Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (24 page)

Like so many of his contemporaries, Nicholson first saw action in the Afghan War; he spent some months as a prisoner of the Afghans, and on his way bade to India after his release discovered the body of his own younger brother, Alexander, naked and mutilated in the Khyber. He made a name for himself in the Sikh wars, and so came as one of the Lawrences’ protégés to the Punjab. There, among the fierce untameable Sikhs, he established so absolute an ascendancy in his own district that people actually deified him. He had first acquired a myth of sanctity after the battle of Gujerat in 1849, when entirely on his own responsibility he had released all the Sikh prisoners, telling them to go home quietly. This mercy in victory so impressed them that they believed him to be more than human (and certainly it was not how they would have behaved themselves). A brotherhood calling itself the Nikkulseynites declared him to be a reincarnation of Brahma, and fakirs dedicated themselves to his honour, and had themselves flogged in reverent penance. When he died two holy men killed themselves, and the cult of the Nikkulseynites long survived him, and was intermittently re-discovered by historians and anthropologists until the end of the century.

Yet he treated Indians tyrannically, submitting his conduct to no arbitration but his own—or God’s, which was the same thing in
practice. In Bannu, when a potentate spat contemptuously at his feet, Nicholson made him lick up the spittle, and then had him kicked out of the camp. Elsewhere he had the beard shaved off an imam who ventured to scowl at him. He flogged miscreants without compunction, and publicly displayed the corpses of convicted criminals. ‘There is not a man in the hills,’ one Punjabi chief is alleged to have testified, ‘who does not shiver in his pyjamas when he hears Nicholson’s name mentioned.’

Still, an essential quality of the Victorian hero was tenderness, a feminine sensibility to set off the courage and command, and this too Nicholson assiduously displayed. Though he believed in rough and instant justice, was a terrible tiger-hunter and a famous guerilla leader, still he possessed a sentimental streak, and indulged himself frequently in protracted misunderstandings and reconciliations. He was a hero-worshipper, like so many of his time, and though he was an incoherent writer and an almost inaudible speaker, his friendships were urgent. Later analyists would say they were unconsciously homosexual, but they doubtless sprang from just the same earnestness and desire for fulfilment that made him so dedicated a man of action.

We shall see later how he died: for another extreme of temperament let us turn from him to one of his closest friends in the Punjab. William Hodson was the most dashing and ruthless of all the Punjabi men, and his name was to enter the vocabulary of arms. In spirit a survivor from the old days of the East India freebooters, Hodson was a soldier through and through, but unlike most of his colleagues, he was bred to the humanities. He was the son of a canon of Lichfield, was at Rugby under Arnold, took a degree at Cambridge and was a man of wide reading. He loved Shakespeare, and this was natural, for he was Hotspur brought to life. He enjoyed war for war’s sake, fought it with superb panache, and was one of the greatest British leaders of irregular troops. He was a blue-eyed, blond English gentleman, and like many another, he was flawed—as though the type were too perfect, the ensemble too balanced to be true. He was the sort of man who is commonly called fearless, a quality that so often masks some inner atrophy, and in his unquenchable hunger for physical conflict one senses an uncertainty of spirit. We are told
that in battle, heedlessly slashing with his sabre or galloping pell-mell towards the enemy lines, his face was habitually wreathed in smiles: in a sword-fight he laughed out loud, and sometimes encouraged his opponent like a fencing-master–‘Come along now, make me sweat for it! You call yourself a swordsman? Try again, try again!’

Hodson had, so his contemporary J. W. Kaye said, ‘the fierce courage of the tiger unsubdued by any feelings of human compassion’. He had a taste for subterfuge, too, and despite his canonical background and improving friendships, was not guided by any very evident code of morals. He was a born
condottiere
, or perhaps a secret policeman, and among the wild irregular horsemen of his own regiment, Hodson’s Horse, we see him abandoned to all the delights of brigandage—fair-haired and bright-eyed among those swarthy mercenaries, swathed himself in the loose gaudy draperies of the Punjabi horseman, scimitar at his side, jack-booted, lean and tense—an Englishman gone feral, and totally acclimatized to the fierce culture of the country. There is to his presence, as there is to all those Englishmen who relinquished themselves so absolutely to India, something strained, even a little pathetic: Hodson was presently to be accused of manipulating the mess accounts (a charge never finally resolved), and the final act of his life, as we shall presently see, was one of theatrical and even paranoiac cruelty.

These were terrific people—not all terrifically good, but terrifically forceful, commanding, convincing. They seemed bound to win, and their success was self-generating, until a soldier like Nicholson went into action armoured against all odds, and an administrator like Lawrence could recognize no alternatives. They spanned a changing era in the history of Britain in India, and that time of transition was coming to an end.

