of the people of this country upon their rulers, or with our own responsibility as the delegated Government of such an empire'. T o this end Bentinck established, on military principles, a long chain of authority and supervision: each officer, board, or court was to report twice a year on subordinates' performance. Bentinck's Government, in other words, was trying to establish something like a modern uniform salary structure, with incremental scales, an efficiency bar, and supervisory career management.49 This was too much, not just for servants in the field but for the Court of Directors. The Court was willing to set maximum salaries; but it combined retrenchment with conservatism. It forbade salary increases (thus maiming uniformity); it abrogated the rule of service; it turned down the proposed division of grades into classes; with the Board's strong encouragement it threw out 'merit-fostering' supervision as making for bias and ill feeling. Once again Bentinck had been 'marching too fast'. No doubt some of his reforms, like others at home in the 1830s, were more drastic than the society would bear—especially when 'meritfostering' led to the removal of four divisional commissioners. Long ago at Madras he had wanted the Government Bank to 'go on like a machine, like a clock, every part of which had a fixed and unalterable duty' (though there was no need to go into 'extraordinary minutiae' in its regulations).50 The mechanical principle in human organisation had a long Newtonian ancestry; resistance to it, on grounds selfish or humane, conservative or anarchic, was long also. Bentinck's reform was thus one more half-finished marker on the way to a rationalised service in which men qualified on merit would make a career. From the start Bentinck had been aware that he would be deeply

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2 • HEAD OF THE SERVICE unpopular with the services. ' I dread . . . touching any civil or military allowances as much as a magazine of gunpowder . . .'. 5 I The half-batta order brought a famous outcry. Officers—encouraged by the AdjutantGeneral—several times combined to decline Bentinck's invitations; nearly three years after the order some were still indirectly snubbing Lady William. Letters to the press, now and then comparing Bentinck to Jack Ketch or hinting at mutiny, went on for a year and a half until Bentinck in September 1830 got ¿he Court's final confirmation of the order; he then used his power of censorship for the first and last time. Civil service resentment simmered on much longer. From the florilegium of outraged protest it is clear that economy cuts and rationalisation did not merely hit European pockets; they came as a shock to long-held assumptions, especially about status. Bengal junior officers were genuinely low-paid by British standards (hence hard hit); but amid all the rhetoric—'our pride is humbled— our energies are poisoned and our hearts broken'—part of their grievance was the 'absolute necessity' for a subaltern to keep fourteen servants, and the absolute loss of 'respectability' in Indian eyes if he had 'to pace the streets of Calcutta on foot'. 52 Indian caste restrictions did multiply servants and services; all the same, there was about the officers' plight a touch of 'relative deprivation'. So too civil servants were 'beginning to hate our government'; its measures would, as one of them wrote, 'cast the silver veil upon my brow long, long before the kindlier hand of age would have placed it there'; they were daily driving 'many fine young men . . . to the bottle and premature graves from utter recklessness and desperation', while 'swelling the coffers of nefarious fat-gutted commissariat Brahmins'. Behind all this lay, not merely jealousy of Bentinck's newly promoted Indians, but the 'understanding' upon which 'we enter the s e r v i c e . . . that certain benefits and emoluments are our right and will be derived from it'. Bentinck's general request for information of 'defects in the existing establishment' looked like 'espionage'; steps to establish a career service meant that 'what was formerly the probation of months has now become . . . the endurance of years'. 53 Corporate privilege had indeed been a way of life; it was being called in question. The protesters did not have it all their own way; some officials thought Bentinck 'just'. But on the whole the fruit of his 'most odious duty' was, he knew, 'universal dislike'. At the height of the uproar in the Army he felt at times that he had 'a monstrous concern . . . on my back'; it had 'poisoned all the happiness' he had looked for. Yet he did 3i5

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not seriously doubt that he could handle the situation if he kept his nerve: 'I feel that I am coping with children.' The less glaring snubs he ignored; when, as happened twice, groups of officers declined his invitations he saw to it that they retracted or apologised and left it at that. But for the one order closing discussion of half-batta he gave the press its head. He endured. It all implied, in an ageing man whose earlier life had had its moments of angry self-assertion, a view of authority as rooted in self-control.54 Bentinck was thus a governor who tried to rule against the grain of the British services in India. Shortly before the end of his term Lady William—much relieved that his unpopularity was at length wearing off—wrote to him: 'two-thirds of the Europeans, and the whole of the native population, will regret your departure'.55 True or false, it was not a proportion her husband necessarily disliked.

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GENERALSHIP

Bentinck's style of government in Bengal may be called administrative generalship. He identified issues he thought important. He then tackled each in a 'campaign'. The first step was to gather information, sometimes by sending out questionnaires to officials in the field, sometimes by personal inquiry, sometimes by entrusting the job to a committee, formal or informal. Bentinck then went through the results with the Council or, if he was away from Calcutta, with whatever secretaries or other officials he had taken along. The outcome as a rule was a substantial Minute by the Governor-General; as a rule, too, this became the foundation of policy. Not all of this was of course new. A government of boards and committees was bound to work in some such way. What was new—and it was in tune with the contemporary British pursuit of facts through Select Committees or Royal Commissions—was Bentinck's use of the questionnaire, of comparative statistics, and of bodies like the Civil Finance Committee which deliberately cut across existing establishments. His style also showed in the way he tried to bring all resources —above all personal inquiry—to bear on one problem at a time. An example is army reorganisation. Even before setting out for Bengal Bentinck had been discussing a possible increase in the pro316

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not seriously doubt that he could handle the situation if he kept his nerve: 'I feel that I am coping with children.' The less glaring snubs he ignored; when, as happened twice, groups of officers declined his invitations he saw to it that they retracted or apologised and left it at that. But for the one order closing discussion of half-batta he gave the press its head. He endured. It all implied, in an ageing man whose earlier life had had its moments of angry self-assertion, a view of authority as rooted in self-control.54 Bentinck was thus a governor who tried to rule against the grain of the British services in India. Shortly before the end of his term Lady William—much relieved that his unpopularity was at length wearing off—wrote to him: 'two-thirds of the Europeans, and the whole of the native population, will regret your departure'.55 True or false, it was not a proportion her husband necessarily disliked.

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GENERALSHIP

Bentinck's style of government in Bengal may be called administrative generalship. He identified issues he thought important. He then tackled each in a 'campaign'. The first step was to gather information, sometimes by sending out questionnaires to officials in the field, sometimes by personal inquiry, sometimes by entrusting the job to a committee, formal or informal. Bentinck then went through the results with the Council or, if he was away from Calcutta, with whatever secretaries or other officials he had taken along. The outcome as a rule was a substantial Minute by the Governor-General; as a rule, too, this became the foundation of policy. Not all of this was of course new. A government of boards and committees was bound to work in some such way. What was new—and it was in tune with the contemporary British pursuit of facts through Select Committees or Royal Commissions—was Bentinck's use of the questionnaire, of comparative statistics, and of bodies like the Civil Finance Committee which deliberately cut across existing establishments. His style also showed in the way he tried to bring all resources —above all personal inquiry—to bear on one problem at a time. An example is army reorganisation. Even before setting out for Bengal Bentinck had been discussing a possible increase in the pro316

3 • ADMINISTRATIVE GENERALSHIP portion of European troops, and the need to equalise allowances in the three Presidencies. 1 By 1830 he was convinced that with India 'virtually . . . one empire' the army must be redeployed: far too much of it was stationed in the South where it was no longer needed.2 But the Military Finance Committee could not agree; Bentinck therefore put off the question. By mid-1832 he was holding private military councils on it twice a week and gathering information—for instance a vast report on the working of the French gendarmerie since the Revolution. By late 1833 meetings had gone up to three a week.3 T h e process culminated in a series of Minutes which Bentinck wrote between August 1834 and the eve of his departure in March 1835. ^ his illness had not got in the way of his original plan he would have spent these months at Agra, so as to draw up his final proposals where he could be in touch with the main body of the army. 4 He had throughout been 'very adverse to small or detached [measures], that is parts only of a general measure. At least the general measure should be first determined upon; and it may afterwards be executed in part or in whole as may seem best.' 5 His series of Minutes put forward such a comprehensive scheme; they covered establishments, dispositions, rewards, and a strategic appraisal. He had acted in much the same way in 1830-2 over the mahalwari land settlement. Bentinck's governor-generalship can be divided into three main phases, each marked by several campaigns. The first (1828-30) he spent mainly in Calcutta. Much of it was taken up with economy and attendant reforms of the civil service. Another campaign was the inquiry into sati and its abolition. Bentinck had not intended this phase to last beyond late 1829; he meant at that time to begin his tour of the North. But the Home Government prevented him from taking his council with him; he dared not leave it behind while discontent over half-batta was still at its height.6 Meanwhile the initial economy campaign—conducted in the spirit of Gladstone's later saving of candle-ends, and stretching even to the Botanical Garden— had turned an average annual deficit of nearly £ 3 millions in 1823-9 into a surplus of over £ 1 million in 1829-30. Largely because of the depression this performance could not be repeated: after several years near break-even point, increased revenue brought surpluses hovering about £1 million a year in 1835-8, after Bentinck had gone: but they were then quickly swallowed up in the Afghan War. 7 The second phase was Bentinck's prolonged tour of the North and

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Centre in 1830-3. Here the chief campaign was the land settlement of the Western Provinces; he was also much taken up with the Grand Trunk Road and with external affairs—with Avadh and the opening up of the Indus; through a durbar at Ajmer in 1832 he tried with indifferent success to settle the quarrels of the Rajput princes. Throughout this time Metcalfe as Vice-President in Council ran the day-to-day business of the Supreme Government in Calcutta. How effective was this attempt to govern India from a distance? Bentinck was not merely in the North; during the hot months of 1831 and 1832 he was at Simla, remote indeed at a time when dispatches went by runner. He had arrived in Bengal just when the governors of all three Presidencies had begun to take to the hills for part of the year. Bentinck thought it an 'abuse' to do this every year, but he loved 'the beautiful verdure of our mountains' (and their temperature of 69F in July) 8 : between Simla and his enforced convalescence of 1834 amid the drizzle of Utakamand he set a fashion which was to turn future rulers into 'strangers in the land' in earnest. As it was, Macaulay wrote from Utakamand, 'for all purposes of communication' the Colonial Secretary in London 'is quite as near to Canada or Jamaica as Lord William to his own seat of government'. 9 Even from Simla, however, Bentinck was in constant and cordial touch with Metcalfe. Given that, and the deliberate pace of a government of the written word, Bentinck's remoteness was hardly a grave drawback except in the one matter of Mysore. He had argued from the first that the North was the most important part of British India, and the land settlement one of the most important problems to be solved there. He did solve the administrative if not the substantive problem. Those who value in government chiefly the steady control of the administrative machine as a whole may agree with the shocked Chairman of the Court of Directors, who kept asking what people would say if the King or the Prime Minister went to York to set things right. 10 Bentinck in India preferred the campaigning style as a means of getting one or two things done. His last phase ran from February 1833, when he returned to Calcutta, until his departure just over two years later. Here the great campaign was army reorganisation. A minor one, long delayed until Bentinck could go south early in 1834, was the final untangling of the Mysore muddle. He was also much taken up with steam communication. Then, in March 1834, came the illness which drove him to resign earlier than he had planned.

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When he recovered he knew he had about a year left. At Utakamand and then in Calcutta he plunged into intense activity. Not only did he go forward with army reorganisation and other measures already in train. He deliberately turned this last year into a coda to his rule: now that he had nothing to lose he introduced new measures which were bound to stir up trouble. He launched the education policy. He abolished flogging in the company's army. Here in sedate bureaucratic terms was something like his gambler's throw in Italy in 1814. 'I fearlessly pronounce the Indian Army to be the least efficient and most expensive in the world.'11 This sets the tone of Bentinck's liberated last phase. Army reorganisation was a vastly complex task. The half-batta order (which should have been part of a general reform but, issued in isolation, had merely got in its way) had shown how delicate the undertaking must be. Bentinck started from the long-held premise that Indian native troops had neither 'national' feeling nor 'attachment' to the British; we have seen how his military proposals were bound up with his constant wish to see India 'nationally' transformed and imperially governed from Agra. He reverted to his old dream of a Piedmontese (later an Italian) national army inspired and led by the British. He recommended that the proportion of European troops should be roughly doubled— as Munro had long since proposed, to one-third of the whole. Only thus, he argued, could the army be fitted to meet an external European enemy (Russia); the one potential internal enemy worth bothering about, the native army itself, would at the same time be diluted. He also tried to raise Indian soldiers' 'national' feeling and status through the Order of Merit. The reformed army should be concentrated in large stations, the bulk of it in an advanced position in the North. Finally, he brought forward a battery of proposals for amalgamating regiments, equalising both European officers' and Indian soldiers' allowances and pensions in the three presidencies, and giving Indians graduated increases in pay. The whole plan meant doing what the home authorities disliked— spending more money in some directions—for the sake of saving perhaps six times as much on the whole. Bentinck tried to enforce this point by holding out the danger that European officers might one day mutiny; Indian officers too, aware of weakening European prestige and of rising Indian status in the civil administration, must be prevented from sinking deeper into a sense of their own 'degradation'.12 Bentinck thus, 22 years before the Mutiny, looked ahead to some 3i9

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unforeseen crisis—to Grant he privately instanced the 1830 Revolution in France and the Reform Bill agitation—and tried to prevent it. As usual he worked under constraints. Some of his proposals, notably about allowances, went through in modified form, but the bulk of them were lost to sight in the Afghan War. One thing Bentinck could do on his own: that was to abolish flogging in the company's army. He did it in 1835 with the unanimous support of the Council but against the opinion of all the officers he consulted. He could not do the same for the King's Army; but he recommended that flogging should be limited to special penal companies. At home his move 'created a great hubbub': the King (who had set up his own inquiry into flogging) was upset; Ravenshaw, with many others, protested that 'it would never do to be flogging European soldiers and not natives'." Like the education policy (launched in the same last few weeks of his term) it was something of a coup, a gamble: Bentinck was in effect saying, Wellesley fashion, 'undo this if you can'. As with education he only half won: in the wake of the 1844 mutinies Hardinge, then Governor-General, restored flogging for a time. Bentinck was able to do it at all only because 'the human mind in England' had already moved a long way since his experience as a young man in the French wars, when—he recalled—the cat o' nine tails had dealt with offences great and small, and 'corporal punishment was the echo in each and every one of the articles of war'. For the sake of persuading his brother officers he now exaggerated the 'long reflection' it had taken him to move away from the lash. The truth was that as early as 1807 he had hoped 'to see in great measure abolished that abominable "cat o' nine tails," . . . the only resource of the foolish, the idle, and the cruel commanding officer, the destruction of all good and honourable spirit in the soldier, the substitute for kindness and attention in the officer, and in short the very ruin of the army'. 14 In this he had been at one with humane officers of the time like Admiral Collingwood—Nelson's successor in the Mediterranean—and his own commanding officer in Spain, Sir John Moore. IS Now, a quarter-century and many thousands of lashes further on, he demonstrated through the usual statistical inquiry that the Bengal Army— partly reformed by Combermere—gave in each regiment less than one-tenth the lashes inflicted in Bombay. Among the Indian soldiers, he concluded—men of high caste and proverbially obedient—the threat of discharge could do everything the lash was supposed to do; officers' belief in flogging as 'the sine qua not? of discipline was mere 320

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unreasoning superstitition, wrong in principle, disproved by the precedent of sati. ' I denounce this opinion as prejudice, and nothing else but prejudice.. . . My whole reason utterly repels the fear and the doubt.' 16 These were the last gambling throws in Bentinck's administrative campaigns. Yet there were gambles he would not take. He would not take over Avadh. He left it to Metcalfe formally to emancipate the press, though just before and during his time it had become virtually free in Calcutta; he held back because (as he explained) he had never been able to make up his mind on the principle, and probably also because, with free discussion already in being, he saw no need to upset the Home Government yet again by taking a formal stand.* 17 At 60 the gambler had learnt to play his cards with some care.

4 - A U T I L I T A R I A N GOVERNOR-GENERAL? Jeremy Bentham in old age used to say: 'Mill will be the living executive—I shall be the dead legislative of British India.' 1 This celebrated boast, together with some other evidence, has led many historians to describe Bentinck as a Utilitarian Governor-General. They have assumed that he either was himself a Benthamite or at least was directly influenced by Utilitarian thought. On the other hand the two most penetrating recent studies of his Indian administration have begun to bring out his share in the Evangelical and Liberalhumanitarian movements of his time.2 What are we to conclude? Before his arrival at Calcutta in 1828 Bentinck—we have seen—had had only casual dealings with the Benthamite inner group. He had not himself been a disciple of Bentham or Mill. But as a member of a ducal family who showed an open, in some ways sympathetic, mind he had looked to Bentham and Mill like a potentially great catch. How did his performance bear out this hope? • Bentinck told Hobhouse in 1 8 3 6 that he had never formed an opinion about the legal freedom of the press. This was almost certainly true; it is borne out by his attitude in Sicily. His doubts probably sprang from his experience of the British press in his youth, which had been notoriously venal and libellous. In 1 8 2 8 - 3 5 the Calcutta press was extremely lively, but in the other presidencies three governors (Malcolm, Clare, and Lushington) gagged theirs and complained bitterly about the failure to gag the 'Radical editors' of Bengal: see their letters to Bentinck, BP/PwJf/ 6 5 7 - 8 0 , 1 3 0 8 - 9 , 1 4 2 9 - 3 0 , and Bentinck to Clare (private), 1 June 1 8 3 2 , ibid. no. 2696. L

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unreasoning superstitition, wrong in principle, disproved by the precedent of sati. ' I denounce this opinion as prejudice, and nothing else but prejudice.. . . My whole reason utterly repels the fear and the doubt.' 16 These were the last gambling throws in Bentinck's administrative campaigns. Yet there were gambles he would not take. He would not take over Avadh. He left it to Metcalfe formally to emancipate the press, though just before and during his time it had become virtually free in Calcutta; he held back because (as he explained) he had never been able to make up his mind on the principle, and probably also because, with free discussion already in being, he saw no need to upset the Home Government yet again by taking a formal stand.* 17 At 60 the gambler had learnt to play his cards with some care.

4 - A U T I L I T A R I A N GOVERNOR-GENERAL? Jeremy Bentham in old age used to say: 'Mill will be the living executive—I shall be the dead legislative of British India.' 1 This celebrated boast, together with some other evidence, has led many historians to describe Bentinck as a Utilitarian Governor-General. They have assumed that he either was himself a Benthamite or at least was directly influenced by Utilitarian thought. On the other hand the two most penetrating recent studies of his Indian administration have begun to bring out his share in the Evangelical and Liberalhumanitarian movements of his time.2 What are we to conclude? Before his arrival at Calcutta in 1828 Bentinck—we have seen—had had only casual dealings with the Benthamite inner group. He had not himself been a disciple of Bentham or Mill. But as a member of a ducal family who showed an open, in some ways sympathetic, mind he had looked to Bentham and Mill like a potentially great catch. How did his performance bear out this hope? • Bentinck told Hobhouse in 1 8 3 6 that he had never formed an opinion about the legal freedom of the press. This was almost certainly true; it is borne out by his attitude in Sicily. His doubts probably sprang from his experience of the British press in his youth, which had been notoriously venal and libellous. In 1 8 2 8 - 3 5 the Calcutta press was extremely lively, but in the other presidencies three governors (Malcolm, Clare, and Lushington) gagged theirs and complained bitterly about the failure to gag the 'Radical editors' of Bengal: see their letters to Bentinck, BP/PwJf/ 6 5 7 - 8 0 , 1 3 0 8 - 9 , 1 4 2 9 - 3 0 , and Bentinck to Clare (private), 1 June 1 8 3 2 , ibid. no. 2696. L

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Before we make the inquiry it is as well to ask how fully Benthamite doctrine was understood in India. Among civil servants Holt Mackenzie had studied it, as he had studied recent political economy: so had Macaulay, Alexander Ross, and—among the business community —Bentham's correspondent James Young. All these men veered away from aspects of the doctrine while accepting others; thus Ross upheld the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law, while Young favoured the Permanent Settlement and the extension of native agency.3 Beyond these men it is tolerably clear that Utilitarianism, like rent theory, was something between a cant term and a set of ideas with which people had a superficial acquaintance. One reform-minded officer described the Orientalists as 'speculative reading men, ideologists as they would be termed by the utilitariansCharles Cameron, a new member of Council, appeared to the Chief Justice 'to a certain extent a disciple of the school of Mill and Bentham'; William Macnaghten, on the other hand, reported that Cameron 'though a Liberal is not, I am assured, half so devoted a Benthamite as Macaulay'.5 Even to some of the well-read—Macnaghten's words suggest— 'Benthamite' (or 'Utilitarian') was a term at once fashionable and amorphous, rather like 'Socialist' in the 1890s. Bentinck's only recorded use of it was as a joke. After his return to Europe he took with him to Carlsbad his doctor, an argumentative Scot and strong democrat with whom he had a bantering relationship. To show his gratitude he proposed to give the doctor £200, 'following my utilitarian principles in the choice of means'.6 The term was in the air; the doctrine had some general influence; knowledgeable disciples were few. That seems a fair conclusion. It is also clear that, because the Benthamites shared with their contemporaries a number of assumptions and aims, a man could put forward a view of Indian administration congruent with theirs and yet not himself be a Benthamite. Thus Metcalfe advocated a government rim on lines of unified central authority, a clear chain of command, 'singleseatedness' in preference to boards, a codified law, and some executive control over the courts; but he was not, for all that, a Benthamite.7 We may say much the same of Bentinck. His view of the proper form of government for India was not far removed from Metcalfe's. If anything it coincided rather less than Metcalfe's with that of Bentham and Mill. On the one hand he was a strong believer in what was later called 'centralisation and uniformity'; partly through his influence the Supreme Government won in the 1833 Charter Act an enhanced 322

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control over the subordinate presidencies.8 He tried to establish in the administration a clear chain of command—an aim he had long since taken over from Munro, not from Munro's paternalist ideology but from the military experience which he and Munro shared; that Bentinck's call for 'subordination' sprang from his military origins is well shown by the contrasts he drew between well-behaved soldiers and insubordinate civil servants, and by his much-resented preference for 'military civilians' (officers transferred to civil duties).9 Again, Bentinck wished to see in India a unitary law codified and revised at regular intervals.10 Where he parted company from Metcalfe —and from the Utilitarians—was in consistently opposing 'singleseatedness' wherever government had to legislate, and in upholding the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law. Bentinck in his younger days had been ready enough to act on his own authority alone. But by 1828-35 he had come a long way. He genuinely valued the process of 'discussion—mutual information— mutual concession' whereby 'business is better understood and decided; more is done; differences are more easily accommodated; and there will be gradually a greater portion of concert and harmony'.11 For him to act alone on his tours 'may be legal, it cannot be constitutional': that was why he wanted to take his Council along.12 Because he was 'strongly opposed to individual agency except in cases of great emergency' he tried for a long time to avoid putting Mysore under a single commissioner.13 Finally, he stood out against any notion of doing away with councils in the subordinate governments: 'It is quite unintelligible to me how in a settled and regular government the pure monarchical principle, the institution of so many Anglo-Indian rajas, can be deemed preferable to a collective and deliberative Council.' The decisions of his own Council he had always found more satisfactory, indeed better, than 'those ruled by my own good pleasure and my single judgment'.14 Bentinck thus repudiated 'single-seatedness' in the executive, a device close to the heart of Benthamite doctrine. We have seen that he disregarded other central tenets—the multiplication of tribunals and (except for supervisory purposes) the union of the judiciary and the executive in unsettled districts. In the Western Provinces he departed in practice from Mill's application of rent theory, would not fix all raiyats' rents, and favoured some large landholders. Against Mill's teaching he did his best to raise Indians within the administration: like Mill, but with more of an eye to representativeness, he wished 'native

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gentlemen' to sit on the Legislative Council. Finally, he hoped all his life to see a permanent settlement of the land revenue where it had not yet been made—first in Madras and then in the Western Provinces. Almost his last act as Governor-General was to recommend it where 'estates' in the Western Provinces had been surveyed; he was still calling for permanent settlement in 1 8 3 8 . " The one field in which Bentinck was closer to Mill than has generally been allowed was education. His education policy with its strong emphasis on the vernacular and on 'useful knowledge' was much like Mill's. It was not his fault that the vernacular element went by the board, and that historians were left with the English element—or rather with Macaulay's tactical pyrotechnics in its favour. Bentinck, we must conclude, was not a Utilitarian in any strict sense, either in his affiliations or in his performance. Nor was he a Utilitarian in the popular sense personified by Dickens in M r Gradgrind. Far from wishing to sell off the Taj Mahal, Bentinck's Government took some care of it; Bentinck himself, like Trevelyan, admired Mughal architecture; though committed to economy he was prepared to spend Rs 5,000 on 'a grand exhibition of fireworks' so that Indians might celebrate the new Charter. Stories to the contrary were—as a contemporary noted—really 'a curious illustration of [his] unpopularity' with the services. 16 Yet an inquiry such as we have just made, classifying this or that measure or attitude as Utilitarian or not, is unsatisfactory. It has to be made because previous historians have used such tests, and because Bentinck's historical role must be cleared of unexamined cobwebs. In a more general sense Bentinck and the Utilitarians shared certain attitudes and aims. They wished to unify India, to make her institutions rational and modern, her government strong and decisive. They rejected her ancient civilisation—though Bentinck still felt the tug of Mughal imperial glory. They looked to 'useful knowledge' to redeem her. Beyond this we have to say that simple classification will not do. Men of the 1830s did group themselves in schools for some purposes. But the schools overlapped; within each school men differed in opinion and temperament, in grasp and interpretation of doctrine. The historical situation in those years of British crisis and Indian transition was complex; historical understanding must allow for the complexity of motives from which action sprang. Bentinck, like many others, was no doubt influenced in a general sense by the Utilitarian school. But the inner springs of his career were much more clearly his need for

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action, his Evangelical faith, his belief, never extinguished, in 'political liberty', his pursuit of economic development through modern technology, and, perhaps most important, the vision of nationhood under British guidance which he had first begun to shape on the battlefields of Piedmont.

