‘A ship came in yesterday that left England the beginning of March, but had no news, having left England without having gone to Portsmouth and having left all the passengers and brought their baggage, besides a poor woman who took her passage from Deal to Portsmouth. Think of anybody coming to the East Indies by mistake!’
Lady Henrietta Clive, Madras, 1799
On March 4th 1800, Lady Henrietta Clive took the first steps in the realisation of a dream. In fulfilment, as she put it, of ‘a most indescribable wish to go and see’ Seringapatam and whatever remained of Tipu Sultan’s world, she set forth on a seven-month excursion into South India that would cover over one thousand miles. Accompanying her were her daughters, Harriet (Harry aged thirteen), Charlotte Florentia (Charly aged twelve) and an Italian artist, Signora Anna Tonelli. A Captain Brown commanded her bodyguard and baggage train. Fourteen elephants carried tents, as well as a harp, a pianoforte, and Henrietta’s one horse bandy. One hundred bullocks hauled provision carts; camels delivered express messages. Escorted by an enormous retinue of over seven hundred and fifty people, including sixty-six infantry, cooks, palanquin bearers, maids, hangers-on and her Persian teacher, Henrietta made her way over mountains and through ‘tygerish’ jungles and crocodile-infested rivers, camping for the most part along the route, studying her Persian verbs, searching for local flora and fauna, reviewing troops, visiting with East India Company officials and British military representatives, meeting polygars and fakeers, calling on the wives and older sons of Tipu Sultan, Ranees, Maharajahs, and even the Danish Commandant of Tranquebar. Henrietta did indeed visit Seringapatam, and ‘all the great horn, besides’, travelling the while, as she wrote to her friend Lady Frances Douglas, ‘not with seven leagued boots, but with elephants and camels like an Eastern Damsel with all possible dignity’.
* * *
My personal introduction to Lady Henrietta Clive came some years ago. Like my subject, I had recently been in South India. A strange curiosity led me to Powis Castle, Wales to have a look at the collection ‘Treasures from India: the Clive Collection’, acquired primarily by Lord Robert ‘Clive of India’, and later added to by his son, Lord Edward Clive, Governor of Madras, and daughter-in-law, Lady Henrietta. Although I found the artifacts to be interesting enough, it was Henrietta herself, a Welsh woman traveller, journeying to and within the interior of South India at the turn of a now-distant eighteenth and nineteenth century, who rather gripped my attention.
By virtue of my own Indian journeys and projects I had acquired a certain eclectic familiarity with South India. My experiences were certainly varied and sometimes even happenstance. In Mysore, for example, I had the great good fortune to meet and converse with R. K. Narayan on several occasions. Sitting on his upstairs verandah, watching the changing colours of the sunset, listening to cicadas and the occasional chirp of a gecko and drinking milky sweet, South Indian coffee, we gossiped about his characters dwelling out there in the fictional world of Malgudi. Narayan conceived of the lives of his characters, all lives for that matter, as part of a continuous flow of coming together and parting. I had myself spent countless sultry, full-moon nights in isolated temples or under ancient trees observing the ritual healing dances of masked spirit dancers in South Kanara (once the Kingdom of Tuluva), a narrow strip of land along the Arabian coast of South India. The narratives recited by the dancers were odd and compelling tales of left-over-lifestill-to-live. After having seen the Powis Castle exhibit, I found myself musing about how Lady Henrietta Clive’s historical adventure in the East might contain its own inherently fascinating tales. Anxious to know more about her and her journey to, within and back home from the South India of that period, I took my first steps.
A few weeks later while at home in West Texas, I rang the 7th Earl of Powis [George William Herbert, 1925–93] at Chirbury, introduced myself and asked where Lady Henrietta Clive’s India papers were held.
‘Her letters and a journal are at home in the castle,’ said the Earl of Powis, seemingly unperturbed by this unexpected call from West Texas. ‘Please speak more loudly, as I have difficulty hearing.’
‘Would it be possible for me to see them?’ I shouted obligingly.
‘Yes … but not today,’ he responded.
We set a date when I would return to Powis Castle and left it at that.