With Sind and the Punjab under the flag, the British had almost completed their long conquest of India. In the east their flank was secured by the annexation of the idyllic kingdom of Burma. In the north Dost Mohammed, now a direct neighbour of the British Empire,
was proving himself a good friend after all. In the west the armies of the Company, in the last of all their frontier wars, farcically invaded Persia with a show of power which, while it made very little difference to the Persians, and was largely concerned with the alleged sexual indiscretions of the British Minister in Teheran, did consolidate British supremacy in the Persian Gulf. Within India a new political theory, the ‘doctrine of lapse’, empowered the Raj to acquire Indian States whose rulers died without an heir, and very soon placed under British rule a number of ancient principalities never previously heard of. Finally Lord Dalhousie, in a parting coup at the end of his Governor-Generalship, forcibly annexed the great central State of Oudh—for as Dalhousie reasoned, the ‘British Government would be guilty in the sight of God and men if it were any longer to aid in sustaining by its countenance an administration fraught with suffering to millions’.

So the pattern of sovereignty was established once and for all. Half India was still ostensibly under the control of its own princes, hundreds of them, ranging from millionaire rajahs to petty village chieftains: but none of them was really competent to act without the approval of the Raj, and the British were the true rulers of the entire sub-continent, Khyber to Irrawaddy. Another era was ending. Soon personal imperialism of the Punjabi kind would be no more than a legend, or a smoking-room hazard, and the Napiers and the Hodsons, the prophets and the
condottieri
would give way to more ordinary successors. But though in one sense they were survivors, in another they were precursors. If they had one quality in common, it was conviction—whatever their motives, they had no doubts: and before long the British Empire itself would act not merely by haphazard instinct, by that unconscious imperial sentiment which Gladstone had recognized as innate to the nation, but by a growing conviction of the right to rule.

L
ONG before imperialism became a national cause, a popular enthusiasm or even an electoral issue, it occurred to some Britons that they might be a kind of master race. This was not because of their dominions across the world, nor because they believed in any biological superiority, nor that they were yet persuaded of a divine injunction to be great, but because they were so patently the titans of technology. England was the workshop and the laboratory of the world: the British began to feel, as they gazed upon their blast furnaces and rushing railways, their steamships and their cast-iron bridges, their presses and mills and mechanical looms and iron ploughs, that they possessed in themselves some Promethean fire. They began to think that with technology they could achieve anything, even spiritual regeneration. ‘Forward, forward,’ cried Lord Tennyson, who thought railway trains ran in slots—‘Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change!’

Constable had represented the English genius in terms of hay wains and cathedral spires: Turner now interpreted it apocalyptically in thrilling visions of steam, speed and power. As the railways, the couriers of all this excitement, spread with astonishing rapidity across England, a buoyant sense of optimism went with them: the worst miseries of industrialization were apparently over, the threat of social revolution seemed to have passed, British skill and science was ready to usher mankind into a golden age.
Dulce
et
decorum
est
‚
said the monument in St James’s Church, Sydney, commemorating John
Gilbert, an ornithologist speared to death by aboriginals in 1845,
pro
scientia
mori
.
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This exalted enthusiasm was particularly marked at the very head of the Empire. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s handsome consort from Saxe-Coburg, fervently believed that this was the age of redemption. Nature was about to be conquered: the first barriers of evil were down. With his eager interest in everything modern, useful or mechanical, Albert was himself a very image of technical enlightenment, while his wife the Queen, in the full flush of a happy marriage, was imperially explicit about the situation. ‘We are capable,’ she wrote in her diary on April 29, 1851, ‘of doing anything.’

For in that year the British deliberately symbolized this sense of hope and power in the Great Exhibition, the first of the modern international fairs, which was honestly designed to honour the achievements of all nations, but was to be remembered chiefly as a magnificent celebration of Victoria’s Britain. Nothing could better represent the British instinct of easy, almost airy possession, the sensation that Britannia could now control the elements themselves, than the palace which Joseph Paxton built for the occasion in Hyde Park. For a few months this building, more truly than the Houses of Parliament or even Westminster Abbey, was the focus of British pride: wherever they were in the Empire, in places like Burma where no train had yet been seen, or in Australia where they had yet to experience a telegraph wire, Britons read of the Crystal Palace with self-congratulatory wonder. It really was, as the Queen wrote, ‘one of the wonders of the world, which we English may indeed be proud of’.