Lord William Bentinck, in old age 325

PART VI

Not Quite a Radical 'It is well known,' John Stuart Mill wrote in 1839, 'that everywhere in Scotland, except at Edinburgh, a Liberal and a Radical are synonymous.'1 On his return from India Bentinck experienced just what this meant. He spent his last few years as member for the biggest, rowdiest, and most Radical of Scottish constituencies, Glasgow. Little in his career had prepared him for it. True, in India he had become steadily more critical of the means by which the British landed classes kept their supremacy—of the rule of patronage and 'interest', of Church establishment, of barriers to free trade and to cheap, efficient administration. He fully supported the electoral reform of 1832. But Glasgow, a great industrial city on the brink of the 1837 trade slump and of Chartism, already given over to Anti-Corn Law agitation, was a new world far removed both from India and from the political arenas Bentinck had known—from Westminster, from the comfortable merchant oligarchy of King's Lynn, above all from the rule of ducal families and gentry in Nottinghamshire. In the Britain of the 1830s Glasgow was the nearest thing to a democracy. It was democratic not in its mode of voting—though its electorate of almost 9,000 was now among the biggest—but in its tone, in its organisation, in the political aims many of its people set themselves. In all these ways it had less in common with the Dukeries than with Jacksonian America. Bentinck was a reluctant candidate. When he saw that representing Glasgow entailed he became a reluctant M.P. In the last two years of his life he tried several times to give up a constituency which—he had quickly come to feel—made him 'a slave'.2 Yet Glasgow had its effect on him. On his first visit he was curious 'to know what real Radicals are . . .'. 3 He found out. It was a rough passage. Bentinck, however, had at most times adapted himself to 'the march of mind'; in this new setting he went on adapting himself to such effect that at his second election, in 1837, he made a democratic, not to say demagogic speech presenting himself as 'a supporter of the people's rights' who rejected all distinc326

VI • NOT QUITE A RADICAL tions of rank or class and who wished to stand 'upon no better footing than that of the poorest person in Her Majesty's dominions'. 4 Even this was not enough to win for the duke's second son the assent of the extreme Radicals who were about to launch Glasgow Chartism. But it was enough to alarm Bentinck's family and friends: he was, his nephew Charles Greville noted with disgust, 'the first man of high rank and station who was publicly professed . . . ultra-Radical opinions . . A 5 When Bentinck and Lady William landed at Portsmouth on 1 2 July 1835 both of them were 60; both had been severely ill—Lady William was still partly crippled by a painful rheumatic illness; after seven years in India both were worn out. Within three months they settled in Paris, where they were to spend the greater part of their remaining years. A well-heated apartment in the then fashionable Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin did Lady William some good; Louis-Philippe and the royal family made much of them; they had many friends and visitors. By Christmas Bentinck's nephew thought him 'quite himself again and up to anything; he makes nothing of getting into a hack post chat se in the snow . . . and going 15 or 20 miles to breakfast by ten o'clock . . .'. Bentinck himself agreed that he was much better—he seemed to be over his heart trouble—but by March 1836 he was still 'far from having recovered my strength'; his wife remained 'a great invalid'. 6 T h e debts were paid off; there seemed every reason why the Bentincks should enjoy in Paris, away from the island fogs, a comfortable retirement. Bentinck's active temper might well have reasserted itself anyhow: his work in these last years on steam navigation to India suggests as much. What drew him back into politics was the weakness of the Government. The Whigs, after five years in office (but for one short break) since 1830, and with most of their reforming measures behind them, were beginning to lose momentum; Melbourne as Prime Minister did little to supply it. They needed all the support they could get. Shortly after his return Bentinck had declined Melbourne's offer of a peerage; there were rumours that he had also declined the Board of Control. 7 The Government, however, needed 'some very distinguished person' to stand at Glasgow, where the resignation of one of the two members was about to cause a by-election, and where the Reform party could not agree on a local candidate. Bentinck at first refused on grounds of health; when pressed he refused again, all the more decidedly because he would have been expected to go to Glasgow in

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VI • NOT QUITE A RADICAL midwinter and wage an active campaign. In the end the Central Committee of the Glasgow Reform Association nominated him none the less as the least divisive—even though absent—candidate: anyone else, they feared, would split the party and let in a Tory. Bentinck was returned on 17 February 1836; on a low poll he took 1,996 votes to 903 for the rival candidate—the dissident son of the Provost (mayor) of Glasgow who had proposed Bentinck. Another nine months went by before Bentinck visited his new seat; this time too he had to be pressed. 8 Almost anywhere else Bentinck might have been a welcome, even an advanced Reform candidate. He was 'warm with the Government in their general course of polities', yet advanced enough privately to call Melbourne 'a damned old Tory in his heart'.9 Glasgow, however, was special. Industrialisation had transformed it. Since 1800 the population had more than trebled; it now stood at about a quarter of a million. Coal, iron, and steel were fast catching up with cotton: in 1834-5 there were, within a 25-mile radius, 134 cotton mills and 29 blast furnaces. Bentinck, when he finally saw it, was astonished at its prosperity. Prosperous it was, but at a cost: nearly half its children grew up untaught; its central slums, piled high with filth, were reported 'unfit even for sties'; there was one public-house for every thirteen families; typhus in 1837 killed over 20,000. All this made it, like Manchester, an exhibit of the new industrial age, at once heartening and appalling: it stood not as yet for the norm of British social life—even of urban life—but for a new, bold, frontier society, where (an observer reported in 1837) 'every man almost is the maker of his own fortune, and feels the importance which attaches to him'. 1 0 In such a city privilege was suspect, rank a handicap. 'A pretty thing it would be for the Radicals of Glasgow'—one of them exclaimed—'to be represented by a Lord!' 1 1 Even Bentinck's supporters had to explain defensively that he was unlike 'the Dames and the Dowagers, the Noodles and the Doodles, who never did anything for their country at all'. 12 What mattered in Glasgow was class—largely measured by money; that, and religion. Apart from a minority of Tories grouped round the old colonial merchant families, and of 'high' upholders of the established Church of Scotland, most politically active Glaswegians were committed Reformers. They shared a background of Radical agitation in the past, above all in 1830-2, when a Political Union had campaigned for a wider franchise, triennial Parlia328

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ments, and the secret ballot. The leaders—merchants, entrepreneurs, lawyers, journalists—had welcomed the support of trade unionists; at their meetings the working class turned out in force. At one such meeting a i5s-a-week craftsman and trade union leader could propose a Radical mine-owner as Parliamentary candidate, only to see him denounced by a collier for having cut wages nearly twenty years before. But, as in other industrial cities, the 1832 Reform Act had left a trail of disappointment. By the time Bentinck came along the strains unavoidable in an alliance of haves and have-nots had deepened. An observer in 1837 saw the Reformers as divided among 'the wealthier and more educated class'—with 'a bolder tone to their Liberalism' than their Edinburgh equivalents, thanks to the teachings of Adam Smith and the 'free atmosphere of a mercantile city'; the operatives, apt to become 'extreme' in times of distress; the 'voluntary Dissenters' (supporters of Church Disestablishment); and many other minor groups. All of these were boisterous and easily divided on both religious and 'economical questions.' By 1836 even moderate Radicals were growing more and more disappointed with the Melbourne Government over its cautious reform of local government and tithes and its failure to do away with all sinecures or to repeal the Corn Laws. Government supporters' task was therefore to keep these moderates from falling in with 'extreme Radicals'—the men, some of them future Chartists, whom they attacked as 'wee cleekies' and accused of being in collusion with the Tories: charges readily turned back on the Government men, 'milk and water Whigs, with the rag-tag of "tea and jelly" Radicalism . . . ' . During the 1837 slump these strains were to lead to a distinct break, largely on class lines. Bentinck, then, had stumbled on a hornets' nest; what the nest was abuzz with was, first and foremost, 'the war of property and no property'. 13 He had also stumbled upon something like democratic party organisation. The Reform Association had just reformed itself; there was now a three-tier system, with district (ward) associations open to all, large 'aggregate committees' for groups of districts, and a 6o-strong central committee; the last two were delegated by the first, and all three tiers had to vote on a Parliamentary candidate.14 The Association, like the Anti-Corn Law League a few years later, applied to contested elections the most advanced business methods; its canvassing was both efficient and cheap. 15 Alongside the party structure, however, the Political Union carried on, swayed by votes at large meetings where

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non-electors could make their weight felt; Bentinck's arrival was the signal for it to turn against the official Reform leadership. Bentinck had at first thought it enough, when he was still not a candidate, to say that minor differences of opinion 'must merge in the one great object of maintaining the present advanced position of reform'. 16 When the Reformers unexpectedly chose him to fight the by-election he had to spell out his policy for the first time in his life. British Radicals had had available to them since the 1780s an armoury of demands to which they could recur in times of stress and with varying degrees of boldness. Most of these amounted to a demand for political democracy (with strong popular control over the legislature), for low taxes, and for an end to aristocratic privilege, especially to sinecures and pensions. Among detailed demands were short (perhaps annual) Parliaments, equal electoral districts, a wider franchise (perhaps going as far as manhood suffrage), and the secret ballot —all of which in their sharpest form were to find their way into the Charter. By the mid-i830S these had been joined by demands for Irish and Scottish Church Disestablishment, for Free Trade and Corn Law Repeal, and for measures to deal with obstruction by the House of Lords, perhaps by making it elective or by abolishing it outright. Moderate Glasgow Radicals in 1836 wanted all these things, though they were prepared to cut down the seven-year interval between elections to two years or at most three, and to settle for an unspecified further extension of the franchise. To the abolition of the House of Lords they would have added that of primogeniture and entail.17 Altogether a tall order for a duke's younger son to swallow. Bentinck had come a long way from his denunciation of Radicalism in 1820 as 'the empire of the mob'—not to mention his father's dread of 'popularity' in the 1790s—but he had not come as far as this. He may also have been misled by the outgoing member he was to replace, who had thought the suffrage question would not even be 'mooted'. In the election address he sent to Glasgow Bentinck tried to compromise. He upheld the Melbourne Government's Irish Church policy (though it was 'imperfect and insufficient'); he opposed further endowment of the Scottish Church; he declared himself for Free Trade, retrenchment, and the abolition of the Com Laws, within the limits of efficiency and of an 'equitable compromise' between agricultural and manufacturing interests. But on institutional questions he stuck. He favoured quinquennial rather than triennial Parliaments. On

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VI • NOT QUITE A RADICAL the franchise he came out for nothing more specific than 'the broader admission of all the intelligent classes to the government of the country'. The ballot he thought a 'complete illusion'—it would lead to corruption—but if his constituents wished he would vote for it 'as an experimental and temporary measure'. Lords and Commons must be 'brought into harmony', but only by creating more peers; no organic change was necessary. 18 This was not what the moderate Radicals wanted to hear—still less the advanced Radicals. Even before Bentinck's adoption the advanced group had tried to run an alternative candidate. Because of factional disputes nothing came of these attempts, or of an earlier promise to stand made by the extreme Radical leader Feargus O'Connor. But Bentinck's candidature had a rowdy passage on 22-5 January through the three tiers of the Reform Association; on the 28th, amid 'perfect tumult', the Political Union carried a motion against it. Within a week the advanced Radicals set up an Interim Committee of Independent Reforming Electors to run against Bentinck the Provost's son, a refugee 'from the trammels of his immediate friends and class', who stood on household suffrage, triennial Parliaments, and the ballot. The short campaign turned not just on these issues but on Bentinck's personal standing. The cry against him at the hustings was 'no pensioner, no sinecurist, no soldier'; he was attacked as a stranger and a lord, related to the now Conservative Portland. His defenders countered that though he was regrettably a lord 'his was the aristocracy of worth, of talent and virtue'. Neither side was particularly well briefed. Bentinck's supporters claimed that he had resigned his Italian command in disgust at Castlereagh's 'betrayal' of Genoa; his opponents made play with his sinecure as Clerk of the Pipe (by then abolished); one of them, apparently mixing him up with another GovernorGeneral, Lord Hastings, said he 'had fought against the liberties of America'. Bentinck himself tried to persuade his opponents (by post) that though they might disagree about some of the means they all agreed on 'the thorough reform of our constitution in Church and State'. In the event the moderate Radicals stayed with Bentinck for fear of splitting the party; in a city where class was becoming increasingly divisive they tried to make out that 'the really influential part of the operatives' had had no part in the breakaway. Bentinck won easily; all the same, there was reason to fear that 'if he should prove lukewarm in the cause of Reform this election will . . . [break] up the Reform party in Glasgow'. 19 33i

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Bentinck was thus back at Westminster. He kept his base in Paris but spent much of the 1836-7 session in London. At the House he busied himself not only with steam navigation but with the forwarding of 'improvements' such as both he and the Glasgow worthies had at heart—the launching of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway and the control of Clyde navigation. Some of his votes dismayed the moderate Radicals who had supported him—as when he voted against the abolition of flogging in the British Army (he thought a system of rewards should first be brought in) and against an inquiry into pensions. He also joined the Tory Ashley—the future Lord Shaftesbury, whose Evangelicalism he shared—in upholding legal restrictions on the working hours of factory children.* This did not necessarily endear him in Glasgow, where some of the loudest Radicals were employers.20 Bentinck at length, in November 1836, overcame his 'Glasgowphobia' and went north to receive from the Corporation the freedom of the city. A public meeting held after the ceremony began with a 'tumult' as a great crowd rushed the doors. Bentinck then answered questions. He had already had to expound a policy; now he was having to undergo exmaination, not just on his policy but on his voting record, from anyone who cared to speak up. In the main Bentinck stood his ground. He did say that he now favoured the ballot—but rather spoilt the effect by admitting that he had accidentally missed the Commons vote on it; he also put off the Glasgow artisans by dismissing the amounts still paid in pensions as 'trifling'. He was 'for Free Trade in all things, no doubt of that', but still less than downright about the Corn Laws. He dismissed as 'abstract questions which do so much harm' proposals for the abolition of tithes and of bishops' seats in the Lords. On the franchise he stood fast: I believe the great body of the people are satisfied with the reform in the House of Commons. . . . I believe that the people of Glasgow are friendly to the British Constitution, completely and effectually reformed in a constitutional way. If they are not, I must say that I am not fit to be their representative. . . . Why ask * Althorp's Act of 1833 had restricted the employment of factory children aged from 9 to 13 to eight hours a day. Poulett Thomson in 1836, on behalf of the factory owners and with the Melbourne Government's support, brought in a Bill to make the eight-hour clause apply only to children under 12. The Bill was supported and opposed by mixed ranks of Whigs, Radicals, and Tories; Lord George Bentinck voted for it, his uncle Lord William against it. The Bill was carried by two votes but then withdrawn.

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an extension of the suffrage, while the difficulty will be to keep what we have got? What is the reason? Why, the people of this country see that there is no end to these demands. This was stiff medicine. Though an attempt to deplore Bentinck's stand on the franchise was voted down,* even moderate Radicals were left with 'a kindly feeling towards Lord William personally; an impression that he is very much in advance of liberality of the class to the which he belongs; but a conviction that he does not adequately represent the political opinions of the majority of the Reform electors of Glasgow.' Indeed 'no member of the aristocracy', these Radicals concluded, 'can ever' represent the city. 21 A still more damaging consequence followed a week later. The advanced Radicals set up a breakaway Radical Association; they came out for universal suffrage and annual Parliaments. They also invited Feargus O'Connor to tour Scotland: this he did, attacking Bentinck several times as an aristocrat.22 Chartism was not far off. Bentinck had felt tired and cold on his trip north; though he was impressed with Glasgow and at first thought he saw how its rowdy politics could be handled he soon wished to be rid of the whole business, above all of the amount of work entailed by a large, clamorous urban seat. When Victoria's accession in 1837 brought a general election he tried to retire. Once again he was prevailed upon to stand because the Glasgow Reformers could not agree on anyone else. The Melbourne Government was in decline; two Tories were standing; trade was distressed. A new local candidate might have driven either conservative Whigs or Radicals to vote Tory. Once again, too, the campaign turned a good deal on Bentinck's aristocratic connections; an advanced Radical proposed to stand but withdrew after sensational charges of 'Tory gold'; the moderate Radicals grumblingly rallied to the official candidates for fear of letting in a Peel Government. But the poll measured the decline of the Reform coalition since its triumph in 1832; Bentinck and his fellow-Reformer John Dennistoun got 2,767 and 2,743 votes apiece, the two Tories 2,121 and 2,090." For Bentinck the campaign meant a yet closer acquaintance with a near-democratic kind of politics. This time he had to go to Glasgow and speak at four public meetings. He also agreed to make the terms of his election address conditional on the wishes of a Reform meeting • The attempt to censure Bentinck was led by Robert Owen's chief Scottish disciple, Alexander Campbell.

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VI • NOT QUITE A R A D I C A L 4,000 strong and to redraft it in consequence. In the end his address came out for the ballot and the abolition of the Corn Laws and of church rates; it still held to his old line on quinquennial Parliaments and on the franchise for 'all intelligent classes'. In theory, then, Bentinck stood much of his ground. In practice he was learning to say things that would have startled his old mentors Canning and Burke. On the hustings he dealt with Tory charges that he was a pensioner, a sinecurist, a conservative, and the son of a duke: I consider the noblest work of God is man (hear)—and I acknowledge no distinction between one man and another but that which consists in his honesty (cheers)—in his intelligence (cheers)—and in his independence (immense cheering)—and in his moral and religious character (tremendous cheering). . . . I wish to stand before you upon no better footing than that of the poorest person in Her Majesty's dominions (cheering). Now, gentlemen, here I am, the son of a duke (cheers and laughter)—and I appeal to you whether, out of the aristocracy or in i t . . . there is a man who . . . has been more a supporter of the people's rights than myself (loud cries of Hear, hear, and cheering). In Italy, in Sicily, in India—Bentinck said—he had done his best to forward the liberty, independence, prosperity, and happiness of the people. He made much of his character as 'an old soldier' and of the Scottish and Irish regiments he had served with (Glasgow already had a significant Irish population). He ended by raising the then common bogy of the Duke of Cumberland, Victoria's reactionary uncle, who— some feared—might exert a baleful influence over her. If 'that evil' should come about, Bentinck concluded, ' I hope t h a t . . . every Briton will do his duty'. 24 This speech suggests that Bentinck, adaptable to the last, had all the makings of a successful democratic politician, and only wanted years and health to bring them to bloom. As it was he was 63, in uncertain health, with a semi-invalid wife who needed to live in Paris. He spent the next two years trying in vain to give up his seat. Only five months after the general election he asked Melbourne, as a way out, for the peerage he had earlier refused. Melbourne at first agreed but— because a Government in steady decline could not afford a byelection—later put him off. Bentinck was still Glasgow's reluctant and absentee member when he died. 25 For a duke's second son to have come as close to espousing democ334

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racy as Bentinck did at Glasgow was, in the 1830s, a novelty. It shocked Greville. The Tories made the most of it. Disraeli attacked Bentinck in one of his anonymous Times open letters as 'the antiquated governor and the drivelling nabob'.26 Bentinck's old disciple Sir James Graham, by now a convert to Conservatism and as enthusiastic as most converts, laughed at his troubles with the Glasgow crowd and thought he might turn out to have 'lost India for us' by his incorrigible mismanagement.27 Even among moderate Liberals the editor of the Edinburgh Review wished in 1840 to cut out of Macaulay's manuscript the well-known line in praise of Bentinck; 36 years later Macaulay's Liberal biographer was still a trifle uneasy at the 'sometimes... turbid part' Bentinck had played in Glasgow.28 Yet Bentinck had consistently lagged behind the Glasgow electorate —not to mention the voteless thousands who were about to plunge into Chartism. The strength of Glasgow Radical opinion had carried him as far as the ballot, probably against his better judgment; but he had steadily resisted such clamant democratic measures as very short Parliaments, the abolition of the hereditary House of Lords, or an immediate widening of the franchise beyond the bounds set in 1832. Like his friend Louis-Philippe Bentinck sincerely wished to identify himself with 'the intelligent classes'—with prosperous, hard-working business and professional men; but he would go no further. In Glasgow he had managed, duke's son though he was, to get on terms with an industrial electorate dominated by self-made men, many of them Dissenters; he had learnt to address large, turbulent crowds in the democratic tone they wished to hear. Once again Bentinck was a forerunner: this time of the Gladstone of the great campaigns of the late 1860s and 1870s, a landed gentleman with a strong belief in aristocratic rule whose oratory yet managed to bring into the political process large numbers of humble, newly enfranchised men, and to persuade them that his cause was theirs.29

EPILOGUE Early in May 1839 Bentinck was struck down in Paris by a severe illness. His physicians could not agree on a diagnosis. Clearly, however, his circulatory system had broken down; he suffered from dropsical swelling, was extremely weak, and for about a month could not speak above a whisper. At least one doctor said there was no hope; 335

VI • NOT QUITE A RADICAL Bentinck himself seemed to understand that the end was near, though 'the wonderful strength of his constitution' bore him on for a while longer. Lady William managed to nurse him, never getting more than four hours' broken sleep at a time; she was joined by his niece. By 10 June mercury treatment had brought down the swelling; Bentinck was now able to speak and to shift restlessly from his bed to his chair; he suffered badly from bedsores. He had wanted to move to the Bois de Boulogne; this was out of the question, but at least the acacia blossom in the streets below scented the air. On 17 June he died suddenly and peacefully. 1 According to the autopsy Bentinck's illness had been 'an ossification of the heart, attended with cancer of the aorta'. 2 It clearly followed on from the giddiness and other circulatory troubles he had had in India. Until he sailed to Bengal in 1828 his health had been excellent; he had suffered at most from the occasional fever or twinge of gout. Ruling India killed him at 64, less swiftly but just as surely as it did two other reforming Governors-General, Cornwallis and Dalhousie. His body was taken to London and buried at St Marylebone. His will directed that—in those days of extravagant funerals —his should be 'perfectly plain'; if possible it should not cost more than £50. He left everything to 'my dear wife'. 3 Lady William lived on, mainly in Paris, until 1 May 1843, when she too died after a painful illness of several weeks. She was much troubled about her will, signing codicils in a weak hand. One late bequest to the Paris convent her nurses came from her sister Lady Millicent Barber—wife of an Anglican clergyman —apparently persuaded her to revoke. But as the revocation was not properly signed or witnessed the bequest went through. Bentinck would have approved the outcome.4 In his la^t years the 'very plain old man' Lord William had grown steadily more liberal, not just in politics but in the deeper sense of respect for the personality and needs of others. Some people stiffen as they age, some grow easier and mellower. Bentinck was of the second kind. He had never shared, even as a young man, the 'very common but most nonsensical feeling' about forms, rank, and precedence.5 But he had been something of a prig, stiff-necked, very sure he was in the right. In old age he relaxed. '. . . I suppose one must leave others to live and die as they please', he said when a nephew would not take a cure that would help him—he who had risked much to improve, as he saw it, men, nations, and institutions.6 He was now capable of a bantering humour united with a delicate courtesy. His doctor from

336

EPILOGUE India, a long-winded Scottish democrat and atheist, begged to decline £200 which Bentinck had offered him as reward for his company at a Continental spa. Bentinck replied: Let us compliment one another. It is seldom an unpleasant task. We have both done right and if possible our previous sentiments of esteem have, I trust, improved. I agree to your request, for I have no objection to an additional obligation to you. 7 The Governor-General who had put up in India with the same doctor's 'noisy and boisterous' professions of infidelity was also the member of Parliament who had gone some way to meet the aspirations of Glasgow Radicals. This was not mere opportunism. Bentinck remained open to what seemed new, forward-looking, likely to make for 'the good of mankind'. His historical role cannot be seen in isolation from the times, the nations, the social groups in which he moved. If a great man is one who now and then transcends his setting, who brings to life for others forces and values they were unaware of, who identifies in himself deep movements in the life of a society, Bentinck can hardly be called a great man. But he was a forerunner: of Italian and Indian nationalism, of the purposeful development of poor societies, of the Liberal idea of an empire reconcilable with independent nationhood. Like those of many forerunners his career could be read as a failure. He sometimes mistook the signs, hoped for more than the Situation would yield, bungled the tactics even when he had sensed the long-term strategic need. He risked much; where others might have used caution he was temperamentally inclined to act. In his last years he was still acting, whether to keep abreast of Glasgow Radical politics or to send steamships across the Indian Ocean. Near the start of his governor-generalship Bentinck had been much struck, on a voyage to Penang and Singapore, with the overseas Chinese—'their superior energy, their industry, their spirit of calculation and profit, quite equal to that of any European nation'. They were 'the Scotch of India'. 8 A monument to Bentinck, the peripatetic improver, more fitting than the statue by the Victoria Memorial with its high-sounding inscription is the Calcutta thoroughfare called Bentinck Street. A crowded commercial street, it is lined with Chinese shoemakers' shops. India could do worse than to perpetuate in this congenial setting the name of a man who sought through the devices of homo faber to raise her out of subjection and poverty. 337

References PART I • Section i > T. B. Macaulay, 'Lord Oive', in Critical and Historical Essays (1843), HI, 206; DNB, s.v. Bentinck. » G. Martin, The Red Skirt and the Cross of Savoy (1970), 186. 1 I. Husain, Land Revenue Polity in North India (Calcutta-New Delhi, 1967), 240-1. • P. Spear, 'Lord William Bentinck', Journ. Ind. Hist., XIX (1940); V. Jacquemont, Correspondanee avee sa famille et ses amis . . . 1828-1832 (Paris, 1869; ist ed. 1833), 313-14. 5 Friend of India, 22 Aug. 1839; cf. Bengal Hurkaru, 14, 19, 23 Aug. (quoting several other newspapers). 6 F. J. Shore, Notes on Indian Affairs (1837), II, 216-33 (first published 1834-5 as articles in India Gazette); cf. H. T. Prinsep, autobiography, in 'Three Generations in India 1770-1904* (typescript copy, IOL MSS Eur. C. 97), quoted in Marquis Curzon of Kedleston, British Government in India (1925), II, 125, 194-5E. Thornton, History of the British Empire in India (1843), V, 228-36. Sir Spencer Walpole. A History of England from the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815 (1890; ist ea. 1878-86), VI, 131-2,140. C. D. Yonge, Life of Lord Liverpool (1868), II, 23, III, 203-4. J. C. Marshman, History of India (1867), H, 4*5- Cf. H. H. Wilson, History of British India (1848), III, 472-4; H. Beveridge, A Comprehensive History of India (1867), III, 192-250. Spear, 'Lord William Bentinck', and 'Bentinck and the Taj\jfourn. Roy. Asiatic Soe. (1949), 180-7. D. C. Boulger, Bentinck (Oxford, 1892), 7, 208. R. C. Majumdar, British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance (Bombay, 1963; vol. IX of The History and Culture of the Indian People), 37-46. The Greville Memoirs (ed. L. Strachey and R Fulford, 1938), III, 281-2. Freiherr von Helfert, Königin Karolina von Neapel (Vienna, 1878); O. Browning, 'Queen Caroline of Naples', Eng. Hist. Rev., II (1887). C. K. Webster, The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh (1922, 1931), I, 75. R. W. Seton-Watson, Britain in Europe 1789-1914 (1934), 28. Sir C. Oman, A History of the Peninsular War (Oxford, 1902-30), I, 504. B. Croce, Storia del Regno ii Napoli (Bari, 1925), 245, 247-8. Section 2 1 2