A light snow had fallen when I appeared once again in Wales.
‘It is too cold for you to work in the castle,’ said the Earl of Powis, a kind, scholarly man, as he looked me up and down. ‘You are so “wee” you might freeze to death.’ He then added decisively, ‘You must use my study at Marrington Hall.’
So it was that I drove the narrow lanes to Marrington Hall in Chirbury from Shrewsbury each morning to examine, in the comfort of the Earl of Powis’s state-of-the-art, centrally heated study, several boxes of documents. At eleven o’clock he would bring me a cup of coffee and chat briefly about the Herbert family history and, in particular, its strong women. Around three o’clock, after a cup of tea, he would send me on my way before dark settled in on those short January days. In those moments in snowy Wales, indirectly, through the 7th Earl of Powis, I was welcomed aboard and accepted as a fellow traveller with Henrietta. Henrietta and I joined hands, as it were, both in her Welsh setting and her journey through South India. She led me into her story, rekindling in me the Indian sights and smells and sounds which so fascinated, and for a time, intoxicated her. In a different period, I, too, had breathed and looked at that air.
Henrietta’s words, written in an eighteenth-century script of now faded ink, were often difficult to decipher. The Earl of Powis encouraged me to use his Xerox machine to copy whatever documents I wished. When my schedule did not permit me time enough to finish going through the papers, he allowed me to come for another visit before he relinquished the boxes to the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth.
Certainly Henrietta’s journalistic narrative is not wholly unlikely for the times. For example, Mrs Eliza Fay, thought to have been the daughter of a sailor, sailed to India on three separate journeys and wrote letters about her experiences. Her first voyage was in 1779 with her East India Company lawyer-husband, who was going out to practise as an Advocate at the Supreme Court of Calcutta. Of Mrs Fay’s letters the liveliest and most interesting one was written on her initial trip out when she was held captive by Haidar Ali on the West coast of India in Calicut. After divorcing her husband, who had run off with another woman, Mrs Fay sailed again to Calcutta on her own in 1784 and a final time in 1815. She died in 1816 in Calcutta; her letters were published in 1817. Two years after Henrietta had returned to England, in 1803, Mrs Maria Graham, daughter of Rear Admiral George Dundas, sailed with her husband, a Captain in the Navy, to India. Her collected Indian letters, Journal of a Residence in India (published in 1813) offer a more refined and educated voice than Mrs Fay. However, Mrs Graham did not seem particularly to enjoy India. Her knowledge of it was fairly circumscribed, dealing for the most part with port calls to Bombay, Ceylon and Madras.
Henrietta’s narrative is unique, precisely because it bears the voice of Henrietta’s letters and journal from the interior of South India. Prior to her adventurous trek, western travellers in this little-travelled region had been, for the most part, the British military, various foreign missionaries and East India Company representatives, although two British artists, Thomas Daniell (1749–1840) and his nephew, William (1769–1837), had toured South India in 1792, recording hill forts, temples and antiquities. Henrietta’s perspective allowed her to illuminate the turbulent historical backdrop following the fall of Tipu Sultan from the point of view of a woman traveller. In a manner unlike that found in the writings of a professional soldier such as Colonel Arthur Wellesley and/or an East India Company envoy for British commerce such as Lord Richard Mornington, Henrietta offers a down-to-earth account of whatever situation she found herself in. In a narrative style that is conversational, captivating and, indeed, reflecting her own vitality, her writings provide a sense of permanence to the fleeting moments, people, places and events which ebbed and flowed about her. Likewise Anna Tonelli, Henrietta’s travelling companion, recorded the first watercolour sketches of scenes and people painted by a Western woman artist in the South Indian interior.
Each day throughout her journey, Henrietta opened her writing box, took her pen in hand, dipped it into ink and inscribed her impressions, if only for the length of a page, in her multicoloured Indian paperback notebook. Letters to her husband began with a formal ‘My dear Lord Clive’, and gave an account of the sights and events experienced, along with a commentary about her health and that of their daughters. Although letters addressed to Lady Douglas and the Dowager Lady Clive occasionally contained personal references, for the most part they were more general and meant to be passed around for the entertainment of a select audience of friends and acquaintances. Letters to ‘My dearest brother’ were more intimate and provided Henrietta with a much needed outlet ‘to seem to talk to you’.
