The Empire of Good Intentions A History of Britain by Simon Schama

BUGLE CALL

January 1901 - the dawn of the British Empire's fourth century.

Few of its servants or rulers imagined it would be its last.

Queen Victoria was barely cold in her coffin

when her Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, envisioned a fitting memorial in Calcutta

to the Queen Empress who reigned over a fifth of the globe.

A learned enthusiast of Indian architecture,

Curzon's mind naturally turned to the most beautiful memorial in the world - the Taj Mahal.

Not least because HE had been responsible for making it beautiful again -

cleared out the bazaar in front of it, restored its water gardens.

Now he would build the British Taj, faced with the same white marble hewn from the Makrana quarries.

But the Victoria memorial would not be a poem in stone

so much as a proclamation in domes and columns

that the British Raj was the Rome of the modern age.

But was this a time to be spending a royal fortune when millions of peasants were starving?

When the foundation stone was laid,

a year after Curzon left India amidst violence and chaos,

at least 16 million Indians had perished

in the most terrible succession of famines Asia had known for centuries.

What had happened?

The men and women who'd sat at their desks, played out their chukkas and danced in the club

were not monsters of hard-hearted indifference. They had, many of them, only the very best of intentions.

They had a vision that their Empire was the best the world had ever seen because it was built on virtue.

Its power was to be measured, not in Gatling guns,

but in an unselfish dedication to eradicating poverty, ignorance and disease.

We would take cultures crippled by those maladies and stand them on their own two feet.

In the fullness of time, so the theory went,

the millions would become civilised enough to govern themselves

and we would leave them, the children of our liberal dream, grateful, devoted, peaceful

and - this was the bonus for the modern world - free.

It didn't exactly work out like that, did it?

So what went wrong?

On February 4th 1834, the young MP for Leeds made a farewell speech to his electors.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Clever Tom, boy wonder at Cambridge,

juvenile lead of the Whigs in the Commons, ace reviewer and historian in the making,

had decided that, as nice as all this was, he needed a fortune.

India, he'd been told, was where you got it, fast.

And just to show he wasn't a greedy Tom, while he was at it, he'd do good to the natives.

He might be leaving industrial Britain,

but he was confident he'd find its products as well as its benevolent spirit alive and well in Calcutta.

May your manufactures flourish, may your trade be extended, may your riches increase.

May the works of your skill and the signs of your prosperity meet me in the furthest regions of the East,

give me fresh cause to be proud of the intelligence, the industry and the spirit of my constituency.

Macaulay's breezy optimism

that cotton cloth and constitutionalism were what Britain had to offer the world

was the authentic voice of the liberal Empire,

equally sure of itself whether it was preaching and teaching at India, Ireland or darkest England,

where the natives also toiled in filth, ignorance and disease,

and equally in need of a hefty dose of Victorian vim and vigour.

Asia, they thought, was especially inert,

and the great principle of liberalism, according to its founders, was, above all, movement.

Macaulay had been brought up a strict Christian, but his real church was the church of progress -

steam engines, free newspapers, and parliamentary government.

The historian in him looked at the rise and fall of civilisations

and was jubilant that this was Britain's time for imperial greatness.

We would share our blessings, moral and material.

We would take ancient societies, miserable with poverty and tyranny, and teach them self-reliance.

And when we'd done the job, we'd pack up and go home.

The great principle of the British Empire would be self-liquidation.

It would be like a parent, full of bittersweet emotion as its children were sent off into the world,

tied to the home no longer by power but by grateful affection.

Never had Britain had such an abundance of clever, zealous young men

itching to liberate Asia from the grip of superstition and disease.

And in the Governor General of India, Lord William Bentinck, they'd found an ardent patron.

Even the most dedicated pilgrims in search of the relics of the Raj

are not going to make a beeline for this statue.

In fact, I don't suppose anybody in this park knows who Lord William Bentinck really was.

You have to look at the figures in the frieze here to see why he rates a commemoration.

Bentinck was the first of the authentic do-gooder Governors General,

and the kind of person he wanted to do good to was this woman in distress in the middle of the sculpture group.

She's a young widow about to join her husband in a joint cremation, the traditional Hindu practice of suttee.

Unlike an older generation of British in India,

the likes of Macaulay and Bentinck knew next to nothing of this kind of tradition,

nor would it have made any difference if they had. What they knew was an abomination when they saw it.

