A History of Britain by Simon Schama: Episode 14 - Empire of Good Intentions
Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.
Simon Schama looks at how the liberal politics and free-market economics of the British Empire in the 19th century unravelled, leading to the potato famine in Ireland and mutiny in India. By the early 20th century, nationalist movements around the globe had turned their back on the British 'workshop of the world'.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
Simon Schama looks at how the liberal politics and free-market economics of the British Empire in the 19th century unravelled, leading to the potato famine in Ireland and mutiny in India. By the early 20th century, nationalist movements around the globe had turned their back on the British 'workshop of the world'.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00BIRDS CHIRP
00:12January 1901.
00:15The dawn of the British Empire's fourth century.
00:19Few of its servants or rulers imagined it would be its last.
00:24Queen Victoria was barely cold in her coffin
00:28when her Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon,
00:31envisioned a fitting memorial in Calcutta
00:34to the Queen Empress who reigned over a fifth of the globe.
00:40A learned enthusiast of Indian architecture,
00:43Curzon's mind naturally turned
00:46to the most beautiful memorial in the world,
00:49the Taj Mahal.
00:53Not least because he had been responsible
00:56for making it beautiful again,
00:58cleared out the bazaar in front of it,
01:00restored its water gardens.
01:05Now he would build the British Taj,
01:08faced with the same white marble hewn from the Makrana quarries.
01:14But the Victoria Memorial would not be a poem in stone
01:18so much as a proclamation in domes and columns
01:22that the British Raj was the Rome of the modern age.
01:28But was this a time to be spending a royal fortune
01:32when millions of peasants were starving?
01:36When the foundation stone was laid,
01:40a year after Curzon left India amidst violence and chaos,
01:44at least 16 million Indians had perished
01:48in the most terrible succession of famines
01:51Asia had known for centuries.
01:56What had happened?
01:58The men and women who had sat at their desks,
02:01played out their chakras and danced in the club
02:04were not monsters of hard-hearted indifference.
02:07They had, many of them, only the very best of intentions.
02:12They had, in fact, a vision that their empire
02:15was the best the world had ever seen
02:17because it was built on virtue.
02:20Its power was to be measured not in gatling guns
02:23but in an unselfish dedication
02:25to eradicating poverty, ignorance and disease.
02:29We would take whole cultures crippled by those maladies
02:33and stand them on their own two feet.
02:36In the fullness of time, so the theory went,
02:40the millions would become civilised enough to govern themselves
02:44and we would leave them, the children of our liberal dream,
02:48grateful, devoted, peaceful,
02:51and, this was the bonus for the modern world, free.
02:56It didn't exactly work out like that, did it?
02:59So what went wrong?
03:25SCREAMING
03:27SCREAMING
03:51On February the 4th, 1834,
03:54the young MP for Leeds made a farewell speech to his electors.
03:59Thomas Bamington Macaulay, clever Tom,
04:03boy wonder at Cambridge,
04:05juvenile lead of the Whigs in the Commons,
04:08ace reviewer and historian in the making,
04:11had decided that, as nice as all this was,
04:14he needed a fortune.
04:16India, he'd been told, was where you got it fast.
04:20And just to show he wasn't a greedy Tom,
04:23while he was at it, he'd do good to the natives.
04:27He might be leaving industrial Britain,
04:30but he was confident he would find its products,
04:33as well as its benevolent spirit, alive and well in Calcutta.
04:39May your manufactures flourish.
04:41May your trade be extended.
04:43May your riches increase.
04:46May the works of your skill and the signs of your prosperity
04:49meet me in the furthest regions of the East.
04:52Give me fresh cause to be proud of the intelligence,
04:56the industry and the spirit of my constituency.
05:01Macaulay's breezy optimism, the cottoncloth and constitutionalism,
05:06were what Britain had to offer the world,
05:09was the authentic voice of the liberal empire,
05:12equally sure of itself, whether it was preaching and teaching
05:16at India, Ireland or darkest England,
05:19where the natives also toiled in filth, ignorance and disease,
05:23and equally in need of a hefty dose of Victorian vim and vigour.
05:28Asia, they thought, was especially inert,
05:31and the great principle of liberalism, according to its founders,
05:35was, above all, movement.
05:41Macaulay had been brought up a straight Christian,
05:44but his real church was the Church of Progress.
05:47Steam engines, free newspapers, parliamentary government.
05:55The historian in him looked at the rise and fall of civilisations
06:00and was jubilant that this was Britain's time for imperial greatness.
06:05We would share our blessings, moral and material.
06:09We would take ancient societies, miserable with poverty and tyranny,
06:15and teach them self-reliance.
06:17And when we'd done the job, we'd pack up and go home.
06:23So the great principle of the British Empire
06:26would be its own self-liquidation.
06:29It would be like a parent, full of bittersweet emotion,
06:33as its children were sent off into the world,
06:36tied to the home no longer by power, but by grateful affection.
06:41Never had Britain had such an abundance of clever, zealous young men
06:46itching to liberate Asia from the grip of superstition and disease.
06:50And in the Governor-General of India, Lord William Bentinck,
06:54they'd found an ardent patron.
07:02Even the most dedicated pilgrims in search of the relics of the Raj
07:06are not going to make a beeline for this statue.
07:10In fact, I don't suppose anybody in this park really knows
07:13who Lord William Bentinck really was.