Disraeli to Queen Victoria, 13 July 1868, in R. Blake, Disraeli (1966), 492. Ibid., p. 423

338

REFERENCES 3

Sir G. Elliot to Lady Elliot, 2 May 1793, Minto MSS M 21. A. S. Turberville, A History of Welbeck Abbey and its Owners (1938-9), II, 34S (n). 5 Ibid. II, 433 ff. 6 Earl of Malmesbury, Diaries and Correspondence (1844), II, 477-9, 480, 482. Cf. Turberville, op. cit., II, 433 ff. 7 Elliot to Lady Elliot, 27 Dec. 1792, Minto MSS M 21. » The Complete Peerage, X, 594 (n); D. E. Ginter, 'The Whig Party, 1783-1793: a Study on the Rise of the Modem Party System' (Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1964), 135 ff. » Portland to Titehfield, 31 Aug. 1795, BP/PwH/324. •o To Charles Greville, 7 Apr. 1813, BP/PwJd/6250. 11 James Graham to Sir James Graham, 9 Nov. 1813, Graham MSS. 12 Dr. Andrew [PBerry] to Bentinck, 20 Oct. 1807, BP/PwJb/626. 13 Castalia Countess Granville (ed.), Private Correspondence of Lord Granville Leveson Gower (1916), I, 217, II, 3, 117-18, 186, 230, 241-2, 358-9. 14 R. J. Mackintosh, Memorials of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh (1835), I, 408. " William Adam to John Adam, 1 Sep. 1785, in D. E. Ginter, 'The Whig Party', 12. 16 Countess of Minto, Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto (1874), II, 3" F. O'Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (1967), 10. " Duchess of Portland to Portland, 28 Mar., 7 July, 14 Nov. 1774, letters of 1777, passim, 11 Mar. 1780, BP/PwF/10650, 10655, 10661, 10677-96, 10728. 14 Duchess of Portland to Portland, 2 Jan. 1779, in Turberville, Welbeck Abbey, II, 157-820 Lord Edward Bentinck to Bentinck, 22 Aug. 1793, BP/PwJa/30. 21 Lord Frederick Bentinck to Bentinck, 23 Jan. 1797,2 Sep. 1793, BP/PwJa/31,33. 11 Lady Mary Bentinck to Bentinck, 26 May 1793, BP/PwJa/38. 21 Duchess of Portland to Portland, 14 Nov. 1774, BP/PwF/10661. 24 DNB; Turberville, Welbeck Abbey, II, 322; Goodenough to Portland, 29 Nov 1775, BP/PWF/4202, to Bentinck, 8 Aug. 1795, BP/PwJa/164. 25 Goodenough to Portland, 1775-81, passim, BP/PwF/4202-50. 26 J. D. Carleton, Westminster School (1965 ed.), 29-40, 48, 50; L. E. Tanner, Westminster School (1951 ed.), 57; Sir A. Paget (ed.), The Paget Papers (1896), vi-vii. " G. F. Russell Baker and A. H. Stenning, The Record of Old Westminsters (1928), II, 1115-16. 21 Fox to Holland, [ ] Dec. 1793, 15 Nov. 1795, in Lord J. Russell (ed.), Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox (1854), III, 61-2, 124-5; Cornwallis to Maj. Gen. Ross, 15 Dec. 1797, in C. Ross (ed.), Cornwallis Correspondence (1859), II, 329-30. " A. Hare, The Gurneys of Earlham (1895), I, 98-103. 30 W. B. Pope (ed.), The Diary of Benjamin Robert Hayion (Cambridge, Mass., 1960-3), IV, 303. 31 Minto to Lady Minto, 23 Jan. 1799, Minto MSS M 25. " Minto to Lady Minto, 13 July 1807, Minto MSS M35; Sir W. Napier, Life of Sir C. J. Napier (1857), I, 96-7. 4

339

REFERENCES 33

F. Bickley (ed.), The Diaries of Sylvester Douglas (Lord Glenbervie) (1928), II, 30534 To Millicent Sparrow, 23 Nov. 1821, Manchester MSS DdM 10/A/8. " W. Dowdeswell to Bentinck, 30 May 1805, BP/PwJb/13. 36 Portland to Bentinck, 14 Sep. 1802, BP/PwJa/55. " T . L. O'Beirne, Bishop of Meath, to Bentinck, 5 Nov. 1809, BP/PwJc/143. 38 Lord George Bentinck to Graham, 24 Jan. 1836, Graham MSS; Charlotte Lady Milnes to Bentinck, 20 Oct. 1801, BP/PwJa/294. 39 To Bentinck from Mrs. Louisa Ponsonby (24, 25 Dec. 1794), John Ponsonby ([ ] '794)> Lady Mary Bentinck (21 June 1793), T . Carter (19 Apr. 1798), Bishop of Meath (24 Jan. 1817), BP/PwJa/41, 78, 359-63, PwJe/573.

PART I • Section 3 1

'Progetto italiano', 357(n). Jacquemont, Correspondance, I, 100 (3 Sept. 1829). 3 Bentinck to H. Clinton, 23 Apr. 1794, Clinton MSS, John Rylands Library, Manchester, Misc. Milit. Corr.; Bentinck's 1793 campaign journal, 1794 campaign narrative, BP/PwJa/456, 610-12, 617-22, passim. 4 Sir H. Calvert, Journals and Correspondence (ed. Sir H. Verney, 1853), 143. 3 H. Randolph, Life of. . . Sir Robert Wilson (1862), I, 63-4. 6 Robert Wilson to Bentinck, Clonmel, 4 July 1798, BP/PwJa/424. 7 Lt.-Col. C. Combers to Bentinck, 20 Apr. 1797, ibid., no. 112; H. Grattan, Life of... Henry Grattan (1839-46), IV, 235^7; G. A. Chetwynd Stapylton to Sir G. M. Milnes, Down patrick, 24 May 1797, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, Sheffield City Libraries, F3o(f). 8 Bentinck to Portland, 2 June 1795, BP/PwF/1201; to Windham, 6 Apr. 1798, Add. MSS 37877 f. 291. ' Addresses from the magistrates and city of Armagh, 27 Apr. 1797,10 Oct. 1798, Dean Warburton to Bentinck, 28 Apr. 1797, BP/PwJa/275-6, 342-3, 398. 10 Col. Loftus to Bentinck, 26 Dec. 1794 and 1794-1802, passim, 'Half-yearly report on garrison under the command o f . . . Lord William Bentinck', 14 May 1808, BP/PwJa/244-j73, PwJc/195; Bentinck to Dalhousie, 7 June 1831, Scot. Rec. Off. GD 45/5/60; to Howick, 31 Mar. 1837, Grey MSS, University of Durham, Dept. of Palaeography, box 138 f.4. 11 To Bentinck from G. Gledstanes, 21, 26 Apr., Col. J. McMahon, 30 Apr. 1794, BP/PwJa/160-1, 279; Bentinck to McMahon, 6 May 1794, in A. Aspinall (ed.), The Correspondence of George Prince of Wales 1770-1812 (1963^71), II, 426-^7. " See, for this episode, A. B. Rodger, The War of the Second Coalition, 1798-1801 (Oxford, 1964), and 'Progetto italiano', where detailed references may be found. 13 Bentinck's travel diaries in Egypt, Turkey, and the Balkans, BP/PwJa/613-14, 631, passim. 14 'Progetto italiano', 358; Bentinck to Sir Hew Dalrymple, 2 Oct. 1808, BP/PwJc/ 236; Oman, History of the Peninsular War, I, 504. 15 From T . Carter (11, 17 Apr. 1798), from Jarry (1799-1800, passim), Bentinck's notes on military matters, BP/PwJa/76-7, 202-8, 441-7, 471-3, 639. 16 Bentham to Col. J. Young, 28 Dec. 1827, in J. Bentham, Works (ed. J. Bowring, 2

340

REFERENCES Edinburgh, 1843), X, 576-7; to Bentinck, 9/10 Apr. 1829, University College, London, Bentham MSS, X, f. 176. Bentinck and Sicily, 18. Bentinck to Petrie, 13 Dec. [1807], Madras diary, 1806-7, passim, pocket diaries, notes on reading and lists of books, BP/PwJa/632-8, PwJb/343-584, 672/1, 677/1, PwJd/6147, PwJe/i3o-i, 1063, 1067-85. 1793 campaign journal, 1 Aug., 8 Sept., BP/PwJa/610, 612.

Section 4 O'Gorman, The Whig Party, 6-7: Ginter, 'The Whig Party', 63-6, 82-98, 135 ff., and 'The Financing of the Whig Party Organisation, 1783-1793', Amer. Hist. Rev., L X X I , No. 2 (Jan. 1966); Malmesbury, Diaries and Correspondence, II, 473-4, 481. Ginter, 'The Whig Party', 24-6, 158. A. Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century (i960; 1st ed., 1929), ch. 4. Mulgrave to Windham, 5 July 1797, Add. MSS 37877 f. 114. Portland to French Laurence, 30 Aug. 1791, BP/PwF/6241. For Portland's role in 1791-4 see the works of O'Gorman and Ginter, already cited; H. Butterfield, 'Charles James Fox and the Whig Opposition in 1792', Cambridge Hist. Journal, 1949; Turberville, Welbeck Abbey, II, 209-42. Portland to Fitzwilliam, 14 June 1794, in O'Gorman, The Whig Party, 196. Bishop of Ossory to Fitzwilliam, 19 Oct. 1798, Sheffield City Libraries, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments F 30 (e). Malmesbury, Diaries and Correspondence, II, 486; Fox to Holland, 9 Mar. 1794, Memorials of Fox, III, 65; Portland to Bentinck, 7 , 1 4 Apr. 1794, BP/PwJa/47-8. S. Rolleston to Duke of Leeds, 20 Nov. 1794, Add. MSS 28067 f- >44Sir L. Namier and J . Brooke (eds), History of Parliament; The Commons 17541790, III, 303-4; R. W. Goulding (ed.), Letters Written by Charles Lamb's 'Princely Woman' . . . (Roxburghe Club, 1909), 20-30, 76-8; Turberville, Welbeck Abbey, II, 235. Rolleston to Leeds, 29 Nov. 1794, Add. MSS 28067 f- 146 (summarised in Political Memoranda of the Duke of Leeds, Camden Society new series X X X V (1884), 211). Frederick Hotham to Bentinck, 15 July 1795, BP/PwJa/177. Bentinck to Windham, 5 Feb. 1805, in Mrs H. Baring (ed.), The Diary of William Windham (1866), 447-8. To Castlereagh (private), 12 Sep. 1803, BP/PwJb/722; to Windham, 6 Apr. 1798, (private) 11 Mar. 1807, Add. M S S 37877 f. 291, 37886 f. 166. Lord Holland, Memoirs of the Whig Party (1852-4), I, 23,72-3; Earl of Ilchester (ed.), Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland, 1791-1811 (1908), II, 290-1 (Oct, 1811). 'Progetto italiano', 358 (n). A. Aspinall (ed.), The Later Correspondence of George ///(Cambridge, 1962-70), IV, 5—6; C. H. Philips, The East India Company, 1784-1834 (Manchester, 1940), 30 (n), 121; letters to Bentinck, 1802, from Portland (5, 15 July), Monckton

341

REFERENCES (7 July, 10 Aug.), B. Langlois (10 May), BP/PwJa/51, 54, 234, 296-7; Melville to Macartney (confidential), 16 Jan. 1803, Scot. Rec. Off. GD 51/1/557/7. PART I • Section 5 Bentinck to Minto (private and confidential), 1 Oct. 1806, BP/PwJb/726; cf. Aspinall, Later Corr. of George III, IV, 284-5, 392_4Bentinck to Dalhousie, 23 June 1831, Scot. Rec. Off. GD 45/5/60. Bentinck to Petrie, 30 June, 6 July 1805, BP/PwJb/343-584. To Petrie, no date, ibid. Minto to Lady Minto, 29 June 1807, in Countess of Minto, Lord Minto in India (1880), 16-23. Cf. Lord Valentía and H. Salt, Voyages and Travels to India . .. (1809), I, 389-90. G. Elers, Memoirs 1797-1842 (ed. Lord Monson and G. Leveson Gower, 1903) 139, 171-5; to Bentinck from A. Anstruther (22 Oct.), G. Buchan (29 Feb.), Sir T. Strange (1 Mar. 1808), BP/PwJb/314, 316, 320. To Plumer, 7 Jan. 1803, in Goulding, Letters Written by Charles Lamb's 'Princely Woman' . . ., 76-8. To Sir T. Strange (private, [ ] 1804), Thomas Grenville (private, 10 Mar, 1807), Tierney (private, 9 Mar. 1807), Petrie ([ ] Aug. 1804), BP/PwJb/723, 726, 343-584To Sir T. Strange (private), [ ] 1804,7 Mar. 1805, to Charles Grant (private), 8 Sep. 1805, to E. W. Fallofield (private), 17 Apr. 1805, BP/PwJb/723-5. Monckton to Bentinck, 4 Aug. 1806, BP/PwJb/172. Wellesley to Grenville, 29 Jan. 1806, Hist. MSS Commission, Fortescue MSS, VII, 347-

6 7

Maj.-Gen. W. Dowdeswell to Bentinck, 1804, passim, BP/PwJb/13. Bentinck to Petrie, 11 May, to Titchfield, 6 Sep. 1805, to Portland, 17 Sep. 1806, Bentinck's journal, Jan. 1802, BP/PwJb/343-584, PwH/249, PwF/1203, PwJa/625. Mrs Anne (Dundas) Strange to Melville, Madras, 5/8/9 March 1805, letter book in the possession of Mrs Naomi Mitchison, Carradale House, Argyll; to Bentinck from Castlereagh (private, 14 Mar.), Charles Grant (private, 21 Mar. 1806), BP/PwJb/155, 157. Bentinck to Portland, 17 Sep. 1806, Madras Diary, 9 Sep. 1807, BP/PwF/1203, PwJb/677/1. Among others in Madras who expected Bentinck's recall on these grounds were Cradock, the Commander-in-Chief, and Sir Thomas Strange, the Chief Justice: to Bentinck, 7 July 1806, 16 Sep. 1807, ibid., PwJb/12, 253b. Aspinall, Correspondence ofGeorge Prince of Wales, V, 398; Minto to Lady Minto, 27 Sep. 1807, Minto MSS M36. Sir A. Wellesley to Wellesley, 21 Feb. 1807, Hist. MSS Commission, Fortescue MSS, EX, 52. Bentinck to Portland, 17 Sep., 20 Oct. 1806,3 Mar. 1807, 'Memoranda delivered by the Governor to Major Leith . . . ' , 15 Oct. 1806, BP/PwJb/1203-4,1208,179. The most detailed accounts of the mutiny are in W. J. Wilson, History of the Madras Army (Madras, 1882-9), III, 169-201, and M. Gupta, 'Lord William Bentinck in Madras 1803^7' (Ph.D. thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, London Univ., 1969).

342

REFERENCES Malcolm to Pellew (prívate and confidential), 20 Feb. 1807 (copy), Add. MSS 37384 f. 123. 11 Cradock to Bentinck (private), 17 June 1806, BP/PwJb/12. 22 Bentinck to Tierney, [early July] 1807, ibid., no. 726. 21 Philips, East India Company, 168-9; Maj. Leith to Bentinck, 8/14 Apr., Board to Court, 11 Apr., R. Dundas to Portland, 16 Apr. 1807, BP/PwJb/25,214, 216. 24 To Petrie, 11 Sep. 1804, ibid., nos. 343-584. M Bentinck to Portland, 22 July 1807, BP/PwF/1212. 26 Madras Diary, 1 Sep-4 Oct. 1807, BP/PwJb/677/1. 27 Bentinck to E. Parry, 19 Apr. 1808, ibid., no. 317; Philips, loc. cit. 21 Bentinck's correspondence with Castlereagh, Sir Hew Dalrymple, and Sir John Moore, his Spanish Journal, Sep.-Nov. 1808, BP/PwJc/48-9, 236, 238; to H. Clinton, 2,18, 20 Nov. 1808, Clinton MSS, Misc. Milit. Corr. John Rylands Library, Manchester; Oman, Peninsular War, I, 288. " Lady Elizabeth Foster to Augustus Foster, [early Aug.] 1809, in V. Foster (ed.), The Two Duchesses (1898), 333; Canning to Bentinck, June 1809, PRO FO/7/89. 30 E. Phipps (ed.), Memoirs of Robert Plumer Ward (1850), I, 206-9, 217-19, 251, 272-4, 279-80; Letters of the First Earl of Malmesbury (1870), II, 159, 162-4, 167-8; D. Gray, Spencer Perceval (Manchester, 1963), 264-9. 31 Wellington, Supplementary Dispatches (ed. Duke of Wellington, 1858-65), VI, 468, 517, 520; Bentinck to Liverpool, [ ] May 1810, BP/PwJc/112. 32 Henry Clinton to Bentinck, 5 Mar. 1810, BP/PwJc/42. 33 Pocket Diary, 13, 14 Feb. 1811, BP/PwJd/6452. » To Pellew, 15 Jan. 1811, Exmouth MSS. 31 On 23 Sep. 1809 he thought he was likely to spend only 'a short time in England': to R. F. Greville, Add. MSS 40716 f. 51. 34 Henry Clinton to Bentinck, 5 Mar. 1810, BP/PwJc/42. 37 Spanish Journal, 8 Sep. 1808, BP/PwJc/238. 20

Section 6 1

Maj. Stutterheim to Bentinck, 24 July 1801, BP/PwJa/386. 'Progetto italiano', 359. 3 Lady Cowper to F. Lamb, 12 June 1827, in A. Aspinall, The Formation of Canning's Ministry (Camden 3rd ser., LIX, 1937), 242; T. H. Le win (ed.), The Lewin Letters (1909), I, 192-3; Letters of Harriet Countess Granville (ed. F. Leveson-Gower, 1894), I, 296-7, II, 352-3. 4 Jacquemont, Correspondance, I, 89-90. ' Bentinck to Pellew, 12 May 1812, Exmouth MSS. 6 Bentinck to Millicent Sparrow, 6/7 Oct. 1820, Manchester MSS Dd Mío A/8. 7 Graham to Castlereagh (private), 21 Feb., to Bentinck, 3 Apr. 1814, BP/PwJd/ 2691, 2696; to his father Sir James Graham, 28 July 1814, Graham MSS. • De Andreis to Bentinck, 30 Apr. 1821, BP/PwJe/32. • Verney to Bentinck, 1, 2 Feb. 1828, 3 Apr. 1829, BP/PwJf/2150-1, 2154. 10 Troyer to Bentinck, 4 Oct. 1820, ibid., no. 2120. Cf. Greville Memoirs, V, 90-1. For Troyer's career, see J. Mohl, 27 Ans d'histoire des études orientales (Paris, 1879-80), II, 678-82. 2

343

REFERENCES " Jacquemont, Correspondance, I, 96-^7, 113-4. » To Verney, 2 Feb. 1828, Claydon House MSS. " Graham to Sir James Graham, 9 Nov. 1813, Graham MSS. Bentinck to Troyer, 7 June 1807, BP/PwJb/616. » To Verney, 17 Oct. 1819, Claydon House MSS. 14 Graham to Bentinck, 29 Jan., 8 Mar. 1814, BP/PwJd/2690, 2695; Bentinck to Graham, 14 June 1816, Graham MSS. 17 Bentinck to Trevelyan, 1 Dec. 1832, Trevelyan Papers, University Library, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. '» Bentinck to Graham, 16 Apr. 1834, Graham to Stanley, 21 Oct. 1838, Graham MSS. 19 Bentinck's letters to Millicent Sparrow, nearly all written in 1820-2, are in Manchester MSS Dd M 10/A3, 8. 10 Grattan, Memoirs of Henry Grattan, IV, 233-4; J- J- Gumey to J . Hutchinson, 3 Dec. 1818, in J . B. Braithwaite (ed.), Memoirs of Joseph John Gumey (Norwich, 1854), 1 , 1 5 0 . 11 Victoria County History, Huntingdonshire, III, 13, 16; correspondence between Lady Olivia Sparrow and Millicent Sparrow, Millicent Sparrow to Hannah More, 2 Feb. 1818, Manchester MSS Dd M 10A/3, 4; Gurney to Mary Fowler, 31 Aug. 1826, in Braithwaite, op. cit., I, 308-9. " Hare, The Gurneys ofEorlham, 1 , 1 8 ff., 78 ff., 146 ff., 225-8, II, 2; J . J . Gurney's MS journal (copy), Friends House Library, London, 24 Oct. 1825; Gurney to Bentinck, 13 Oct., Bentinck's pocket diary, 19,20 Oct. 1825, BP/PwJe/349,1078. m Bentinck's 1808 journal, 15 Feb., BP/PwJc/237; Grant to Petrie, 16 Sep. 1808, in H. Morris, The Life of Charles Grant (1904), 305. " Bentinck to Titchfield, Madrid, 31 Oct. 1808, BP/PwJb/324; Philips, East India Company, 168-9; A. T. Embree, Charles Grant and British Rule in India (1962), 205, 237-9. In his letter to Titchfield Bentinck referred to 'Mr. Grant's first draft' (clearly drawn up from notes or a rough text supplied by Bentinck); of one illustration based on his own Spanish experience he wrote 'Mr. Grant has not introduced the observation'. The draft was then gone through and corrected by Bentinck and, separately, by Titchfield. Though the evidence does not positively identify 'Mr. Grant' with Charles Grant, there is no sign that Bentinck was in touch with anyone else of that name in England who could have done the job. For the reasons why Grant and Bentinck should have made common cause at this point, see pp. 143-4. Grant (not yet vice-chairman at the time) had signed the dispatch recalling Bentinck but had not otherwise been involved in the original decision: to Bentinck, 17 Apr. 1807, BP/PwJb/218. " Graham to Sir James Graham, Palermo, 9 Nov. 1813, Graham MSS; C. S. Parker, Life and Letters of Sir James Graham (1907), I, 5-6. 16 Gurney's MS journal, loc. cit. " Duc de Dalberg to Bentinck, 8 Feb. 1826, BP/PwJe/18; Jacquemont, Correspondance, I, 89-90. To Petrie (private), 17 Sep. 1807, BP/PwJb/343-584. « To Castlereagh (private), 2 Nov. 1808, BP/PwJc/236. « To V. S allier de la Tour, 17 Apr. 1815, in G. Gallavresi and V. Sallier de la Tour, Le Maréchal Sallier de la Tour (Turin, 1917), 430. 51 Account with Gurney, Birkbeck & Co., 4 Oct. 1811, Pocket Diaries, passim, letters from Newcastle (17 May 1819) and Rev. R. E. Hankinson (28 July 1826), BP/PwJd/6303, PwJe/210, 388, 1067-85. 344

REFERENCES " To J. Kirke, 22 May 1820, BP/PwJe/482. 11 To Millicent Sparrow, 17 Mar. 1821, Manchester MSS, Dd M. 10A/8. 34 Count Albertini to Bentinck, 1 May 1814, BP/PwJd/216; Bentinck and Sicily, 44; 1824 Continental journal, 11 July, Lady Olivia Sparrow to Bentinck, 27 July [?I8I6], BP/PwJe/789, 1082. " To Millicent Sparrow, 8 June 1820, Manchester MSS loc. cit. 36 To Millicent Sparrow, 25 Dec. 1820, Manchester MSS loc. cit. 57 To Sir Harry Verney, 5 Sep. 1826, Qaydon House MSS. 31 Friend of India, 22 Aug. 1839, quoted in Bengal Hurkaru, 23 Aug. « Bentinck to Melville, 17 Oct. 1828, BP/PwJf/2594/xviii. 40 C. Barrett, 'Lord William Bentinck in Bengal, 1828-1835' (Oxford D.Phil, thesis, 1954), 12-14. 41 Bentinck's evidence to Select Committee on Steam Navigation with India, Pari. Papers (1837), VI, 551. PART I • Section 7 1

Bentinck and Sicily, 64, 134-5, I 4 3 Ibid., pp. 64, 184. 3 Pocket diaries, BP/PwJe/1067-74. The '1782' may be a slip for 1792. 4 Orleans to Bentinck, 24 June 1817, BP/PwJe/593. > To Millicent Sparrow, 23 Nov. 1820, 20 Feb., 17 Mar. 1821, Manchester MSS Dd M 10A/8. 6 Pari. Debates, new series, V, 1234 ff. (21 June 1821). 7 Goulding, Letters mitten by Charles Lamb's lPrincely fVoman' . . ., 103-4, S. Reid, Life and Letters of Lord Durham (1906), 1,159; to Bentinck, 1823, from Brougham (10 Mar.), Holland (7 Mar.), F. W. Myers (printed broadsheet, 10 Mar.), Canning (19 June), BP/PwJe/134,166, 308, 565; E. Beresford Chancellor (ed.), The Diary of Philipp von Neumann (1928), I, 124-5. 8 Life of Lord Campbell (1881), I, 386. Bentinck had previously been a member of Boodles, which was 'for the country gentlemen, and . . . considered neutral': ibid., p. 409. ' A. Aspinall,' "The Canningite Party"', Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc. (1934), 204. 10 King's Lynn Pollbook (1826) (speech of William Ayre); Huntingdonshire election correspondence, Manchester MSS Dd M 21B/8; Pocket Diary, 15 June 1826, BP/PwJe/1079. " 'Sketch of a speech intended to have been spoken onfinanceand the state of the country', 1819, BP/PwJe/1056. " To Millicent Sparrow, June 1820-Jan. 1821, passim, Manchester MSS Dd M 10A/8. 13 A. Mitchell, The Whigs in Opposition, 1815-1830 (Oxford, 1967), 167; []. Wade], The Supplementary Black Book (1823), 139. 14 Continental Journal, 1824,5 July, Hamond to Bentinck, 1 Mar. 1823, BP/PwJe/ 374, 108-4; Canning-Bentinck correspondence, Sep. 1825, Canning MSS, bundle 79. 15 To Frederick Lamb, 30 Oct. 1826, Hertfordshire County Record Office, Cowper Panshanger MSS box 32, shelf 231. 2

345

REFERENCES 16

'Sketch of a speech intended to have been spoken on finance and the state of the country', 1819, BP/PwJe/1056; Sir G. O. Trevelyan, Life of Macaulay (World's Classics ed.; 1st ed. 1876), 1,223-4. " Sir George Savile, 1769, quoted in J . D. Chambers, Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century (1932), 82. " J . H. Moses, 'Elections and Electioneering in the Constituencies of Nottinghamshire, 1702-1832', Nottingham University Ph.D. thesis (1965), ch. 1. '» Henry Sedley to Bentinck, 20 Feb. 1803, BP/PwJa/378. 20 Moses, loc. cit.; J . Golby, 'A Great Electioneer and his Motives', Historical Journal (1965, no. 2), 207-8; Turberville, Welbeck Abbey, II, 338. 11 Hayman Rooke to Bentinck, 5 Apr. 1797, BP/PwJa/373. 22 To Bentinck, 1802, from Lady Newark (17 Apr.), Sir F. Molyneux (10 May), BP/PwJa/295, 346. 21 Moses, 'Elections in Nottinghamshire', I, 97-103; W. Sherbrooke to Bentinck, 3 June 1813 (received Tarragona, 5 Aug.), BP/PwJd/4906; Bentinck and Sicily, 113, 142-3; J. Rosselli, 'An Indian Governor in the Norfolk Marshland: Lord William Bentinck as Improver, 1809-27,' Agric. Hist. Rev., June 1971, 53-4. 24 Moses, op. cit., I, 105-7. « To Titchfield, 6 Jan. 1820, BP/PwH/250. 16 Bentinck to Portland, 16 Dec. 1821, BP/PwH/270; Goulding, Letters Written by Charles Lamb's 'Princely Woman1. .., 116-18; Sherbrooke to Bentinck, 26 Jan. 1826, BP/PwJe/769; King's Lynn Pollbooks, 1822, 1824, 1826 (1824 pollbook in collection of the late R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Felbrigg Hall, Norwich; others in King's Lynn Public Library). " King's Lynn Pollbook, 1826; Bentinck to Charles Heaton, 22 Oct. 1824, BP/ PwJe/405; Lord George Bentinck to Lady Canning, 1 1 Feb. 1828, Canning MSS, bundle 147. 28 Report of the Commissioners on Municipal Corporations . . ., Pari. Papers (1835), XXVI, 2389-2428; A Report of the Proceedings ofH.M. Commissioners... at King's Lynn (Lynn, 1834) (in Norwich Central Library); Speech of William Ayre, King's Lynn Pollbook (1822). 29 King's Lyim Pollbooks, 1822, 1824, 1826, 1835; A Correct Copy of all the Addresses . . . during the late contested election . . . (1822); A Report of the Proceedings of H.M. Commissioners . . . at King's Lynn, p. 31. 30 Pocket Diaries, 1815-27, passim, BP/PwJe/i 068-84. » To Harry Verney, 2 Aug. 1824, Gaydon House MSS. » [C. A. A'Court] to Lady William, 18 Mar. 1814, BP/PwJe/951. PART I Section 8 1 2 1 4 5

Jacquemont, Correspondence, I, 101. J . S. Mill, Essay on Bentham, in Mill, Essays on Polities and Culture (ed. G. Himmelfarb, New York, 1963), 110. 'Reorganisation of the Reform Party', ibid., p. 276. Bentinck to Graham, 27 June 1831, Graham MSS. 'You know what an enemy I have ever been and the dread I have always had of popularity': Portland to Fitzwilliam (most secret), 21 Feb. 1795, Sheffield City Libraries, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, F 31 (f).