Never mind that there were only 500 cremations a year -

the campaign to abolish suttee was the campaign of their dreams, and they went about it with a will.

Volumes were written by missionaries, committees deliberated in Parliament, a law was passed,

and inspectors were dispatched to intercept widows en route to the funeral pyre.

The 1830s were a crossroads in the young life of the liberal Empire.

Did the welfare of our native subjects oblige us to impose the values of the West on the East?

Or should we be rebuilding and reinvigorating Asian culture and society?

Charles Trevelyan, another high-minded young reformer, who was courting Macaulay's sister,

was in no doubt at all which road to take. The more British India could become, the better.

For Macaulay and Trevelyan, the country would be turned into one vast school room.

Teaching, for them, was not just a job. Western education was the instrument

by which India was going to be transformed from a world of bullock carts and beggars

into the progressive Victorian dynamic world of the telegraph and the locomotive.

English would be a way to bring Indians, divided by so many faiths and languages, together,

and it would help bridge the culture gap between Europe and the subcontinent.

To those who said, "You're destroying their own culture,"

Trevelyan replied that Hinduism was:

Identified with so many gross immoralities and physical absurdities

that it gives way at once to the light of European science.

Well, here we are, on the veranda. Late afternoon, the perfect Imperial time of day.

This is the time when words like veranda and bungalow enter the British vocabulary,

and they would make you think that the world that the sahibs built for themselves

was a marriage between an Indian and a British lifestyle.

A bungalow, after all, was a one-storey Indian dwelling. But it wasn't really like that at all.

What the British had done with the bungalow was make a life for themselves

that was as much as possible like the life of a country gentleman in Buckinghamshire or Lancashire.

So instead of the bustle of an Indian courtyard, with animals inside it, washing and cooking going on,

we have the rose garden, the well-kept hedges,

the strictly disciplined gardeners.

Tucked safely away behind the walls of bungalows and barracks,

and flattered by a new class of English-speaking merchants,

the sahibs imagined they knew everything about this new Westernised India,

which would be, as Macaulay liked to put it, "An ally, not a subject."

So when Macaulay and Trevelyan went home at the end of the 1830s to government jobs in London,

they were confident that they had sown the seeds of a modern, liberal India.

Everything was now in place

to ensure as much of the world as possible would be governed by the one mechanism capable of doing so -

the British Empire of free trade. And educated, anglicised India would be a key player.

There was just one iron law - let the market do its job.

If people clinging to backward ways went under in the name of the new economic order, well, so be it.

But while the modernisers were all looking East to see the payoff of their great experiment,

the first great shock to the complacency of their views came from the opposite direction - the West.

Somewhere alarmingly closer to home - from Ireland.

Many of those who looked back on the disaster thought they should have seen it coming all along,

seen that Ireland was India with rain.

A population explosion from over two to over eight million in a century.

Too many bodies clinging to unworkable little plots,

too small to make a profit in the Imperial marketplace.

Of course, just like India, there were islands of modernity in the great ocean of poverty.

Rich Ireland was the East and the North, around Dublin and Belfast,

facing the immense engine of industrial Britain and supplying it with butter, meat, linen and oatmeal.

But the West was where Ireland's agony was felt.

Tiny scraps of land with a cabin and a pig

and only potatoes to grow to make the difference between survival and starvation.

By the 1840s, Irish men and women, especially in the poorer counties of the West,

were eating between 10lbs and 15lbs of potatoes a day, sometimes washed down with a little buttermilk.

Then in 1845 the angel of death struck, in the shape of the fungus phytophthora infestans.

Spores grew on the underside of leaves.

The Irish wind blew them to their neighbours, and the Irish rain made sure the crop rotted.

The infestation was so sudden and so unprecedented,

it was impossible at first to take in the magnitude of the disaster.

In August 1846, Father Theobald Matthew saw the damage for himself.

On the 27th of last month, I passed from Cork to Dublin.

This doomed plant bloomed in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest.

Returning on the 3rd of the following month,

I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation.

In many places the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens,

wringing their hands and wailing bitterly at the destruction that had left them foodless.

And while this was happening, oats, one of rich Ireland's prime exports, were being shipped out.

The man executing Government policy at the Treasury was Charles Trevelyan.

Someone who could see a catastrophe around the corner

wrote to Trevelyan, begging him to stop the export of oats.

