15

The Viceroy’s Routine

EACH OF CURZON’S Indian years followed the same pattern except for 1904, when he went to England. A winter season of three or four months in Calcutta was followed by a spring tour of about six weeks, a five-or six-month summer in Simla, and an autumn tour which brought him back to Government House shortly before Christmas. The Simla sojourn was the least enjoyable as well as the longest part of the year. The Curzons redecorated Viceregal Lodge, replacing the Lincrusta and paper ornamentations with damask of less dingy colours, corrected and restored the ancestral shields of the Governors-General, and designed a rose pergola for the garden. But they still disliked the house. They loved the scenery, the crimson rhododendrons, the snows on the mountain tops, the wooded hills all around, but they never loved the town set in the midst of it. Curzon claimed to love everything and every place in India except Simla. Each year he felt more afflicted by its ‘garish setting of inane frivolity’ and ‘its atmosphere of petty gossip and pettier scandal’.1

The Simla season, which peaked in June, was the high point of the year for many people, especially for district officers and their families who after ten months in the plains needed a cool respite in the hills. Isolated in their work and suffering from the climate, they grasped the chance of relaxing in the company of their fellow countrymen, playing tennis and polo, going on picnics, organizing dances and amateur theatricals, ‘taking the air’ in the evenings along Simla’s fashionable Mall. It may have been ‘inane frivolity’, but it was the frivolity of people under strain, the frenzied gaiety of aliens often unsure why they were in India and desperate to enjoy themselves while they could. If, as Bishop Welldon suggested, they were like ‘people dancing under the shadow of a volcanic mountain’,2 one should not be too hard on them, or on Simla.

Senior officials of the army or the civil service, cooped up in the place for half the year, felt differently. Clinton Dawkins, who spent a single summer there on Curzon’s Council, declared himself amazed by the vulgarity and silliness of English people trying to amuse themselves.3 As a young Punjab official in 1884, Walter Lawrence had enjoyed Simla: it was bright and cheerful, full of clever and interesting people. But when he returned fifteen years later as the Viceroy’s Private Secretary, Simla seemed rowdier and more frivolous. Feeling old and disinclined to take part in society’s ‘high jinks’, he preferred to spend his free evenings advancing through a shelf of Dickens.4

Curzon found Simla’s social life small, narrow and monotonous. Taste, imagination, interest in art and literature either did not exist or else had been ‘sterilised by the arid breath of a semi-court and purely official existence’.5 He kept his social life to a minimum: the Polo Final, the Old Etonian Dinner, a meeting of the Simla Temperance Association, an occasional visit to amateur theatricals in which his ADCs acted so badly that he felt obliged to offer ‘a lot of hints and tips’ about the art of the stage.6 He attended the unavoidable functions but spurned events such as the Horse and Dog Show and seldom found time to go to gymkhanas. Such aloofness annoyed and unnerved people. It was said that in Simla you could not hear your own voice for ‘the grinding of axes’, and the grinders and gossips were often conflated. One of the town’s worst features, Curzon thought, was the ‘sinister novelty’ of having to begin each season with a new set of gossips and idlers. His unguarded talk at meals was distorted and repeated by his listeners to the rest of Simla, which chuckled about it and referred to him as ‘Imperial George’. Little jests were misinterpreted, and remarks such as ‘no self-respecting woman would allow cold tapioca pudding to be served at luncheon’ were taken seriously and resented. Curzon made no effort to change his image. ‘The world saw him in caricature,’ wrote Lawrence, ‘and unfortunately he was apt to play up to the caricature’.7

Although he disliked Simla, the Viceroy could work well there, undisturbed except for the weekly meeting of his Council and the visits of the departmental secretaries. He often wished that discontented people in the plains, who thought government officials spent their time in picnics, balls and gymkhanas, could observe his routine. Sometimes, he told MacDonnell, he did not leave the house for two or three days in succession, and he was seldom in bed before two in the morning.8 But the whole raison d’être of Simla – to rejuvenate officials and restore their health – passed him by. As soon as he arrived there, he was seized by ‘the usual Simla reaction’, backache and ‘utter lassitude’, and during his stay was afflicted frequently by fever and sometimes by dysentery.