346

REFERENCES * T o Sir Thomas Graham, 28 Oct. 1808, National Library of Scotland, Lynedoch M S S 3605 f. 66. ' Bentinck and Sicily, m - 1 7 . * Egyptian Diary, 23, 24 Sep. 1801, BP/PwJa/613. * Continental Journal, 5 Aug. 1824, BP/PwJe/1082. 10 Bentinck and Sicily, 211. " T o Verney, 14 Apr. 1834, Qaydon House MSS. " T o Portland, 16 May 1831, BP/PwH/283. " To Graham, 27 June 1831, Graham MSS; to Portland, 14 Aug., 4/14 Dec. 1831, 9 June, 2 Aug. 1832, BP/PwH/286-9, 292. 14 Graham to Holland, 29 Oct. 1826, Add. M S S 51542; Jacquemont, Correspondance, II, 145-6; Newcastle to Bentinck, 22 Mar. 1817, Bentinck to Portland, 16 May 1831, BP/PwH/283, PwJe/209. " T o Graham, 27 June 1831, Graham MSS. 16 Bentinck to Portland, 14 Aug., 2 Sep., 1834, BP/PwH/305-6. 17 E. Stokes, English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959), 51 (n), correcting an error made by Halévy in his History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century and repeated by a number of historians. '» E.g. D. Beales, From Castlereagh to Gladstone, 1815-1885 (1969), 163-4. " Works, X, 450. 20 See, for this problem in general, J. S. Mill, Autobiography (1873), chs. 3,4; Stokes, English Utilitarians, ch. 1; and the controversy started by O. MacDonagh, ' T h e Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal', Hist. Journal, I (1958), and continued by H. Parris, 'The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal Reappraised', ibid., I l l (i960), J. Hart, 'Nineteenth-Century Social Reform: A Tory Interpretation of History,' Past and Present, no. 31 (July 1965). 21 The Lewin Letters, I, 173-7, 184, 190-7, 209-10, 212, II, 359; Harriet Grote, The Personal Life of George Grote (1873), 57 (n); History of Parliament: The Commons 1754-1790, III, 303. " M. L. Clarke, George Grote (1962), 24-5,67-71; Mrs Grote, Personal Life, 43-5. " I b i d , p. 57 (n). M Pocket Diary, 23 Oct. 1822, BP/PwJe/1075; A. Bain, James Mill (1882), 203-4, 208. 15 Bentham to James Young, 28 Dec. 1827, in Bentham, Works, X, 576-7. 16 Bain, James Mill, 374-5, 39°" Bentham to Rammohan Roy, [Feb. 1828], Works, X, 591. 18 I b i d , X, 576-7, XI, 9. " Bentham to Bentinck (draft), 19 Nov. 1829, Bentham MSS, University College, London, X, f. 179. 30 Bentham to Bentinck (drafts), 9/10 Apr. 1829, i b i d , ff. 175-8; cf. later drafts, 19, 21 Nov. 1829, ff. 179-85. 31 Bentham, Works, XI, 51. » Auckland to Bentinck, 26 June 1826, BP/PwJe/280; H. Hale Bellot, University College London 1826-1926 (1929), 73. 33 T o Bentinck from Holt Mackenzie, 24 Oct. 1829, BP/PwJf/1348. 34 Stokes, English Utilitarians, 102-3. 31 I b i d , pp. 25-47 (for the best discussion of the question in the Indian context).

347

REFERENCES Section g This section is largely based on my article 'An Indian Governor in the Norfolk Marshland: Lord William Bentinck as Improver, 1809-27', Agric. Hist. Review (June 1971), which readers may consult for detailed references. Material not used in this article is however referred to in the notes, as—on occasion—is material interesting to students of Indian history. To Ellenborough (private), 5 Nov. 1829, BP/PwJf/2594/ix. Bentinck to A. Obins, 16 Mar. 1804, BP/PwJb/723. To Bentinck from Auber (18 Apr. 1831), Charles Heaton (11 Sep. 1835), ibid., PwJf/253, 1148. Philips, East India Company, 121. Bentinck to Plumer, 7 Jan. 1803, in Goulding, Letters written by Charles Lamb's 'Princely Woman'.. ., 78. Philips, East India Company, 228; Mackintosh, Life of Sir James Mackintosh, I, 188; G. R. Gleig, Life of... Sir Thomas Munro (1830), I, 227-9; Sir T . Strange to Bentinck, 28 Feb. 1812, BP/PwJd/6325; Trevelyan, Life of Macaulay, I, 299, 345-6; F. C. Danvers, M. Monier-Williams and others, Memorials of Old Haileybury College (1894), 36. Bentinck to Titchfield, 6 Sep. 1805, 11 Jan. 1806, BP/PwH/249, PwJb/723. To W. Petrie, 2 June 1807, BP/PwJb/343-584. To Metcalfe, 5 Apr. 1834, BP/PwJf/1729. Bentinck to Charles Grant, 14 April 1834, in E. Thompson, The Making of the Indian Princes (1943), 176. To W. Tierney Clark, 29 Nov. 1829, BP/PwJf/205. To Verney, 8 July 1827, Claydon House MSS. To Portland, 14 Aug. 1831, BP/PwH/286.

Section 10 Bentinck to C. Marjoribanks, 22 July, 29 July (draft—not sent), 30 July 1819, BP/PwJe/532-7. Philips, East India Company, 238-40; Yonge, Liverpool, III, 204-5; Canning's correspondence with Huskisson, J . Pattison, T. Reid, G. A. Robinson, Oct., Lady William to Canning, 26 Nov. 1822, Canning Papers, bundles 67,79,99; Canning to Portland, 3 Oct. 1822, BP/PwH/448; A. Aspinall,' "The Canningite Party" 209. Wellington, Dispatches (ed. Duke of Wellington, 1867-73), H, 516-18. Aspinall, op. cit., 212; T. Hoseason to Bentinck, 17/18 Dec. 1824, BP/PwJe/441. Bentinck to Millicent Sparrow, 4 Apr. 1822, Manchester MSS Dd M 10A/8. Harriet Grote to Bentinck, 21 Apr. 1825, BP/PwJe/339. Bentinck's travels are documented chiefly by his pocket diaries, ibid., nos. 1067-85. Orleans to Bentinck, 9 Nov. 1822, BP/PwJe/596. Louis-Philippe's letters to Bentinck have been published by Prof. Lewis Thorpe in University of Nottingham, Nottingham French Studies, I, no. 2 (Oct. 1962), II, no. 1 (May 1963). Bentinck to F. Lane, 3 Oct. 1823, ibid., no. 993.

348

REFERENCES » P. Balsamo, Sulla istoria moderna del Regno di Sicilia: memorie segrete (Palermo, 1848), 15710 Bentinck to Sallier de la Tour, 5 Jan. 1816, BP/PwJd/3059. " To Auber, 10 June 1829, BP/PwJf/191. 11 Continental Journal, 6 Sep. 1824, BP/PwJe/1082. » Philips, East India Company, 206-1; Aspinall, The Formation of Canning's Ministry, 200; Ravenshaw to Bentinck, 17 July 1827, BP/PwJf/1900. •4 Journal of Robert Guthrie (surgeon of HMS Undaunted), Nat. Maritime Museum, Greenwich, JOD/16 MS 54/01 ia; Bentinck's Pocket Diary, 1828, BP/PwJf/2970; John Bull (Calcutta), 5 July 1828. " Amherst to Bentinck, 7 Mar. 1828, BP/PwJf/125. 16 Bentinck to Verney, 12 Mar. 1829, Qaydon House MSS. 17 Jacquemont, Correspondance, I, v, 93, 107, 269-70, II, 203, 217-18, 221-4. 18 J. Baillie Fraser, Military Memoir of Lt.-Col. James Skinner (1851), II, 201-18; Jacquemont, op. cit., II, 157. '« H.M. Parker to Bentinck, [ ] Sep. 1834, BP/PwJf/1872. 20 Jacquemont, op. cit., I, 89.

PART n • Section 1 1

Bentinck to Wellesley, 2 May 1804, in R. Montgomery Martin (ed.), The Despatches .. .of the Marquess Wellesley . . . in India (1836-^7), III, 586-7; to Auber, 6 May 1830, BP/PwJf/198. 1 To Pellew, 9 June 1812, Exmouth MSS. > To Pellew, 2 Oct. 1812, ibid. 4 To Pellew, 25 Jan. 1814, ibid. 5 Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century, ch. 4. See, for the eighteenth-century idea of the nation, F. Chabod, VIdea di Nazione (Ban, 1962). 6 P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford, 1965), 180-7. 7 Cobban, loc. cit. • Cobban, op. cit., 107-8, 115-18. ' K. N. Pandey, 'Bentinck and the Indian States' (London School of Oriental and African Studies Ph.D. thesis, 1957), 241 (n). 10 To Pellew, 14 Mar. 1812, Exmouth MSS. Section 2 1 1 1 4

Bentinck to Sir Harry Verney, 9 Dec. 1835, Claydon House MSS. To Windham, 6 Apr. 1798, Add. MSS 37877 f. 291; to Portland, 9 June 1833, BP/PwH/295. To Windham, 6 Apr. 1798, loc. cit. For studies in English of these movements, see E. E. Y. Hales, Revolution and Papacy 1769-1846 (i960), ch. 7; A. Heriot, The French in Italy 1796-1799 (1957), ch. 9; E. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, 1959). 349

REFERENCES Bentinck to Grenville, 14 Nov. 1799, PRO FO/43/3. See, for a fuller account (with references) of Bentinck's share in the 1799-1801 Italian campaign, 'Progetto italiano', 357-62. Calvert, Journals and Correspondence, 260-1, 267-8. Bentinck to Castlereagh (private), 18 Oct. 1808, BP/PwJc/236. To Henry Clinton, 18 Nov. 1808, Rylands Library, Manchester, Clinton MSS, Misc. Military Corr. For these attempts at a Mediterranean strategy, see Rodger, The War of the Second Coalition, 208-10; P. Mackesy, The War in the Mediterranean 1803-1810 (1957), passim. Southey, quoted in Cobban, Edmund Burke, 143-50. Wordsworth, 'Concerning . . . the Convention of Cintra . . .' (1809), in R. J . White (ed.), Political Tracts of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley (Cambridge, 1953), 179—85; Sir J . Mackintosh, diary for 18 Jan. 1812, in Life of Mackintosh, II, 193-4G. F. Leckie, Historical Survey of the Foreign Affairs of Great Britain (1808). For other works in which Leckie's influence can be traced, see Bentinck and Sicily, 20 (n). 'Hints for the Improvement of Sicily' (1812), Castlereagh, Correspondence (ed. Marquess of Londonderry, 1848-53) VIII, 224-32. This anonymous paper is, on internal evidence, almost certainly by Leckie. See, for a fuller account of Anglo-Sicilian relations (with references), Bentinck and Sicily; also F. Renda, La Sicilia nel 1812 (Caltanissetta, 1963), and D. Mack Smith, Modern Sicily (vol. I l l of M. I. Finley and D. Mack Smith, A History of Sicily, 1968). To Pellew, 15 Nov. 1810, Exmouth MSS. Bentinck to Pellew, 16 Nov. 1811, ibid.; to Col. McMahon, 5 Oct. 1811, Royal Archives, Windsor, 18641-2. See, for a fuller account and references, 'Progetto italiano', 366-75; and, for a penetratingly malicious sketch of the Archduke Francis in his later phase as Duke of Modern, the portrait of the Grand-Duke in Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme. Bentinck to Pellew, 14 Aug. 1811, Exmouth MSS. To Pellew (private), 15 Nov. 1811, ibid. PART II • Section 3 ' Bentinck to Wellesley, 24 Oct. 1811, BP/PwJd/6243/1. * To Wellesley, 4 Apr. 1811, Add. MSS 37292 ff. 313-36. 3 Col. Meyrick Shawe's memorandum on Wellesley's resignation, in Wellington, Supplementary Dispatches, VII, 264-5; Orleans's account of conversation with Wellesley, in Bentinck's Journal, 14 July 1814, BP/PwJd/6260. 4 A. S. Beimeli, 'Southern India under Wellesley' (Oxford B.Litt. thesis, 1951), ch. 2. 5 Bentinck to Titchfield, 6 Sep. 1805, BP/PwH/249. 6 To Wellesley, 2 May 1804, in Martin, Wellesley Dispatches, III, 586-^7. ' See R. Mauzi, L'Idée du bonheur dans la littérature et la pensée françaises au 18¿me siècle (Paris, i960), and L. Trénard, review article in Annales hist, de la Révolution française (1963), 309 ff., 428 ff; for Stendhal, his letter to his sister Pauline,

350

REFERENCES 9 June 1807, in Correspondance (París, ed. H. Martineau and V. Del Litto, 1962-8), I, 354. • Bentinck to Thomas Pakenham, 14 Dec. 1828, BP/PwJf/1864. » P. J. Marshall, Problem of Empire: Britain and India 1757-1813 (1968), 60, 107, 139-41, 159, 180-4, I 9 I - 2 > 212-13; rod 'Indian Officials under the East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Bengal', Bengal Past and Present, LXXIV (1965), 107. 10 Marshall, Problems of Empire, 78 ff. 11 Stokes, English Utilitarians, 62-6. 12 Danvers, Memorials of Old Haileybury College, 251. " Philips, East India Company, 191; Marshall, Problems of Empire, 72-3. 14 Charles Grant to Bentinck (private), 31 Oct. 1805, BP/PwJb/592. 15 Marshall, op. cit., 183-4. 16 Bentinck's notes for Wellesley, 20 July 1804, Add. MSS 13633 f. 83; to Castlereagh (private), 24 Mar. 1804, BP/PwJb/722. 17 List of stores shipped out, BP/PwJb/5. 18 Bentinck to Josiah Webbe, 7 Jan. 1804, notes for Wellesley, July 1804, Add. MSS 13634 f. 26, 13633 f. 83. "> To Petrie, 25 Apr. 1805, to Minto (private), 20 Oct. 1806, BP/PwJb/343-584, 726. 20 To Sir Thomas Strange (private), 7 Mar. 1805, ibid. no. 725. 11 Bentinck's Sicilian Journal, 16-23 June 1814, BP/PwJd/6260. 22 Bentinck to Charles Grant (private), 8 Sep. 1805, BP/PwJb/724. 23 To Sir T. Strange (private), 7 Mar. 1805, ibid., no. 725. 24 William Dowdeswell to Bentinck, 10 June 1805, Bentinck to [? J. Chamier], 22 Feb. 1806, ibid., nos. 13, 147. 29 Bentinck to Castlereagh (private), 24 Mar. 1804, to Portland, 3 Feb. 1805, ibid., nos 722-3. 26 To Castlereagh, loc. cit.; to Petrie, 6 July 1805, ibid. nos. 343-584 (Petrie, the senior member of Council, endorsed Bentinck's unfavourable comparison of Madras with Bengal civilians 'very interesting . . . most true'). Cf. Wellesley to Bentinck (private and confidential), 1 Feb. 1804, Add. MSS 13633 f. 69; Sir James Mackintosh's journal, 30 Dec. 1805, in Life of Mackintosh, I, 280. 27 To Portland, 3 Feb. 1805, loc. cit. 2 » To Portland, 17 Sep. 1806, BP/PwF/1203. ™ To Sir Thomas Strange (private), 7 Mar. 1805, to Petrie, 17 Mar. 1805, BP/ PwJb/725, 343-584; notes for Wellesley, July 1804, Add. MSS 13633 f. 83. 30 To Castlereagh (private), 21 July 1804, to J. Wallace, jun. (private), 3 Apr. 1805, to Petrie, 11 Mar. 1805, BP/PwJb/722, 724, 343-584. " To Petrie, 30 March [ ], from Chamier, 5 Dec. 1803, [ ] 1804, 11 Sep. 1804, from A. Falconar, 20 Sep. 1805, to Sir T. Strange (private), [ ] 1804, ibid., nos. 6, 19, 343-584, 723; to Wellesley (private and confidential), 9 Sep. 1804, from W. Blackburne, 8 Mar. 1804, Add. MSS 13634 ff. 191, 201. 32 Bentinck to Castlereagh (private), 24 Mar. 1804, to Sir T Strange (private), 15 Mar. 1804, to Petrie, 6 July 1805, to Portland, 3 Feb. 1805, BP/PwJb/722-3, 343-584. 33 To Castlereagh, loc. cit.

351

REFERENCES M

To Castlereagh (private), 18 Oct. 1804, 'Memoranda delivered by the Governor

to Major Leith', 15 Oct. 1806, BP/Pwjb/179, 722. " To Castlereagh, loc. cit.; from Duncan (private), 3 Dec. 1803, ibid., no. 15. 36 To Portland, 7 Mar. 1807, in Goulding, Letters written by Charles Lamb's 'Princely Womari . . ., 159-60; to Wellesley (private and confidential), 9 Sep. 1804, Add. MSS 13634 f. 191; to D. Craufurd (judge, Mannargudi), 20 Feb. 1807, from F. W. Ellis (judge, Kumbakonam), 22 Jan. 1807, BP/PwJb/7. 37 To W. Harrington (private), 24 Dec. 1805, ibid., no. 724. 3 * Bentinck, Memorial Addressed to theHonourable Court of Directors (1810), 22-3. 35 To Castlereagh (private), 18 Dec. 1804, BP/PwJb/722. 40 'Memoranda delivered by the Governor to Major Leith . . .', 15 Oct. 1806, to W. Cochrane (private), 21 Sep. 1805, to Charles Grant (private), 8 Sep. 1805, ibid., nos. 179,724. Cf. T . H. Beaglehole, Thomas Munro and the Development of Administrative Policy in Madras 1792-1818 (Cambridge, 1966), 74-9. 41 'Memoranda . . . to Major Leith', loc. cit.; to Blackburne (private), 29 Oct. 1805, BP/PwJb/724. Beaglehole, op. cit., 73-7. 43 To Portland, 7 Mar. 1807, in Goulding, op. cit., 160. 44 B. Hjejle, 'Dry and Wet Cultivation in the Shaping of Early British Revenue Systems in Madras' (paper read to the first European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, Cambridge, June 1968). « Beaglehole, op. cit., 58-68. 46 Bentinck to S. Skinner, 17 Mar. 1805, BP/PwJb/724. 47 To G. Stratton, 9 May, to W. Thackeray, 29 May, to Munro (private), 14 Feb. 1805, ibid. 48 To Lt. Col. Macaulay (private), 13 Nov. 1805, ibid. 49 'Memoranda . . . to Major Leith', 15 Oct. 1806, ibid., no. 179. 50 Ibid.; to Munro (private) 29 Oct. 1805, ibid., no. 724. 51 Chamier to Bentinck, 20 Nov. 1804, 23 Jan., 1 Feb. 1805, ibid., no. 6. 51 To Lt.-Col. Monypenny, 1 Feb. 1805, ibid., no. 724. 53 To Petrie, 19 Nov. 1804, ibid., nos. 343-584. 54 Gupta, 'Bentinck in Madras', 68-^77, 79-82; Bentinck to Wellesley (secret), [ ] Jan. 1805, Wellesley's draft reply (not sent), Add. M S S 13634 ff. 145, 158; Bentinck to Lt.-Col. Macaulay, [ ] Dec. 1804, ibid., 13635 f. 155, 20 Jan. 1805, BP/PwJb/724. Malcolm thought only Bentinck's 'decided personal support' had saved Mark Wilks, the Resident at Mysore, and Purnayya, the dewan, from either resigning or adulterating the much admired Mysore system of indirect rule: to [? Minto], 8 Oct. 1807, Add. MSS 37284 f. 160. 55 Bentinck to Wellesley, 2 May, (private and confidential) 9 Sep. 1804, ibid., 13634, ff. 123, 191. 56 From W. Blackburne, 29 Sep., 16 Dec., from F. W. Ellis, 23 Oct., 9 Nov., to Blackburne, 23 Nov. 1806, BP/PwJb/7, 176, 184, 190. 57 To R. Alexander (private), 21 Sep., to C. M. Lushington (private), 27 Sep. 1805, ibid., no. 724. 91 From Alexander, 10 Dec., to Alexander (private), 21 Dec. 1805, ibid., nos. 1, 724« To S. Skinner, 17 Mar., 9 May, to Lt.-Col. Taylor, 9 Dec., to W. Thackeray and Skinner, 18 Dec. 1805, from Lt. P. Davie, 21 Dec. 1806, ibid., nos. 7, 724. 41

352

REFERENCES 60

61 62 63 M 65

66

From R. Alexander, 30 Sep., 3 Dec. 1805, to Alexander (private), 16 Oct. 1805, ibid., nos. 1, 724. T o Castlereagh (private), 21 July 1804, ibid., no. 722. Duncan to Bentinck, 24 Apr. 1805, ibid., no. 15. Memorial to the Court of Directors, 35. Bentinck to Minto (private), 20 Oct. 1806, BP/PwJb/726. Gupta, 'Bentinck in Madras', 317-26; Cradock to Bentinck, 13 Aug. 1806, BP/ PwJb/12. Gupta, op. cit., 326-35; Memorial to the Court of Directors, 27-40.

« Grant to Bentinck, 17 Apr. 1807, BP/PwJb/218. 68 Maj. Leith to Bentinck (private), London, 8/14 Apr. 1807, ibid., no. 25; Parry to Minto (private), [Nov.] 1807, Minto M S S vol. 192. Cf. Embree, Charles Grant, 237. 6» T o Thomas Grenville (private), 1 Dec. 1806, BP/PwJb/726. 70

Quoted in P. Spear, The Nabobs (Oxford, 1963; 1st ed. 1932), 137. Cf. Marshall, 'Indian Officials under the East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Bengal', passim.

71

T o Thomas Grenville (private), 30 Dec. 1806, to J. Wallace (private), 22 Sep., to W. Cochrane (private), 21 Sep. 1805, to J. Bosanquet (private) 29 Jan. 1806, Munro to [? ] 4 July 1805, BP/Pwjfo/19, 724, 726-7.

72

Rottler to Lady William Bentinck, 8 Oct. 1807, ibid., no. 290.