I know there is a great and serious objection to any interference with these exports,

yet it is a most serious evil.

Trevelyan wrote back:

We beg of you not to countenance in any way the idea of prohibiting exportation.

The discouragement and feeling of insecurity to the trade

would prevent its doing even any immediate good.

If the peasants of Western Ireland weren't able to grow potatoes,

perhaps by labouring on public works they could earn money to buy food.

This is one of those relief projects, a road in the Burren in County Clare which goes absolutely nowhere.

But it didn't matter. Even these futile jobs got closed down.

So too did the soup kitchens which the Government briefly provided,

following the example of the Quakers and others.

Now there was only one place to go - the workhouse - even if you had typhus or dysenteric fever.

Workhouses like this one at Portumna in Galway were filled to overflowing.

Workhouses had always been deliberately designed to be as much like prisons as possible

to deter anyone who had the slightest chance of a job.

But as the famine developed, the situation here got much, much worse,

the sick and the healthy placed side by side. You'd had to be off your head to want to cross the threshold.

But when the alternative was starvation, multitudes were banging at the doors begging to be let in.

After June 1847, to get any sort of relief you had to prove you were at the very bottom of the heap,

with no more than a quarter of an acre to call your own.

Of course, renting, say, one acre of bog or heath didn't exactly make you middle class.

Hundreds of thousands of peasants, of course, were clinging to their cabins and patches of land

on which they hoped to be able one day to grow potatoes again. Now they were faced with a terrible choice -

either turn in that extra land to the landlords to get poor relief, or stay put and starve.

It was no choice at all.

The hungry converted themselves into the officially landless just to get something to eat,

travelling miles to the widely dispersed workhouses, leaving their plots behind.

It was just the opportunity Irish landlords had been waiting for.

Tenants who tried to stay were forcibly evicted, their roofs smashed in to make sure they didn't return.

Now the landlords could stock their acres with sheep and cattle.

So much more profitable than peasants and pigs.

At the height of the famine, there were too many babies dying either at birth or in early infancy

for the priests to be able to baptise them all.

Denied consecrated ground, their fathers carried them to a little piece of no-man's-land,

like this, on the very rim of the island, on the Atlantic shore,

and put up a rough stone marker to mark their short, sad life.

For two million Irish men and women

for whom it was just too exhausting to go on fighting the uphill battle against hunger,

opportunist landlords and the stony heartlessness of the Government,

there was one more place to trudge to - the ports,

which would carry them away to America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand

and - they hoped to God - a better chance, a better life.

It would be many generations

before Ireland's population would recover to the numbers before the potato blight struck.

And in the memory bank of the Irish diaspora, in Boston, New York or Sydney,

the great emptying of Western Ireland was above all a British - make that an English - plot,

little short of genocide.

It certainly wasn't that. Many of the cruelties were acts Irishmen inflicted on each other,

just as the Highland clearances had been horrors committed by Scots against other Scots.

But Trevelyan and men like him DID subscribe to the blessing-in-disguise theory,

in which, as in India, the road to modernity in overcrowded, unproductive rural economies

would always be paved with the ruin of villages.

This is how a contemporary English newspaper summarised it:

The truth is that these evictions are not merely a legal, but a natural process.

And however much we may deplore the misery from which they spring,

we cannot compel the Irish proprietors to continue in their miserable holdings

the wretched swarms of people who pay no rent

and who prevent improvement of property as long as they remain on it.

For many Irish on both sides of the Atlantic, Trevelyan was to blame.

John Mitchell, a journalist and the most eloquently bitter of the Anglophobes wrote:

I saw Trevelyan's claw in the vitals of those children -

his red tape would draw them to death.

The price of this religious devotion to the Victorian bible of free trade was a million dead,

another two million uprooted as emigrants, more than a third of the total population of Ireland.

It was perhaps the greatest peacetime calamity in all of 19th-century European history,

and it happened not just on the doorstep of the richest country in the world, but inside our own house.

Ireland, after all, had been part of the kingdom since 1801,

and this, nationalists would say for generations afterwards, was the bitter fruit of the union.

Knighted in 1848 for his sterling work on Irish relief,

Sir Charles Trevelyan was oblivious to all this hatred.

No blots on HIS conscience.

"I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course,"

his memorial window would proclaim in the church near his family's estate in Northumberland.