Weekends were spent at a house called the Retreat, a thousand feet higher in the village of Mashobra six miles from Simla. Curzon did not care for it either, mainly because he was kept awake by the noise of the ‘coppersmith’ and ‘brain-fever’ birds, but he admitted the climate was more bracing. He much preferred living in tents at Naldera, a favourite camping ground of Lytton and Dufferin, where he could communicate with Simla, sixteen miles away, by signalling and heliograph during the day and by lamp-flashes at night. The place was ‘unutterably peaceful’ with no sounds but ‘the faint whisper of the wind through the deodars’ and the distant humming of the River Sutlej through a deep gorge over 3,000 feet below. The family camped there for two or three weeks each June and loved it, the children rolling about among the pine needles and trying to catch butterflies. Their father arranged the plan of the tents and marked out a golf course where he played daily in the evenings. It was almost his only exercise of the year, for in Calcutta it was too hot to walk, and at Simla he limited himself to an afternoon stroll and, when his back permitted, an occasional game of tennis. Naldera was also the closest he came to a relaxing holiday. When Mary was in England in 1901, he claimed he did little more than six hours work a day, that he was in bed by midnight and that he did not start writing, at his table under the deodars, until just before noon.9 The open-air life was good for him; both his back pains and his insomnia diminished in the idyllic surroundings.

The chief drawback of the Simla months was the monotony. People at home, he wrote, might think the Viceroy lived in sumptuous palaces surrounded by oriental pomp, but in fact he spent half the year on a single hilltop chained to a sort of middle-class suburb where there was no culture or conversation and where he had to lunch day after day with his ADCs, a set of youths interested only in polo and dancing. Presumably they thought it wise not to discuss such topics with their chief, for Lawrence, who frequently lunched at Viceregal Lodge, observed that they dared not open their mouths. It was perhaps understandable that Curzon should describe Simla life in one of his most celebrated snobbisms as ‘like dining every day in the housekeeper’s room with the butler and the lady’s maid’.10

As the Viceroy himself recognized, his official position made it difficult for him to attract the solace, the advice or even the friendly conversation which he craved. He could not see anyone except by sending for him, an action which in itself gave the subsequent meeting a certain formality. Furthermore, the interviewee, whose entire future probably depended on the Viceroy, would feel constrained from telling him unwelcome facts. All India, Curzon realized, was talking about his plans, his caprices, his sayings and his actions, but he knew nothing about what was being said except what he read in the newspapers; even Lawrence dared not repeat gossip.

He did enjoy the company of some of his entourage, notably Captain Wigram (‘so dependable a fellow’), the most efficient and intelligent of his ADCs. And he was very fond of Lawrence, who made use of the privilege, open to others though availed of few, of making frank and unresented criticisms. Yet Lawrence and Wigram were both employees who could not treat him as his old friends among the Souls or in the House of Commons had done. ‘The great want’, he sighed to Brodrick, ‘is that of human fellowship.’ He had always liked to chaff his friends about their alleged deficiencies: when Ian Malcolm, an MP who had assisted him at the Foreign Office, accompanied the Viceroy on his Burmese tour, he was teased remorselessly about his equestrian defects and his fear of crossing a rope bridge. But Curzon could not behave like that with subordinates. The one man in India he regarded as a close friend left the Subcontinent after only a brief spell as Bishop of Calcutta. Welldon was the Viceroy’s intellectual equal and the only person with whom he could have a natural and uninhibited conversation. Yet their friendship had its drawbacks because, as Lawrence observed, it led people to associate the Bishop’s unpopular views with Curzon. Tact was not among Welldon’s gifts, and in his first few weeks in India he had antagonized almost all classes and sects by his missionary zeal: he even managed to alienate his natural supporters in Calcutta society by closing the cathedral doors to prevent them leaving for dinner before the sermon.11 Welldon was so out of touch with Indian feeling that he was unable to understand why Queen Victoria appealed more to her subjects than Jesus Christ.12 While they valued his friendship, the Curzons knew Welldon was unsuited to India, and they advised him not to return after a visit to England in 1901.