" E. H. Cutts, ' T h e Background of Macaulay's Minute', Amer. Hist. Rev., L V I I I (July 1953), 829, states that Bentinck approved this plan but that it was cut short by the VeUore mutiny. This is not borne out by his source, an article by the Rev. C . S. John (a Danish missionary of German origin), 'Indian Gvilisation; being a report of a successful experiment . . . in fifteen Tamil and five English native schools', Missionary Register, I (1813), 369-83. John makes it clear that grants to schools had been company policy since the time of the great Danish missionary C. F. S w a m (died 1798), that lack of teachers was the trouble, and that Tamil was the medium of instruction as much as English. This venture thus has small standing as a forerunner of the 'English education' o f the 1830s. Kerr to Bentinck, 2 Feb., 17 March 1805, 27 May, 7 July, 3 Aug. 1806, BP/ PwJb/23, 25. 75 76

77

78

75 80 81 82

81

This was Grant's reading: to Bentinck, 17 Apr. 1807, BP/PwJb/218. Bentinck to P. Cherry, 2 June 1805, ibid., no. 724. Cf. Blackburne to Bentinck, 12 June 1806, ibid., no. 4 (on the Raja of Thanjavur's reluctance to pay more than lip-service to vaccination). T o Minto (private and confidential), 1 Oct. 1806, ibid., no. 726. Cf. Lord Minto in India, 369. T o Barlow (private), 12 July, to T . Grenville (private), 1 Dec. 1806, BP/PwJb/ 726. Memorial to the Court of Directors, passim; Gupta, 'Bentinck in Madras', 313-42. Gupta, loc. cit., and 344-7; Memorial to the Court of Directors, 17-18. Philips, East India Company, 160-2, 168-9; Embree, Charles Grant, 238-48. Bentinck, Memorial, 3, 55-8; Wilson, History of the Madras Army, III, 174, i93 - 4Abbé J. A . Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies (3rd ed. by H. K . Beauchamp, Oxford, 1906), vi, viii-xv. M

353

REFERENCES Wilks to Bentinck (private), 13 Jan. 1807, BP/PwJb/199. Bentinck to Governor in Council, 26 Sep. 1807, ibid., no. 703, printed in Dubois, op. cit., xv. PART II • Section 4 Lamb to Bentinck, 23 Apr. 1814, BP/PwJd/3000. For a fuller account (with references) of Bentinck's Sicilian career, see Bentinck and Sicily. In the present section references are given only to material not mentioned in that work. W. A'Court, 'Minutes of a conversation with Lord Castlereagh at Paris', 16 May 1814, Add. MSS 41515 f. 62. Bentinck to Pellew, 24 Feb. 1812, Exmouth MSS. To Amherst, 29 Jan. 1812, IOL MSS Eur. 140/15^). To Pellew, 13 Mar. 1813, Exmouth MSS. To Pellew, 24 Feb. 1812, ibid. Stendhal, Rome, Naples et Florence (ed. H. Martineau, Paris, 1927), III, 183. W. A'Court, 'Minutes of a conversation with Lord Castlereagh', Paris, 16 May 1814, Add. MSS 41515 f. 62. To Pellew, 25 Jan., 9 Feb., 21 June 1814, Exmouth MSS. P. M. Benza to Bentinck, Madras, 14 Sep. 1835, BP/PwJg/32. PART II • Section 5 Bentinck to Maj.-Gen. R. MacFarlane, 1 May 1814, PRO FO/70/64. In this section references are given only to material not referred to in Bentinck and Sicily and 'Progetto italiano'. The chief published sources for British involvement in Italian affairs in 1811-15 are still the enormous compilations of M. H. Weil, Le Prince Eugine et Murat (Paris, 1902) and Joachim Murat, roi de Naples. La dermire annie de tigne (Paris, 1909-10), which however are not always accurate in their reproduction of documents. See also Webster, Castlereagh, I; C. S. B. Buckland, Mettermeli and the British Government from i8og to 1813 (1932); A. Capograssi, GFInglesi in Italia durante le guerre napoleoniche (Lord W. Bentinck) (Bari, 1949); G. Gallavresi, 'Larivoluzionelombarda del 1814 eia politica inglese,' Archivio Storico Lombardo, 4th ser., XI (1909); R. J. Rath, The Provisional Austrian Regime in Lombardy-Venetia 1814-1815 (Austin, Tex., 1969). Stendhal, Rome, Naples et Florence, III, 183. To the Duke of the Genevese, 12 May 1812, in A. Segre, Vittorio Emanuele I (Turin, 1928), 143. Wellington to Bentinck, 1 July 1813, in Wellington, Dispatches (ed. Gurwood, 1844«!.), VI, 564-5. F. Lemmi, 'La restaurazione dello Stato Sardo nel 1814-15', in University of Turin, Miscellanea della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia (Turin, 1938), II, 187 (n). Original in French: Bentinck and Sicily, 54. Bentinck to Bunbury, 7 Apr. 1813, Add. MSS 37050 f. 232. [C. A. A'Court] to Lady William Bentinck, (8 Mar. 1814, BP/PwJe/951. Bentinck to Pellew, 5 Apr. 1814, Exmouth MSS. These negotiations are deah with extensively in Weil, Prince Eugine, III-V, passim, and in Webster, Castlereagh, I, 253-60. 354

REFERENCES " Graham to Bentinck (private), 7 Jan. 1814, BP/PwJd/2680; Weil, op. cit., IV, 165-76. 11 G. Pepe, Mémoires (Paris, 1847), II, 6a; F. Maceroni [Macirone], Memoirs (1838), II, 106. 11 Webster, op. cit., I, 257. » Bentinck to Titchfield, Madrid, 31 Oct. 1808, BP/PwJb/324. " To Bunbury, 17 Feb. 1814, Add. MSS 37050 f. 236. " To Pellew, 9 Feb. 1814, Exmouth MSS. " F. Lemmi, La restaurazione in Italia net 1814 nel diario del barone von Hügel (Rome-Milan, 1910), 99. " Gallavresi, 'Rivoluzione lombarda', 140-1; D. Spadoni, Milano eia congiura militare del 1814 per Pindipendenza itahana (Modena, 1936), I, 155-6. Draft (not sent) of letter to Bathurst, 1815, BP/PwJd/5554/7. 10 R. M. Johnston, The Napoleonic Empire in Southern Italy and the Rise of Secret Societies (1904), II, 50-1; Bentinck-A'Court correspondence, Sep.-Oct. 1815, Add. MSS 41534 ff. 123, 128, 131, 154, 166. 21 Webster, Castlereagh, I, 259; Cardinal Delia Genga to Bentinck, 6 June 1820, BP/PwJe/313. " Pocket diary, 4, 5 Sep. 1815, letters from A. Brignole Sale, G. Serra, BP/PwJd/ 763-9, 4881-6, PwJe/1068. 11 Rendiconti del Parlamento italiano (1865-6), II, 1560 (speech of F. D. Guerrazzi, 21 Mar. 1866). I owe this reference to Mr D. Mack Smith. 24 Bellegarde to Metternich, 28 Mar. 1815, in Weil, Joachim Murat, III, 233-5. 15 Burghersh to Castlereagh, 31 Jan. 1815, in R. Weigall (ed.), Correspondence of Lord Burghersh (1912), 94.

Section 6 1

George Norton (Judge-Advocate, Madras) to Bentinck, 30 Oct. 1835, BP/ PwJg/279. 1 See D. Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance (Berkeley, 1969); and, for the post-Mutiny period, A. Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Cambridge, 1968). » To Auber, 6 May 1830, BP/PwJf/198. 4 Ellenborough to Bentinck, 19 May 1829, ibid., no. 932. 5 To Ellenborough (private), 5 Nov. 1829, Minute (Secret Dept.), 20 Jan. 1834, ibid-, nos. 2594/ix, 2913. CÍ Marshall, Problems of Empire, 60. 1 Bentinck's notes to Metcalfe's Minute, 1 1 Oct. 1829, Bentinck to Col. Sahnond (private), to Ravenshaw, both 16 Sep. 1832, to Auber (private), 12 May 1834, ibid., nos 233,1522, 2041, 2685; Bentinck's Minute, 15 Mar. 1835, ' n Boulger, Bentinck, 177-201. ' Minute (General Dept), 30 May 1829, BP/PwJf/2903. 8 J. W. Kaye (ed.), Selections from the Papers of Lord Metcalfe (1855), 161^77; Macaulay to his sister Margaret Cropper, 27 June 1834, Macaulay MSS, Trinity College, Cambridge, O. 15. 12D; evidence of Holt Mackenzie, Pari. Papers (1831-2), XI, 298-9; Jacquemont, Correspondance, I, 341-2; Sir Samford Whittingham to Bentinck, 15 Feb. 1834, BP/PwJf/2285; Sir W. H. Sleeman, 355

REFERENCES Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official (revised ed. by V. A. Smith, 1915; 1st. ed. 1844), 413-14; Wilson, History of British India, III, 566-7. » India Gazette, 23 Nov., quoted in Bengal Hurkaru, 24 Nov. 1829. 10 Trevelyan's evidence, Pari. Papers (1852-3), X X X I I , 165-6, qq. 6649-53; Lord Canning to 5th Duke of Portland, 22 Aug. 1861, BP/PwJf/2586/i/xiv; Friend of India, 22 Aug., quoted in Bengal Hurkaru, 23 Aug. 1839. 11 'A Looker-on', India Gazette, 13 Mar. 1833. " Pari. Papers (1852-3), X X X I I , 188-9, 192-3. 216-17, qq. 6778. 6792, 6887. Cf. Trevelyan to Bentinck, 9 Apr. 1834, quoted in K. A. Ballhatchet, 'The Home Government and Bentinck's Educational Policy', Cambridge Hist. Journal, X (1951), no. 2. " R. Rickards, India (1829-32), I, 1-5, 9-15, 44-75, 272-3, II, 56. 14 Reformer and Jnananvesan, quoted in India Gazette, 15 Nov. 1831,29 Mar. 1833; W. Fane, memorandum to Bentinck (on Rammohan's views), 16 Aug. 1830, BP/PwJf/954. 15 A. F. Salahuddin Ahmed, Social Ideas and Social Change in Bengal (Leiden, 1965), 126-8. 16 Minute (General Dept), 30 May 1829, BP/PwJf/2903. 17 To Frederick Lamb, 5 Nov. 1829, Beau vale Papers, Royal Archives, Windsor, box 8. 11 Minute (Secret Dept.), 20 Jan. 1834, BP/PwJf/2913. For Bentinck's view of the company and its service, see Parts III and V. '« Macaulay to T . F. Ellis, 15 Dec. 1834, Macaulay MSS, Trinity College, Cambridge, 0.15.12". The second clause is omitted in Trevelyan, Life of Macaulay (World's Classics ed.), I, 395. 10 Lists of guests at parties 'for the natives', Minute (Public Dept.), 14 Oct. 1833, BP/PwJf/2628/lv-vii, 2902; Bengal Herald, 27 June 1829; Salahuddin Ahmed, op. cit., 3-4. " Minute (Military Dept.), 22 Dec. 1834, to Metcalfe, 26 Nov. 1831, BP/PwJf/ 1719, 2910. « Baillie Fraser, Military Memoir of James Skinner, II, 192-200,224-31; DNB,s.v. Skinner. u Bentinck kept a diary of his private audiences until 1830, when he apparently gave it up, borne down by excess of work. This diary (BP/PwJf/2943) records no meetings with Indians but may not have been intended to. Bentinck certainly had at least one or two private meetings with Rammohan Roy: to Auber (confidential), 11 May 1832, ibid., no. 210. « Minute, 31 July 1834, Pari. Papers (1852-3), XXVII, 526. 25 Pari. Papers (1837), VI, 550-1, 553. This, Bentinck's evidence to the 1837 Select Committee on Steam Navigation to India, consisted partly of a letter he had written to the Madras Steam Fund subscribers in 1834, partly of new matter. Though the distinction is not made clear in the printed text the break appears to come on p. 552, line 24. The tone and content of the evidence are anyhow of a piece throughout. PART II • Section 7 1

The best account of these proposals is Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', 131-41 and ch. 1 1 . Bentinck's crucial Minutes are those of 30 May 1829 (General Dept.) and 20 Jan. 1834 (Secret Dept.), BP/PwJf/2903, 2913.

356

REFERENCES 2

Bentinck's Minutes, 10 Feb. 1829, 22 Feb. 1830, 20 Jan. 1834, Bentinck to Auber (private), 12 May, to Tucker, 1 1 Aug. 1834, BP/PwJf/233, 2138, 2911, 29I33 Minute, 20 Jan. 1834, loc. cit. 4 To Bentinck from Holt Mackenzie, 3 Sep. 1828, from Malcolm (secret and confidential), 24 Jan. 1828, 2 Dec. 1830, BP/PwJf/1341-2, 1403, 1474. 5 Minutes, 10 Feb. 1829, 22 Feb. 1830, 20 Jan. 1834, ibid., nos. 2911, 2913; Minute, 13 Mar. 1835, in Boulger, Bentinck, 194. 6 To Malcolm, 26 Aug. 1828, BP/PwJf/1399. 7 Malcolm to Bentinck, 14 Sep., 17 Oct. 1828, ibid., nos. 1412, 1414. * To Metcalfe, no date but c. 1832, ibid., no. 1779. • To Grant (confidential), 14 Apr. 1834, ibid., no. 1066. 10 To Ellenborough, 23 Feb. 1830, ibid., no. 2594/xlix. " B. Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism (Cambridge, 1970), 82-91, 103124. 11 Rickards, India, I, 77 ff.; Bengal Hurkaru, 10 Nov., 5 Dec. 1828, 17 Nov. 1829; Bengal Herald (paper backed by Rammohan Roy, Dwarkanath Tagore, and R. Montgomery Martin), 13 June 1829; B. B. Majumdar, History of Political Thought from Rammohan to Dayananda (Calcutta, 1934), I, 72-5, 129 (n); Salahuddin Ahmed, Social Ideas and Social Change in Bengal, 9. 13 Figure for 1828 (almost certainly underestimated): Pari. Papers (1831), V, 769. This represented a 50% increase on 1815. 14 Minute (General Dept.), 30 May 1829, BP/PwJf/2903. " Pari. Papers (1830), VI, 173; Ravenshaw to Bentinck, 3 May 1830, BP/PwJf/ 1916. 16 Pari. Papers (1830), loc. cit.; to Bentinck from Ellenborough (private, 15 May 1830), Robert Campbell (27 May 1830), Peter Auber (6 June 1829), BP/PwJf/ 237. 577» 94°17 Peter Auber to Bentinck, 17 Aug. 1833, ibid., no. 292. 19 To Metcalfe and Holt Mackenzie (confidential), 16 Sep. 1829, commenting on Ellenborough to Bentinck, 19 May 1829, ibid., nos. 932, 2634. Minute (General Dept.), 30 May 1829, ibid., no. 2903. 20 Notes on Bengal Council's observations, no date but c. 1806, BP/PwJb/193. 11 Minute, 30 May 1829, loc. cit. " Pari. Papers (1837), VI, 553. 23 Grant to Bentinck (private), 6 Aug. 1805, BP/PwJb/590. See, for Grant, Bureau of Education, India, Selections from the Educational Records of the Government of India (ed. H. Sharp and J. Richey, Calcutta, 1920-2), I, 81-6; Embree, Charles Grant, 118, 141-57. 24 Macaulay, speech of 10 July 1833, quoted in Stokes, English Utilitarians, 43-4; Trevelyan's evidence, Pari. Papers (1852-3), X X X I I , 176-83, qq. 6706-45; S. D. Collet, The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy (ed. D. K. Biswas and P. C. Ganguli, Calcutta, 1962; ist ed. 1900), 336-8. 25 'Indophilus' (Trevelyan's pseudonym), India Gazette, 7 May 1833; Sir C. Grey to Bentinck, 23 Apr. 1832, BP/PwJf/1115. 26 Pari. Papers (1837), VI, 553; J . F. Hilliker, 'British Educational Policy in Bengal, 1833-1854' (SOAS Ph.D. thesis, 1968), 66-7. 27 Rambles and Recollections (1915 ed.), 422-4, 578-9. 2 « C. Dilke, Greater Britain (1868), passim. 357

REFERENCES PART II • Section 8 ' R. E. Frykenberg, Guntur District 1788-1848 (Oxford, 1965). The best discussion of native agency just before and during Bentinck's time is Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', esp. ch. 7. J Holt Mackenzie's evidence, Pari. Papers (1831-2), XI, 304. * To Bentinck from Ellenborough (confidential and secret), 23 Sep. 1830, from Ashley (private), 24 June 1829, BP/PwJf/132, 947. 5 To Astell (private), 8 June 1829, ibid., no. 141. 6 R. D. Mangles's evidence, Pari. Papers (1830), VI, 47; Meerut Observer, quoted in Calcutta Courier, 26 Dec. 1832, and in Bengal Hurkaru, 25 Nov. 1833. Bentham's friend James Young described Mangles as the leader of the 'Christian bigots' who could bear nothing short of total repudiation of every aspect of Indian culture: to Bentinck, 20 Apr. 1834, BP/PwJf/2386. The editor of the Meerut Observer described himself as a Benthamite and attacked 'pseudoBenthamites' who wished to extend native agency. For Mill, see Stokes, English Utilitarians, 64-6. 7 Barrett, op. cit., ch. 6. Prinsep was joined by W. Fane, T. C. Robertson, and R. W. Tilghman. * Bengal Hurkaru, 8, 14 July, 6 Nov. 1829. « Jnananvesan, quoted in India Gazette, 28 Feb. 1833. 10 Astell to Bentinck (private), 20 Jan. 1829, BP/PwJf/137. II Metcalfe to Bentinck, 12 July 1832, ibid., no. 1646; Trevelyan's evidence, Pari. Papers (1852-3), XXXII, 219, q. 6893. 12 Ibid., pp. 146-7,185, qq. 6572, 6758; R. J. Moore, 'The Abolition of Patronage in the Indian Civil Service and the Closure of Haileybury College', Hist. Journal, VII (1964), 246-57, and Sir Charles Wood's Indian Polity 1853-66 (Manchester, 1966), ch. 5. » Minute (General Dept.), 27 Dec. 1828, BP/PwJf/2902. To Astell (private), 8 June 1829, BP/PwJf/141. " Minute, 10 Nov. 1831, ibid., no. 2902. 16 To Charles Grant, 21, 22 Dec. 1832, ibid., no. 2685. " Minutes, 22 Sep., 22 Dec. 1834, ibid., nos. 2909-10, 13 Mar. 1835, in Boulger, Bentinck, 179; Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', ch. 10. Malcolm had instituted an Order of Merit in the Bombay Army and urged its importance: to Bentinck (private), 28 July 1830, BP/PwJf/1458. " Minute, 20 Jan. 1834, ibid., no. 2913. Cf. Stokes, English Utilitarians, 174-83. 19 Bentinck's public notice inviting suggestions for improvement, 2 Mar. 1829, in Salahuddin Ahmed, Social Ideas and Social Change in Bengal, 3 (n); to Ellenborough (private), 18 Dec. 1829, from Sir SamforaWhittingham, 28 Aug. 1828, BP/PwJf/2183, 2594/xlvii. 20 Salahuddin Ahmed, op. cit., 163^7. 11 Bentinck to Auber (confidential), 11 May 1832, BP/PwJf/210. 22 S. N. Sastri, Ramtanu Lahiri, Brahman and Reformer (ed. Sir R. Lethbridge, 1907), 81; Bentinck to Granville, 15 Dec. 1831, BP/PwJf/2594/lxxvi; H. H. Wilson's evidence, Pari. Papers (1852-3), XXXII, 270, q. 7241. 23 India Gazette, 22 March 1833. I

358

REFERENCES u

To Bentinck from D. Ruddell, 7 Feb. 1831, Sir Edward Ryan, Jan.-June 1831, A. Dobbs to R. Benson, 19 Jan. 1832, BP/PwJf/894, 1967/1, 1988-93; Sastri, op. cit., 190; Salahuddin Ahmed, op. cit., 43-6, 145. " Ryan to Bentinck, 5 Mar. 1835, BP/PwJf/3028. 16 Minute (Political Dept.), 5 Aug. 1832, ibid., no. 2912; Minute (Revenue Dept.), 26 Sep. 1832, para. 108, in IOR, Official Publications, Selections from the Revenue Records of the North-Western Provinces 1822-33 (Allahabad, 1872), 418; Husain, Land Revenue Policy in North India, 207. " To Granville, 15 Dec. 1831, BP/PwJf/2594/lxxvi. 28 Malcolm to Wynn, 19 Apr. 1828, in Stokes, English Utilitarians, 16 (n); to Bentinck (private), 19 Sep. 1829, BP/PwJf/1436. 29 Calcutta Courier, quoted in India Gazette, 1 Feb. 1833. Section 9 ' B. Hjejle, 'The Social Policy of the East India Company with regard to Sati, Slavery, Thagi and Infanticide, 1772-1858' (Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1958), ch. 9; Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', 148-54. 1 This is particularly well brought out by Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance, and by Hilliker, 'British Educational Policy in Bengal'. 5 E. g. Thornton, History of the British Empire in India, V, 234-5; Shore, Notes on Indian Affairs, II, 217-18. 4 Kopf, op. cit., 4, 8, 162, 178, 186, 241, 286. > R. A. Huttenback, British Relations with Sind 1799-1843 (Berkeley, 1962), 118. 6 Minute (Secret Dept.), 20 Jan. 1834, BP/PwJf/2913. 7 Bentinck to Metcalfe, 31 July 1834, ibid., no. 1736. * Hilliker, op. cit., 58-61; Astell to Bentinck (private), 4 Oct. 1830, BP/PwJf/145. ° Minute (Political Dept.), 5 Aug. 1832, ibid., no. 2912. 10 Minute, 8 Nov. 1829, in Boulger, Bentinck, 96-111. " Minute on Military Board, 1831, BP/PwIf/2666/v; E. D. Potts, British Baptist Missionaries in India 1793-1837 (Cambridge, 1967), 139-56, 165; Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', loc. cit. Cf. K. Ingham, Reformers in India 1793-1833 (Cambridge, 1956), 44-54. " To Astell (private), 12 Jan. 1829, BP/PwJf/2615/i. 13 Bentinck to Bishop Turner (private), 23 Feb. 1830, to Bishop Wilson, t May, 6 June 1834, to Money, 1 July 1834, from Bishop Wilson (private), 18 July 1833, from Sir Edward Ryan, 29 Feb. 1836, ibid., nos. 532, 565-6, 2643/i, 2647-8, PwJg/309; reply to farewell address from missionaries, 1835, in Pari. Papers (1852-3), XXXII, 196, q. 6800. To Grant (private), 10 Mar. 1833, BP/PwJf/2709/iii. " To Money, 1 July 1834, ibid., no. 2643/i. 14 G. Seed, 'The Abolition of Suttee in Bengal', History, Oct. 1955; Hjejle, op. cit., ch. 2. 17 Bentinck to Ravenshaw, 11 Dec. 1832, Calder to Benson, [ ] 1830, ibid., nos. 451, 2685; Wilson, History of British India, III, 273-5. Through an error, Seed, op. cit., 296, misrepresents Bentinck as having been privately contemptuous of H. H. Wilson: he attributes to Bentinck a letter which was in fact from Major W. Beatson, a member of Derozio's Academic Association (to Benson, 29 Dec. 1828, BP/PwJf/421). There is no evidence that Bentinck regarded 359

REFERENCES Wilson other than with respect; he warmly recommended Wilson for the Sanskrit Professorship at Oxford: to Granville, 15 Dec. 1831, ibid., no. 2594/ lxxvi. •» Hilliker, 'British Educational Policy', 38-54; Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', ch. 3; Selections from the Educational Records, I, passim. See also P. Spear, 'Bentinck and Education', Cambridge Hist. Journal, VI (1938), no. 1; Ballhatchet, 'The Home Government and Bentinck's Educational Policy'; G. Seed, 'Lord William Bentinck and the Reform of Education', Journal of the Roy. Asiatic Soc., Apr. 1952; Kopf, British Orientalism, parts 4, 5; Salahuddin Ahmed, Social Ideas, passim. Hilliker's thesis gives the most comprehensive and balanced account of the education controversies of the 1830s. Sel. Educ. Records, I, 1 1 1 , 121; Trevelyan, The Education of the People of India (1838), in Pari. Papers (1852-3), XXVIII, 420-4. 20 Wilson, History of British India, III, 305^7; Sel. Educ. Records, I, 41. 21 Auckland's Minute, 24 Nov. 1839, Sel. Educ. Records, I, 148-9. 12 Spear, op. cit., 86. 11 Trevelyan to Bentinck, 30 Apr. 1834, BP/PwJf/2105. M To Money, 1 June 1834, ibid., no. 2643/i, quoted in Spear, 'Lord William Bentinck', 109-10. 25 Macaulay, Minute, 2 Feb. 1835, in Sel. Educ. Records, 107-17. 16 Trevelyan's evidence, Pari. Papers (1852-3), X X X I I , 155-7, 6606-18; Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections (1915 ed.), 340, 586. 27 H. Colebrooke to Bentinck, 23 May 1807, BP/PwJb/7. 28 To and from T. Cockburn (10 Dec. 1827), from T. Robinson (15 Nov. 1828), BP/PwJf/796-7, 1952. " Minute, 4 Feb. 1831, ibid., no. 2902. 30 Leyden to Bentinck, 30 June 1807, Bentinck, Minute (General Dept.), 27 Dec. 1828, BP/PwJb/25, PwJf/2902. 31 To Auber (private), 12 May 1834, ibid., no. 233. 32 Minutes (Military Dept.), 26 Jan. 1835, ibid., no. 2910. 33 Minute (General Dept.), 20 Jan. 1835, ibid., no. 2902. 34 Trevelyan's evidence, Pari. Papers (1852-3), X X X I I , 155^7, qq. 6606-18; Hilliker, op. cit., 55-74; Salahuddin Ahmed, op. cit., 148-51. 35 Kopf, op. cit., 6, 47-126, 217-35, and passim. 36 Ibid., 221-9; Holt Mackenzie to Bentinck, 18 July 1828, BP/PwJf/1340. 37 Bentinck, Minutes (General Dept.), 27 Dec. 1828, 4 Feb. 1831, to Auber, 14 Nov. 1830, from Auber (private), 8 Jan. 1829,17 June 1830, ibid., nos. 185,206, 243, 2902; Sel. Educ. Records, I, 38—9; Kopf, op. cit., 221-35; Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', ch. 6. 38 This is the interpretation persuasively put forward by Hilliker, 'British Education Policy', whom I have followed. Bentinck's letters to Macaulay and Trevelyan at this time are not among their papers. It was possible for W. H. Macnaghten, an Orientalist who had worked closely with Bentinck, to write to him in mocking terms about the 'Anglomania and Persiphobia' of Trevelyan, who was 'becoming perfectly rabid. . . . He has bitten Macaulay and Macaulay has bitten Ross, but I do not think the infection is likely to go much further among the Council': 7 May 1835, BP/PwJf/1369. 3 » Minute (General Dept.), 20 Jan. 1835, ibid., no. 2902. 40 Sel. Educ. Records, I, 152-3; Hilliker, op. cit., ch. 3. 360

REFERENCES 41 42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49

Rickards, India, II, 387-90. S. E. Finer, The Life and Times of Edwin Chadmck (1952), 93-5. Kopf, op. cit., 266-72, 283-91. List of guests at Government House, BP/PwJf/2628/lv-lvii; Salahuddin Ahmed, op. cit., 159-68; Pradip Sinha, Nineteenth-Century Bengal: Aspects of Social History (Calcutta, 1965), 97-8. See, for a stimulating discussion of these issues, A. D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism (1971). Sastri, Ramtanu Lahiri, 41-4; Salahuddin Ahmed, op. cit., 20-1, 159-68; Kopf, op. cit., 160-2. Abbé Dubois, Letters on the State of Christianity in India (1823), 165-7. Alexander Duff's evidence, Pari. Papers (1852-3), XXXII, 54, q. 6098. See, for a less catastrophic view than KopFs of the mid-Victorian Bengali intelligentsia, Pradip Sinha, op. cit., chs. 2, 5; W. M. Gunderson, 'Modernisation and Cultural Change', in E. C. Dimock, Jr. (ed.), Bengal Literature and History (East Lansing, Mich., 1967).

