Raffles, Lady Sophia and their nephew, Charles Flint, left Bencoolen in April, and arrived back in England on the twenty-fourth of August, after a frightening passage round the Cape of Good Hope. They stayed with Sophia’s parents in Cheltenham, where they were reunited with their daughter Ella, now three years old.
In November they rented a small house in Piccadilly, where Raffles prepared a long memorial to the Court of Directors of the East India Company, petitioning them for compensation for expenses incurred during the foundation of Singapore, and requesting a pension appropriate to his years of service to the Company. In July the following year, Raffles bought a house and farm acreage at High Wood, near the country village of Hendon. But that year passed with no word from the Court of Directors.
Finally, in April the following year, Raffles received a thick package marked ‘Private and Confidential’. It contained two letters. The first was from the Court of Directors. They commended Raffles for the role he had played in the administration of Java and Bencoolen, and in the foundation of Singapore. But they strongly disapproved of his excessive expenditures, objecting in particular to his profligate use of Company funds for public works in Singapore, before agreement had been reached with the Dutch about the future of the settlement. Having willfully ignored their direction on countless occasions, he could not expect to be rewarded with a pension.
The other letter was from the accountant general of the Company, which disallowed many of the expenses Raffles had claimed for his administration of Java, Bencoolen, and Singapore, and presented him with a demand for the twenty-two thousand pounds he owed to the Company.
* * *
Raffles woke with a start. He could hear shouting in the distance, and the alarm bell ringing. He dragged himself out of bed, and rushed over to the window. Dear God! The place was on fire! The Chinese town glowed orange and red in the distance, and the flames had managed to spread across the river by way of Presentment Bridge, which was now collapsing into the dark waters of the river. The government buildings on the east bank were ablaze, and the fire was spreading along the east beach at an alarming rate. Raffles pulled on his pants and boots, pausing only to tuck in his nightgown and grab his coat, before he rushed out of the bungalow and made his way down Government Hill as fast as his legs could carry him.
He ignored the cries of the servants as he raced down the hill, his eyes set on the blaze like an animal fixed by the stare of a cobra. He ran faster and faster, tripping over thickets and careering into small trees. The sepoy cantonment was ablaze, and the soldiers were fleeing the smoking barracks. He must get there before it was too late. Then his foot caught on the exposed root of a tree, which snapped his ankle like a dried chicken bone. He stumbled in his pain, and pitched forward. As he floated through the air, time seemed to stand still. Then a searing silver light flashed in his head, and the darkness swallowed him up.
* * *
Lady Sophia found him at five o’clock in the morning, sprawled at the foot of the stairs. One of the servants had come to tell her that although the master’s door was open, he was not in his room, and she had gone to look for him. Sir Stamford Raffles died on the fifth of July 1826, the day before his forty-fifth birthday. The physician who carried out the autopsy recorded that he died of a stroke caused by an abscess on his brain.[1]
Six months later Lady Sophia wrote to the Court of Directors, informing them that she could raise only ten thousand pounds toward the debt they claimed that Sir Stamford Raffles owed to the Company. The Court agreed to accept that amount in final settlement of the Company’s claims against the estate of Sir Stamford Raffles. She stayed on at Highwood, and her Memoir on the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles was published in 1830 to critical acclaim. She died in 1858 at the age of seventy-two. Ella, their last surviving child, died tragically in 1840, at the age of nineteen, on the night before her wedding. ↵