By the spring of 1857,

Trevelyan was in no doubt that Victorian Britain was, in the best sense imaginable, the new Rome,

the Rome before corruption and despotism set in. A light to the nations.

And thanks to Trevelyan's reforms, run by a new kind of civil service - entry by exam, not by connections.

Now government, the dream machine of Trevelyan and Macaulay,

needed a space that would properly proclaim its moral and political grandeur.

Not a rabbit warren of inky-fingered scribes, but a palace of the high-minded and the hard-working.

And here it is. The new Foreign Office, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott.

Swaggering enough to take its place alongside the Topkapi in Istanbul,

Versailles or the Doge's Palace in Venice as an indisputable house of power.

And it was a machine whose every part interlocked with majestic economy and precision.

Our great banks told native money men what Britain needed,

THEY told their cultivators, and lo, raw cotton and indigo dye arrived.

We shipped back to them the manufactures produced in the workshop of the world,

locomotives taking our textiles and heavy metal to the towns of India and China and Latin America.

The globe was shrinking. And through the modern marvel of the electric telegraph,

this was the first empire that could boast it was run on high-speed information,

a worldwide web of intelligence - commercial, political, military.

So how was it, then, with all this,

we managed NOT to hear the ominous rumble of an earthquake in the making right in the heart of India?

Perhaps because we were so besotted with our shiny new toys

we weren't looking or listening in the right place,

weren't eavesdropping in the bazaar and the mosque, listening to the imams and the soothsayers.

If we had been listening,

we'd have heard in the towns angry complaints about missionaries pushing Bibles in native languages,

and in the countryside protests about who controlled the land and the taxes you had to pay for it.

Mutiny, the word by which WE know the terrible slaughters of 1857,

seems to speak of rank ingratitude for all the good Britain was supposed to have brought India.

But if you look at it from the Indian point of view, the picture changes.

Both British and Indians got very worked up about loyalty and honour.

But what they meant by those very highly-charged words were two completely different sets of values,

values which were at war with each other in 1857, before a single shot had been fired.

The Indians, whether Hindus or Muslims, peasants or townsmen,

lived in a world governed by ceremony, shame, respect and passion.

The Victorians prized moral and material self-improvement, and above all, tight emotional discipline.

Typical, then,

that in their eagerness to issue their Indian recruits, or sepoys, the new, improved Enfield rifle,

the Army neglected to ensure that the cartridge grease was made of neither pig nor cow fat -

an oversight bound to offend both Muslims and Hindus.

In fact, it was not the issue of the offending cartridges which was the problem.

Vegetable grease was quickly substituted. What was most offensive

was the increasingly arrogant response of the British to matters which they regarded as trivial.

They were about to find out just what was trivial to an Indian and what wasn't.

For generations, the province of Awadh in N India had supplied the British Army with its best sepoys,

in return for which they got to go back home

and swagger about in the gardens of Lucknow, its principal city.

Then in 1856, their special status disappeared when Awadh was annexed.

And why? Because the new Trevelyanite civil service decided that the province was badly administered.

The sepoys joined a long queue of people - tax collectors, local judges, palace courtesans -

all bitter that a perfectly workable regime had been demolished by the British in the name of officiousness.

Lucknow, once one of the most easy-going places for Europeans and Indians to mix -

at cockfights, for instance - had become a segregated city.

The tight-laced British huddled together in their military cantonment

and in buildings scattered through the 37 acres of the Residency,

complete with churches, clubs and banquet hall.

They were about to pay the price for this distance. Their over-reliance on the new information technology

had fatally separated them from the word on the street.

The sahibs, of course, said they'd built this cordon sanitaire for the memsahibs,

who'd come out to India in record numbers.

Have to keep the ladies away from the dirt, disease and frightful morals of the natives, don't you know?

But the memsahibs at Lucknow were about to get a taste of the real India with a vengeance.

Take Katherine Bartram, for example. 23 years old, just married to an Army surgeon,

living in a hill station 80 miles away from Lucknow.

There with her new baby, Kate lived the usual bungalow life, waited on hand and foot by servants.

In early June 1857, Kate and her husband Robert would have heard the incredible news

that sepoys had marched to Delhi and persuaded the old king, the last of the Mughals, Bahadur Shah,

to issue proclamations calling on the faithful to rise against the Feringhis, the detestable foreigners.

European Delhi burned,

its desperate survivors retreating up this hill to the ridge at the northeast end of the city.