PART II Section 10 1

Philips, East India Company, 219. The most comprehensive study is K. N. Pandey, 'Lord William Bentinck and the Indian States, 1828-35' (London Ph.D. thesis, 1957). Nineteenth-century historians like Wilson, Marshman, and Beveridge also treated these matters in detail. See, for the north-west, Huttenback, British Relations with Sind, and J. A. Norris, The First Afghan War 1838-1842 (Cambridge, 1967); for Mysore, E. Bell, Memoir of General John Briggs (1885). There is no good modern study of relations with Avadh. 3 Secret Committee of the Court of Directors, 1823 (summing up much earlier policy), in Philips, op. cit., 240. 4 E. g. Marshman, History of India, II, 358-60; Beveridge, Comprehensive History of India, III, 210-29, 2 49~5 o ; Philips, op. cit., 271-2. 5 R. C. Majumdar, British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance, 37-46. 6 Malcolm to Bentinck, 27 July 1830, BP/PwJf/1457; H. StG. Tucker, Memorials of Indian Government (ed. J. W. Kaye, 1853), 242-6. ' To Bentinck from Auber (6 Mar. 1828), Ravenshaw (1 Feb. 1830), BP/PwJf/ 168, 1913. 8 Pandey, op. cit., 1-14, 78-96, 119-48; Bentinck, Minute (Political Dept.), 10 Feb. 1829, BP/PwJf/2911; Philips, op. cit., 271-2. * Briggs to Bentinck, 10 Sep. 1832, in Bell, Briggs, 206. 10 Pandey, op. cit., 80-1. " To Maddock (private), 4 Aug. 1830, BP/PwJf/1383; Pandey, op. cit., 96-118. ,J ^Ibid., ch. 3. 13 To Auber (private), 7 June 1832, BP/PwJf/211. 14 Pandey, op. cit., chs 3, 4; H. T. Prinsep to Bentinck, 21 June 1831, Bentinck to J. M. Macleod, 9 Sep. 1832, BP/PwJf/1893, 2696; K. N. V. Sastri, The Administration of Mysore under Sir Mark Cubbon (1834-1861) (1932), 137-50, 153-4; Bell, Briggs, 139-212. 1

361

REFERENCES 15

Bentinck to Ellenborough (private), 5 Nov., to Astell (private), 14 Nov. 1830, BP/PwJf/2594/xxxvii, lvi. 16 To Auber (private), 7 June 1832, ibid., no. 211. " To Lt.-Col. Lockett, 25 Apr. 1832, to Col. J. Stewart (confidential), 17 July

20

"

22

«

24 29 26 27

21

" « "

32

1834, ibid., nos 2074, 2696. Pandey, ch. 5; Bentinck to Portland, 13 Apr. 1834, BP/PwH/302. Bentinck, 'Mysore Queries', BP/Pwjf/3586/i/xi. Pandey, op. cit., 241 (n). Hjejle, 'Social Policy of the East India Company', ch. 15. 'Mysore Queries', loc. cit. Minute (Secret Dept.), 20 Jan. 1834, BP/PwJf/2913. Bentinck to Dalhousie, 3 Jan. 1832, Scot. Rec. OAF. GD/45/5/60; to Auber, 2 Apr. 1832, BP/PwJf/309; Pandey, op. cit., ch. 6. Norris, First Afghan War, 18-42; Ellenborough to Bentinck (private), 13 Jan. 1830, BP/PwJf/2594/xxxv. To Ellenborough (private), 1 June 1830, ibid., no. 2594/lii. Bentinck to Malcolm (private), 25 Sep. 1828, to Capt. Murray (private and confidential), 22 Oct. 1830, to Metcalfe (no date but c. 1830-1), to Maj. J . Stewart, 7 Sep. 1831, Stewart to Bentinck, 22 June 1830, ibid., nos. 1400, 1779 1836, 2594/lxxv, 2655/i; Jacquemont, Correspondance, I, 227-8; Minute, 13 Mar. 1835, in Boulger, Bentinck, 177-201. Bentinck to Grant, 17 Dec. 1831, (private) 1 May 1832, to Pottinger (private and confidential), 3 Nov., to R, Campbell (private). 15 Dec. 1831, BP/PwJf/2594/i, 2685/1, 2696; Huttenback, British Relations with Sind, 22-3. To Pottinger (private), 25 Feb. 1834 (draft, not sent), BP/PwJf/1885; Huttenback, op. cit., 27-9. Bentinck to C. Marjoribanks, 26 Feb. 1833, BP/PwJf/2709/v; Norris, op. cit., 61-3; Pandey, 'Bentinck and the Indian States', 227-39. Minute (Secret Dept.), 1 June 1833, BP/PwJf/2913. History of British India, III, 392-3.

P A R T ED Section 1 1

Bentinck to S. R. Lushington, 27 May 1832, BP/PwJf/2696. A view still embodied in P. Woodruff, The Men who ruled India (1953). » To Ravenshaw, 11 Dec. 1832, BP/PwJf/2685. 4 Embodied in the monumental work of B. H, Baden-Powell, Land-Systems of British India (Oxford, 1892). 2

Section 2 ' William Thackeray's report to Bentinck, 29 Apr. 1806, Pari. Papers (1812), VII, 9i3~i92 B. Stein, 'Integration of the Agrarian System of South India', and N. Mukherjee and R. E. Frykenberg, 'The Ryotwan System and Social Organisation in the

362

REFERENCES Madras Presidency', in Frykenberg (ed.), Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History (Madison, Wise., 1969). See also Baden-Powell, op. cit.; N. Mukherjee, The Ryotwari System in Madras 1792-1827 (Calcutta, 1962); Beaglehole, Thomas Munro; Hjejle, 'Dry and Wet Cultivation . . . in Madras'. > R. Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal (Paris-The Hague, 1963). 4 Hjejle, op. cit.; D. Kumar, Land and Caste in South India (Cambridge, 1965), ch. 1. ' Pari. Papers (1812), VII, 922-37. 6 Beaglehole, op. cit., 28. 7 G. R. Gleig, Life of Munro, I, 1-14. ' Beaglehole, op. cit., 17-29; Mukherjee and Frykenberg, op. cit., 223-5. ' Munro to T . Cockburn, 20 Dec. 1799, in Gleig, Life of Munro, I, 240. 10 Everyman edition, I, 154-62, 200-14. " To Petrie, 8 Nov. 1804, BP/PwJb/343-584. 12 To Ravens haw (private), 26 May 1805, ibid., no. 724. 13 Philips, East India Company, 200-4; Beaglehole, op. cit., 77-8; Pari. Papers (1812), VII, 912-13; Bentinck to Munro and others, 27 May, to Charles Grant (private), 8 Sep. 1805, 'Memoranda . . . to Major Leith', 15 Oct. 1806, BP/ PwJb/179, 724. 14 Gupta, 'Bentinck in Madras', 126-37; Philips, loc. cit.; Bentinck to S. R. Lushington (private), 30 Sep. 1828, to Loch (private), 20 Sept. 1829, to Astell (private), 14 Nov. 1830, BP/Pwjf/1208, 1397, 2594/xxxvii. " To W. Cochrane (private), 21 Sep. 1805, ibid., PwJb/724. 16 To Grant (private), 8 Sep. 1805, ibid., to Munro, 2 Dec. 1805, in Beaglehole, op. cit., 157. 17 R. Alexander (Judge, Ganjam) to Bentinck, 20 Sep., 27 Oct. 1806,15 Feb. 1807, BP/PwJb/i. 18 Munro, Minute, 31 May 1800, in Sir A. J . Arbuthnot (ed.), Major-General Sir Thomas Munro . . . Selections from his Minutes . . . (1881), I, 65. " Bentinck and Sicily, 169 (n). 10 To Ravenshaw (private), 26 May 1805, BP/PwJb/724. 11 Bentinck, Minute, 28 Nov. 1806, Pari. Papers (1812), VII, 920-1. 22 Munro, Minutes, 31 May, 19 Nov. 1800, in Arbuthnot, op. cit., I, 55-88. " For a fuller modern account (even then necessarily cautious) of Kanara tenure, see Kumar, Land and Caste, 26-8. 24 Ibid., 14-20; Hjejle, op. cit. » Pari. Papers (1812), VII, 918-19. 16 Bentinck to J . W. Cochrane (private), 21 Sep., Cochrane to Bentinck, 28 Nov. 1805, BP/PwJb/6, 724. " Bentinck's journal, 14 Feb. 1808, BP/PwJc/237. Section 3 ' This section is based on Bentinck and Sicily, together with Renda, La Sieilia nel 1812, and Mack Smith, Modern Sicily. References are given only to matter not dealt with in the first-named work.

363

REFERENCES Renda, op. cit., 52-3. Renda, op. cit., 410-16. Giovanni Corvaja, 'Memoria ossiano istruzioni per l'estimo di tutti i beni rivelati . . .', presented to Bonanno, 11 May 1814, Archivio di Stato, Palermo, Real Segreteria Incartamenti 5430. Corvaja, the author of the plan for a revenue survey, later had a curious career as a company promoter and a designer of Utopian Fourierist schemes for social and economic control through a collectively owned Government bank: D. Cantimori, Utopisti e riformatori italiani (Florence, 1943), 203-29. Munro, Minutes, 19 Sep. 1820, 25 Feb. 1823, in Arbuthnot, Munro Minutes, I, iI7-23-

P A R T m • Section 4 To Money, 1 June 1834, BP/PwJf/2643/i, quoted in Spear, 'Lord William Bentinck', 105-i. Eric Stokes's words, English Utilitarians, 104. To C. Marjoribanks, 30 July 1819, and discarded draft, BP/PwJe/531-7. The fullest account of British revenue policy in this region in 1801-33 is Husain, Land Revenue Policy in North India. See also Baden-Powell, Land-Systems of British India; Stokes, English Utilitarians; A. Siddiqi, Agrarian Change in a Northern Indian State (Oxford, 1973); S. C. Gupta, Agrarian Relations and Early British Rule in India . . . (1963). Minute, 7 Nov. 1830, in J. W. Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Charles Lord Metcalfe (1854), II, 191-2. Bentinck to Lushington (private), 30 Sep., to EUenborough (private), 16 Dec 1828, BP/PwJf/1397, 2594/xvi. Holt Mackenzie's comments on R. M. Bird's memorandum, no date but probably 1830, ibid., no. 2650/xvi. Husain, op. cit., 139-46. Stokes, English Utilitarians, 110-16. In his 'Traditional Elites in the Great Rebellion of 1857: Some Aspects of Rural Revolt in the Upper and Central Doab', in E. Leach and S. N. Mukherjee (eds.), Elites in South Asia (Cambridge, 1970), and 'Traditional Resistance Movements and Afro-Asian Nationalism: the Context of the 1857 Mutiny Rebellion in India', Past and Present, no. 48 (Aug. 1970). This and the following six paragraphs are based on my article 'Theory and Practice in North India: the Background to the Land "Settlement" of 1833', Indian Economic and Social History Review, VIII, No. 2 (June 1971), where full references are given. Baden-Powell, Land-Systems, II, 43. See, besides my 'Theory and Practice in North India', B. S. Cohn, 'Structural Change in Indian Rural Society 1596-1885', in Frykenberg, Land Control and Social Structure; E. Stokes, 'Rural Revolt in the Great Rebellion of 1857 in India: A Study of the Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar Districts', Historical Journal, X I I (1969), no. 4. A. Siddiqi, 'Agrarian Depression in Uttar Pradesh in 1828-33', Indian Econ. and Soc. Hist. Rev., VI (June 1969).

364

REFERENCES 15

16 17

18

" 20

21 22 23

" »

26

27

28

" 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38

"

Holt Mackenzie to Briggs, n Dec. 1868, in Bell, Memoir of General John Briggs, 279. Holt Mackenzie to Bentinck, 27 Aug., 3 Sep. 1828, BP/PwJf/1341/2, 2589/1. Governor-General in Council to Boards of Revenue, Western and Central Provinces, IOR, Bd. of Rev. Cent. Prov. range 114, vol. 19 (31 Oct. 1828, no. 13). To T . Pakenham, 14 Dec. 1828, to Lushington, 6 Sep., to Ellenborough (private), 5 Nov. 1829, to Loch (private), 21 Feb., Minute, 22 Feb., to Astell (private), 23 Feb., 14 Nov., 1830, to R. Campbell (private), 11 May 1831, BP/PwJf/i47, 1 2 1 1 , 1315, 1864, 2594/ix, xxxvii, xxxix. (The improver of Sutherland was a brother of William Loch, Deputy Chairman, then Chairman of the Court of Directors in 1828-9). To Auber, 14 Dec. 1829, ibid., no. 195. This, though Mackenzie is not named, seems the obvious meaning of his statement to Ellenborough (9 Nov. 1830, ibid., no. 2594/lvii) that he was having to take with him men less qualified than he could have called upon a year earlier. India Gazette, 11 Jan. 1833 (report of Bentinck's visit to Jabalpur). Collection of revenue papers, BP/PwJf/6250. Husain, op. cit., 240-1. Pari. Papers (1852-3), X X V I I I , 193-6, 205-«, qq. 5576-7, 5663. To Ravenshaw, 11 Dec. 1832, BP/PwJf/2685. Minute, 26 Sep. 1832, para. 4. This and other documents concerning the 1832-3 'settlement' appear in IOR, Selections from the Revenue Records of the Northwestern Provinces, 1822-33. There is a full discussion in Husain, ch. 5, and in S. C. Gupta, ch. 9. Auckland Colvin in 1872 was still putting forward Bird's view that pre-British revenue rates were 'perfectly well-known and undisputed' and that chief revenue engagers had merely enjoyed a one-tenth collection fee: Memorandum on the Revision of Land Revenue Settlements in the North-Western Provinces, A.D. 1860-1872 (Allahabad, 1872), 9 - 1 1 . Minute, 26 Sep. 1832, paras 16-32. Bird's memoranda, no date, BP/PwJf/2650/xvi, 2694/I; Bird's minute, 25 Sep. 1832, Sel. Rev. Rec. N.W. Prov. 1822-33, 419 ff. Bentinck's Minute, 26 Sep. 1832, paras 33-44. Ibid., paras 15, 46; Husain, op. cit., 217-21. Minute, 26 Sep. 1832, paras 1 1 - 1 5 , 45-108; Stokes, English Utilitarians, 114; Husain, op. cit., 214-17; Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections (1915 ed.), 63; Bentinck to Auber (confidential), 11 May 1832, BP/PwJf/210. Evidence of T. J . Turner, Pari. Papers (1852-3), XXVIII, 210-11, qq. 5708-17. Minute, 26 Sep. 1832, paras 66-7. Ibid., para. 36. Ibid., paras 64-5. Husain, op. cit., 195-212; Siddiqi, Agrarian Change, 36-41. To Money, 1 June 1834, BP/PwJf/2643/i, quoted in Spear, 'Lord William Bentinck', 105-6. Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', 247-50; Pari. Papers (1831-2), XI, 304 (evidence of Holt Mackenzie); Salahuddin Ahmed, Social Ideas and Social Change, 103-8; Marshman, History of India, II, 350-2.

365

REFERENCES 40

E. T . Atkinson (ed.), Statistical, Descriptive, and Historical Account of the Northwestern Provinces . . . (Allahabad, 1881), VI, 388-9. 41 Siddiqi, 'Agrarian Depression in Uttar Pradesh'. 41 Memorandum to Bentinck, no date, BP/PwJf/2694/l. This paper probably dates from Bentinck's visit to Gorakhpur in February 1830. The depression got under way in 1828. 45 To Astell (private), 14 Nov. 1830, ibid., no. 2594/xxxvii. 44 T o Briggs (draft), 14 Aug. 1831, ibid., no. 2594/kvii. The words quoted are crossed out. Cf. similar criticism of the 'perpetual drain' on India by the Tory 'Bengali' H. St G. Tucker, Memorials of Indian Government, 395, 491-502. 45 To Briggs, 14 Aug. 1831, loc. cit. 46 To W. Cochrane (private), 21 Sep. 1805, BP/PwJb/724. 4 ' Rickards, India II, 18-47, 188-91, 196-203; Bell, Briggs, 88-9, 108-22. 4 * To Briggs, 14 Aug. 1831, loc. cit.; Bentinck's marginal notes to extracts from Munro's revenue papers, BP/PwJf/2650/xii. 49 Minute, 26 Sep. 1832, para. 69. 50 T o Ravenshaw, 11 Dec. 1832, to C. Marjoribanks, 26 Feb. 1833, ibid., nos. 2685, 2709/v. 51 W. W. Bird to Bentinck, 15 Aug. 1833, ibid., no. 2626/i. The rate of 5 or 6% which Bentinck had mentioned to Bird (Bird thought it 'not unfrequently perhaps more') was presumably a monthly rate: an annual 5 or 6% would have been hopelessly unrealistic. In any case they were discussing short-term loans needed to pay instalments of revenue while the crops stood in the fields. Bird's conclusion was that 'without [the moneylender] in the actual state of things the business both of cultivating and collecting would soon come to a stand'. Cf. Siddiqi, Agrarian Change, 130-9.

Section 5 1 2

3 4 5

6 7 8

Bentinck to Charles Grant, 21 Dec. 1832, BP/PwJf/2685, quoted in Spear, 'Lord William Bentinck', 106-7. The judicial reforms of Bentinck's time have been studied by Stokes, English Utilitarians, ch. 3; Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', ch. 7; G. Seed, 'The Social and Administrative Reforms of Lord William Bentinck' (St. Andrews Ph.D. thesis, 1949), 45-113; C. Sinha, 'Doctrinal Influences on the Judicial Policy of the East India Company's Administration in Bengal, 1772-1833', Hist. Journal, X I I , no. 2 (1969). Sir H. S. Maine, Village-Communities in the East and West (1871), 27-8. B. S. Cohn, 'From Indian Status to British Contract", Journal of Economic History, Dec. 1961. General Letter to Bengal, 10 Feb. 1830, para. 4, quoted in IOR, Sadr Bd of Rev. on Deputation Western Provinces, range 96, vol. 38 (10 Aug. 1830, no. 12); Trevelyan's evidence, Pari Papers (1852-3), X X V I I I , 1 3 3 - 5 , 1 1 - 5165-9. Bentinck's note on Metcalfe's minute, 11 Oct. 1829, BP/PwJf/1522. To Sir C. Grey, 21 Dec. 1829, ibid., no. 1101; Minute, 31 July 1834, Pari. Papers (1852-3), XXVII, 526-7. Quoted by Seed, 'Social and Administrative Reforms of Bentinck', 80-5.

366

REFERENCES To Sir T. Strange (private), 7 Mar. 1805, BP/PwJb/725; Gupta, 'Bentinck in Madras', 151-79. Bentinck and Sicily, 78-9, 124-5. Cf. Sinha, 'Doctrinal Influences'. Bentinck to Petrie, 30 Mar. i8o[ ], BP/PwJb/343-584. Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal' ch. 6; Ellenborough to Bentinck, 2 Jan. 1830, quoted in D. Panigrahi, 'Sir Charles Metcalfe's Administration and Administrative Ideas in India 1806-1835' (SOAS Ph.D. thesis, 1964), 227-8; Auber to Bentinck, 24 Nov. 1831, BP/PwJf/261; L. S. S. O'Malley, The Indian Civil Service 1601-1930 (1931), 51. 'Abstract statement of suits determined . . .', BP/PwJf/2571/iv; Stokes, op. cit., 15*To Metcalfe, 16 Sep. 1829, quoted in Sinha, op. cit. Seed, op. cit., 45-106; Stokes, English Utilitarians, 154-5,188-9, 214-15, 264-5. To Grant, 21, 22 Dec. 1832, BP/PwJf/2685. P. Banerjea, Indian Finance in the Days of the Company (1928), 315-17. Sir C. Grey to Bentinck, 6 July 1832 (on James Mill's views), ibid., no. 1117.

PART IV • Section 1 D. H. Buchanan, The Development of Capitalistic Enterprise in India (1966; ist ed. 1934), 450-1, 455-9. This remains the most comprehensive survey. See also D. and A. Thorner, Land and Labour in India (1962), 51-112, and, for a questioning of commonly held assumptions, M. D. Morris, 'Towards a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth-Century Indian Economic History', Journ. of Econ. Hist., XXIII (1963), no. 4. A. Tripathi, Trade and Finance in the Bengal Presidency, 1793-1833 (Bombay, 1956), 246-7. John Bull (Calcutta), 16 Sep. 1829. Tripathi, op. cit., 191, 217-18. Notice, 2 Mar. 1829, in Salahuddin Ahmed, Social Ideas and Social Change in Bengal, 3 (n). India Gazette, 1, 14 Feb. 1833. Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections (1915 ed.), 444-5; Memorandum, BP/PwJf/ 2682/xi-xii. To Auber, 27 Mar. 1833, ibid., no. 216. To BentinckfromSir C. Grey (11 Oct. 1828), Sir E. Ryan (29 Jan. 1832,29 Feb. 1836), ibid., nos. 1095, 2000, PwJg/309; H. T. Bernstein, Steamboats on the Ganges (Bombay, i960), 42-5. To Ellenborough, 5 Nov. 1829, 7 Nov. 1830, Minute on Military Board, 1831, ibid., nos. 2594/iv, ix, 2666/v. To Ellenborough, 5 Nov. 1829, loc. cit. Malcolm to Bentinck (private), 28 July 1830, Bentinck to Grant, 3 May 1831, BP/PwJf/1458, 2594/xxvii. To Portland, 11 July 1830, BP/PwH/279. Cf. Buchanan, op. cit., 127-8, 136.

367

REFERENCES T o Grant, 14 Apr. 1834, quoted in Thompson, The Making of the Indian Princcs, 176; to R. Campbell (private), 7 May 1831, 8 June 1832, from Ravenshaw, 28 Feb. 1834, from Auber, 17 Aug. 1833, BP/PwJf/292, 1942, 2594/xli, 2685. Pari. Papers (1837), VI, 551 (quoting Bentinck's 1834 letter to the Madras Steam Fund). Though much work on Indian economic history is still to do some of these questions are dealt with, more comprehensively than is possible here, by (for indigo) B. Kling, The Blue Mutiny (Philadelphia, 1966), (for tea) Sir P. Griffiths, A History of the Indian Tea Industry (1967), (for steam navigation) Bernstein, op. cit., H. L. Hoskins, British Routes to India (New York, 1928), and D. Thorner, Investment in Empire: British Railway and Steam Shipping Enterprise in India 1825-1849 (Philadelphia, 1950), (for finance and banking) Tripathi, op. cit., and Banerjea, Indian Finance in the Days of the Company. There is a survey, not quite complete, of Bentinck's improvement ventures in Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', ch. 8. P A R T IV • Section 2 James Young to Bentinck, 12 Dec. 1832, BP/PwJf/2382. Minutes (Financial Dept.), 14 May 1830,15 Apr. 1833, ibid., no. 2903; Tripathi, op. cit., 209-11, 226-31, 237-40. Cradock to Bentinck, 26 Nov. 1805, BP/PwJb/12. S. Ambirajan, 'Laissez-Faire in Madras', Ind. Ec. and Soc. Hist. Rev., VII (1965); Gupta, 'Bentinck in Madras', 249-63. Tucker, Memorials of Indian Government, 403-5; J. W. Kaye, Life . . . of H. StG. Tucker (1854), 104-18; Banerjea, Indian Finance, 65 ff. Bentinck to Wellesley, [ ] Jan., July 1804,12,29 Mar. 1805, to Bentinck from Wellesley (26 Jan. 1804), Tucker (11 July 1804), A. Davis (1804), Add. M S S «3633 ff- 52> 83> 92» 98, 13634 ff- 28, 150, 13635 f. 187; Basil Cochrane to Bentinck, 31 May 1806, BP/PwJb/7. Ambirajan, op. cit.; Bentinck to Castelreagh, 20 Feb., to Sir G. Barlow (private), 14 Feb., to J. Bosanquet (private), 24 Feb., 'Memoranda . . . to Major Leith', 15 Oct. 1806, BP/PwJb/179, 726-7; B. Cochrane to Bentinck, loc. cit. T o [Chamier], 22 Feb., to Castlereagh, 20 Feb. 1806, BP/PwJb/147, 726. T o Wellesley (private), 29 Mar. 1805 (with marginal notes by A. Davis), Add. M S S 13635 f. 187; Gupta, op. cit., 220-32, 278-80. T o A. Cockburn, 12 Jan. 1806, to Petrie, 12 Apr., 29 Sep. 1807, to Titchfield, 11 Jan. 1806, BP/PwJb/343-584, 723. Minutes, 14 May 1830, 15 Apr. 1833, to Astell, 4 June 1830, to Auber, 7 May 1833, BP/PwJf/149, 218, 2903. Bentinck's loans to the agency houses were not fully taken up—just over half the 1830 loan was, and even less of the 1833 loan: Court's proposed financial paragraphs to Bengal, Bentinck to C. Marjoribanks, 31 Dec. 1833, ibid., nos 2689, 2696. Kling, op. cit., 42-4. Ibid., 19-42; Buchanan, op. cit., 35-53. Minute, 30 May 1829, BP/PwJf/2903; Kling, op. cit., 42-4, 219. T o Bentinck from D. Craufurd (Judge, Mannargudi), 29 Oct. 1806, F. W. Ellis (Judge, Kumbakonam), 22 Jan. 1807, BP/PwJb/7. T o W. T . Clark, 29 Nov. 1829, BP/PwJf/205.