07:16You have to look at the figures in the frieze here
07:19to see why he rates a commemoration.
07:22Bentinck was the first of the authentic do-gooder Governors-General,
07:26and the kind of person he wanted to do good to
07:29was this young woman in distress in the middle of the sculpture group.
07:32She's a young widow, and she's about to join her husband in a joint cremation,
07:37a traditional Hindu practice of sati.
07:46Unlike an older generation of British in India,
07:49the likes of Macaulay and Bentinck
07:51knew next to nothing of this kind of tradition,
07:54nor would it have made any difference if they had.
07:57What they knew was an abomination when they saw it.
08:03Never mind that there were only 500 cremations a year,
08:06the campaign to abolish sati was the campaign of their dreams,
08:10and they went about it with a will.
08:14Volumes were written by missionaries,
08:16committees deliberated in Parliament,
08:18a law was passed,
08:20and inspectors were dispatched to intercept widows
08:23en route to the funeral pyre.
08:29The 1830s were a crossroads in the young life of the liberal empire.
08:34Did the welfare of our native subjects
08:36oblige us to impose the values of the West on the East,
08:41or should we be rebuilding and reinvigorating Asian culture and society?
08:48Charles Trevelyan, another high-minded young reformer
08:52who was courting Macaulay's sister,
08:54was in no doubt at all which road to take.
08:57The more British India could become, the better.
09:01For Macaulay and Trevelyan,
09:03the country would be turned into one vast schoolroom.
09:08Teaching, for them, was not just a job.
09:11Western education was the instrument by which India was going to be
09:15transformed from a world of bullock carts and beggars
09:19into the progressive Victorian dynamic world
09:22of the telegraph and the locomotive.
09:25English would be a way to bring Indians,
09:28divided by so many faiths and languages, together,
09:31and it would help bridge the culture gap
09:34between Europe and the subcontinent.
09:39To those who said,
09:41you're destroying their own culture,
09:43Trevelyan replied that Hinduism was...
09:46..identified with so many gross immoralities and physical absurdities
09:51that it gives way at once to the light of European science.
09:59Well, here we are on the veranda, late afternoon,
10:03the perfect imperial time of day.
10:06This is the time when words like veranda and bungalow
10:10enter the British vocabulary,
10:12and they would make you think that the world
10:15that the Tsar built for themselves
10:17was a marriage between an Indian and a British lifestyle.
10:21A bungalow, after all, was a one-storey Indian dwelling,
10:26but it wasn't really like that at all.
10:29What the British had done with the bungalow
10:31was make a life for themselves that was as much as possible
10:35like the life of a country gentleman
10:37in Buckinghamshire, Hampshire or Lancashire.
10:40So instead of the bustle of an Indian courtyard
10:44with animals inside it, washing and cooking going on,
10:48we have the Rose Garden, the well-kept hedges,
10:52the strictly disciplined gardeners.
11:01Tucked safely away behind the walls of bungalows and barracks
11:05and flattered by a new class of English-speaking merchants,
11:08the Soybs imagined they knew everything
11:11about this new, westernised India,
11:14which would be, as Macaulay liked to put it,
11:16an ally, not a subject.
11:23So when Macaulay and Trevelyan went home at the end of the 1830s
11:28to government jobs in London,
11:30they were confident that they had sown the seeds
11:33of a modern, liberal India.
11:38Everything was now in place to ensure as much of the world as possible
11:42would be governed by the one mechanism capable of doing so,
11:47the British Empire of free trade
11:50and educated, Anglicised India would be a key player.
12:02There was just one iron law.
12:05Let the market do its job.
12:08If people clinging to backward ways went under
12:11in the name of the new economic order, well, so be it.
12:15But while the modernisers were all looking east
12:18to see the payoff of their great experiment,
12:21the first great shock to the complacency of their views
12:24came from the opposite direction, from the west.
12:29Somewhere alarmingly closer to home, from Ireland.
12:36Many of those who looked back on the disaster
12:39thought they should have seen it coming all along,
12:42seen that Ireland was India with rain,
12:45a population explosion from over two to over eight million in a century.
12:50Too many bodies clinging to unworkable little plots,
12:54too small to make a profit in the imperial marketplace.
13:00Of course, just like India,
13:02there were islands of modernity in the great ocean of poverty.
13:07Rich Ireland was the east and the north around Dublin and Belfast,
13:12replacing the immense engine of industrial Britain
13:16and supplying it with butter and meat, linen and oatmeal.
13:22But the west was where Ireland's agony was felt.
13:25Tiny scraps of land with a cabin and a pig and only potatoes to grow
13:30to make the difference between survival and starvation.
13:37By the 1840s, Irishmen and women,
13:40particularly in the poorer counties of the west,
13:43were eating between 10 and 15 pounds of potatoes a day,
13:47sometimes washed down with a little buttermilk.
13:55Then, in 1845, the angel of death struck,
13:59in the shape of the fungus, Phytophthora infestans.
14:03Spores grew on the underside of leaves.
14:06The Irish wind blew them to their neighbours
14:09as rain made sure the crop rotted.
14:13The infestation was so sudden and so unprecedented,
14:17it was impossible at first to take in the magnitude of the disaster.
14:23In August 1846,
14:25Father Theobald Matthew saw the damage for himself.
14:30On the 27th of last month, I passed from Cork to Dublin.
14:35This doomed plant bloomed in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest.
14:40Returning on the 3rd of the following month,
14:43I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation.