What started as a mutiny of soldiers

built like wildfire into an immense rebellion of peasants and townspeople,

right through the mid-Ganges Valley, the prosperous heart of India.

Lucknow would not escape the flames.

Rumour fed disobedience, even up at the Bartram bungalow.

With brutal speed, the world that Kate must have thought would never change,

that daily routine of sweepers, punka wallahs, grooms, cooks, gardeners,

now began to crumble under her slippered feet.

All our servants have deserted us, and now our trials have begun in earnest,

for from morning till night we can get no food cooked and we have not the means of doing it for ourselves.

How we are to manage, I cannot tell.

For many nights we have not dared to close our eyes.

I keep a sword under the pillow, and dear R has his pistol ready to start up at the slightest sound.

Their isolation marked them as sitting ducks.

Their only chance lay in somehow getting through to the stronghold at Lucknow.

When Robert was called to his regiment,

Kate made her way by elephant through hostile country to the domes and minarets of Awadh's golden city.

8,000 sepoys were preparing to encircle the Residency.

Within the grounds were barely 800 British soldiers, just 700 loyal Indian troops

and 50 pupils from La Martiniere, Lucknow's model Western school,

who were also ready to do their bit.

Soon after Kate arrived, the siege began.

When a breakout failed, it was obvious that the British wives would be needed to nurse and cook.

The torrid heat was broken only by torrential rain.

Above them, bullocks and horses wandered about, mad with thirst.

Details had to be sent out to bury the rotting carcasses.

As it got hotter, the Residency turned into a stagnant pool of sickness.

Kate Bartram gagged at the overflowing latrines.

Food became dire, covered with thick swarms of flies.

There was still champagne, but now it was an anaesthetic used only for the badly wounded -

one bottle drunk at a gulp before an amputation.

Kate Bartram watched babies and mothers die, as cholera and dysentery took their toll.

She saw people go mad. The Victorian mask was slipping.

After nearly five months, a relief force managed to break through and evacuated the women and children.

But still the siege wore on.

It wouldn't be lifted until 1858, the following spring.

By then, the great Indian rebellion had been crushed.

Calcutta had remained intact at one side of the country and the Punjab at the other.

Troops from both converged on the centre, and then it was only a matter of time.

But then came retribution, swift and terrible.

Sepoys blown apart by cannon, flogged to death, mutilated.

Prints illustrating what British men and women had suffered fed the calls for revenge.

Since the public expected to see a charnel house, photographers who came to Lucknow obliged them,

dressing their photos with the disinterred bones of mutineers.

Things would never be the same. As a sop to Indian pride,

the East India Company had pretended to govern alongside a symbolic Mughal presence, the King of Delhi.

For a brief moment during the rebellion, he had become an emperor again.

But now he was a wanted fugitive.

The British caught up with the pathetic, blind old man at Humayun's tomb in Delhi.

As a captive, he became a figure of ridicule.

The East India Company and the rule of the Mughals were put to rest at the same time.

The catastrophe of the mutiny threw into crisis all the old ideas about how the Empire should be run.

What shape it would take in the future divided opinion,

and those divisions were personified by the Punch and Judy of politics

in the second half of Victoria's century - Disraeli and Gladstone.

They'd slug it out for decades,

their views on Imperial power as conflicting as their personal and political styles.

The man who gave the British a real appetite for empire was, of course, Benjamin Disraeli.

His whole career, from taking on and tearing down the venerated leader of the Tory Party, Sir Robert Peel,

to taking the reins of that party,

was one long virtuoso exercise in improbability.

And the most improbable feat of all was to make the exotic, starting with himself -

domestic, national, patriotic.

When Macaulay had made his maiden speech, arguing for the admission of Jews to parliament,

it's unlikely he could ever have imagined that one would lead the Tories in the next generation.

Dizzy was in fact a baptised Jew, a romantic novelist who compensated for his lack of aristocratic pedigree

or commercial fortune, by being the attack dog of a party not famous for verbal brilliance in the House.

He took one look at how politics was conducted in mid-Victorian Britain and saw that something was missing.

That something was what he called imagination.

Now, what does a politician do with imagination? Well, in the hands of a mere showman, not a lot.

But behind the parliamentary performer, the wag in the cherry-red waistcoats and the glossy curls,

was a political tactician of pure genius,

someone who could take imagination and turn it into power.