368

REFERENCES " To Loch, 12 Aug. 1828, from Loch, 20 Apr. 1829, Minute (Revenue Dept.), 2 Feb. 1830, to R. Campbell (private), 7 May 1831, ibid., nos. 1202-3, 2594/*li> 2903. 18 D. Dewar, A Handbook to the English Pre-Mutiny Records in . . . the United Provinces... (Allahabad, [1919]), 326; Seed, 'Social and Administrative Reforms of Bentinck', 26-40. "> Ibid., 211-14; Ravenshaw to Bentinck, 10/27 Dec. 1831, BP/PwJf/1924. 20 Minute (General Dept.), 22 June 1829, ibid., no. 2902. 21 Spear, 'Bentinck and the Taj'; Mofiusil Akhbar, quoted in Calcutta Courier, 15 Dec. 1832; Capt. Boileau and Lt.-Col. J. Taylor to Benson, Mar-July 1833, BP/PwJf/2855. 22 G. B. Tremenheere, 'On Public Works in the Bengal Presidency', Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, XVII (1857-8), 483-538; Bentinck, Minute, 27 July 1829, Minute on Military Board, 1831, correspondence from Sir S. Whittingham and R. A. C. Hamilton, BP/PwJf/2199, 2208, 2666/v, 2672, 2902. 21 Minute (Revenue Dept.), 2 Feb. 1830, other papers on Salt Lake, ibid., nos 2778, 2903. 24 See note 22. 25 Minute on Military Board, 1831, BP/PwJf/2666/v. Bentinck also had 1% levied on the town duties to forward urban improvement. 26 D. Wilson (ed.), Bishop Wilson's Journal Letters . . . (1863), 8 (10 June 1833). 27 J. Prinsep to C. B. Greenlaw, 10 Mar. 1835, Steam Committee petition, 12 Feb. 1838, BP/PwJf/2726/vi, PwJg/137. 28 Calcutta Courier, 18 July 1833. " To Auber, 12 May 1834, BP/PwJf/233. 30 Thorner, op. cit., 178-9. 31 Semmel, Rise of Free Trade Imperialism, 108. 52 J. H. Johnston to Bentinck, 3 Jan. 1837, 18 Sep. 1838, BP/PwJg/213, 215. Cf. Bernstein, Steamboats on the Ganges, 112. 33 Sir E. Ryan to Bentinck, 29 Feb. 1836, BP/PwJg/309. 34 Minute (General Dept.), 16 Aug. 1830, to Grant (private), 21 Oct. 1833, to T. A. Curtis, 29 Nov. 1838, BP/PwJf/2709/ii, 2902, PwJg/87. 35 Bentinck to Rev. [ ] Jolliffe, 1 July 1830, BP/PwJf/1181; Bernstein, op. cit., 29-37; Hoskins, op. cit., 103-10. 36 To Auber, 20 Oct. 1827, BP/PwJf/164. In 1801 Bentinck had extracted from RennelTs Memoir on the Map of Hindostan a passage about Pliny's account of navigation between India and the Isthmus of Suez: ibid., PwJa/460. 3 ' Bentinck to Loch, 12 Aug., to Astell, 17 Oct. 1828, BP/PwJf/135, 1202. 38 Bernstein, op. cit., ch. 5. 39 Minute (Political Dept.), 28 Mar. 1834, BP/PwJf/2912; Hoskins, op. cit., 110-25; Seed, op. cit., 224^7. 40 For the companies aiming at ocean-borne communication, see Hoskins, op. cit., 213-17, 245-51, Thorner, op. cit., 29-39; f° r the proposed inland companies, Bernstein, op. cit., 112-13, and Bentinck's correspondence with Tennant, Thomas Ochterlony, J. H. Johnston, and Andrew Henderson, besides prospectuses &c, BP/PwJg.

369

41 41

43 44

45 46 47

REFERENCES Tb BcBbnck from Head, 1836-7, from A, Wardrop, 24 Feb. 1837, ibid., nos. 162, 171-180. Letter by Peter Auber, Asiatic Journal, N.S. XXVIII, no. 1 1 1 , pp. 235-41; Benririck to Teimant, 25 Feb. 1838, Maj. Gen. Wright to Bentinck, 12 Mar. 1839, BP/PwJg/341, 390. Curtis to Bentinck, 2 Sep., Bentinck to Poli (not sent), 13 May 1825, proposed distribution of shares, BP/PwJd/6228, PwJe/243, 678. Bentinck to Chairs, 14 Aug., to Curtis, 29 Nov. 1838, to Bentinck from Auber (15 Jan. 1838,7 Mar. 1839), Curtis (6 Nov. 1838), Col. Craigie (30 Sep. 1838), Capt. Barber (it Jan. 1839), BP/PwJg/15,17, 29, 79, 86-7, 435. Maj. W. Turner to Bentinck, 14 Nov., Bentinck to Curtis, 29 Nov. 1838, ibid, nos. 87, 353; Thorner, op. cit., 33-4. Pari. Papers (1837), VI, 550-4. Ibid., pp. 546-7, qq. 1928-34; Macnaghten to Bentinck, 30 Jan. 1836, BP/ PwJg/237. Section 3

1

J. H. Bell, British Folks and British India Fifty Years Ago: Joseph Pease and His Contemporaries ([1891]), 35-6. 2 E. de Valbezen, quoted in Banerjea, Indian Finance, 111 (n). 3 K. N. Chaudhuri, 'India's International Economy in the Nineteenth Century: an Historical Survey', Modern Asian Studies, II (1968), no. 1, 31-50. 4 Tripathi, Trade and Finance, 236. 5 Ibid., 193-4, 220 i 249-50; Trevelyan's evidence, Pari. Papers (1852-3), XXXII, 156, qq. 6637-9, 6660; Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', ch. 8. 6 Bentinck's farewell message to Calcutta Steam Committee, 1835, Pari. Papers (1839), XXXIX, 201. » Kling, Blue Mutiny, 19-26, 34-7. 8 Sir G. Clarke, The Post Office of India and its Story (1921), 14-18; Barrett, op. cit., ch. 8. 9 Bernstein, op. cit., 97-100, 101-2, 113-17. 10 Tremenheere, op. cit., 501-4. " Thorner, op. cit., 34-9. 11 Minute (Revenue Dept.), 8 Aug. 1830, BP/PwJf/2903. Cf. Minute (General Dept.), 30 Jan. 1831, Bentinck's diary, 15 Sep. 1828, Sage to Benson, 24 Feb. 1830, ibid., nos. 440, 2902, 2943, for other data on coal prospecting. " Buchanan, Capitalistic Enterprise, 127-9, 255-7, 274-81.

PART V • Section 1 • Bentinck to Ravenshaw, 30 Dec. 1833, BP/PwJf/2709/vi. Bentinck to Portland, 23 June 1807, BP/PwF/1211. 3 Ravenshaw to Bentinck, 3 Dec. 1827, BP/PwJf/1901. 2

370

REFERENCES Holt Mackenzie to [ ], [ ] 1828, ibid., no. 1340/1. The Journal of Mrs. Fenton ... 1826-1830 (1901), 233 (Sep. 1828). To Sir H. Taylor, 14 Feb. 1829, in E. Taylor (ed.), The Taylor Papers (1913), 243. Speech at East India Company's dinner, 1827, BP/PwJf/2577. To Malcolm (private), 26 Aug. 1828, ibid., no. 1399. To Portland, 11 Sep. 1830, BP/PwH/280. Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', 351; Bentinck to Metcalfe (confidential), 20 Nor. [1831L BP/PwJf/1759. Bentinck's health in India is documented chiefly by his letters to Portland, BP/ PwH/272-308. See also: to Metcalfe, 15 Mar., 22 Apr. 1834, from Sir F. Adam, 10 Mar. 1835, ibid., PwJf/116, 1728, 1731. [?James Young] to Bentham, 14 Nov. 1830, in Bentham, Works, XI, 60; The Taylor Papers, 225, 227; Shore, Notes on Indian Affairs, II, 231 (n). Section 2 Fitzjames Stephen, quoted in B. Spangenberg, 'The Problem of Recruitment for the Indian Civil Service during the Late Nineteenth Century*, Journal of Asian Studies, XXX, no. 2 (Feb. 1971). P. Auber, The Rise of British Power in India (1838), II, 232-49, 309-10; Bennell, 'Southern India under Wellesley', App. I. Wellesley to Bentinck (private and confidential), 1 Feb. 1804, Bentinck to Wellesley (private), 2 Mar., 6, 9, 15 June, 24 Nov. 1804, to F. North, 7 Sep. 1805, Add. MSS 13633 f. 69, 13635 ff. 26, 105, 114, 116, 146, 37309 f. 29; Dowdeswell to Bentinck, 10,14 May, 30 June 1804, Wellesley to [Dowdeswell], 24 July 1804, BP/PwJb/13. Gupta, 'Bentinck in Madras', 232-3; G. Seed, 'The Mutiny at Vellore and the Dismissal of Lord William Bentinck from the Governorship of Madras' (unpublished article kindly communicated by Dr. Seed). Bentinck to [PChamier], 22 Feb., to J. Bosanquet (private), 24 Feb., to Castlereagh (private), 20 Feb., to Titchfield, n Jan. 1806, to Portland, 1 Jan. 1807, BP/Pwjb/147, 723, 726-7, PwF/1206. To Astell (private), 8 June 1829, to R. Campbell (private), 4 May 1831, 8 June 1832, BP/PwJf/141, 2594/xli. To Castlereagh, 18 Oct. 1808, BP/PwJc/236. Memorial to the Court of Directors, 47-8. Pari. Papers (1837), VI, 554. Ravenshaw to Bentinck, 7 July, 19 Nov. 1829, 16 Feb., 3 May, 9 Dec. 1830, BP/PwJf/1909, 1912-13, 1915-16, 1918. Stanhope, Conversations with Wellington (3rd ed., 1889), 68. Bentinck's name is suppressed, but the anecdote immediately follows one about Lady William; cf. similar Wellington sayings in Lord Ellenborough, Political Diary (ed. Lord Colchester, 1881), II, 51-2, 56-7, 59, 143; Shore, Notes on Indian Affairs, II, 231 (n)P. Spear, 'Lord Ellenborough and Lord William Bentinck', Proceedings of the Indian History Congress (1939), 1360-74; Bentinck to Grant, 3 May 1831, BP/PwJf/2594/xxvii. 37*

REFERENCES 13

To Frederick Lamb, 5 Nov. 1829, Beauvale Papers, box 8, Royal Archives, Windsor. 14 Ravenshaw to Bentinck, 13 Sep. 1832, BP/PwJf/1930. 15 To Bentinck from C. Marjoribanks (13 May 1833), Auber (private, 20 Apr., 11 May 1833), ibid., nos. 285-6, 1494. 16 Bentinck to Graham, 27 June 1831, Graham MSS; to Metcalfe, no date, BP/ PwJf/1772. " To Titchfield, 11 Jan. 1806, BP/PwJb/723. 18 Auber to Bentinck (private and confidential), 3 July 1829, Bentinck, Minute (General Dept.), 8 Aug. 1829, BP/PwJf/2631/i, 2902. " Bentinck to Metcalfe, 5 Apr. 1834, ibid., no. 1729; Pari. Papers (1835), X X X I X , 4-21. 10 To Grant (private), 10 Mar. 1833, BP/PwJf/2709/iii. 21 Macaulay to Spring Rice, 8 Feb. 1836, Bodleian MS Eng. Lett. c. 58, quoted in Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', 9. 22 Kaye, Life of Metcalfe, II, 173-9. 23 Pari. Papers (1852-3), X X X I I , 165-6, qq. 6649-51. 24 Shore, Notes on Indian Affairs, II, 220-1. " Bentinck to Castlereagh (private), 30 Aug. 1813, BP/PwJd/6250; to Andrew Douglas, 20 May 1814, Public Record Office PRO/7/1. 16 Bentinck to Prinsep, 4 Mar. 1832 (draft), BP/PwJf/2696; cf. Miss Eden's Letters (ed. V. Dickinson, 1919), 320. 27 To Malcolm, 26 Aug. 1828, to Metcalfe (private), 4 Feb. 1834, BP/PwJf/1399, 1726. 28 To Melbourne, 1836, quoted in Marshman, History of India, II, 439. 29 Bentinck to Lushington, 27 May, to Macleod, 27 May, 9 Sep. 1832, in Bell, Briggs, 175. 30 To Cradock, 7 May 1807, BP/PwJb/12. 31 To Grant, 21 Dec. 1832, in Spear, 'Lord William Bentinck', 107. 32 Ravenshaw to Bentinck (private), 16 Oct/23 Nov. 1832, BP/PwJf/1932. 33 To Portland, 3 Mar. 1807, BP/PwF/1208. 34 There is a vast documentation on the Gwillim affair. See IOR, Home Miscellaneous 431, 691 (3-10); BP/PwJb/132-3, 135, 178, 191-2, 201, 203-10, 634; Gupta, 'Bentinck in Madras', 179-96, 204-17. 31 Bentinck to Portland, 3 Feb. 1805, 17 Sep. 1806, correspondence with Cradock, MacDowall, T. Grenville, 1805-7, Bentinck's Madras journal, 1 Jan., 3 July 1807, BP/PwF/1203, PwJb/12, 189, 197-8, 672/1, 677/1, 723-4; Bentinck to Wellcsley, 13 Mar. 1805, Add. MSS 13635 f. 173. 36 To Barnes, 2 May 1832, BP/PwJf/360. See, for Combermere, Mary Viscontess Combermere and W. W. Knollys, Memoirs and Correspondence of. . . Viscount Combermere (1866), II, 199-214, Barrett, op. cit., ch. 10; for Dalhousie, his papers in the Scottish Record Office, GD/45/5/59-60, 51/9/472; for both of these and Barnes, Bentinck's correspondence with all three, as well as with Auber, Grant, Loch, Metcalfe, and Ravenshaw, and (for similar troubles in the Bombay and Madras Governments) with Clare and Sir F. Adam, BP/PwJf. 37 Lieut. H. J . Close to Bentinck, 7 Jan. 1807, BP/PwJb/7. 38 To Bentinck from A. Anstruther, 22 Oct. 1808, Dr. Fitzgerald, 14 Jan. 1805, D. Craufurd, 21 Sep. 1806, ibid., nos. 7, 19, 320.

372

REFERENCES 19

Bentinck's correspondence with Oakes and Petrie, 1804-7, passim, ibid., nos. 151-3, 215, 225-31, 286, 343-584, 612, 614; Bentinck to Castlereagh (private), 18 Oct. 1804, ibid., no. 722, to Portland, 15 May 1807, BP/PwF/1210; Wellesley to Bentinck (private and confidential), 4 Dec. 1803, Add. MSS 13633 f. 64; Bennell, 'Southern India under Wellesley', 166-72. 40 To Col. Craigie, 9 Nov. 1833, BP/PwJf/2696. 41 To Col. Salmond, 16 July 1830, ibid., no. 2040. 42 To Grant, 21 Dec. 1832, ibid., no. 2685. 43 Minute (Public Dept.), 10 Nov. 1831, ibid., no. 2902. 44 To Auber, 6 May 1830, ibid., no. 198. 45 To Bentinck from Col. Doyle (12 July 1827), Auber (24 Nov. 1831), Ellenborough (19 May 1829), ibid., nos. 261, 906, 932; from Ellenborough, 2 Jan. 1830, quoted in Panigrahi, 'Sir Charles Metcalfe's Administration', 227-8. 46 Diary, July 1828, to Metcalfe, 4 Feb. 1834, BP/PwJf/1726, 2943. 47 To Martin, 14 June, to Astell, 5 July 1830, to Metcalfe, 5, 28 June, 19 Sep. 1831, ibid., nos. 152, 1709, 1711, 1714, 2663/1/vi. 48 Shore, Notes on Indian Affairs, I, 95-104. 49 These measures are dealt with in detail by Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', ch. 6. See also Seed, 'Social and Administrative Reforms of Bentinck', 15-40; O'Malley, The Indian Civil Service; A. Barat, The Bengal Native Infantry (Calcutta, 1962). 50 Bentinck to Charles Harris, 24 Jan. 1806, BP/PwJb/727. f To Loch, 12 Aug. 1828, BP/PwJf/1202. 52 Letters to Bengal Hurkaru, 28 Jan., 21 Mar., 11 June 1829. 53 Letters to India Gazette, 18 May 1829 (quoted in Hurkaru, 19 May), 13 Sep., 4, 22 Nov., 17 Dec. 1831. 54 Bentinck to Auber (private), 10 June, to Loch (private and confidential), 7, 29 June 1829, to Col. Salmond, 16 July, to Metcalfe, 1 Dec., to Capt. Angelo, 2 Dec. 1830, to R. Campbell (private), 11 May 1831, BP/PwJf/130, 191, 1206-7, I 7 20 > 2040, 2594/xxxix. For Bentinck's handling of the press over half-batta, see M. Barns, The Indian Press (1940), 186, 191-6. For minority service opinion in Bentinck's favour, see P. Meadows Taylor, The Story of My Life (1876), I, 115119; S. Sneade Brown, Home Letters 1827-41 (1878), 61-3, quoted in Barrett, op. cit., 10. » Lady William to Bentinck, 15 July, 10 Nov. 1834, BP/PwJf/485, 488.

PART V • Section 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

C. W. Wynn to Bentinck (private), 3 Nov. 1827, BP/PwJf/2370. To Auber, 6 May 1830, ibid., no. 198. To Ravenshaw (private), 8 July 1832, to Auber (confidential), 29 Dec. 1833, military papers, 1832-3, ibid., nos. 2669, 2685, 2696. To Grant, 15 Mar. 1834, ibid., no. 2690/i. To Grant, 21 Oct. 1833, ibid., no. 2709/ii. Minute, 22 Feb. 1830, ibid., no. 2911. Banerjea, Indian Finance, 101-6; Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', ch. 8. To Metcalfe, 17 July 1831, to Ravenshaw, 30 Dec. 1833, BP/PwJf/1712, 2709/vi. 373

REFERENCES • Macaulav to Margaret Cropper, 10 Aug. 1834, Macaulay MSS, Trinity College, Cambridge, 0.15.12D. 10 Auber to Bentinck, n May 1833, BP/PwJf/286. Then and later the Court regularly objected to governors leaving the Presidency Towns: Pari. Papers (1852-3), XXXIII, 76, q. 8777; Benson to Bentinck, 31 Dec. 1837, BP/PwJfg/35. 11 Minute, 13 Mar. 1835, in Boulger, Bentinck, 201. 12 Bentinck to Grant (private), 12 May 1834, BP/PwJf/1067. See Boulger, op. cit., 177-201; Barat, Bengal Native Infantry, 95-100, 134-6, 143—9; Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', ch. 10. " Pari. Papers (1836), XL, 451-8; to Bentinck from Hobhouse (20 July), Ravenshaw (5 Oct. 1835), BP/PwJf/1156, 1158. Cf. Sir J. Keane to Sir H. Taylor, 7 Apr. 1837, in The Taylor Papers, 387-8; Barat, op. cit., 163-6; Barrett, op. cit., 306-9. >• Bentinck to Windham (private), 11 Mar. 1807, Add. MSS 37886 f. 166. Already ten years earlier Bentinck disapproved of the lash as a punishment for drunkenness: Lt.-Col. Combers to Bentinck, 27 Sep. 1797, BP/PwJa/i 13. » Bentinck's Spanish journal, 7, 8 Sep. 1808, BP/PwJc/238 (conversations with Moore). '» Minute, 16 Feb. 1835, Pari. Papers (1836), XL, 453-8. " Barns, The Indian Press, i8iff.; Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal', ch. 2.

PART V • Section 4 1

Bentham, Works, X, 450. Barrett, 'Bentinck in Bengal'; G. D. Bearce, British Attitudes Towards India 1784-1858 (Oxford, 1961), 153-79* Young to Bentinck, [ ] 1828,4 July 1830,20 Apr. 1834, BP/PwJf/2376, 2379, 2386. See Stokes, English Utilitarians, 118, 190-3, 234^7. * Maj. W. Beatson (a member of Derozio's Academic Association) to Capt. R. Benson, 29 Dec. 1828, BP/PwJf/421. » To Bentinck from Sir E. Ryan (19 Oct.), Macnaghten (16 Aug. 1835), BP/ PwJg/236, 308. 6 Bentinck to Dr. Turner, 25 Oct. 1835, BP/PwJf/2146. 7 Panigrahi, 'Sir Charles Metcalfe's Administration', ch. 5. 8 Trevelyan's evidence, Pari. Papers (1852-3), XXVIII, 122-5, 130, qq. 5101-6, 5i4°* Bentinck to Lushington, 27 May, to Grant, 21 Dec. 1832, to Col. Stewart, 29 Apr. 1834, BP/PwJf/2073, 2685, 2696; O'Malley, Indian Civil Service, 51. 10 Minute, 10 Oct. 1829, Pari. Papers (1831), VI, 568-70. " To Ravenshaw (private), 17 Nov. 1832, BP/PwJf/2685. 12 To Astell (private), 23 Feb. 1830, ibid., no. 147. 13 To Briggs, 27 Feb. 1832, in Bell, Briggs, 175. "» To Tucker (private and confidential), 11 Aug. 1834, BP/PwJf/2138. Cf. Stokes, op. cit., 174-5. 15 Ibid., p. 116; Husain, Land Revenue Policy, 243-4; Bell, British Folks and British India, 35-6. 2

374

REFERENCES Spear, 'Bentinck and the Taj'; Major Mountain to Bentinck, 3 Nov. 1834 (on the care of the Taj and the need to care for Agra Fort), Bentinck, Minute (Public Dept.), 14 Oct. 1833, BP/PwJf/1826, 2902; Trevelyan's evidence, Pari. Papers (1852-3), XXXII, 169-2, 197, qq. 6635-6, 6800; India Gazette, n July 1831. Section 6 'Reorganisation of the Reform Party', in Estays on Politics ami Culture, »75. To Melbourne, 6 Dec. 1837, Melbourne Papers, Royal Archives, Windsor. To Sir James Graham, 10 Dec. 1836, Graham MSS. Glasgow Argus, 27 July 1837. Greville Memoirs (ed. Strachey and Fulford), III, 281-2 (12 Feb. 1836). Bentinck to Portland, 12 July, 19 Oct- 1835, to Metcalfe (confidential), 7 Mar. 1836, BP/PwH/308-9, PwJf/1746; Lord George Bentinck to Graham, 24 Jan. 1836, Graham MSS. Bentinck to Metcalfe, 7 Mar. 1836, loc. cit.; from Sir Edward Ryan (29 Feb.), Rev. J. Hill (9 May 1836), BP/PwJg/2o8, 309. Palmerston to Bentinck, 1 Aug. 1835, in Goulding, Letters written by Charles Lamb's'Primely Woman'..., 171; from E. J. Stanley, 2, 16, 23 Jan. 1836, from Colin Dunlop (outgoing M.P. for Glasgow), 16 Dec. 1835, 20 Jan. 1836, from W. Mills, 21 Mar., from John Bowring, 8 Sep. 1836, Bentinck to Lord Advocate of Scotland, 14 Oct., 1 Dec. 1835, to Dunlop, 4 Jan. 1836, BP/PwJf/911-15, PwJg/44, 256, 274-5, 325-7; Glasgow Herald, 18, 19 Feb. 1836. Lord George Bentinck to Graham, 24 Jan. 1836, Graham MSS. A. Wilson, The Chartist Movement in Scotland (Manchester, 1970), ch. 1; Spectator, quoted in Glasgow Argus, 25 May 1837. Glasgow Argus, 25 Jan. 1836 (speech of David Todd at Political Union meeting). Reformers' Gazette, 30 Jan. 1836. Wilson, op. cit., 28-41; Glasgow Argus, 15 Feb. 1836 (quoting Liberator), 25 May 1837 (quoting Spectator); Reformers'' Gazette, 30 Jan. 1836. Glasgow Argus, 1 Feb. 1836. Election accounts, BP/PwJg/404-5. The 1836 by-election cost £456 2s 3d plus £100 for the agent; Bentinck paid all of this. Returning two candidates in 1837 cost £1,883 I 2 S 2 d, of which Bentinck paid half. Portland's agent thought the 1836 expenses 1very moderate': Charles Heaton to Bentinck, 23 May 1836, ibid., no. 201. Bentinck to Dunlop, 4 Jan. 1836, BP/PwJf/913. Leading article, Glasgow Argus, 1 Feb. 1836. Dunlop to Bentinck, 16 Dec. 1835, BP/PwJf/911; election address, Glasgow Herald, 8 Feb. 1836. Glasgow Herald, 11 Jan-15 Feb.; Glasgow Argus, 19 Jan-18 Feb.; Reformers' Gazette, 30 Jan., 27 Feb.; Spectator, quoted in Argus, 3 Mar. 1836. Reformers' Gazette, 30 Apr., 4 June 1836; Glasgow Argus, 1 Dec. 1836; J. T. Ward, The Factory Movement 1830-1855 (1962), 151, 155-6. Glasgow Argus, 1 Dec. 1836. Ibid., 8, 15 Dec. 1836; Wilson, Chartist Movement in Scotland, 28-41; Bentinck to Graham, 10 Dec. 1836, Graham MSS. 375

REFERENCES 15

George Crawfurd to Bentinck, 15, 20 July 1837, BP/PwJg/81-2; Glasgow Argus, 17-27 July 1837. « Ibid. " Bentinck to Melbourne, 6 Dec. 1837, Melbourne to Bentinck, 9 June 1838, Gosford to Melbourne, 31 May 1839, Melbourne Papers, Royal Archives, Windsor; Bentinck to [PLady William], fragment of letter, 3 Oct. 1838, BP/ PwJg/39726 Blake, Disraeli, 130-31. " Graham to Stanley, 12 Dec. 1836, 21 Oct. 1838, Graham MSS. 18 Trevelyan, Life of Macaulay (World's Classics ed.), II, 27-8. " See, for Gladstone's role, J . Vincent, The Formation of the Liberal Party 18571868 (1966), 211-35. EPILOGUE 1

Lady Charlotte Denison to Portland, 11 May-10 June 1839, BP/PwH/544-5; Letters of Harriet Countess Granville, II, 287-9. 1 A Portion of the Diary Kept by Thomas Raikes from 1831 to 1847 (1856-7), III, 352 (19 June 1839). 3 Bentinck's will, proved 5 Nov. 1839, Probate Registry, Somerset House. 4 Lady William's will, proved 5 May 1843, ibid.; Letters of Harriet Countess Granville, II, 352. ' To Sir T. Graham, 10 Nov. 1808, Nat. Libr. of Scotland, Lynedoch MSS, 3605 f. 86. 6 Bentinck to Portland, 20 May 1830, BP/PwH/278. 7 To Dr. Turner, 10 Nov. 1835, BP/PwJf/2147. For Turner, see Macaulay to Margaret Cropper, 6 July 1834, Macaulay MSS, Trinity College, Cambridge, 0.15 12D. * Minute, 24 Jan. 1834, Pari. Papers (1839), X X X I X , 227-8; to Portland, 1 1 June 1829, BP/PwH/273.