14:48In many places, the wretched people were seated
14:51on the fences of their decaying gardens,
14:53wringing their hands and wailing bitterly
14:55at the destruction that had left them foodless.
15:00And while this was happening,
15:02oats, one of rich Ireland's prime exports, were being shipped out.
15:07The man executing government policy at the Treasury
15:10was Charles Trevelyan.
15:14Someone who could see a catastrophe around the corner
15:17wrote to Trevelyan, begging him to stop the export of oats.
15:22I know there is a great and serious objection
15:25to any interference with these exports,
15:28yet it is a most serious evil.
15:32Trevelyan wrote back,
15:34We beg of you not to countenance in any way
15:38the idea of prohibiting exportation.
15:42The discouragement and feeling of insecurity to the trade
15:46would prevent its doing even any immediate good.
15:53If the peasants of Western Ireland weren't able to grow potatoes,
15:57perhaps by labouring on public works,
15:59they could earn money to buy food.
16:03This is one of those relief projects,
16:05a road in the Burren in County Clare,
16:08which goes absolutely nowhere.
16:11But it didn't matter.
16:13Even these futile jobs got closed down.
16:18So, too, did the soup kitchens,
16:20which the government briefly provided,
16:22following the example of the Quakers and others.
16:25Now, there was only one place to go, the workhouse,
16:29even if you had typhus or dysenteric fever.
16:36Workhouses like this one at Portumna in Galway
16:39were filled to overflowing.
16:41Now, workhouses had always been deliberately designed
16:44to be as much like prisons as possible,
16:47to deter anyone who had the slightest chance of a job.
16:50But as the famine developed, the situation here got much, much worse.
16:54The sick and the healthy placed side by side.
16:57You'd have to be off your head to want to cross the threshold.
17:01But when the alternative was starvation,
17:04multitudes were banging at the doors, begging to be let in.
17:10After June 1847, to get any sort of relief,
17:13you had to prove you were at the very bottom of the heap,
17:16with no more than a quarter of an acre to call your own.
17:20Now, of course, renting, say, one acre of bog or heath
17:23didn't exactly make you middle class.
17:27Hundreds of thousands of peasants, of course,
17:29were clinging to their cabins and patches of land
17:32on which they hoped to be able one day to grow potatoes again.
17:37Now they were faced with a terrible choice,
17:40either turn in that extra land to the landlords
17:43to get poor relief or stay put and starve.
17:48It was no choice at all.
17:50The hungry converted themselves into the officially landless
17:54just to get something to eat,
17:56travelling miles to the widely dispersed workhouses,
17:59leaving their plots behind.
18:03It was just the opportunity Irish landlords had been waiting for.
18:07Tenants who tried to stay were forcibly evicted,
18:10their roofs smashed in to make sure they didn't return.
18:14Now the landlords could stock their acres with sheep and cattle,
18:18so much more profitable than peasants and pigs.
18:26At the height of the famine, there were too many babies
18:29dying either at birth or in early infancy
18:32for the priests to be able to baptise them all.
18:36Denied consecrated ground,
18:38their fathers carried them to a little piece of no-man's land,
18:42like this, on the very rim of the island, on the Atlantic shore,
18:46and put up a rough stone marker to mark their short, sad life.
18:57For two million Irish men and women,
19:00for whom it was just too exhausting to go on fighting
19:03the uphill battle against hunger, opportunist landlords
19:07and the stony heartlessness of the government,
19:10there was one more place to trudge to,
19:14the ports, which would carry them away to America, Canada,
19:18Australia, New Zealand, and, they hoped to God,
19:22a better chance, a better life.
19:31It would be many generations before Ireland's population would recover
19:35to the numbers before the potato blight struck,
19:39and in the memory bank of the Irish diaspora,
19:42in Boston, New York or Sydney,
19:44the great emptying of Western Ireland was, above all, a British,
19:48make that an English, plot, little short of genocide.
19:54It certainly wasn't that.
19:56Many of the cruelties were axe Irishmen inflicted on each other,
20:00just as the Highland Clearances had been horrors
20:03committed by Scots against other Scots.
20:07But Trevelyan and men like him did subscribe
20:10to the blessing-in-disguise theory,
20:13in which, as in India, the road to modernity
20:16in overcrowded, unproductive rural economies
20:20would always be paved with the ruin of villages.
20:26This is how a contemporary English newspaper summarised it.
20:32The truth is that these evictions are not merely illegal,
20:36but a natural process,
20:38and however much we may deplore the misery from which they spring,
20:43we cannot compel the Irish proprietors to continue
20:46in their miserable holdings,
20:48the wretched swarms of people who pay no rent
20:51and who prevent improvement of property as long as they remain on it.
20:57For many Irish on both sides of the Atlantic, Trevelyan was to blame.
21:02John Mitchell, a journalist
21:04and the most eloquently bitter of the Anglophobes, wrote...
21:08I saw Trevelyan's claw in the vitals of those children.
21:12His red tape would draw them to death.
21:18The price of this religious devotion
21:21to the Victorian Bible of free trade
21:25was a million dead,
21:27another two million uprooted as emigrants,
21:30more than a third of the total population of Ireland.
21:34It was perhaps the greatest peacetime calamity
21:38in all of 19th-century European history,
21:41and it happened not just on the doorstep of the richest country in the world,
21:45but inside our own house.