I was to see only a few pages written by Henrietta’s brother, George Edward Herbert, whose early reluctance as a letter writer was noted in an undated letter written by his mother, Lady Barbara, to his father, the Earl of Powis, relaying a message to her young son from his little sister, Henrietta Herbert: ‘Henrietta and I agree George has neither pen, ink or paper for her and therefore we send him a sheet of paper and desire that he will borrow a pen from Will Thomas, ink from John Davies, and sense from the ass whose milk you drink. This is H. H.’s message.’ Throughout her life, any letter from ‘my dearest brother’ was greeted with Henrietta’s joy. On August 6th 1786, just before she and her husband set out for Naples on an extended stay in Europe, Henrietta responded to an unexpected letter from her brother saying, ‘At last to my great surprise I beheld the most beauteous scrawl of your lordship and tho’ I confess it was a letter yet it was not too long nor did it contain too much news and therefore you cannot expect a very long one from me.’
Her brother was of immense importance to Henrietta. Presumably her personal vitality, her fearless passion for living life to the full and her joie de vivre were shared with him. Quite possibly Henrietta, or someone in the family, discreetly destroyed his letters to her, as well as many of hers to him. Jane Austen’s letters were edited by her sister, who cut out parts and burnt others for privacy’s sake. Lord Byron’s missives to his beloved sister Augusta were obtained by an indignant Lady Byron, who vindictively publicised their contents. Byron probably did not much care about privacy, but Henrietta, even as Jane Austen, was a careful and private person.
Letters from other periods of Henrietta’s life were also in the boxes, but it was her depiction of life in India that propelled her compelling narrative forward with her accounts of sailing to India, residing in Madras, experiencing a beyond-the-ordinary seven-month adventure while travelling in South India and then sailing home. India is never easy, but the difficulties Henrietta encountered were heightened by her living in an age much less appreciative of such courage and tenacity in a woman. For the most part, wives were left at home. But then Henrietta was more than a wife: she was her own person of note. She did not fit with the prevailing attitudes of her time or with that of the memsahibs to follow in later years. Colonising and proselytising did not interest her in the least; a hands-on coming to know the world of India, however, emphatically did. Henrietta endeavoured to understand and to appreciate.
* * *
Henrietta’s avid desire to experience ‘the magnificence of the East’ was put in place when, as a girl, she had thrilled to first-hand accounts of the India adventures of her neighbour and mentor, Clive of India. On his return from India with vast wealth, Lord Clive had purchased Oakly Park from Henrietta’s father, Henry Arthur Herbert, the Earl of Powis. This transaction was to provoke discussions between the two men about the desirability of a marriage between Clive’s son Edward and the Earl’s daughter, an alliance that would offer prestige to the Clives and the possibility of reviving the fortunes of the titled and landed, but financially strapped, Herberts.
When Henrietta was fourteen, her father died, having made no financial provision for his daughter or wife, yet all too typically, leaving his son, George Edward, heir to the Powis estate. Henrietta went to live in London with her brother, a foppishly fashionable and extravagant young man, who was three years older than she. He was to become part of the London social scene and a great favourite with the ‘Majesties’, King George III (1732–1820) and Queen Charlotte (1744–1818), driving elegant phaetons with spirited horses and hosting lavish and expensive festivities. For Henrietta he was always ‘my dearest brother’, her confidant. Brother and sister became deeply estranged from their mother, who as an habitué of the gaming tables with an addiction to the card game ‘loo’, vied with her son in spending the remaining Powis wealth. George Edward spurned his mother’s pleas to have him pay her gambling debts. In return Lady Barbara refused to sanction her son and daughter living together. In a letter to Probert, who looked after the family’s financial affairs, Lady Barbara noted her concerns: ‘It is not to be expressed what I feel. Henrietta would be undone if anything happens wrong.’