376

INDEX (Individuals are listed under the name they bore during most or all of the period covered in this book. Titles acquired later or borne earlier are given in brackets) Abbot, Charles (Lord Colchester), 30 Acheson, Mary, see Bentinck, Lady William Aci, Prince of, 157 A'Court, William (Lord Heytesbury), 166,167 Adam, John, 273 Adam, William, 221 Administrative reform, 268-70,313-14 Afghan War, First, 21,222,225,231-5, 317,320 Agnew, Col., 51 Agra, as capital city, 190,192,210,231, 319; Fort, and Great Gun, 283 Agrarian relations, in India, depression of 1828-33,254,263-4; mahalwari settlement in North India, 250-65; permanent settlement, 240,242,250, 324; raiyatwari settlement in South India, 46,135-«, 238-45,249,250; resumption of revenue-free lands, 262-3; rights of superior landholders and raiyats, 258-62; village community, 243,244,251,257,258 Agrarian relations, in Sicily, abolition of feudalism, 56,159-60,246-8 Ahmuty, Lieut., 206 Allahabad, as administrative and judicial centre, 191-2,200,269,271 Althorp, Lord (Lord Spencer), 79,81 America, as example to India, 193,199, 222 America, South, revolutionary movements, 70 Amherst, Lord, 3 0 , 1 0 1 , 1 0 4 , 1 1 9 , 1 5 9 Arbuthnot, Charles, 30 Arcot, see Karnataka Aristocracy, British, 24-9,56,77; in Glasgow politics, 326-33, passim; North Indian, 252,258-9,260; Sicilian, 117-19,156-60,245-8; South Indian, 136-7, 138-9 Army, in India, abolition of flogging, 320-1; agitation over allowances, 131,

315-16; disputes with civil authorities, 308-10; mutinies, 45-54,139-40, 252,310; position of Indians in, 201, 204-5; proposals for reorganisation, 316-17,319-20 Ashley, Lord (Lord Shaftesbury), 21, 66,202,332 Assam, States, annexed, 225; tea, 276 Astell, William, 210 Auckland, Lord, 85,222 Austria, 33,35,54,69,107,109,113-14, 120,148,169-70,174,176-7,179 Avadh, parallel with Sicily, 123; possible take-over of, 225-6,228-30,321; 256,313 Balsamo, Abate Paolo, 103,118,157, 160,247,268 Bangalore, 230 Banking, Government, in India, 46,50, 278-80 Barber, Lady Millicent, 336 Barnes, Sir Edward, 309-10 Bathurst, Lord, 44 Bayley, W. B., 266 Bellegarde, Comte de, 36,173,174 Belmonte, Prince of, 1 1 8 , 1 1 9 , 1 2 1 , 1 5 0 , 155-7,160-1,189 Bengal, Burke on integrity of, 109-10; compared with European economies, 284,293; compared with Fens, 99; Council, 299,311; Presidency, 192, 266 Bengalis, British contempt for, 193; in educational and social reforms of 1830s, 213-25, passim Bentham, Jeremy, 27-8,82,84-6,125, 321 Benthamism, alleged influence on Bentinck, 22,82-6,87,217,260-1, 266-71, passim, 321-5; 183,202,205, 251. 252-5 Bentinck family, 24-9 Bentinck, Lord Charles, 28,55,74

377

INDEX Bentinck, Lady Charles (Anne Wellesley), 28,99 Bentinck, Lady Charlotte (Lady Charlotte Greville), 28 Bentinck, Lord Edward, 27,74 Bentinck, Lord Frederick, 28,55,74 Bentinck, Lord George, 41,75,332 Bentinck, Lord John, see Portland, 5th Duke of Bentinck, Lady Mary, 28,32 Bentinck, Lady William (Mary Acheson), death, 336; Evangelicalism, 62, 63; ill health, 58,74,75,88,300,327; marriage, 45,56-8; 20,50,60,6i, 83, 84,95.99» 101-2,146,188,206,315, 316 Bentinck, Lord William, abolishes flogging, 320-1 ; and administrative reform, 266-7,268,311-15; and agrarian relations, 46,125,135-6, 237-65; and Benthamism, 22,82-6, 321-5; and defence of India, 192-3; and economic development of India, 186,195,272-97; and European settlement in India, 190,194-9; and free trade, 71,72,330,332; and Genoa, 67,176; and Ireland, 34,112, 212; and Italian independence, 22-3, 35,67.80,107,112-14, " 9 - 2 2 , 1 6 7 180; and judicial reform, 46,125,130, 131,133-5,265^71; and native agency, 200,201-9; and non-intervention, 110-11,124,225-36; and Radicalism, 70,72,78-9,8i-6,326-7, 330-5; and sati, 208-14; and Sicily, 22-3,66-7,70,147-67,245-8; and Spain, 37,54,69-70,114-15,175; and Whigs, 31,39-43,49,67-71,128, 133,327-8; Austrian policy, distrust of, 33,109,114; birth, 29; campaigning style of administration, 316-21 ; career in home politics, 67-77,326335; character and appearance, 25-6, 31-2,47-8,59-60,77-8,103,700, 336-7; constitutionalism, 67, fo-70, 101,133,150-1,158,162-3,168,323; death, 335-6; disciple of Burke, 31, 38-44,47,68,72,80,109-10,129, 130,133,175; disciple of Wellesley, 48-9,123-5; disregard for titles and forms, 77-8,89-90,105-6,336; drain theorist, 264,293-4; education, 2930,37-8; educational policy, 186,

214-25; enforces economy, 104-5, 185,214,254-5,263-4,294,317; family background, 24-9; Fenland improver and entrepreneur, 77,86, 90-100,276;financialtroubles, 46, 55,86-05,99-100; France, opposition to revolutionary and imperial, 33,3839,43,49,174-5; friendships, 31,5861,69,102-3; gambling streak, 16870,305,321; Governor-General, 104106,180-9,298-325; Governor of Madras, 45-54,88^9,123-46,278-80, 302-3,309,111; health, 58,99,300-1, 327,335-6; hopes for Supreme Government of India, 45,48,50,52, 53,54,86,88-9,94,101 ; idea of nationality, 68,107-11,135,150-1, 155,180,185-6,189-90,197-201; imperialist, 22,67,125,226,235-6; Liberal, 78-82,186-7,326-35; marriage, 45,5^-8; military career, 31,32, 33-9,54,55; passion for improvement, 91,96,97,282; peerage, declines and then asks for, 327,334; Pittite, 24,31,42-3,49,54-5,67-8, 71,81; pragmatism, 258-61,279-80, 287; promotes steam navigation, 285292; relations with British Government, 49-50,68,187,190,304; relations with Court of Directors, 46,48, 5°, 53-4, i ° o - i , 104,124,130,131, 190,277-9, passim, 281,287,291, 299-300,301-6; relations with covenanted civil service, 130-3,202204,219-20,256,305-8,310-15; relations with Indians, 127,188-9,206208,256; religious feeling, 31,55-6, 61-6,187-8; religious policy, 141-2, 186,208-14; reputation, 19-23; resignation, 301 ; seeks to shift capital of British India, 186,190-4; travels and residence abroad, 35-7,74,94,101-3, 104,178, ^27; unpopular among British in India, 20-1,104-5,314-16,324; view of British rule in India, 128-39, 145-6,180-9,196-201,210, 291-2 Bentinck, Vice-Admiral William, 90 Bessborough, Lady, 26 Bible Society, 64 Bird, R. M., 250,252,256-9, passim, 263 Bird W. W.,250 Blackstone, influence of, 38,150,240 Board of Control, 45,266-7,287, 314

378

INDEX Bombay, and steam navigation, 286, 188,289; Government, conflict with] judge, 308 Bonanno, Gaetano, 248 Bramah, Joseph, 93 Briggs, John, 228-9, 264, *75> 3°7 Broglie, Due de, 77 Brougham, Henry (Lord Brougham), 70 Bunbury, Sir Henry, 30,97,169 Burke, Edmund, influence on Bentinck, 31,38-44.47,68.73.80.109-10,139, 130,150,175,334; 183 Burnes, Alexander, 233 Buxton, Fowell, 62 Calcutta, 19,46,105,188,189-92, passim, 283,284,286,288-90,300 Calvert, Sir Harry, 114 (see also Verney) Camelford, 74 Cameron, Charles, 322 Campbell, Alexander, 333 Canning, George, relations with Bentinck, 43-4,68-9,70-2,78,100101,104; 54,55,90,334 Canning, Joan (Lady Canning), 90 Carnatic, see Karnataka Caroline, Queen, 58,71 Cassaro, Prince of, 153,156,157,159,247 Castelnuovo, Prince of, 118,121,148, 156,157,160-1,246-7,268 Castlereagh, Lord, relations with Bentinck, 67,68,74,150,154-5, 165166,169,174,175,177,305; 44,49, 54,71,79,101,114,331 Catholic Emancipation, 70-1,72,79, 112,187 Catinelli, Carlo, 179 Cavendish family, 25,27,39,41,69,77 Chadwick, (Sir) Edwin, 82, 222 Chamier, John, 138,311 Chartism, 327-35, passim Chinese, overseas, 337 Chittur, 137-8 Clare, Lord, 321 Clark, William Tiemey, 93 Qifden, Lord, 34 dive. Lord, 134,302 Cochin, 137 Coke of Holkham, Thomas, 69 Colebrooke, Sir Edward, 313 Combermere, Lord (Stapleton Cotton), 30,309-10,320

Communications, effect of slow, 115, 148,229,318 Concannon, Lucius, 171 Conrad, Joseph, 272 Cooke, Edward, 165 Coorg, 225,230,231 Cora Laws, 70-1,72,329,330,3«, 334 Cornwallis, Lord, 31,36,46,49,89,126, 131,133-6, passim, 141,144,201, 265,267,271,336 Corunna, battle of, 32,37,54 Cotton, Stapleton, see Combermere Cradock, Sir John (Lord Howden), 45, 51-2,140,142-5,309,310 Croce, Benedetto, 23 Cubbon, Mark, 307 Cumberland, Duke of, 334 Curtis, (Sir) Timothy A., 290,291 Czartoryski, Prince, 179 Dacca, 273 Dalberg, Due de, 63,65 Dalhousie, Lord (Commander-inChief), 309-10 Dalhousie, Lord (Governor-General), 206,283,336 Das, Lakshman, 207 De Andreis, Giulio, 58,60 Deb, Gopimohan, 188 Deb, Radhakant, 188,206,213,223 Delhi, King of, 231 Dennistoun, John, 333 Derozio, Henry, 206-7 Devonshire, Duke of, and Georgiana, Duchess of, see Cavendish Dharma Sabha, 223 Dilke, (Sir) Charles, 200 Disraeli, Benjamin (Lord Beaconsfield), 25,335 Dissenters, 62,64,77,85,281 Dost Muhammad, 234 Dubois, AbW J. A., 145-6,216 Duncan, Jonathan, 134,146 Dundas, Henry (Lord Melville), 40,42, 49,125-6,303 Dundas, Robert (Lord Melville), 49, 52, 53 Dunkirk, siege of, 33 42 Durham, Lord, see Lambton Dutt, Rasamay, 223 East India Company, Charter, 125,126, 190,203,322-3; civil service, 20-1,

379

INDEX 88,131-3,201-4,308,310-15; Court of Directors, 45,46,47,48-9, 50,52,62-3,100—1,104,124,131, 137.143-4,190,195-*, 202,205,219, 241-2,277-8,281,286-91, passim, 301-6,314; Haileybury College, 126, 200,218 (see also Army; Bengal; Madras) Economical Reform, 79,87,187,219, 264,311 Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway, 290, 332 Education, in India, Calcutta Madrasa, 207,220; controversies over English, vernacular, and Oriental education, 214-25; Fort William College, 132-3, 214,216,218-20,223-5; Hindu College, 184,188,202,203,206-7, 274; influence of classical education, 164,173,214-15; La Martiniére, 212 Egypt, 36 Elizabeth, Princess, Landgravine of Hesse, 103 Ellenborough, Lord, 125,182,195,196, 199,202,230,232-5, passim, 274, 33»304,3i2 Elliot, (Sir) Gilbert, see Minto Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 108,195-6, 292 Eugéne (de Beauharnais), Viceroy of Italy, 175 Eurasians, 198,199,200,205-6,281 Evangelical movement, 26-7,28,31,56, 61-6,77,86,126,142,183,210-11 Exmouth, Lord, see Pellew Fane, William, 256 Fen District, Bedford Level Corporation, 97-8; Bentinck's role in, 55,86, 90-100; drainage, 96-9,284 Ferdinand IV of Naples, King (III of Sicily, I of the Two Sicilies), 118, 152-5,158-9,166-7,178,228,234 Fitzwilliam, Lord, 39,41-2,69 Flanders, campaigns in, 33 Florida Blanca, Count of, 114-15 Ftor Gloucester cotton mills, 275,280, 296 Fox, Charles James, 25,26,39-42,43, 49,133,150 Francis, Archduke, of Austria-Este (Francis IV, Duke of Modena), 120, 121,122,171

Francis, Hereditary Prince (King Francis I of the Two Sicilies), 147, 153-65, passim Fry, Elizabeth, 31,62 Garrow, George, 132 Genoa, 67,68,175-80, passim, 243,331 George, Prince of Wales (Prince Regent, King George IV), 27,50,71,120 Ghose, Kasiprasad, 207 Ghosh, Harachandra, 207 'Giuditta, La Belle', 57 Gladstone, John, 77 Gladstone, W. E., 107,317,335 Glasgow, 68,326-35 Golconda, Zamindar of, 139 Goodenough, Samuel (Bishop of Carlisle), 29-30 Gosford, Lord, 45,61 Graeme, H. S., 242,256 Graham, (Sir) James, 58-9,60,66,81, 85,114,174,306,335 Grant, Charles (the elder), 62-3,66,82, 100,101,126-7,140,141, 1 43 - 4,199, 225,242 Grant, Charles (the younger) (Lord Glenelg), 204,212-13,233,301,304 Grant, Robert, 127 Grenville, Lord, 35,43-4,49,116,165 Grenville, Thomas, 39,49 Greville, Charles (the elder), 28 Greville, Charles (the younger), 28,103, 327 Grey, Lord, 68,301 Grey, Sir Charles, 200,271 Grote, George, 82,83 Grote, Harriet, 83-4,102 Gurney, Joseph John, 62,63 Gwalior, 230,256 Gwillim, Sir Henry, 309 Hakim Mahdi, 147,229 Hamond, Sir Andrew, 96 Hardinge, Lord, 320 Hare, David, 224 Harrington & Co., 278 Harris, Charles, 132 Harrowby, Lord, 68 Hastings, Lord (Lord Moira), 33,42, 88,312,331 Heber, Reginald, Bishop of Calcutta, 213 Hesse, Landgravine of, see Elizabeth

380

INDEX Hezeta, Col. José de, 195 Hinduism, 198-9,211-13 Hodgson, John, 240 Holland, Lord, 41,70 Hoseason, Thomas, 96 Houses of agency, 95, 276, 277-8, 280 Huntingdonshire, 61,71 Huskisson, William, 90,304 Hyderabad, 227,313

King's Lynn, and fen drainage, 77,9699,103; politics, 74-7,95 Kopf, David, 218-19,223-5 Lahiri, Ramtanu, 206,224 Lamb, Frederick (Lord Beauvale), 147,

Imperialism, 22,67,116-17,235-6 India, British ignorance of, 182-3; capital city, 189-94,200; Christianisation, h i , 126-7,131. ' 4 I - 4 i 184,197, 199,210,212; European settlement, 131,194-200; 'happiness' and 'degradation', 124-^7,183-5; native agency, 136,141,197-8,201-8,253254,267,269-70; one empire, 108, 181-2,192,196; parallel with Italy, 108,193; poverty and economic development, 184,185,195,272-97; princely states, 225-36; ultimate selfgovernment and independence, 108, h i , 199-201 Indigo, 195,280-2,295,304 Ireland, 34,112,212 Italy, armed risings, 112-13, II5> Bentinck's residence in, 74,94,102, 178; campaigns in, 35-6,116; independence and unity, 35,67,107-8, 119-22,151,158-9,167-^80; Italian Levy, 107,122,178,179 Jacquemont, Victor, 58-9,60,63,78, 81,105,106,182 Jaipur (Chissà), Zamindar of (Ramchandra Deo), 139 Jaipur (Rajputana), 230 Jarry, Gen. Francis, 37 Johnston, J. H., 289 Judges, in India, conflicts with government, 308-9 Judicial reform, 46,130,131,133-5, 265-71 Kanara, 242-4,261 Karnatalea, Nawab of, 123-4,127> '38, 140; Nawab's debts, 44,131,311 ; parallel with Sicily, 123 Kay, James (Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth), 221 Kerr, Dr A. H., 141-2

ton, Lord (Lord Durham), 70 Leckie,G.F., 116-17 Leveson Gower, Lord Granville (Lord Granville), 179 Leyden, John, 216,217 Liberalism, 67,78-9 Liverpool, Lord, 44,55,68,69,71,72, 101,104,116,148,150,158,174 Locke, John, influence of, 150,242-3 Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orleans, King of the French, 24,65,69,78,79,80, 81,102-3,154,247,273.3 2 7,335 Macaulay, T. B. (Lord Macaulay), in education controversy, 214-24, passim; on Bentinck, 19,60,306; 38, 106,108,182,185,188,199,210, 238, 267,270,318,322,335 Macaulay, Zachary, 66 MacDowall, Gen., 309 Mackenzie, Holt, 85,182,192,195,202, 219,220,224,250-9, passim, 263, 266-71, passim, 299,306,311,313314,322 Mackintosh, Sir James, 27,70,88,116, 146 Macleod, J. M., 242 Macnaghten, William, 292,311,322 MacPherson, James ('Ossian'), 43 Maddock, (Sir) Herbert, 313 Madras, British settlement in, 46-7, 127; civil service, 131, 311; Government, 45,308-9; in Mysore takeover, 229,307; Military Institution, 132 Malcolm, Sir John, 51,184,192,193, 203,204,207,307,321 Malmesbury, Lord, 39 Malthus, T. R.,241 Mandeville, Lord (Duke of Manchester), 71 (see also Sparrow) Maria Carolina, Queen, of Naples and Sicily, 22,67,118-19,122,124,150, 152-4 Martin, W. B.,313 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 108,178

3»r

INDEX Melbourne, Lord, 8a, 327,338,330,334 Melville, see Dundas Metcalfe, Sir Charles (Lord Metcalfe), 97,108,182,195,197,200,235,250, 251,256,266,269,275,295-6,305, 306.3°7,3io, 3 " . 3i®> 321,322-3 Metternich, Prince, 80 Milan, 176-7,178,193 Mill, James, alleged influence on Bentinck, 82-6,217,252,260,261, 321-4, passim; 37,38,126,202,207, 252 Mill, John Stuart, 78-9, 326 Minto, Lord, 35, 39, 49, 50, 89 Missionaries, 51, 64,141, 142, 143, 212, 213, 224 Moira, Lord, see Hastings Moliterno, Prince of, 157 Monckton, Edward, 44,48 Montesquieu, influence of, 150,279,280 Moore, Sir John, 37,54,165,320 More, Hannah, 61 Munro, Sir Thomas, 46,88,131,132, 135-6,137.143» 239-45.246,248, 249,258,269,302,306,319,323 Murat, Joachim, King of Naples, relations with Bentinck, 67,170,173-5; 68,77, i°9. "4» n 9 , "3-4,148,152 Muslims, in India, 51,143-5, passim, 200 Mysore, 50,143,225-6,228-31,318, 323 Nagpur, 227,304,305 Napier, Sir Charles, 32 Naples, Kingdom of, 69,118,157-9, 170, 193 Napoleon I, Emperor, 35,36,37,115, 168,175,177-8 Nasiruddin, King, of Avadh, 228 Nationalism, and Bentinck, 108-11,180, 200-1; and Burke, 40,109-10; British hopes of, on Continent, 116117; in India, 222-5; I&tyi 167-80, passim Newcastle, Duke of, 64 Norfolk, Duke of, 69,77 Nottinghamshire, politics, 31,68,69, 73-45 24-5 Nugent, Gen. Count, 120,159,171 Oakes, Thomas, 49,311 O'Connell, Darnel, 112

O'Connor, Feargus, 331,333 Oudh, see Avadh Paget, (Sir) Edward, 30 Pal, Kristo Das, 207 Pahnerston, Lord, 31,33,55 Panjab, 231-2,233 Parliamentary Reform, 72,76,79,80-1, 187, 330-3 Parry, Edward, 140,143 Patrick, 275 Peacock, Thomas Love, 285,289 Pdfcw, Sir Edward (Lord Exmouth), 53.9», 109,166 Pellew, Fleetwood, 58 Penang, 308,337 Peninsular & Oriental Co., 285,390, 291,296 Peninsular War, 37,54,55,67,114-15, 116,148,173 Perceval, Spencer, 54-5,68,110-11, «3 Petrie, William, 138,311 Piedmont, 69,70,112-14,176,177, *79. 193,242-3,325 Pierce, Major, 51 Pitt, William, 40-44, passim, 49,68,71, 114,125-6,150,179 Pius VII, Pope, 80,178 Plumer, William, 42,47,69,83,88 Polavaram, Zamindar of (Maiigapetti Dw),i39 Police, in India, 269-71 Ponsonby, John (Lord Ponsonby), 32 Portland, 2nd Duchess of (Margaret Harley), 25 Portland, 3rd Duchess of (Lady Dorothy Cavendish), 27-8,42,77,87 Portland, 3rd Duke of, character, 26; financial troubles, 24,87; relations with Bentinck, 32,45 ; relations with Fox and Whig Party, 25-6,39-42; 20, 3i, 49, 52, 53, 54, 67, 68,74,79, 88, 330 Portland, 4th Duke of (Lord Titchfield), 25,26,27,29,32,40,75,87, 94-5,99,331 Portland, 5th Duke of, 25-6,75,76 Pottinger, Henry, 233-4 Press, freedom of the, 72,161,315,316, 321 Prinsep, H. T., 202,203,214-15,220, 221,307,311

382

INDEX Prinsep, James, 285 Pulicat, 47 Radicalism, 72,76,78-80,326-35, passim [see also Benthamism) Rajput States, 226,318 Ranjit Singh, 105,231-5, passim Rao, Krishna, 207 Ravenshaw, J . G., 132,195,242,296, 303,3«>9,320 Read, Alexander, 135 Rennie, John (the elder), 92,96,97,98 Rennie, (Sir) John (the younger), 92,96, 98-9,283 Ricardo, David, 70,252 Rickards, Robert, 132,194,222,264 Ricketts, Mordaunt, 313 Roads, 275,282-4,295-^6 Roscoe, William, 77 Ross, Alexander, 250,266,271,322 Rottler, J . P., 141 Roy, Rammohan, 184,188,194,199, 206 Russell, Lord John, 69,71,72 Russia, fear of designs on India, 232-5, passim Ryan, Sir Edward, 256 Sallier de la Tour, Count, 1 2 1 , 1 7 1 , 1 7 8 , 179 Sati (suttee), abolition, 20,208-14 Schwarzenberg, Prince, 77 Secret societies, in Italy, 23,172 Sen, Madhusudan, 206 Sen, Ramkamal, 206 Shaftesbury, Lord, see Ashley Shore, Sir John, see Teignmouth Shuja, Shah, 234 Sicily, Bentinck's role in, 22-3,55,56, 66-7,70, n o , 120-2,130,147-67, 245-8; constitutional crisis of 18101816,117-21,155-63,166-^7; contrast with Northern Italy, 151; parallel with Indian States, 123-4, 147-51,163,165,228-30; possible annexation to British Empire, 117, 118-19,150,164-6; proposed silk mill, 291 Simla, 105,229,300,307,318 Sind, 1 1 1 , 2 2 5 , 2 3 1 - 4 Skinner, James, 189 Sleeman, (Sir) WilHam, 183,200,230-1, 306

Smith, Adam, influence of, 38,240,280, 329 Spain, 69-70 (see also Peninsular War) Sparrow, Millicent (Lady Mandeville, Duchess of Manchester), 58,60-2,64, 65,69,71,91 Sparrow, Lady Olivia, 60-2,63,64 Spear, T. C. Percival, 21 Steam navigation, to and in India, 184, 232-3,285-92,295 Stendhal, 125,158,168 Stokes, Eric, 252 Strachey, (Sir) Henry, 44 Strange, Anne (Dundas), 49,53 Strange, James, 49 Strange, Sir Thomas, 88,267 Stuart, Sir John, 119 Suttee, see Sati Suvorov, Marshal, 35 Tagore, Dwarkanath, 188,194,273,290 Taj Mahal, 283,324 Talleyrand, Pnnce de, 77 Tarragona, siege of, 37,161 Teignmouth, Lord (Sir John Shore), 64, 273 Telford, Thomas, 92,96,281,283 Tennant, Charles, 186,290-1 Thackeray, William, 239,241,242,244 Thagi (thuggee), 20,230-1 Thanjavur, 132,138,244,282 Thomson, Poulett, 332 Thornton, Edward, 21 Thugs, thuggee, see Thagi Tierney, George, 49,50,70 Tilghman, R. M., 256 Tipu Sultan, 50,123,145,148 Titchfield, Lord (eldest son of 4th Duke of Portland), 75,101 (see also Portland, 4th and 5th Dukes of) Travancore, 137,138 Trevelyan, (Sir) Charles, in education controversy, 214-24, passim; 59,60, 183,184,188,199-200,203, 210,266, 294,306,324 Troyer, Anthony, 59,60,132,215 Tucker, H. St G., 278 Tulloh & Co., 280 Turkey, 36 Turner, Bishop, of Calcutta, 212 Turner, Dr, 322,336-^7 Turn, Alessandro, 1 2 1 - 2 , 1 7 1 , 1 7 2 - 3 Tuscany, 1 7 0 , 1 7 1 , 1 7 3 - 4

INDEX Utakamand, 3 1 8 , 3 1 9 Utilitarianism, see Benthamism Valenciennes, siege of, 33,39 Vattel, Emmerich de, n o , 230 Vellore, mutiny at, 45-6,50-4,89,103, 139-40,143-5,154,183 Vendée, 40, n o , 1 1 5 Verney, (Sir) Harry (Harry Calvert), 58-60,80,99 Victor Emmanuel I, King, of Sardinia, 67,168,177,178 Vidyasagar, Iswarchandra, 225 Vincent, William, 30 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 194,235, 286 Walpole family, 76 Warden, Thomas, 205,302 Webster, Sir Charles, 22 Wellesley, Arthur, see Wellington Wellesley, Lord, family relationship with Bentinck, 28; Foreign Secretary, 5 5 , 6 7 , 1 2 0 , 1 2 1 - 2 , 1 4 7 - 5 0 , passim, 1 6 9 , 1 7 1 , 1 7 3 ; Governor-General, 45,

46,60,131,135,138,144,273,303, 3 1 1 ; influence on Bentinck, 48,66, 108, n o , H I , 1 2 3 - 5 , 1 6 5 , 1 7 4 , 1 8 1 , 191,199,216,219,302,305,320 Wellington, Duke of (Sir Arthur Wellesley), distrust of Bentinck, 50,68, 1 0 1 , 1 0 4 , 1 2 2 , 1 4 8 , 1 6 9 , 1 9 0 , 3 0 4 ; 33, 37, 47, 55, 58, 67 Westminster School, 30,85 Whigs, 3 9 - 4 1 , 4 3 - 4 , 4 9 , 6 7 - 8 , 6 9 , 7 0 , 7 4 Whitbread, Samuel, 70 Wilberforce, William, 2 1 , 6 1 , 6 3 , 6 6 , 1 2 6 Wilks, Mark, 146 William IV, King, 320 Wilson, Daniel, Bishop of Calcutta, 212, 285 Wilson, H. H., 183, 2 1 3 , 2 1 4 , 2 1 5 , 235 Wilson, Sir Robert, 30,68 Windhamites, 40 Wisbech, and Fen drainage, 77,96,97 Wordsworth, William, 1 1 6 , 2 4 1 Wynn, C. W. W., 104 York, Duke of, 3 2 , 3 3 , 3 7 Young, James, 82,84,277,322

384