21:48Ireland, after all, had been part of the kingdom since 1801,
21:54and this, nationalists would say, for generations afterwards,
21:58was the bitter fruit of the Union.
22:02Knighted in 1848 for his sterling work on Irish relief,
22:07Sir Charles Trevelyan was oblivious to all this hatred.
22:11No blots on his conscience.
22:14I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course,
22:18his memorial window would proclaim,
22:20in the church near his family's estate in Northumberland.
22:30By the spring of 1857, Trevelyan was in no doubt
22:34that Victorian Britain was, in the best sense imaginable, the new Rome,
22:39the Rome before corruption and despotism set in,
22:43a light to the nations.
22:45And thanks to Trevelyan's reforms,
22:48a new kind of civil service, entry by exam, not by connections.
22:55Now, government, the dream machine of Trevelyan and Macaulay,
22:59needed a space that would properly proclaim its moral and political grandeur.
23:04Not a rabbit warren of inky-fingered scribes,
23:07but a palace of the high-minded and the hard-working.
23:11And here it is, the new Foreign Office, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott.
23:18Swaggering enough to take its place alongside the Topkapi in Istanbul,
23:23Versailles, or the Doge's Palace in Venice,
23:27as an indisputable house of power.
23:35And it was a machine whose every part interlocked
23:38with majestic economy and precision.
23:41Our great banks told native moneymen what Britain needed.
23:46They told their cultivators,
23:48and lo, raw cotton and indigo dye arrived.
23:54We shipped back to them the manufactures produced
23:57in the workshop of the world,
23:59locomotives taking our textiles and heavy metal
24:02to the towns of India and China and Latin America.
24:10The globe was shrinking,
24:12and through the modern marvel of the electric telegraph,
24:15this was the first empire that could boast it was run on high-speed information,
24:20a worldwide web of intelligence, commercial, political, military.
24:26So how was it then, with all this data-gathering equipment,
24:29we managed not to hear the ominous rumble of an earthquake
24:33in the making right in the heart of India?
24:43Perhaps because we were so besotted with our shiny new toys,
24:47we weren't looking or listening in the right place,
24:51weren't eavesdropping on the bazaar and the mosque,
24:54listening to the imams and the soothsayers.
25:00If we had been listening, we'd have heard in the towns
25:04angry complaints about missionaries pushing Bibles in native languages,
25:09and in the countryside, protests about who controlled the land
25:13and the taxes you had to pay for it.
25:21Mutiny, the word by which we know the terrible slaughters of 1857,
25:26seems to speak of rank ingratitude
25:29for all the good Britain was supposed to have brought India.
25:32But if you look at it from the Indian point of view, the picture changes.
25:36Both British and Indians got very worked up about loyalty and honour,
25:40but what they meant by those very highly charged words
25:44were two completely different sets of values,
25:47values which were at war with each other in 1857
25:51before a single shot had been fired.
25:56The Indians, whether Hindus or Muslims, peasants or townsmen,
26:00lived in a world governed by ceremony,
26:03shame, respect and passion.
26:06The Victorians prized moral and material self-improvement
26:10and, above all, tight emotional discipline.
26:19Typical, then, that in their eagerness to issue their Indian recruits,
26:23or sepoys, the new improved Enfield rifle,
26:26the army neglected to ensure that the cartridge grease
26:29was made of neither pig nor cow fat,
26:32an oversight bound to offend both Muslims and Hindus.
26:42In fact, it was not the issue of the offending cartridges
26:45which was the problem.
26:47Vegetable grease was quickly substituted.
26:50What was most offensive was the increasingly arrogant response
26:54of the British to mass executions and mass executions.
26:58It was the British to matters which they regarded as trivial.
27:02They were about to find out just what was trivial to an Indian
27:06and what wasn't.
27:19For generations, the province of Awadh in northern India
27:23had supplied the British army with its best sepoys,
27:26in return for which they got to go back home
27:29and swagger about in the gardens of Lucknow, its principal city.
27:35Then, in 1856, their special status disappeared
27:39when Awadh was annexed.
27:41And why? Because the new Trevelyanite civil service
27:44decided that the province was badly administered.
27:47The sepoys joined a long queue of people,
27:50tax collectors, local judges, palace courtesans,
27:54all bitter that a perfectly workable regime had been demolished
27:58by the British in the name of officiousness.
28:02Lucknow, once one of the most easy-going places
28:05for Europeans and Indians to mix,
28:08at cockfights, for instance, had become a segregated city.
28:14The tight-laced British huddled together in their military cantonment
28:18and in the buildings scattered through the 37 acres of the residency,
28:22complete with churches, clubs and banquet hall.
28:27They were about to pay the price for this distance.
28:31Their over-reliance on the new information technology
28:34had fatally separated them from the word on the street.
28:39The Saabs, of course, said they'd built this cordon sanitaire
28:42for the Mem Saabs, who'd come out to India in record numbers.
28:46Have to keep the ladies away from the dirt, the squalor, the disease
28:50and the frightful morals of the natives, don't you know?
28:53But the Mem Saabs, at Lucknow,
28:55were about to get a taste of the real India with a vengeance.
29:02Take Catherine Bartram, for example.
29:0523 years old, just married to an army surgeon,
29:08living in a hill station 80 miles away from Lucknow.
29:12There, with her new baby, Kate lived the usual bungalow life,
29:17waited on, hand and foot, by servants.