The portrait that Sir Joshua Reynolds painted of Henrietta when she was nineteen depicts a good-looking, small, compact and shapely young woman. She stands against a backdrop of dark feathery tree branches without any of the psychological or social props such as a book, or a bust or needlework frequently employed by portrait painters of the time. Her gaze is contemplative. It is as if she has just turned to speak and one guesses her movements to be nimble, graceful and strong. She is dressed in a stylish but modest pale silk eighteenth-century costume that covers her arms and neck. The distinctive large hat that tilts at a precarious angle over the piled-up tresses of her wig and her stole, were added sometime later by a different hand. There is something oddly affectionate in the way Reynolds has offered the viewer a sense of Henrietta’s independent Welsh spirit, capturing her in an open-ended moment that seems to depict her inner potential as much as her lovely exterior. She gives every indication of being able to handle whatever might come her way.
Clive of India died in 1774 leaving his son Edward a wealthy man. The marriage of Henrietta and Edward which the fathers had hoped for did not take place until ten years later, in May 1784. Not long before the wedding, Edward (aged thirty) wrote to his mother the Dowager Lady Clive to announce his decision to marry Henrietta (aged twenty-six): ‘I have ventured to declare my attachment to a Lady every way calculated to make me happy as a wife and I have been so fortunate as to meet with the most full and unreserved consent on her part. On yours, my Dear Madam, I have ventured to assure Lady H. Herbert there would be the most cordial concurrence and this I have presumed to do from knowledge of the sentiments you and my father entertained of the amiable person on whom depend all my prospects of comfort and felicity. To know that in following my own inclinations I run along with your wishes and what were those of his whose opinions to me are sacred is an important satisfaction.’ They were married in London at the Portland Place address of Henrietta’s brother, the Earl of Powis. Lady Barbara, with whom neither daughter nor son had resolved their conflicts, was not invited to the wedding. In a note to the aforementioned Probert, she commented that ‘my situation as a mother is I believe rather uncommon as neither the day or any other circumstance has been signified to me either by the bride or Lord Powis’. Lord Clive called on her afterwards to inform her of the event.
Over the next five years Henrietta had four children: a son, Edward, was born on March 22nd 1785 and a daughter, Harriet Antonia (Harry) on September 5th 1786. On September 12th 1787, while she and her husband were still on their Grand Tour, Henrietta gave birth in Florence, Italy to their third child, Charlotte Florentia (Charly). To her brother left at home in England with the older children (‘the brats’ as she affectionately called them) Henrietta, a committed traveller, sent a steady flow of lively, lightly humorous letters. There was no doubt that she found Italy invigorating: ‘I draw a great deal now and shall soon equal Raphael.’ She easily handled the less desirable aspects of being in strange locales: ‘Fleas and bugs are in a very flourishing state in Italy and feed most comfortably upon poor me.’ Moreover Henrietta seemed pleased with Lord Clive’s commitment to looking after her health, noting: ‘Lord Clive makes me walk miles everyday … I live upon vegetable – neither Irish beer or wine or anything but milk and water.’
In March 1788 Henrietta and her husband saw that Charly was inoculated with smallpox vaccine in Rome. Henrietta wrote to her brother that ‘this event makes a great noise in Rome as inoculation is looked upon with great horror and the old friars settled in the English coffee house that she would certainly die the third day, but now people are growing more reconciled to it and if she succeeds the Surgeon who attends (but only looks on) is to inoculate ten or twelve directly … therefore your niece’s name will be early famous, at Rome and she will occasion the safety of many children.’ For this first trip abroad, the ever industrious Henrietta had learned to read and speak Italian. Not long after the family reunited in England, the Clives’ fourth and last child, Robert, was born on January 15th 1789.
* * *
In November 1797 the East India Company offered Lord Edward Clive the Governorship of Madras. An elated Henrietta felt herself to be on the threshold of ‘all sorts of things – like the Arabian Nights’. On April 2nd 1798, Lord Clive, Henrietta, their daughters, Harry and Charly, along with the girls’ governess, the Italian artist Signora Anna Tonelli, embarked on the East Indiaman, the Dover Castle. The Clive sons, Edward and Robert, remained behind in England at school and under the supervision of Henrietta’s brother. An arduous journey to India was made doubly difficult by the fact that England was at war with France. Foul weather and an attempted mutiny on one of the ships in the convoy added to the hardships. In June 1798 the Dover Castle sprang a leak and called in at the Cape of Good Hope for repairs.