Disraeli's appeal was being NOT Gladstone, not being the high-minded, morally driven do-gooder.

When Queen Victoria complained she hated being addressed like a public meeting by Gladstone,

she voiced the irritation of millions of her subjects.

How the two of them spent their hours tells you everything.

Gladstone, when he allowed himself time off from the dispatch boxes,

unbuttoning his cuffs and chopping down trees at Hawarden, his estate in Flintshire.

Disraeli, on working days at Hewenden, his house near High Wycombe,

strolled the terrace amidst his peacocks,

and then perused the odd document or two between daydreams in the study, where,

"I like to watch the sunbeams on the bindings of the books."

Like the master psychologist he was,

Disraeli had cottoned on to the insight, so obvious to us, but rather shocking to the Victorians,

that in the dawning age of mass politics, not everyone wanted to be political.

That rather than struggle relentlessly to BE good,

many people would be happier to have good done for them.

The new voter might actually prefer physical betterment

over the moral regeneration the Liberals were always going on about,

might want the kind of things that Disraeli's Government would give them - better food, cleaner water,

and the gaudy oompah of empire over the pious cant of liberty.

In Disraeli's vision for post-mutiny India, the Queen would rule as Empress,

and Britain would swerve sharply away from Macaulay's wishful thinking

that the best thing for Indians would be to turn them into brown Englishmen.

Let them instead be Indians, and be delivered to the tender care of fathers -

the viceroys and their teams of prefects, the district commissioners, magistrates and collectors,

who in return for their children being good boys and girls would promise to deliver peace,

good health and a bowl of rice.

For Disraeli and the Tories, the goal was more empire, not less.

Now what India needed was an extravaganza to celebrate her new dominion.

And who better to organise one than the noble, though irredeemably bad, poet, the Earl of Lytton?

Lytton's India would be a new-old India,

a combination of tigers and peddlers, holy men and native princes, bejewelled, feudal and loyal.

The Queen Empress promising to protect "the ancient usages and customs of India."

The bond would be sealed at a Durbah, a great assembly,

camped on the most sacred site of the Raj - Delhi Ridge,

where the British had precariously held out during the mutiny,

and which, along with Lucknow, had become a place of pilgrimage in the 20 years since.

Spectacle would wipe out the memory of slaughter.

On New Year's Day 1877, thousands watched Lytton step onto a dais,

its banners designed by Rudyard Kipling's father,

and receive on behalf of the Empress the homage of 300 Indian noblemen,

the Nizams and the Gaikwas and the Maharajahs.

The show had to be sufficiently over the top if it was to impress them with the invincibility of the Raj.

As Lytton put it:

The further East you go, the greater becomes the importance of a bit of bunting.

The banquet, the most expensive in British history, went on for a week.

During that week, thousands of the Queen Empress's subjects in Madras and Mysore starved to death.

No reason, Lytton thought, to let it spoil the party.

The monsoon had failed in south India.

Lytton's council knew the situation might get desperate.

But though they were supposed to be the new kind of benevolent ruler, they stuck to the old rules.

Once again, there would be no interference in the grain markets.

One again, famine relief works were overwhelmed,

prompting Lytton's enforcer, Sir Richard Temple, playing the part Trevelyan had played in Ireland,

to introduce the distance test,

which insisted that starving applicants travel at least ten miles to dormitory camps

in order to sign on for hard labour.

The task of saving life, irrespective of cost, is one which it is beyond our power to undertake.

The embarrassment of debt and weight of taxation would soon be more fatal than the famine itself.

What made the scale of suffering so obscene

was that it happened during a time of grain surplus in other parts of India.

But so devoted to the market was the Government,

that it refused to liberate those supplies for fear it would artificially bring down prices.

So common sense, not to mention common humanity,

were sacrificed to the fetish of the market, and millions were abandoned to perish.

Five million died in 1877, of starvation and cholera.

Horrified missionaries would use relatively portable cameras

to record sights that otherwise no-one in Britain might believe.

They saw peasants drop dead in front of troops guarding stockpiles of rice and grain.

Florence Nightingale, moved to indignation by reports of the famine, called it,

"a hideous record of human suffering and destruction the world has never seen before."

For William Gladstone, the lessons of India and Ireland were very clear.

Disraeli's glitzy paternalism was not the answer.

For Gladstone, it was morally inexcusable.

