Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (33 page)

Travellers were liable to find that only the paper money issued by the Ionian Bank, the British-owned bank of the islands, was acceptable in hotels: but anyone would accept the splendid coinage, perhaps the most truly imperial currency of the British Empire, which showed Britannia on one side and the Lion of St Mark on the other. In the bandstand on the promenade, ornately reminiscent of Brighton or Scarborough, military bands played pleasant airs on
summer evenings: and here as everywhere there was a polished class of indigenes which, easily adapting itself to historical circumstance, had become in many ways more English than the English themselves, and certainly more to
the manner of St Michael and St George.

Such a possession, so redolent still of earlier, easier times, was clearly an anachronism in the new empire of the 1850s. It was true that the strategists argued incessantly for the retention of the Ionians. Giving them up, it was said, would be ‘the open and definite renunciation of the mastery of the Mediterranean’, and when in 1858 the British Government wanted to test the efficiency of a new strategic cable, it was to Corfu that a trial message was sent—one word, Charles Greville the diarist heard from Lord Derby, to
which a reply came back in six seconds (‘I would not have believed this on any other authority’).

Mr Gladstone himself, though accepting the need for political reform in the islands, did not grasp the force of the
enosis
movement. His mission was complicated anyway by the untoward publication, in the London
Daily News
, of some highly confidential dispatches from Corfu, and all in all he was not a great success as Special Commissioner to the Ionians. He irritated the British by wanting to change things at all, he disappointed the islanders by declining to recommend instant union with Greece, he embarrassed his best friends by arranging for the recall of the current ‘Lord High’ and inexplicably assuming the office himself. After only three months he went home to England, where he presently crossed to the Liberal benches and became Lord Palmerston’s Chancellor.

So it was not until 1864 that the British eventually left the Ionians, blowing up the Corfu fortifications to prevent their use by an enemy (or a friend, as the islanders not unreasonably complained), and keeping an eye open for any other island territory—Cyprus for example—which might serve as a strategic substitute. But Gladstone’s very presence on the Paxos quay was really an act of foreclosure. His earnest mid-Victorian figure in that setting, among the shades of those rumbustious pro-consuls, was like a last inspection of
the old older. And there was in fect, as the renowned Homeric scholar doubtless knew, a deeper symbolism to his arrival at Paxos. Nineteen centuries before, during the reign of Tiberius, a ship from Egypt had been sailing past this very island, bound for Italy, when Thamus its master heard a voice from the shore. ‘Thamus! Thamus!’ it cried. ‘
Pan magus tetbneeke
!’—‘Great Pan is dead!’ Whereupon, we are told, ‘there were such piteous outcries and dreadful shrieking as hath not been the like … at that time all Oracles surceased, and enchanted Spirits that were wont to delude the people henceforth held their peace’.

Christian commentators assumed that this had been the moment of the Crucifixion, when the false gods of the ancients died: others pined still, perhaps, even in 1858, for those enchanted Spirits, bathed in fire and dressed in bright colours.

I
N 1861 work began on the construction of a new headquarters for the British Empire. In one of the grandest sites in Europe, between Whitehall and St James’ Park in the heart of Westminster, Lord Palmerston’s Whig Government authorized the construction of a great new building to house the India Office, the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office. It was a true palace in the Italian Renaissance manner, magisterially sited, richly ornamented, columned, balustraded, with an open courtyard decorated with majolica friezes, innumerable statues and symbolic medallions, and a chimney piece inherited directly from the old East India House in Leadenhall Street, itself now demolished. It was a building recognizably descended from the sea-empires of Venice and Genoa, and through them from the classical imperialisms of old: but at its north-west corner, overlooking St James’s Park, architectural purists were dismayed to find a curious square-topped tower, oddly out of style, placed asymmetrically at the corner of the structure, and strangely linked to it by another distinctly un-classical feature, a rounded corner.