Henrietta delighted in being once again on land and took enormous pleasure in the proliferation of flora and fauna in South Africa. Lady Anne Barnard, an old acquaintance of Henrietta, offers a glimpse of the Clives during this stop-over to India. ‘She [Henrietta] had a mind open to receive pleasure from everything, to please as far as she can, is incapable of offending and will not tire, I am sure, of any situation she is placed in.’ Of Lord Clive, Lady Anne raised a question: ‘… how comes it that they are going at all? People so wealthy – a man apparently so little ambitious! By implication though not by direct words, I had a reason to think the matter was offered to him, and I did not think Administration – any Administration I mean – was so rich in great appointments as to give without the boon being solicited. Perhaps his name is held to be a lucky one to go to India. He seems in good spirits, but says little … we talked of everything but Madras.’
On reaching Madras on August 21st 1798, the travellers found to their surprise that nothing was as they had expected. Preparations for war were underway against the legendary Tipu Sultan. The engaging, physically fit and strong-willed Colonel Arthur Wellesley of the King’s 33rd Regiment was soon to make his presence known on stage in Madras. Though newly arrived in India, he understood that the Mysore campaign would be extremely risky and that a division of counsel (political as well as military) would impede it. Despite their differences in age and social status, Colonel Wellesley wasted little time in assessing the capabilities of the son of the famous Clive senior. He wrote to his brother, Lord Mornington, the newly appointed Governor General of India in Calcutta, that he found Lord Edward Clive to be ‘a mild moderate man, remarkably reserved, having a bad delivery, and apparently a heavy understanding’. He then amended his description by adding, ‘I doubt whether he is as dull as he appears, or as people think he is.’ A month later in September, Colonel Wellesley followed up his earlier observations in another letter to Lord Mornington saying, ‘Lord Clive opens his mind to me freely upon all subjects. I give him my opinion and talk as I would to Mornington. The truth is he does not want talents, but he is very diffident of himself. Now that he has begun to find out that he has no difficulty in transacting the business of Government, he improves daily, takes more upon himself, and will very shortly have less need for the opinions and abilities of those who have long done the business of the country. A violent or harsh letter from Fort William [Calcutta] would spoil all.’
With Lord Mornington’s entrance on to the Madras scene on December 31st 1798, Lord Clive was relegated to the role of being Governor in name only for the duration of the war. Pragmatically, he summed up his initial relationship with the Governor General as ‘a Awkward but a right one’. Henrietta was considerably harsher in her assessment of Lord Mornington’s usurpation of centre stage. She described him to her brother as ‘extremely pompous … and bringing his authority to bear on me, and everybody in conversation. Lord Clive likes him very well, but you know he does not mind many things, which I confess, disturb my Welsh Spirit.’ She found it ‘entirely an awkward thing to have a Supremo to come over us’. Likewise, she considered Lord Clive’s loss of authority to be unjust, ‘a great mortification’, even though her status in society was not affected, since Lady Mornington had not accompanied her husband to India. Regarding the people of the Madras social scene as ‘not much enlightened’, she declared herself to be ‘most outrageously civil’ in letters to her brother and Lady Douglas.
Indeed, to Henrietta’s disappointment, everything about Madras soon became military: ‘There is nothing but business and solitude,’ she noted. She was not alone, however, in her eagerness for things Oriental. Colonel Wellesley’s own scholarly bent caused him to pursue his continuing studies of India and the Persian language. He had even gone into further debt on his voyage out to add to his library of books on the East. Napoleon Bonaparte’s fervour for the glory of the Orient caused him to include scholars and artists in his expedition to Egypt in June 1798. It was there, en route to aid Tipu Sultan in overthrowing ‘the iron yoke of England’, that he lost his entire fleet to Admiral Horatio Nelson at Aboukir Bay on August 1st 1798. News of Bonaparte’s defeat did not reach Madras until October. If aid had arrived from France, Tipu Sultan would have been an even more dangerous adversary. Fears that the French might have captured the overland trading route, much used by the British for supplies and mail, prompted Henrietta to quip: ‘perhaps Bonaparte has got some of my manuscripts.’