Life in Calcutta was much less dull than in Simla. There was a wider British society, annually reinforced by friends and visitors from home, which at any rate ensured an energetic social life. There was the consolation of a fine palace in an imperial city instead of a gloomy villa in a cramped hilltop town. And there was the stimulus of the legislative session, during which the Viceroy’s reforms became law, and the budget debate which gave him the opportunity to make an annual ‘state of the nation’ address. While there was less time to ponder new policies, he still had the midnight hours for the perusal of files and the redrafting of despatches. Besides, Christmas was a good time for serious projects because, as he put it, everyone was ‘so engaged in hilarity’ that the departments scarcely disturbed him with their day-to-day affairs.

In Calcutta the Viceroy could enjoy the company which the Simla months denied him. Sven Hedin, whom he regarded as the greatest scientific explorer of the age, was entertained at Government House, and later dedicated one of his books to Curzon. Pierre Loti, the exotic French novelist, also received hospitality despite Havelock’s warning that he had come to India as a spy for both the Russians and the French. Dismissing the theory as ‘absolute moonshine’, the Viceroy welcomed Loti who, although he curled his hair and painted his cheeks, seemed ‘otherwise to be a very clever and cultured little man’.13

Other visitors sometimes proved tiresome, particularly European princes who needed a lot of entertaining and were regarded by Curzon as an ‘unmitigated nuisance’. Pearl Craigie came out and wrote some flattering but ‘peculiarly rotten’ articles. Oscar Browning was egotistical and irritating, noted Lawrence, always telling everyone how things were done at Cambridge; having listened to O.B.’s ‘most grotesque’ rendering of ‘funiculi funicula’ after dinner, the Private Secretary recorded his ambition not to become like him when he grew older.14 There was also the problem of relations. Coming out for the Delhi Durbar with his sister Evie, Alfred Curzon expected his brother to arrange free shooting and accommodation for their subsequent tour of India; but the Viceroy refused to inflict his guests on native chiefs, and ‘Affie’, to his disgust, even had to hire a rifle for a tiger shoot. Mary’s sisters, Daisy and Nancy, amused Curzon with their boisterous humour, but they were even more troublesome, flirting with the ADCs, mocking the viceregal etiquette and gossiping about their sister and brother-in-law. Mrs Leiter, by contrast, acquired so much respect for court manners in India that ever afterwards she addressed the American President as ‘Excellency’.15

The cost of entertaining at Government House and Viceregal Lodge was prodigious. Both residences, Curzon complained, were treated like hotels and department stores. People borrowed his tents, his carpets and even his band for their own parties; one total stranger asked for the loan of a horse to ride in a steeplechase. He had to provide good champagne because his guests scrutinized the labels on the bottles, as well as fine cigars which tended to disappear in the pockets of departing gentlemen. The Viceroy soon realized he was being ‘colossally swindled’ by his French chef, who was sacked after engaging in some ‘peculations of a character that excites admiration even in the East’.16

Governors-General had received such munificent salaries from the East India Company that they were able to accumulate large fortunes during their period of office. But by Curzon’s time it was difficult for a Viceroy to save much of his income without reducing the scale of his entertaining. Initial expenses, including the purchase of Elgin’s horses and carriages, cost Curzon £7,200 more than he received as an ‘outfit allowance’, and during the seventeen months following his arrival his expenditure exceeded his income by over £8,000. Neither of the Curzons had been personally extravagant, and Mary claimed that no Vicereine had been so economical with her wardrobe. Lawrence suggested some economies could be made in the kitchen, which was costing £2,500 more than in the equivalent period in Elgin’s time, and in the stables, which were costing £5,700 more. Curzon was so astonished by these figures that he examined the accounts and discovered that, at a time when the average annual income per head in Britain was £40, the Viceroy of India was spending the same amount each year on his guests’ chocolates, rather more on their tennis balls, and £307 on their cigars and cigarettes.17 The Curzons’ initial debt was paid off with help from Mary’s father, and thereafter they managed to balance their budget. In 1902 he asked the India Office to raise his successor’s salary so that no future Viceroy should have to leave India ‘without one penny to his credit after five years of the most laborious service in the world’.18 Hamilton refused.