But liberalism needed to be something more than the old mantra of liberty, free trade and righteousness.

It needed to nail its colours to the mast of political justice.

For surely it was the sense of being robbed of that justice which drove men to fury and violence.

So Gladstone's new testament would be the idea that government,

even self-government within the Empire, or Home Rule, should be the instrument of justice.

William Ewart Gladstone was a politician whose career had always been shaped by religious revelation

and for whom the Bible was not just a sacred text, but a guide to politics.

Once the truth had been revealed to Gladstone, he felt obliged, like the carriers of the first gospels,

to preach to the unbelievers, to bring others to the light.

And did he preach it!

The great railway campaign in the North, Lancashire, Scotland,

where, with the wind in his hair and fire in his belly,

the locomotive-driven prophet, appearing before the immense flock, rained down hellfire

on the immorality and indifference of Disraeli's Government to human suffering.

Gladstone swept to victory in 1880, but he knew he had no time to celebrate.

He had to grasp the nettle.

Ireland is at your doors. Providence has placed it there.

Law and legislature have made a compact between you, and you must face these obligations.

Even if he'd wanted to look the other way, political reality would have made it impossible.

Ireland now boasted a block of 59 MPs,

who had no intention of allowing London to neglect Irish affairs.

And at their vanguard was Charles Stuart Parnell,

whose fate would be tied to Gladstone's as he inched towards Home Rule.

A Protestant landowner from County Wicklow and an MP,

Parnell was the most unlikely incarnation of Irish anger, hopes and dreams.

At this distance, without the sound of his voice or the feeling of his presence,

it's hard to recapture what made this patrician so charismatic a leader.

Perhaps it was just because he went so much against the grain,

did things a gentleman was not supposed to do.

A landlord who burned for the sufferings of the landless,

and who could play the parliamentary game like a Friday-night fiddler.

But Parnell was such a god in the pub and at the race track,

and a god who all too obviously was made of flesh and blood.

Parnell's power to sway the Liberals and Gladstone came because he was riding two political horses -

the well-behaved mare of the ballot box,

and the fiery stallion of countryside violence.

This had been triggered by a collapse in demand for Irish cattle and butter.

Small farmers found themselves struggling to pay their rents. Large numbers faced eviction.

They fought back with ferocity - cattle-maiming, arson, murder.

Parnell, as President of the National Land League,

was the mouthpiece for airing the grievances of the rural population.

In 1881, in an effort to pre-empt more violence, Gladstone pushed through a Land Act

which theoretically gave the Government the right to intervene in landlord-tenant relations.

Suspicions, though, had a way of overcoming trust.

On the Irish side, it was thought that without the threat of violence, boycotts, strikes, hits on landlords,

the British would never get really serious about land reform.

And on the British side, Gladstone was told by the hard-liners in his Government to get tough on militants.

As the apparent figurehead of the militants, Parnell was thrown into Kilmainam Jail.

But Gladstone soon realised it was a futile gesture and that dialogue was the only way forward.

Then, just when it seemed as if progress might be possible,

on May 6th 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and his under-secretary Thomas Burke,

were attacked and stabbed repeatedly while walking in Dublin's Phoenix Park.

Gladstone took it personally.

Frederick Cavendish was not just the chief secretary for Ireland, he was also, for Gladstone, family -

his wife Catherine's nephew.

Parnell was horrified, offered Gladstone his resignation,

and assumed that the Phoenix Park murders had all but killed off any serious chance of collaboration.

But Gladstone did exactly what the hard men of both sides did not expect him to do.

He rejected the resignation and began a correspondence with Parnell which made their relationship much closer.

Parnell's importance to Gladstone was that he alone could translate the fury of Irish grievances

into something politically constructive.

Gladstone's importance to Parnell

was that he was the first British politician to take seriously the nationalist dream of Home Rule.

By the mid-1880s, Gladstone became more adamant that by embracing the cause of Home Rule

he was doing God's work in Ireland.

He was indeed in another world, combing his library at Hawarden for Irish history.

Yet for all the prayers and the penance,

he was only being realistic when he told the House of Commons this was:

One of the golden moments of our history.

One of those opportunities which may come and may go, but which rarely return.

The speech lasted three-and-a-half hours -

as if Gladstone could overcome the adverse arithmetic of the lobby by sheer force of oratory.