29:22In early June 1857, Kate and her husband Robert
29:26would have heard the incredible news that sepoys had marched to Delhi
29:30and persuaded the old king, the last of the Mughals, Bahadur Shah,
29:35to issue proclamations calling on the faithful
29:38to rise against the Feringis, the detestable foreigners.
29:43European Delhi burned,
29:45its desperate survivors retreating up this hill
29:48to the ridge at the north-east end of the city.
29:54What started as a mutiny of soldiers built like wildfire
29:58into an immense rebellion of peasants and townspeople
30:02right through the Mid-Ganges Valley, the prosperous heart of India.
30:07Lucknow would not escape the flames.
30:10Rumour fed disobedience, even up at the Batram bungalow.
30:14With brutal speed, the world that Kate must have thought
30:17would never change, that daily routine of sweepers,
30:21punkawallas, grooms, cooks, gardeners,
30:24now began to crumble under her slippered feet.
30:28All our servants have deserted us,
30:31and now our trials have begun in earnest,
30:34for from morning till night we can get no food cooked
30:38and we have not the means of doing it for ourselves.
30:41How we are to manage, I cannot tell.
30:47For many nights we have not dared to close our eyes.
30:51I keep a sword under the pillow,
30:53and dear R has his pistol ready to start up at the slightest sound.
31:00Their isolation marked them as sitting ducks.
31:04Their only chance lay in somehow getting through
31:07to the stronghold at Lucknow.
31:09When Robert was called to his regiment,
31:11Kate made her way by elephant through hostile country
31:15to the domes and minarets of Awadh's golden city.
31:218,000 sepoys were preparing to encircle the residency.
31:26Within the grounds were barely 800 British soldiers,
31:29just 700 loyal Indian troops,
31:32and 50 pupils from La Martinière, Lucknow's model Western school,
31:37who were also ready to do their bit.
31:46Soon after Kate arrived, the siege began.
31:49When a breakout failed,
31:51it was obvious that the British wives would be needed to nurse and cook.
31:57The torrid heat was broken only by torrential rain.
32:01Above them, bullocks and horses wandered about mad with thirst.
32:05Details had to be sent out to bury the rotting carcasses.
32:12As it got hotter, the residency turned into a stagnant pool of sickness.
32:17Kate Bartram gagged at the overflowing latrines.
32:21Food became dire, covered with thick swarms of flies.
32:27There was still champagne,
32:29but now it was an anaesthetic used only for the badly wounded.
32:33One bottle drunk at a gulp before an amputation.
32:39Kate Bartram watched babies and mothers die
32:42as cholera and dysentery took their lives.
32:45Kate Bartram watched babies and mothers die
32:48as cholera and dysentery took their toll.
32:51She saw people go mad.
32:54The Victorian mask was slipping.
33:04After nearly five months, a relief force managed to break through
33:08and evacuated the women and children.
33:11But still, the siege wore on.
33:15It wouldn't be lifted until 1858, the following spring.
33:22By then, the Great Indian Rebellion had been crushed.
33:26Calcutta had remained intact at one side of the country
33:30and the Punjab at the other.
33:32Troops from both converged on the centre
33:35and then it was only a matter of time.
33:38But then came retribution, swift and terrible.
33:42Sepoys blown apart by cannon, flogged to death, mutilated.
33:50Prints illustrating what British men and women had suffered
33:54fed the calls for revenge.
33:58Since the public expected to see a charnel house,
34:01photographers who came to Lucknow obliged.
34:04Dressing their photos were the disinterred bones of mutineers.
34:14Things would never be the same.
34:17As a sop to Indian pride, the East India Company had pretended
34:21to govern alongside a symbolic Mughal presence, the King of Delhi.
34:28For a brief moment during the rebellion,
34:31he had become an emperor again, but now he was a wanted fugitive.
34:36The British caught up with the pathetic blind old man
34:39at Humayun's tomb in Delhi.
34:43As a captive, he became a figure of ridicule.
34:49The East India Company and the rule of the Mughals
34:52were put to rest at the same time.
34:55The catastrophe of the mutiny threw into crisis all the old ideas
34:59about how the empire should be run,
35:02what shape it would take in the future, divided opinion.
35:05And those divisions were personified by the great punch and judy
35:09of politics in the second half of Victoria's century,
35:13Disraeli and Gladstone.
35:15They'd slug it out for decades, their views on imperial power
35:19as controlling the world,
35:21and they'd slug it out for decades, their views on imperial power
35:25as conflicting as their personal and political styles.
35:31The man who gave the British a real appetite for empire
35:35was, of course, Benjamin Disraeli.
35:38His whole career, from taking on and tearing down
35:42the venerated leader of the Tory party, Sir Robert Peel,
35:45to taking the reins of that party,
35:48was a long, virtuoso exercise in improbability.
35:52And the most improbable feat of all was to make the exotic,
35:56starting with himself, domestic, national, patriotic.
36:02When Macaulay had made his maiden speech
36:05arguing for the admission of Jews to Parliament,
36:08it's unlikely he could ever have imagined
36:11that one would lead the Tories in the next generation.
36:14Dizzy was, in fact, a baptised Jew,
36:17a great novelist who compensated for his lack of aristocratic pedigree
36:21or commercial fortune by being the attack dog of a party
36:25not famous for verbal brilliance in the House.
36:29And he took one look at how politics was conducted
36:32in mid-Victorian Britain and saw that something was missing.