The Viceroys had a rural retreat at Barrackpore, a plain classical house set in a large park on the River Hooghly fifteen miles from Calcutta. The family used to go there by river launch on Saturday evenings and return early on Monday. Curzon naturally took his files and worked on them for most of Sunday, but he enjoyed the twilight journeys, and years later he recalled sitting on deck to watch the changing panoramas of the river banks, the thick vegetation and the feathery palm-tops, the smoke of native villages, the rows of Hindu shrines at the water’s edge, and the white-clad figures moving up and down the dilapidated ghats. Work on Sunday was interrupted by an inspection of the rose garden, which he developed as a nursery for plants needed for state occasions at Government House, and by lunch under a large banyan tree in the garden, a hazardous meal during which native servants with sticks tried to prevent huge kites swooping down and carrying off pieces of meat. After lunch Curzon returned to his papers, while his ADCs lounged about under the banyan tree, eventually rousing themselves to play croquet until the light faded when they retired indoors to play billiards. Late one night Lawrence heard the Viceroy bellowing at them because the click of the balls kept him awake.19

A natural prey to gossip all his life, Curzon soon inspired a collection of stories about viceregal pomp and etiquette which travelled to England and were there repeated, magnified and believed. Even Edward VII enjoyed recounting how Colonel Sandbach had resigned as Military Secretary because Curzon had forced him to stand behind his chair during meals.20 Other circulating fictions included Mary curtseying to him when she woke up in the morning, ladies having to retire backwards after talking to him at balls, people being forbidden to speak to either of them without permission, and lunches at which the Curzons were seated before any guests were allowed into the dining-room. Such stories, expanding with age, continued long after the couple had left India. At Simla in 1919 a member of the current Viceroy’s staff was recounting how Curzon ‘always went to bed preceded by two ADCs walking backwards and carrying silver candlesticks’. One of them, allegedly, had to wait outside the bedroom door until he was dismissed.21

Curzon was exasperated by these stories. Sandbach, who never had to stand behind his chair, resigned because he was more fitted to be a regimental officer than a Military Secretary. Nobody had to walk backwards. The ballrooms at Simla and Calcutta did have a dais where the Curzons stood while people filed by and shook hands, but this was ‘a curious Indian custom’, he pointed out, not one introduced by them. The social etiquette which they observed, he told Hamilton, was exactly the same as that of the Dufferins and the Lansdownes without any modification except that he did not take ‘pretty widows into corners as Lord Dufferin did or slip [his] arm round their waists and call them pretty dears …’22 The Secretary of State was convinced by Curzon’s denials, but the King preferred the apocryphal version. ‘Qui s’excuse s’accuse’, he scrawled on a letter of explanation sent him by Hamilton.23

Other exaggerations continually appeared in the British press. The Saturday Review and the Manchester Guardian complained that he was always making speeches, but other newspapers, eager to stress the oriental pomp of his life, claimed he was always on top of elephants. A.C. Benson heard that he used them like cabs to meet him at railway stations.24 In fact he was the first Viceroy who did not possess an elephant and was forced to borrow one from a maharaja for the state entry at the Delhi Durbar. He never otherwise rode the animals except to go tiger shooting – where they were essential – and described the experience as ‘one of the most horrible forms of locomotion’, especially for someone with a bad back. Criticism of the formality of the viceregal court may have been more justified, because Curzon did nothing to reduce the rituals and indeed restored them to their pre-Elgin level. He certainly enjoyed pageantry and ceremonial, which reached their apogee at the Delhi Durbar, and he correctly estimated their value and importance in the East. But although he loved the splendour of such spectacles, he seldom enjoyed state occasions which were a stress on his physique and a strain on his spirits. Informing Godley in a letter that he was about to put on white breeches and silk stockings, he described the process as ‘the prelude to an evening of incomparable tedium – I allude to a function known as the State Ball’.25