This was a touch of the picturesque, and as such it was more proper to its subject than its critics knew. The designer of the new building was Sir George Gilbert Scott, one of the most celebrated architects of the Victorian era, and a principal exponent of the Gothic Revival. The High Gothic style, of which the greatest example in London was the new Palace of Westminster, completed in 1860, was to prove in the end the most truly imperial of British architectural idioms: touched up often with exotic embellishments, domes, pagoda tops or Hindu motifs, it was presently to commemorate the British presence everywhere from Hong Kong to Ottawa,
and was adapted to every kind of structure, cathedral to engineshed.

It was in this quintessentially Victorian style, long since outgrown its mediaeval origins in technique and elaboration, that Scott himself wished to build the entire imperial headquarters. He envisaged upon that splendid site a fantasy of pinnacles, mansard roofs, gargoyles, tall red-brick chimneys and lavish quirks of ornament. Deposited there next door to Downing Street, towering over the domed Horse Guards, the Banqueting Hall and Adam’s exquisite Admiralty Screen, it would have transformed the character of Westminster, imposing the Gothic as the predominant official style, and thus by association establishing London as an imperial capital above all else.

To a Tory Government it might have been welcome: Gothic was well established as the Tory style of architecture, just as imperialism would later be a Tory speciality of politics. Lord Palmerston, however, brusquely rejected the plan. His ideas of empire were essentially classical ideas—
civis
romanus
sum
was the analogy he had majestically offered, when the imprisonment of the Portuguese-naturalized Gibraltaran sea-captain Don Pacifico had nearly led to war with Greece a few years before. Scott offered a Byzantine modification of his scheme, which Palmerston predictably characterized as ‘a regular mongrel affair’, but reluctantly acquiesced in the end, and immersing himself in a new set of source-books and examples, provided the classical
pala
zzo
Lord Palmerston demanded.

He allowed himself, though, that one Gothic compensation on the corner; and far more than the sumptuous central courtyard of the building, or its laborious scholarship of spandrel or pilaster, the unexpected tower above the lake was to represent to posterity the spirit of mid-Victorian Empire.
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For the Empire was taking a Gothic turn. Its style, in life as in art,
was becoming more elaborate, more assertive, more utterly itself—as Blake had written, the classical forms were mathematical, but Gothic forms had
Life
. Let us view, in illustration, two architectural compositions of the Raj in India, one an inheritance of earlier years, one a mid-Victorian creation, and see how differently they reflect the imperial aspirations of their day.

One’s first view of the city of Calcutta, as one sailed up the Hooghly through the shoals and mudbanks of the Ganges Delta, was essentially
gracious
. This was deliberate. No more than a slaternly collection of hovels until the British settled there, Calcutta remained even now largely an eighteenth-century city, and faithfully represented the spirit of an older empire. To the right there stood Fort William, a powerful heap of ramparts and barracks, with the spire of its garrison church protruding above the walls, to proclaim the Christian presence, and the green space of the Maidan all around to provide a clear field of fire. On the left there extended in happy contrast the leafy expanse of the Botanical Gardens, greenhouses gleaming through the banyans, to remind the traveller that this Empire was concerned not only with power, but with science and beauty too. There were wharves all along the southern bank, lined with three-masters and hung about by country craft, and immediately in front, as the river bent northwards, there stood the mass of the central city, grouped in stylish esplanade at right angles to the stream.

It was a white city, plastered white, peeling in many places and patched with damp, but still to the eyes of a newcomer ethereal against the Indian sky. Around its buildings, as the century progressed, the untidy straggle of an Indian city grew, but earlier Victorian visitors to Calcutta nearly all commented upon its white elegance. They called it the City of Palaces, partly because its buildings were so grand, but partly because, in the pilastered classicism of its predominant style, it suggested a dream-like evocation of Rome or Greece. This was intentional too. As they emerged from the free-for-all eighteenth century, the British in India had been concerned to represent themselves as enlightened despots, and they saw their eastern settlements, as the American colonists had seen Ithaca or Syracuse, as nuclei of classical ideals and virtues. By and
large the architecture stuck to classical rules—Doric for masculine, warlike buildings, Corinthian for pleasure—and if the detailing of these edifices was imperfect, only irritating purists fresh from home complained about their proportions.