Punch
called it the Crystal Palace, and there had never been a structure like it before. It was the allegorical marriage of art, technique and something very like faith—something more than sense could scan, thought
The
Times
. Paxton was not an engineer, still less an architect: he was a former head gardener to the Duke of
Devonshire, and he based his exhibition building upon the lily house he had built at Chatsworth to house
Victoria
Regia
, a gigantic species of water-lily recently introduced from an otherwise little-appreciated corner of the Empire, British Guiana.

The Crystal Palace was made entirely of glass and iron, except for the wooden vaulted roof of the central crossing—an afterthought, added to the design to save chopping down three great Hyde Park elms. It was all light and right angles. A few people, among them the Astronomer Royal, said it would fall down when the wind blew, or that its iron would expand disastrously in the heat, and a well-known opponent of the whole exhibition, Colonel Sibthorp, MP for Lincoln, declared it to be the dearest wish of his heart that it
would
fall down: but this was a confident age, the Building Committee of the exhibition bravely accepted its design, and in seven months 2,200 English and Irish workmen erected it. 

There it stood against the glorious green of a London summer, opened with fanfares and parade by Queen Victoria and her enlightened prince (‘the
greatest
day in our history, the
most
beautiful
and
imposing
and
touching
spectacle ever seen’). Its nineteen acres of interior space were decorated by the exuberant Welshman Owen Jones, who thought that primary colours were a mark of a great civilization, but who relieved early apprehensions, we are told, by toning down his original effects. The décor was stunning nevertheless, and suggested to
The
Times
reporter the day of the Last Judgement, not perhaps what Mr Jones intended. Three times as long as St Paul’s Cathedral, the Crystal Palace consisted basically of a single hall, 1,800 feet long, with an open vista from one end to the other. There were parallel halls, and balconies, and a wide cross-hall, and a high splashing fountain in the very middle of it all; and everywhere in this vast glassy space, bright with reds, yellows and light blues, were statues, pavilions, allegorical tableaux, show cases, chandeliers, wrought iron gates, vast suspended clocks—bays for all
the thirty-four participating nations, a Mediaeval Court, a Hall of the Zollverein—steam engines actually working, model bridges, elaborate claret jugs, meritorious toast racks, tasteful asparagus tongs, toilette glasses decorated with squirrels or sea-nymphs, papier mâché trays worked in gold and pearls in the German Gothic style, and Daniel Gooch’s glorious broad-gauge locomotive
Lord
of
the
Isles
, all green and polished brass, brand-new from the Swindon railway works.

Ceaselessly through this astonishing museum strolled the visitors, 6,063,986 in less than five months: proud Cockneys with their streamers and balloons; foreigners in queer cloaks, turbans and tarbooshes (‘their bearded visages,’ said
The
Times
mischievously, ‘conjuring up all the horrors of Free Trade’); Thomas Love Peacock several days running; a Chinese sea-captain who appeared at the opening ceremony and was assumed to be the representative of the Chinese Emperor, quietly submitting to every honour; Charles Dickens, who went twice, and thought it all too much for him; the Queen herself, who went
many
times, and thought it quite wonderful, and felt
proud
and
happy
there. The whole interior scene was one of bright and complex vivacity, and adding a green complication to the whole, visible from almost every corner of the building, were the delicate silhouettes of the indoor elms.

From outside the scene was calmer, and grander. The Crystal Palace was built parallel with Kensington Gore, on the south side of Hyde Park, between Queen’s Drive and Rotten Row. Though it was large, its proportions were so elegant, and it was so long for its height, that it looked like a great summer-house in the park. On any fine day little groups of sight-seers sat merrily clumped about the green, skirts and picnic baskets spread around them, and when the Queen was there one morning she met all the parishioners of three Kent and Surrey parishes walking two by two through the grounds, ‘the men in smock frocks, with their wives looking so nice’. Behind them the building lay resplendent. The glass glittered. The flags flew. From chimneys here and there steam escaped in small white plumes, with a smudge of smoke from the detached boiler-house. To many the Crystal Palace looked like a contemporary cathedral, and the exhibition organizers, half-recognizing the sanctity of steam
and engine-oil, pulleys and machine-tools, defined it in ecclesiastical terms—the great hall was called its nave, the cross-hall its transept.

‘It is a noble object,’ as Sir Robert Peel had observed, ‘to test by actual experiment to which extent the ingenuity and skill of the nations of the earth has corresponded to the intentions of their Creator’, but once again the Queen herself put it more spaciously: ‘The progress of the human race resulting from the labour of all men ought to be the final object of the exertion of each individual. In promoting this end we are carrying out the will of the Great and Blessed God. This latter motto is Albert’s own.’