Not willing to be upstaged by ‘the fidgety’, Oxford-educated Lord Mornington, Henrietta asserted her own scholarly identity by immediately ‘building a room in the garden and a laboratory for all sorts of odd rocks and works’. Her pursuit of Persian, the language of Indian courts, was well underway, as she had begun her studies shortly after learning that she would travel to India. In Madras she wasted no time in acquiring two tutors: one for Persian and the other for spoken Hindustani. She also carried on a correspondence with young Captain Malcolm assigned to the British diplomatic service in Persia.
Having early shouldered the responsibility for her eclectic education, Henrietta was deeply committed to overseeing the instruction of her daughters. In Henrietta’s world, women were not allowed many legal rights; nor could they be educated at universities. Perhaps Henrietta gave her girls boys’ names because on one level she wanted to treat them as such. More likely, she simply thought it fun to do so. In India she encouraged Harry and Charly to be open towards the astonishing world unfolding around them and saw to it that they experienced as many levels of Indian culture as possible: meeting Armenian merchants, Muslim Nawabs and Hindu Maharajahs; attending a variety of religious festivals, as well as nautchs; visiting markets, mosques, temples, forts, palaces and zenanas. In their daily lessons they studied Indian plants, rocks and shells, as well as animals, birds and butterflies. Hindustani and Persian became part of their curriculum. The girls were also tutored in conversational Italian and read Dante. They played harp and pianoforte and were skilful at drawing. Even in such tasks as writing letters or keeping a journal, Henrietta did not have written examples set for them to follow. Indeed, her own independent attitude must have served continuously as a lesson to them. Above all else, Henrietta emboldened Harry and Charly to make decisions. Lord Clive wrote to his brother-in-law, expressing his satisfaction with their education, ‘The girls will not, I believe, suffer any loss of accomplishment from residing in India except in their dancing.’
As a woman of her time, Henrietta was all too aware of the discrepancies in what was allowed for English men but unacceptable for English women. It was her wont to point out such inequalities. In a letter written to Lord Clive after he had assumed in full his assignment as Governor of Madras and she was on her magnificent trek, she noted: ‘If you want collectors or collectoresses I think I should like to extremely … and grab over strange countries, particularly near Hyderabad. I should delight in it above all things. It is hard that we poor females are not to get anything in this Asiatic world.’
Henrietta’s dedication in seeking to know India was that of a highly motivated and disciplined amateur. From England she brought with her Robert Orme’s A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan from the year MDCCXLV, whose detailed accounts of Lord Robert Clive’s courageous acts in India underscored Henrietta’s visits to the scenes of his triumphs. Thomas Macaulay characterised Orme’s accounts as ‘minute even to tediousness’, but nonetheless had a high regard for his writings. The more charmingly readable Madame de Sévigné’s Lettres also went with Henrietta to India. In her will, Henrietta would later bequeath her copy of Lettres to Charly. For her Persian studies, Henrietta acquired in India some of the lines of the Diwan written by one of the greatest Sufi poets, Khaja Shamsuddin Hafiz, hoping ‘in all due time to be able to read Hafiz and all the learned books’.
* * *
On May 4th 1799 at 1:30 in the oppressive South Indian afternoon heat, the English Army attacked Seringapatam, the island capital of Tipu Sultan. The rains had not yet come and the waters of the River Cauvery (Kaveri) were low, allowing relatively easy access to the walls of the city. Some two hundred and fifty miles away from Seringapatam on the Coromandel Coast at Fort St George, Madras, Henrietta learned of the ‘Tyger of Mysore’s’ death and the end of what she termed ‘this abominable war’. With a keen interest, she followed the descriptions of the treasures found within Tipu’s Daria Daulat palace which included: sumptuous Persian carpets, extraordinary jewels, a golden throne, a book in which Tipu recorded his imaginative dreams of white elephants and emeralds, his gigantic collection of Persian books on diverse topics and engraved swords and guns. Decorative patterns of tiger stripes and jewelled tiger heads were on everything. There was as well a wooden mechanical tiger which with a turn of a handle made sounds of roaring, as a screaming Englishman feebly lifted an arm to protect himself.