Curzon’s favourite seasons were the spring and autumn tours. These were sometimes long journeys, lasting six weeks or more, to distant places in the south or along the frontier. Others were short excursions in different directions, a tiger shoot or a visit to a famine area, a trip to install a maharaja or simply a roundabout way of travelling between Simla and Calcutta. Curzon spent more time on tour than any other Viceroy and enjoyed visiting places unknown to his predecessors. In one year he went on five separate tours and in another spent sixteen weeks on his journeys; his southern tour of 1900, covering 6,000 miles and including more than forty speeches, lasted eight weeks. Most of the travelling was done in a special train which carried, apart from the Curzons and their personal servants, the Viceroy’s Military Secretary, Private Secretary and Assistant Private Secretary, his surgeon and dispensary, four ADCs, nine clerks and about eighty-five native servants; various officials such as the Secretary of the Foreign Department and an Under-Secretary were also included.

The train’s chief occupants were treated with due respect during their travels, receiving a thirty-one-gun salute on arrival and departure at any station with a battery or a fort; if they arrived after sunset or on a Sunday, the salute was fired the following morning. Lawrence was sceptical about the usefulness of these progresses: they were too formal and too rapid, officials were so nervous about meeting the Viceroy that they said silly things, too much time was wasted shooting and sightseeing, and little was achieved by the formal banalities exchanged between Viceroy and native chiefs at the state banquets.26 Other officials took a different view, considering it advantageous for the Viceroy to be seen by so many people and good for the princes to feel that a personal interest was being taken in their affairs. Even Lawrence, whose views had been coloured by a surfeit of dusty clambering over ruins in the footsteps of his chief, later admitted that the sightseeing – and the restoration work that was its fruit – had been worthwhile.27

The tours were also good for the Curzons. Although he slept even worse in trains than elsewhere, the Viceroy was still a traveller at heart, eager to see fresh scenery and buildings, still able to enjoy long cart rides over bumpy terrain. His endurance astonished and often dismayed officials who found him impervious to the sun and incapable of fatigue. Lawrence thought him at his best in a camp in the countryside, where he relaxed and told amusing anecdotes of his early journeys. Mary accompanied him on several tours and, in spite of headaches and the heat, also enjoyed them, especially a trip on hill ponies in the Himalayas and a visit to Burma, drifting down the Irrawaddy and admiring the pagodas. They were both exhilarated by the landscape of the south, which reminded Curzon of the India of his nursery books, ‘made up of black-skinned, idle, grinning people, and peaceful land-locked lagoons, and groves of feathery palms’. He was similarly aroused by the towns with their ‘teeming populations, gross superstitions, and their barbaric and monstrous temples’.28

Official visits in British India consisted mainly of speeches, inspections and social functions which included what the Viceroy regarded as ‘that grimmest of terrors, a garden party’. Factories and hospitals were seen, statues unveiled, interviews given and monuments closely examined. Much amusement was derived from the decorated triumphal arches which welcomed them to Indian towns with inscriptions such as ‘Welcome, our future Emperor’ (in Trichinopoli), ‘Hail Overworked Viceroy, Karachi wants more Curzons’, and ‘A Gala Day’ converted unintentionally in Jaipur to ‘A Gal a Day’. The duration of journeys was much extended by the appeal of history: no place connected with the Moguls or the Mutiny – and few from earlier periods – was overlooked. Instructions for the restoration of ancient buildings and commemorative tablets for even minor Mutiny sites were drawn up before departure. Brigadier John Nicholson’s last hours on earth were traced from the breach in the walls of Delhi to the lane in which he was shot and from there to the place of his burial. A memorial tablet for Sir Henry Lawrence was found in the wrong room of the Residency at Lucknow and was removed and put up on the true spot where he had died. Curzon ‘never ceased to be amazed’ that for over forty years visitors had gazed at the inaccurate tablet without detecting or correcting the error.29