There was the great palace built by Lord Wellesley, brother to the Duke of Wellington, with its great sweep of porte-cochère, its vast colonnade, the white tropic birds poised upon the urns that crowned its balustrade, and the sentries all scarlet and white beside its gates. There was the Town Hall, double-columned in Tuscan Doric, and the Greek Doric Mint, with its portico a half-size copy of the Temple of Minerva at Athens, and the church of St John’s with its façade a facsimile of St Martin-in-the-Field’s in London;
1
and all down Mission Row, and along the Chowringhee edge of the Maidan, and far away down Garden Reach towards the sea, the immense stucco mansions of the merchants and traders stood opulently in the sun—not in squares or terraces, as they would be in London, but each in its own wide compound, like a Roman villa.

This was a retrospective scene, as though the British were recalling a golden age of antiquity, and trying in a gentlemanly way to recreate it in their oriental empire. That the stucco was often peeling and the masonry flimsy, that the great drawing-rooms of those mansions were frequently half-furnished and echoing, did not detract from the illusion: there was an element of theatre to the City of Palaces, insubstantial like a stage set, which many travellers thought proper to so resplendent a showplace. Besides, implicit to the neoclassic outlook was an element of romantic melancholy, and if more sophisticated visitors could not always admire these buildings as examples of the best constructional techniques, at least one could cherish them as ruins of the future.

But later in the century a very different aesthetic governed the architects of the Raj, who were by then mostly officers of the Royal Engineers, and responded professionally to the imperial sentiments fashionable in their day. Now the British were concerned to express
not the classic purity of their standards, but their detached omnipotence. The mid-Victorian buildings of empire were nothing if not assured. In the vast vaulted roofs of railway stations they displayed the technical command of empire; in the derivative spires of cathedrals, or the daunting mahogany halls of Government Houses, they tried to demonstrate its inner calm: and nothing illustrated the Empire’s sense of divine hierarchy more revealingly than the hillstation, a uniquely British contribution to the cultures of the east.

Hill-stations were never thought of by the Moghul rulers of India, who preferred retreats of more languid purpose. They were a device of the mid-Victorian British, pining for the briskness of the north. Until the imperial armies penetrated the Himalayan foothills, in the 1820s and 1830s, the hills were almost unknown to Europeans. Up there the British could start from scratch, and in the high enclaves of the hill-stations, narrowly set upon their terraced ridges, the Britishness of Empire could find its most intense expression—for at Simla, Darjeeling or Mussoorie the gentlefolk of the Raj, celestially withdrawn from the Indian millions on the plains below, lived for a few months in the year entirely for themselves. Such Indians as were present were there as feudatories, servants or dependents, and the emotions of the British, all too often inhibited in the stifling heat of the lowlands, vividly flowered in the mountain brilliance above.

Darjeeling, say, must have seemed a vision of release when the jaded memsahib or exhausted Collector took the last bend out of the deodars and saw it standing there above. Behind it the stupendous Himalaya rose; away to the south the foothills tumbled in terrace and fold towards the plains; yet theatrical though the setting was, instantly the eye was drawn to the modest centre of the stage. Your hill-station was scarcely more than a village, and was ludicrously dwarfed by the scale of the country, but it had the startling impact of an intruder. It was defiantly, gloriously out of place—a figure of despotic privilege.

Where there should be an eaved white temple with prayer flags up there, a Gothic steeple rose instead, with a weathercock on top, and the white blobs of tombstones in the yard behind. Where one
might expect the palace of Mir or Maharajah, a hotel in the Eastbourne manner stood, wicker chairs upon its terrace, awnings above its windows. There were military-looking buildings here and there, and genteel half-timbered villas disposed above rustic steps, and along the top of the ridge there ran a wide paved esplanade, with a bandstand, a fountain in a public garden, and benches, as on a promenade at home, surveying the Himalayan prospect.