Now, with all the tragic hindsight we have of the miseries that would ensue on his failure,

nothing rings more powerfully true than his moving appeal to ditch history and memory

for the sake of the future. Ireland was asking, he said:

For what I call a blessed oblivion of the past.

She asks also a boon for the future,

and that boon will be born to us in respect of honour,

no less than a boon to her in respect of happiness, prosperity and peace.

Such, sir, is her prayer.

Think, I beseech you, think well, think wisely,

think not for the moment, but for the years to come before you reject this bill.

The prayer was not answered. In 1886, the bill went down to defeat.

So too did Gladstone and his party.

It would be six years before he'd be back in power for the last time,

with the chances of success even slimmer.

By that time, Parnell's reputation had been destroyed.

In 1890, the husband of Catherine O'Shea, his mistress,

had brought a divorce action based on Parnell's adultery with her.

A year later, deserted by his followers, disowned by the Catholic clergy, he died in her arms.

New liberalism was now high on the octane of Imperial conquest

or concern with social conditions at home.

Its politicians were just humouring Gladstone with another doomed reading in 1893 of the Home Rule Bill.

The Grand Old Man died five years later.

But he'd been right.

The chance of satisfying Irish self-government inside the United Kingdom would never be realised.

We're still living with the consequences of that defeat.

The failure of Home Rule was more than just the death rattle of Gladstone's project for Ireland.

It spelled the end of the whole Liberal dream of an English-speaking empire,

grounded on English justice and buoyed up by the great miracle of the Victorian industrial economy.

An empire whose pupil colonies would be educated and legislated into free self-government -

Macaulay's vision of half a century earlier.

The Empire, rolling from war to war, painting Africa as well as Asia red,

seemed to be in the hands of men like Lord Salisbury and Cecil Rhodes,

who made no bones about ruling by the sword, making it clear to Westernised natives

that if they thought they were going to have an equal share in law and legislation, they could think again.

It was no wonder, then,

that those who in an earlier generation would still have hoped to see the Liberal dream realised,

now turned their backs on it as a bankrupt fraud.

The Tories wouldn't give them prosperity, and the Liberals couldn't give justice and self-government.

It was time to fend for themselves.

In Britain, the working class finally had had enough of hand-me-downs

from the conscience-stricken middle-class liberals.

They created their own Labour Party.

In India, the writing was on the wall

when militant Hindu nationalists adopted a campaign and a word that had emerged in Ireland - the boycott.

For the entire premise of the Macaulay vision

had been that subject peoples would yearn to join the world of the British consumer,

and here they were saying no thanks to the travelling salesmen of the workshop of the world.

Self-sufficient handcrafts would challenge Imperial commerce.

That's why Gandhi put the spinning wheel at the centre of the Indian flag.

You wouldn't know this perhaps if you got a good seat at the last of the great Durbahs in 1911,

actually featuring a King Emperor, George V, present and in person,

held yet again on the dusty Delhi Ridge where the martyrs of the mutiny had held out.

Three years later, the Empire would ask its loyal subjects to line up for king and country.

Millions did - from Ireland and from India.

Out of the carnage of world war came a reborn Islamic militancy,

and a revolutionary Irish republicanism, eager to escape the clutches of Empire.

This is the Ozymandias of the Raj.

In 1947, when India became independent,

all New Delhi's statues of the King Emperors and viceroys and generals,

the great and the good and the not so good, were rounded up and taken here to the Empire's theme park -

the Durbah field, where they were interned like so many forlorn hostages to that old joker - history.

Was that it, then?

Were Macaulay and Gladstone and all the other high priests of the great Victorian mission

kidding not just the natives, but themselves?

In the end, were they just window dressers of a regime that was really all about money and power,

and when both gave out, just cut their losses and slunk home?

Maybe. But before we write their ideals off completely,

we should take note of what rose from their defeat -

cycles of religious hatred, sectarian wars and massacres, epidemics and destitution -

not all of them, I think, exclusively our fault.

But perhaps the last word on the British Empire hasn't been written after all -

at least if that empire is thought of, not in terms of scarlet tunics and flashing sabres,

but language, law and liberal democracy.

So perhaps the marriage of East and West does have a future if we're prepared to fight for it,

not just in Calcutta and Karachi, but also in Leicester, Oldham, Bradford and Burnley.

Subtitles by Audrey Flynn and Graeme Dibble BBC Broadcast - 2002

E-mail us at [email protected]