36:37That something was what he called imagination.
36:40Now, what does a politician do with imagination?
36:43Well, in the hands of a mere showman, not a lot,
36:46but behind the parliamentary performer,
36:49the flamboyant wag in the cherry-red waistcoats and the glossy curls,
36:53was a political tactician of pure genius,
36:57someone who could take imagination and turn it into power.
37:03Dizz Rayleigh's appeal was being not Gladstone,
37:07not being the high-minded, morally driven do-gooder.
37:11When Queen Victoria complained
37:13she hated being addressed like a public meeting by Gladstone,
37:17she voiced the irritation of millions of her subjects.
37:25How the two of them spent their hours tells you everything.
37:29Gladstone, when he allowed himself time off from the dispatch boxes,
37:33unbuttoning his cuffs and chopping down trees at Harwarden,
37:37his estate in Flintshire.
37:39Dizz Rayleigh, on working days at Hughenden,
37:42his house near High Wycombe,
37:44strolled the terrace amidst his peacocks...
37:48..and then perused the odd document or two
37:51between daydreams in the study,
37:53where, I like to watch the sunbeams on the bindings of the books.
38:00Like the master psychologist he was,
38:03Dizz Rayleigh had cottoned on to the insight,
38:07so obvious to us but rather shocking to the Victorians,
38:11that in the dawning age of mass politics,
38:14not everyone wanted to be political,
38:17that rather than struggle relentlessly to be good,
38:21many people would be happier to have good done for them.
38:25The new voter might actually prefer physical betterment
38:29over the moral regeneration the Liberals were always going on about,
38:35might want to opt for the kind of things
38:37that Dizz Rayleigh's government would give them,
38:40better food, cleaner water
38:42and the gaudy umpire of empire over the pious cant of liberty.
38:50In Dizz Rayleigh's vision for post-mutiny India,
38:53the Queen would rule as Empress
38:55and Britain would swerve sharply away from Macaulay's wishful thinking
38:59that the best thing for Indians
39:01would be to turn them into brown Englishmen.
39:08Let them instead be Indians
39:10and be delivered to the tender care of side fathers,
39:14the viceroys and their teams of prefects,
39:17the district commissioners, magistrates and collectors,
39:20who in return for their children being good boys and girls
39:24would promise to deliver peace, good health and a bowl of rice.
39:31For Dizz Rayleigh and the Tories, the goal was more empire, not less.
39:41Now what India needed was an extravaganza
39:44to celebrate her new dominion.
39:46And who better to organise one
39:48than the noble, though irredeemably bad, poet, the Earl of Lytton.
39:56Lytton's India would be a new Old India,
40:00a combination of tigers and peddlers,
40:03holy men and native princes,
40:05bejewelled, feudal and loyal.
40:09The Queen Empress promising to protect
40:12the ancient usages and customs of India.
40:19The bond would be sealed at a Durbar, a great assembly,
40:23camped on the most sacred site of the Raj, Delhi Ridge,
40:27where the British had precariously held out during the mutiny
40:31and which, along with Lucknow,
40:33had become a place of pilgrimage in the 20 years since.
40:37Spectacle would wipe out the memory of slaughter.
40:44On New Year's Day, 1877, thousands watch Lytton step onto a dais.
40:50Its banner is designed by Rudyard Kipling's father
40:53and receive, on behalf of the Empress,
40:56a list of 300 Indian noblemen,
40:59the Nizams and the Gaikwars and the Maharajas.
41:03The show had to be sufficiently over the top
41:06if it was to impress them with the stupendous invincibility of the Raj.
41:10As Lytton put it...
41:12The further east you go,
41:14the greater becomes the importance of a bit of bunting.
41:20The banquet, the most expensive in British history, went on for a week.
41:25That week, thousands of the Queen Empress's subjects
41:28in Madras and Mysore starved to death.
41:31No reason, Lytton thought, to let it spoil the party.
41:39The monsoon had failed in South India.
41:42Lytton's council knew that the situation might get desperate.
41:46But though they were supposed to be the new kind of benevolent ruler,
41:50when it came to action, they stuck to the old rules.
41:53Once again, there would be no interference in the grain markets.
41:57Once again, famine relief works were overwhelmed,
42:00prompting Lytton's enforcer, Sir Richard Temple,
42:03playing the part Trevelyan had played earlier in Ireland,
42:07to introduce the distance test,
42:09which insisted that starving applicants travel at least 10 miles
42:14to dormitory camps in order to sign on for hard labour.
42:20The task of saving life, irrespective of cost,
42:24is one which it is beyond our power to undertake.
42:28The embarrassment of debt and weight of taxation
42:32would soon be more fatal than the famine itself.
42:40What made the scale of suffering so obscene
42:43was that it happened during a time of grain surplus
42:47in other parts of India.
42:49But so fanatically devoted to the iron law of the market
42:52was the government that it refused to liberate those supplies
42:56for fear it would artificially bring down prices.
42:59So common sense, not to mention common humanity,
43:03was sacrificed to the fetish of the market
43:06and millions were abandoned to perish.
43:11Five million died in 1877 of starvation and cholera.
43:15Horrified missionaries would use relatively portable cameras
43:19to record sites that otherwise no-one in Britain might believe.
43:23They saw peasants drop dead in front of troops
43:26guarding stockpiles of rice and grain.