Having been confined to Madras for the duration of the final Mysore Campaign, Henrietta believed that now she would be able to realise her passion to wander amidst South India’s exotic landscapes, religions and peoples. Immediately following the battle, plans had been made for Lord Mornington and Lord Clive to travel to Seringapatam, with Henrietta to follow somewhat later. Even though their luggage had been sent ahead, Lord Mornington, ever fearful for his health, decided at the last minute that the party would remain in Madras for the victory celebration and forego the trip to Seringapatam altogether.
Refusing to relinquish her schemes to travel, Henrietta simply bided her time, waiting for a more favourable opportunity. Undaunted by the difficulties of journeying in the interior of South India, Henrietta perused the maps and descriptions used by the military. Travel conditions were demanding; roads (when available) were primitive; bridges were non-existent. Polygars and unfriendly rogue military bands, such as that of Dhoondiah, threatened. There was, as well, a significant risk of contracting diseases such as dysentery, elephantiasis, cholera, smallpox, malaria, or other indigenous fevers.
After spending eight months in Madras, the overbearing Lord Mornington left for Calcutta in September 1799. He was to say that he and Lord Clive had lived at Madras as brothers. Lord Clive now assumed his responsibilities in full as Governor of Madras, an area roughly the size of Great Britain. He had weathered the initial pitfalls related to his lack of experience in government affairs and had gained in self-confidence. Indeed, Lord Clive found that India afforded him the opportunity to develop his own capabilities.
Although chafing at her confinement, Henrietta continuously offered her advice and support to her husband. She described hers and her husband’s relationship to her brother as being ‘perfectly comfortable in our selves’. Yet there remained an undercurrent of sadness as she noted that in Madras ‘our lives are so very dark and so really triste’. Exacerbated by her profound sense of ‘the terrible distance from one another’, in what she termed ‘the first year of our banishment’ she confided to her brother that ‘I sit alone and think like this and I make myself quite uncomfortable’. A miniature painted on ivory during his Madras sojourn (1798–1803) depicted Lord Edward Clive as a sturdy middle-aged man with a pleasant face wearing a uniform associated with his job. He appears to be something of a late bloomer and at no time a character of such dynamic depth and radiance as Henrietta. He did not join Henrietta in her South India travels, but remained in Madras to take care of his duties there.
* * *
With a host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air
To the wilderness I wander.
‘Tom O’Bedlam’, Popular Ballads, c.1620
In December 1799, shortly before her departure on her South India journey, ominous news of her brother’s illness arrived with the East Indiaman, the Eastern Magnificence. In spite of this, however, Henrietta got off to a good start on March 4th 1800. She was an adaptive traveller who appeared to thrive on the unpredictability of India. To avoid the heat Henrietta’s party was on its way each morning by four or four-thirty. Experiencing the before-sunrise freshness, the heat of midday and the after-sunset drop in temperature, she came to know the smells and tastes of India as never before. Depending on the terrain and the weather, she covered up to twenty-one miles a day. Most nights Henrietta camped in a tent; sometimes she stayed in an East India Company Collector’s house or in a bungalow belonging to a military officer. She visited the forts made famous by Clive of India – Arcot, Vellore and Trichinopoly; she crossed the ghauts and the Guzelhutty Pass. On the road, Henrietta was an active participant: controlling her pet lion with a whip; driving her bandy over rough surfaces; being jostled in a palanquin; ‘scrambling’ to the top of a ‘rock’; admiring the cattle of the Rajah of Tanjore; or lurching about on an elephant. Elephants were to figure prominently as she not only kept on the lookout for wild elephants in forests, but she had to contend with the deaths of several of her baggage-train elephants, whose rations had been purloined by their handlers. During her Bangalore stay Henrietta had followed avidly the Madras newspaper accounts of the Madras Lottery, whereby objects were raffled off to make funds for the native poor of Madras for such projects as hospitals and dispensaries. She wished, though seemingly without success, that she might get lucky and win.