The exhibits of the Great Exhibition included such unmistakably imperial items as a Bushman’s blanket from Cape Town, a gold ring inscribed with the emblems of the Ionian Septinsular Union, hats made of cabbage-tree leaves by Australian convicts, a dress such as worn by the women soldiers of the King of Dahomey, a preserved pig from Dublin and the Koh-i-Noor.

This was proper, for already the possession of the Empire effectively contributed to the material progress of the British. ‘Rome,’ said the prospectus of the Zoological Society of London, founded by Sir Stamford Raffles the imperialist and Sir Humphry Davy the chemist, ‘at the period of her greatest splendour, brought savage monsters from every quarter of the world then known … it will become Britain to offer another, and a very different series of exhibitions to the population of her metropolis; namely, animals brought from every part of the globe to be applied either to some useful purpose, or as objects of some scientific research’. And savage monsters were the least of it. Almost every branch of science or industry benefited, if only indirectly, from the imperial experience.

British textile manufacturers, for instance, learnt all they could from the techniques of Indian dyeing—and so mastered them that in a very short time they had virtually destroyed the Indian cotton industry. British iron-masters became, thanks largely to imperial needs, early specialists in pre-fabrication: as early as 1815 an iron bridge by John Rennie, the builder of Waterloo Bridge in London,
was shipped out to Lucknow ready-made, by order of the King of Oudh.
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British marine cartographers were preeminent because of imperial demands, the survey ships of the Royal Navy operating virtually without rivals in every ocean. British anthropologists were able to investigate the cranium sizes of Australian aborigines, or the folk-lore of the Naga hill tribes, as a matter of imperial right British geographers had access to an unprecedented flow of material from explorers and administrators in distant fields. From every climate the geologists and zoologists of Britain received specimens of plants, crops, rocks and unsuspected mammals, sent home to London, as often as not, by the hosts of enthusiastic amateurs who stalked the outback, the veldt or the Himalayan foothills with their guns, bottles and sample cases.

And conversely, science and industry had their profound impact upon the Empire itself—upon the very idea of empire, indeed, for it was now in mid-century that the advance of technique seemed to give a new logic to overseas dominion. Suddenly the world seemed smaller, more manageable, and the notion of a political unity scattered across all the seas, and through all the continents, seemed to make new sense. Fourteen years earlier the visionary engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel had dramatically foreshadowed this conception. In the year of the Queen’s accession he had launched his paddle-steamer
Great
Western
specifically as a floating extension of his railway from London to Bristol, destined to carry the island energies out of the island altogether, across the Atlantic to the new worlds on the other side. Now, in the 1850s, steam and iron could carry the imperial momentum clear across the world.

From the first British overseas settlement until Victoria’s day, nothing had greatly changed in the way people travelled about the Empire (except perhaps in Newfoundland, where the construction of roads had done away with Newfoundland dogs as a means of traction).
In 1837 it still took three days to travel from London to the very nearest of the overseas territories, Ireland—by Royal Mail coach to Holyhead, by packet boat to Kingstown. It took at least a month to get to Halifax, six months to Bombay, eight months to Sydney. Within India the Grand Trunk Road carried just the same traffic as it did when the Moghuls built it, and travellers from Calcutta to Peshawar went by barge to Benares, a month’s journey, by horse or carriage to Meerut, and finally by palanquin to Peshawar, travelling at night preceded by torch-bearers with torches of flaming rags. Within Canada, as we have seen, people travelled only by canoe, sledge and snowshoe. Within South Africa people travelled, like the Voortrekkers, in wagons drawn sometimes by teams of a dozen oxen. Within Australia hardly anybody travelled at all.

Earlier generations of imperial soldiers and administrators had grown accustomed to immense journeys as important phases in a man’s life, and sometimes indeed the journey lasted longer than its purpose: Ensign Garnet Wolseley took eight months to reach the second Burmese war, was wounded on his second day in action, and was immediately sent home again. Lasting friendships and enmities were made in the course of the imperial journeys, and prudent men carefully prepared for them. Lord Saltoun, sailing to his command in the China War of 1839, took care to enlist a staff officer who played the cello, Captain Hope Grant of the 9th Lancers, to accompany his own violin on the 164-day voyage to the Yangtze;
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we read often of officers teaching themselves languages
en
voyage
, working out the entire strategy of a forthcoming war, or undertaking some fundamental reform of morals—‘you should endeavour to improve your manners on the passage,’ John Nicholson told his young brother Alexander, whom he was so soon to find castrated in the Khyber, ‘as without good manners you can never advance yourself’. Cadets who embarked as timid youths at Chatham or Portsmouth emerged at the other end, after several months cooped up with their bored and frustrated soldiers, experienced leaders of men.