In decreasing consequence down the ridge to the south, the rest of the town obsequiously fell: lesser hotels, pensions and Eurasian sorts of villa, a clutter of bazaars, an open-air market, a square at the bottom where the rickshaws waited. Socially it was a vertical construction—posh and British on the summit, mixed half-way down, utterly indigenous in the lowest layers. Visually it was a neatly hatched compression of planes. The horizontals were the buildings in their tiers; the verticals were the tall thin trees which stood everywhere like cypresses in Italy, and were matched by the tower of St Andrew’s at the top; the diagonals were the slopes of the hills themselves, which framed the town, and by intersecting behind it accentuated the meshed and intricate texture of the scene. The hillstations were mostly built by military engineers, and if their individual buildings were generally undistinguished and sometimes repellent, their civic patterns were rather handsome. Bath, itself the echo of an earlier empire, was familiar to many an imperial soldier, and in Darjeeling’s simple but elegant plan we perhaps see innocent derivations of Lansdowne and Great Pulteney.

Yet it was not the shape of the town that was exciting, and certainly not its architecture, but the suggestion it gave of concentrated force. For all its respectable trappings it looked a fierce, perhaps a vicious kind of place. It was all in movement. Even from a distance one could see the urgent jostle of its bazaars, the bright crowds hastening arm in arm along the Mall, or clattering hilariously about on mountain ponies. The air was full of sparkle; hoots, shouts, axes, hammers, bugles or even bagpipes sounded; sometimes the sun flashed brilliantly off a window, or a flag fluttered red white and blue through a chink in the buildings.

It was an insignificant, in some ways a preposterous little settlement, but it was more truly a symptom of absolute power than the
City of Palaces had ever been. It was the belvedere of a ruling race, obedient to no precedent, subject to no qualm, from whose terraces as from some divine gazebo the British could look down from the cool heights to the expanses of their unimaginable empire below.
1

All over the Empire this trend towards the aloof and the grandiloquent was apparent. Government Houses, for example, became very grand indeed, however minuscule their colonies: for as a perceptive official memorandum put it, ‘the keeping up of an outward appearance of power will in many instances save the necessity of resort into the actual exercise of it’. The one at Hamilton in Bermuda had a Medici air: it was supposed indeed to have been originally designed for erection outside Florence, and stood among great groves of cedar-trees, crab-grass lawns and banana orchards as if a prince were indeed its occupant, instead of (more often than not) a superannuated and not very successful general. The one at Nassau in the Bahamas, on the other hand, aspired more towards Chatsworth or Woburn in manner, and actually had deer in its park, while the one at Hobart in Tasmania, set with turrets and flagstaffs against the mass of Mount Wellington, looked suggestively like Balmoral.
2

Even the white settler colonies progressed with astonishing speed from the homely to the pretentious. Some lovely buildings had been erected out there in the earlier years of the century. There were the delectable country houses of Tasmania, built to a square simple Georgian of finely-dressed stone: rectory sort of buildings, Gainsborough buildings, with their big sash windows, their whitewashed dairies, the lovely oaks and elms transplanted with them from the English countryside, their verandahs incongruously roofed with corrugated iron, their tall chimneys aromatic with eucalyptus smoke. Or there were the stone farmhouses built by British settlers in the
flank of the Little Karroo, along the coast from Cape Town—buildings so strong, so organic, so deep-shaded by trees and cosy with dry-stone walling, so exquisitely set in their hill-sides, that they might have been lifted stone by stone from Radnor or Brecknock, together with their pigs, sheep and leather buckets.
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And the handsomest small market towns of East Anglia could offer no happier architectural ensemble than the public square at St George’s in Bermuda, which was seventeenth century in origin, but had been discreetly embellished and preserved throughout the heyday of the sugar colonies: an authentic hole-in-corner English square, opening at one side to the harbour, and cluttered all about with wood-framed shuttered houses, open staircases and tall white chimneys—two comfortable old pubs, and the town pillory, and poking quaintly above the houses the tower of St Peter’s, 300 years old already, in whose shady churchyard the negroes sprawled and gossiped among the tombs sealed with whitewash, and from whose belfry on Sundays mellowed English bells summoned the expatriates to worship.