Certainly Henrietta’s wanderings in South India were diverse. At austere Ryacottah, she spent a month living up a mountain, dealing with monkeys and seven discontented sister goddesses. Later when Henrietta resided in Tipu’s abandoned Bangalore palace, Colonel Wellesley and Lieutenant-Colonel Barry Close arranged for Tipu’s munshi to become her Persian tutor. The munshi praised Henrietta’s accomplishment and suggested that the translation of Hafiz would be a worthy project for ‘an illustrious female oriental traveller’. Walking in Tipu’s still-beautiful classical gardens, now grown wild and filled with fragrant white rose trees, listening to the sounds of birdsong and flowing water, Henrietta applied herself to her studies of Persian. While in Bangalore, she translated a number of Hafiz’s ambiguous, multi-level lines that spoke to her of the inconstancy of fortune, of the transitory nature of the present moment.
Throughout her journey, Henrietta pursued not only languages and poetic philosophy, but also continued to acquire plants, animals, birds, butterflies, shells and rocks. Unhesitatingly she queried any and every degree-holding naturalist she found along her way with all the chutzpah of one naturalist to another. During this period of the expansion of naturalistic knowledge all over the world, naturalists were fairly numerous in India. At Cape Town on her voyage out Henrietta had met Dr William Roxburgh, superintendent of a botanical garden established by the East India Company at Sibpu, near Calcutta, who reinforced her interest. At Tranquebar she met Danish naturalists with whom she discussed their acquisitions. Dr Benjamin Heyne, the superintendent of the company’s botanical garden in Madras, helped her to form ‘a complete collection of the Mysore, as well of the plants of the Carnatic, already described by Dr Roxburgh and of any Birds, likewise, Stones or Minerals’. In another age Henrietta might have become a botanist as her interests were particularly keen as a collector of botanical specimens. Lord Clive shared her interests in botany and she sent plants and trees to him as she travelled.
In her letters and journal, Henrietta offered her readers a view of the ongoing drama of her life in India, enlivening her descriptions of place with her tales of ‘tygerish jungles’, alligator-infested rivers and nights spent in the dust and noise of Muslim and Hindu festivities. With perceptive and telling comments she depicted the variety of people she encountered: Ranees, Danish missionaries, Hindu priests, naturalists, Maharajahs, military officers and their wives, Pashas, East India Company Collectors, polygars and fakeers. Simultaneously she confronted a persistent undercurrent in her own bouts of sadness engendered by being, as she wrote to her brother, ‘at such a frightful distance from one another’. She worried, too, when she did not hear from Lord Clive, writing, at one point when there had been a long period in which she did not have a letter from him, that she waited ‘as much in vain I am afraid as for the rain. Perhaps both may come together’. In a letter to her husband she used the phrase, ‘the unpleasantness of absence’, a rather extraordinary understatement for her growing anxiety at his not having written during the last stages of her trek. On another occasion she scolded him by saying ‘I know as little of Madras as Japan’. Missing him she wrote on October 3rd that ‘I think when I see you again it will be one of my most happy days’. Much of her anxiety she invested in worrying about the health of her travelling party, and particularly of her girls.
Henrietta’s journal ended at the seaside village of Allamparva on October 11th 1800. While still on the road, she penned one last letter to Lord Clive in which she confided alarm in the physical alteration of both daughters and expressed her concern that remaining any longer in India might permanently injure their health. Recalling Lord Robert Clive’s epileptic seizures, she reminded her husband of ‘fatal instances, weak nerves, and constitution’ in the Clive family. Increasingly, she had become fearful about the state of her brother’s health. In 1788 when she and Lord Clive had been travelling in Italy, Henrietta had yielded to a similar compelling need that she described as a ‘most amazing’ longing to see her brother, noting that, ‘We have been a long time wanderers upon the face of the earth’. In the autumn of 1800, near the final stages of her South India trek, Henrietta abruptly decided that it was time for her and her daughters to turn towards home.