43:32Florence Nightingale, moved to indignation by reports of the famine,
43:36called it...
43:46For William Gladstone, the lessons of India and Ireland were very clear.
43:52Disraeli's glitzy paternalism was not the answer.
43:56For Gladstone, it was morally inexcusable.
43:59But liberalism needed to be something more
44:02than the old mantra of liberty, free trade and righteousness.
44:06It needed to nail its colours to the mast of political justice.
44:11For, surely, it was the sense of being robbed of that justice
44:15which drove men to fury and violence.
44:20So Gladstone's New Testament would be the idea that government,
44:24even self-government within the empire or home rule,
44:28should be the instrument of justice.
44:32William Newark Gladstone was a politician
44:35whose career had always been shaped by religious revelation
44:39and for whom the Bible was not just a sacred text
44:42but a guide to politics.
44:45Once the truth had been revealed to Gladstone,
44:48he felt obliged, like the carriers of the first Gospels,
44:52to preach to the unbelievers, to bring others to the light.
44:59And did he preach it.
45:01A great whistle-stop railway campaign in the north, Lancashire, Scotland,
45:06with wind in his hair and fire in his belly,
45:09the locomotive-driven prophet appearing before the immense flock,
45:13rained down hellfire on the immorality and indifference
45:17of Disraeli's government to human suffering.
45:25Gladstone swept to victory in 1880,
45:28but he knew he had no time to celebrate.
45:31He had to grasp the nettle.
45:33Ireland is at your doors. Providence has placed it there.
45:38Law and legislature have made a compact between you
45:43and you must face these obligations.
45:47Even if he'd wanted to look the other way,
45:50political reality would have made it impossible.
45:54Ireland now boasted a bloc of 59 MPs
45:58who had no intention of allowing London to neglect Irish affairs.
46:03And at their vanguard was Charles Stuart Parnell,
46:12whose fate would be tied to Gladstone's as he inched towards home rule.
46:20A Protestant landowner from County Wicklow and an MP,
46:24Parnell was the most unlikely incarnation of Irish anger, hopes and dreams.
46:30At this distance, without the sound of his voice or the feeling of his presence,
46:34it's hard to recapture what made this patrician so charismatic a leader.
46:41Perhaps it was just because he went so much against the grain,
46:44did and said things a gentleman was not supposed to do.
46:48A landlord who burned for the sufferings of the landless.
46:52An Irishman who could play the parliamentary game like a Friday night fiddler.
46:58That Parnell was such a god in the pub and at the racetrack,
47:02and a god who all too obviously was made of flesh and blood.
47:08Parnell's power to sway the Liberals and Gladstone
47:11came because he was riding two political horses,
47:15the well-behaved mayor of the ballot box
47:18and the fiery stallion of countryside violence.
47:22This had been triggered by a collapse in demand for Irish cattle and butter.
47:26Small farmers found themselves struggling to pay their rents.
47:30Large numbers faced eviction.
47:32They fought back with ferocity, cattle maiming, arson, murder.
47:40Parnell, as president of the National Land League,
47:43was the mouthpiece for airing the grievances of the rural population.
47:48In 1881, in an effort to pre-empt more violence,
47:52Gladstone pushed through a Land Act,
47:54which theoretically gave the government the right to intervene
47:58in landlord-tenant relations.
48:07Suspicions, though, had a way of overcoming trust.
48:11On the Irish side, it was thought that without the threat of violence,
48:15boycotts, strikes, hits on landlords,
48:18the British would never get really serious about land reform.
48:22And on the British side, Gladstone was told by the hardliners
48:26and his government to get tough on militants.
48:31As the apparent figurehead of the militants,
48:33Parnell was thrown into Kilmainham jail.
48:38But Gladstone soon realised it was a futile gesture
48:41and that dialogue was the only way forward.
48:46Then, just when it seemed as if progress might be possible,
48:50on 6 May 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish
48:54and his under-secretary, Thomas Burke,
48:56were attacked and stabbed repeatedly
48:59while walking in Dublin's Phoenix Park.
49:07Gladstone took it personally.
49:09Frederick Cavendish was not just the chief secretary for Ireland,
49:13he was also, for Gladstone, family, his wife Catherine's nephew.
49:20Parnell was horrified, offered Gladstone his resignation
49:25and assumed that the Phoenix Park murders
49:27had all but killed off any serious chance of collaboration.
49:31But Gladstone did exactly what the hard men of both sides
49:35did not expect him to do.
49:37He rejected the resignation and began a correspondence with Parnell
49:42which made their relationship much closer.
49:46Parnell's importance to Gladstone
49:48was that he alone could translate the fury of Irish grievances
49:52into something politically constructive.
49:55Gladstone's importance to Parnell
49:57was that he was the first British politician
50:00to take seriously the nationalist dream of home rule.
50:05By the mid-1880s, Gladstone became more adamant
50:08that by embracing the cause of home rule,
50:11he was doing God's work in Ireland.
50:16He was indeed in another world,
50:18combing his library at Harwarden for Irish history.
50:22Yet for all the prayers and the penance,
50:24he was only being realistic
50:26when he told the House of Commons that this was...
50:29One of the golden moments of our history.
50:32One of those opportunities which may come and may go,
50:36but which rarely return.
50:38The speech lasted three and a half hours,
50:42as if Gladstone could overcome the adverse arithmetic of the lobby
50:46by sheer force of oratory.