The appeal of history reverberated also in the native states. Much as he appreciated Scindia’s efficient and progressive state of Gwalior, his imagination preferred the unchanging rituals of Udaipur and the feudal flavour of Kathiawar, which he was delighted to find had retained its archaic and aristocratic features under British protection. Portuguese Goa, still run by a colonial power he had never admired, provided a different type of historical interest. The beauty of the churches impressed the Curzons, but the organization of the visit was so feeble and a military parade was such a farce that the viceregal party found it difficult to control their giggles. At the state dinner the British guests, who spoke no Portuguese, were sandwiched between local officials who spoke no English, and conversation was replaced by the sound of two bands, one in the next room and the other in the street, playing different tunes simultaneously. Fortunately one of the Viceroy’s neighbours was a Portuguese lady who had been educated in an English-speaking convent in Macao. After persuading her to translate the last part of his speech and teach him the pronunciation, Curzon was then able to stand up, reply to the Governor’s toast in English and deliver an impassioned finale in fluent Portuguese. His hosts applauded wildly, the State Secretary proposing the Viceroy’s health with the cheer ‘Heep Heep Hah’.30

Most tours included a few days’ shooting of ‘game’ as varied as quail and rhinoceros. Curzon was a good shot who enjoyed the challenge of difficult targets, but he got no satisfaction from massacres or easy hits. After killing one rhino he declined to fire at any others. Nor did he want to shoot at a herd of wild buffalo which, instead of charging on sight, ‘shambled about like a herd of tame cattle in a farmyard’: there was ‘no more sport in the thing than in killing flies on a window pane’.31 In the Gir Forest he cancelled a lion shoot on discovering that the beasts there were close to extinction, and he displayed genuine sorrow on finding three unborn cubs in a tigress he had just killed. The remorse was insufficient to deter him from future hunting, but few of his contemporaries would have shown any at all.

Nothing was more exciting, Curzon admitted to his father, than tiger shooting. ‘You can hear your heart beat as he comes, unseen, with the leaves crackling under his feet, and suddenly emerges, sometimes at a walk, sometimes at full gallop, sometimes with an angry roar.’32 To another correspondent he described the almost inconceivable ‘majesty of the tiger when in a rage’. He had the admiration for his quarry that the best matadors have for brave bulls. One ‘most splendid and courageous brute’ crouched in the dense Nepalese jungle until the hunters’ ring of elephants closed in on him, when suddenly he sprang out and mauled one of them before retreating, growling or roaring, until the next attack. The elephants became so frightened that they ‘curtsied and waltzed about’ and would not go near the tiger. Curzon eventually got him, but it took four bullets, an unusual number for a hunter who seldom required more than one. On another expedition he needed only seven shots to kill a bear, a black leopard, a sambar and three tigers.33

Not all shoots were as successful. In their eagerness to please, Curzon’s princely hosts sometimes tried to provide him with easy tigers, fat and possibly drugged, at which to aim. More often they encouraged the Viceroy with reports of large numbers of the species which turned out either to be non-existent or to have moved away. In Hyderabad and Rajputana, where the tigers were hunted not from the backs of a concentring circle of elephants but from a stationary position, Curzon spent entire days on a platform or on top of a boulder with no animal in sight. On one occasion he and Mary sat together in a tree and saw nothing bigger than a frog, while on an eight-day expedition to Rewa he had only one opportunity of firing his rifle. The absence of tigers was usually known, however, before he left camp in the morning and gave him the opportunity to catch up with his work.

The most irritating thing about the hunting expeditions was the behaviour of his staff, whose company was even more intrusive in camp than at Simla. His Indian servants were often annoying, losing his papers or misplacing his shirts, but the ADCs, who had ‘not two ideas between them’, were even more tiresome. They blazed away at anything that moved but rarely managed to hit it. Curzon thought they shot worse than any body of men in India. Captain Baker Carr, for example, was a ‘colossal fraud’ who ‘gassed’ on and on about his sporting exploits in bygone days but was incapable of either catching a fish or shooting a bird. Colonel Baring, who was Sandbach’s successor as Military Secretary, was a better marksman but a less agreeable character who showed insufficient respect for his chief and indicated disagreement by curling his lip at him. After the Viceroy had shot his first tiger in Nepal, Baring suggested he should retire until the ten members of the staff had each bagged one too – a proposal which infuriated both Curzon and the Nepalese, who protested that the shoot had not been arranged for the benefit of the ADCs. Curzon’s exasperation with his Military Secretary intensified during a lunch on a Himalayan hillside when Baring so annoyed some hornets by flapping at them that they rushed at the Viceroy and stung him all over his neck and scalp. That evening Curzon wrote to Mary, lying in bed with his ‘head all swollen up and a thousand aches in every part of it’, to complain that Baring had neither uttered a word of regret nor enquired how he was feeling.34