50:49Now, with all the tragic hindsight we have
50:51of the miseries that would ensue on his failure,
50:54nothing rings more powerfully true
50:57than his moving appeal to ditch history and memory
51:01for the sake of the future.
51:03Ireland was asking, he said...
51:05For what I call a blessed oblivion of the past,
51:09she asks also a boon for the future,
51:13and that boon will be borne to us in respect of honour,
51:17no less than a boon to her in respect of happiness,
51:22prosperity and peace.
51:24Such, sir, is her prayer.
51:27Think, I beseech you,
51:29Think, I beseech you.
51:31Think well, think wisely.
51:34Think not for the moment, but for the years to come
51:38before you reject this bill.
51:45The prayer was not answered.
51:48In 1886, the bill went down to defeat.
51:51So, too, did Gladstone and his party.
51:55It would be six years before he'd be back in power for the last time,
51:59with the chances of success even slimmer.
52:06By that time, Parnell's reputation had been destroyed.
52:10In 1890, the husband of Catherine O'Shea, his mistress,
52:14had brought a divorce action based on Parnell's adultery with her.
52:19A year later, deserted by his followers,
52:22disowned by the Catholic clergy, he died in her arms.
52:28New liberalism was now high on the octane of imperial conquest,
52:33or concerned with social conditions at home.
52:38Its politicians were just humouring Gladstone
52:41with another doom reading in 1893 of the Home Rule Bill.
52:46The grand old man died five years later.
52:50But he'd been right.
52:52The chance of satisfying Irish self-government
52:55inside the United Kingdom would never be realised.
52:59We're still living with the consequences of that defeat.
53:06The failure of Home Rule was more than just the death rattle
53:10of Gladstone's project for Ireland.
53:12It spelled the end of the whole liberal dream
53:15of an English-speaking empire grounded on English justice
53:19and buoyed up by the great miracle
53:22of the Victorian industrial economy.
53:25An empire whose pupil colonies would be educated
53:28and legislated into free self-government.
53:32Macaulay's vision of half a century earlier.
53:39The empire, rolling from war to war,
53:42painting Africa as well as Asia red,
53:45now seemed to be in the hands of men like Lord Salisbury
53:48and Cecil Rhodes, who made no bones about ruling by the sword.
53:52Making it clear to westernised natives
53:55that if they thought they were going to have an equal share
53:58in law and legislation, they could think again.
54:03It was no wonder, then, that those who in an earlier generation
54:07would still have hoped to see the liberal revolution
54:10now turn their backs on it as a bankrupt fraud.
54:14The Tories wouldn't give them prosperity
54:17and the Liberals couldn't give them justice and self-government.
54:21It was time to fend for themselves.
54:24In Britain, the working class finally had had enough of hand-me-downs
54:28from the conscience-stricken middle-class Liberals.
54:32They created their own Labour Party.
54:36In India, the writing was on the wall
54:39when militant Hindu nationalists adopted a campaign
54:43and a word that had begun its life in Ireland, the boycott.
54:51For the entire premise of the Macaulay vision
54:54had been that subject peoples would use their power
54:57to bring about a change in society.
55:00For the entire premise of the Macaulay vision
55:03had been that subject peoples would yearn to join the world
55:06of the British consumer, and here they were saying no thanks
55:10to the travelling salesmen of the workshop of the world.
55:14Self-sufficient handcrafts would challenge imperial commerce.
55:18That's why Gandhi put the spinning wheel at the centre of the Indian flag.
55:25You wouldn't know this, perhaps, if you'd got a good seat
55:28at the last of the Great Durbars in 1911,
55:31actually featuring a King Emperor, George V, present and in person,
55:35held yet again on the dusty Delhi Ridge
55:38where the martyrs of the mutiny had held out.
55:48Three years later, the Empire would ask its loyal subjects
55:52to line up for king and country.
55:54Millions did, from Ireland and from India.
56:00Out of the carnage of world war came a reborn Islamic militancy
56:06and a revolutionary Irish republicanism
56:09eager to escape the clutches of empire.
56:13BELLS CHIMING
56:24This is the Ozymandias of the Raj.
56:29In 1947, when India became independent,
56:32all New Delhi's statues of the king emperors and viceroys and generals,
56:37the great and the good and the not-so-good,
56:40were rounded up and taken here to the Empire's theme park,
56:44the Durbar Field,
56:46where they were interned like so many forlorn hostages
56:50to that old Joker history.
56:54Was that it, then?
56:56Were Macaulay and Gladstone and all the other high priests
56:59of the great Victoria Mission kidding not just the natives,
57:03but themselves?
57:05In the end, were they just window dressers of a regime
57:08that was really all about money and power?
57:11And when both gave out, just cut their losses and slunk home?
57:17Maybe. But before we write their ideals off completely,
57:21we should take note of what rose from their defeat.
57:24Cycles of religious hatred, sectarian wars and massacres,
57:28epidemics and destitution.
57:31Not all of them, I think, exclusively our fault.
57:35But perhaps the last word on the British Empire
57:38hasn't been written after all.
57:40At least if that empire is thought of not in terms of scarlet tunics
57:45and flashing sabres, but language, law and liberal democracy.
57:52So perhaps the marriage of East and West does have a future
57:56if we're prepared to fight for it, not just in Calcutta and Karachi,
58:01but also in Leicester, Oldham, Bradford and Burnley.