Wherever he was, in camp, on a train or in a maharaja’s palace, Curzon still worked at his papers and correspondence, writing in the dust and heat of a jolting carriage or late at night in his tent after the staff had retired. A day without tigers enabled him to write thirty or forty letters, while an extended period of blank days, as at Rewa, encouraged him to telegraph to Simla for more files. Asked by Ampthill how he managed to get through his work, Curzon replied ‘by never doing anything else’, by sitting up into the night and finding another two and a half or three hours after dinner, by rapid writing – ‘the result of long practice’ – by familiarity with Indian subjects, and by invariably devoting Sundays to some special project. Drafts of his letters, he added, were written ‘in bed, or on a boat, or when dressing, or anywhere, whenever the thing comes into my mind’.35

Work in Simla and Calcutta included meetings, for which he was notoriously unpunctual, interviews, which he tended to regard as a waste of time, and speeches, which he wrote out beforehand, rapidly memorized and then delivered without notes. But the bulk of the work was in the papers and correspondence which Lawrence brought him throughout the mornings and afternoons. His secretary handed him everything from the Foreign Department but tried to make summaries of cases sent from the other secretariats. If the matter seemed complex, however, the Viceroy insisted on seeing all the papers. He was a voracious reader, observed Lawrence, with a wonderful memory, his brain like ‘a splendid and perfect index’ which only failed him when discussing Dickens. His secretary, who had made himself an expert on the writer, recalled that Curzon invariably misquoted him and muddled up his characters. Reflecting on the quality of his mind and his obsession with logic, Lawrence suggested ‘it would have been better for him and for others if he had known more of Dickens and less of logic’.36 It is hard to disagree.

Drafting and redrafting remained the most time-consuming occupation. Convinced there was almost no one in the Government, apart from Ibbetson, who could write ‘a page of either forcible reasoning or of passable English’, Curzon insisted on redrafting despatches on even the most mundane subjects. The situation became particularly bad in the Foreign Department when its efficient Secretary, Hugh Barnes, was promoted to the lieutenant-governorship of Burma in 1902 and replaced by Louis Dane, until then the Resident in Kashmir. The new Secretary’s literary defects soon turned him into a special object of exasperation for the Viceroy. One despatch on a simple subject, complained Curzon, was so abominably done that it took him nearly three hours to rewrite instead of the hour and a half he would have needed had he undertaken the job in the first place.37 His obsession with doing everything himself exceeded even his normal limits at a dinner party in Calcutta when, after the ladies had withdrawn, he remained silently at his place, ignoring his male guests for ten minutes until he had corrected the proof of a note on soldiers’ pay.38

Curzon never tried to delegate. He grumbled to Lawrence of overwork and sometimes told him he felt he was going mad. But he refused to let his secretary help or to trust the departments to do the work themselves.39 When a subordinate slipped up, he delighted in exploiting the incident as a vindication of his methods. His reaction to the placing of a suitcase in the wrong railway carriage was to scoff at the notion that one should trust other people to get things done: in his view, there was ‘no madder philosophy in the world’. After some minor mistake by Lawrence, he told Mary it was ‘no good trusting a human being to do a thing for you. Do everything yourself.’ Even Hamilton was treated to an exposition of this theory and informed that ‘every really great man from Caesar to Napoleon [had] been a master of detail’.40

All his life Curzon piled pointless and unimportant burdens on top of his official labours. After travelling to India on a P & O vessel, he felt obliged to tell Selborne, who was a director of the shipping line, that the food on board was atrocious and had made one of Mary’s sisters ill. When Selborne disputed the poor quality, the Viceroy replied with a further eight pages on the subject, and a year later was still sending his friend evidence from other passengers who had suffered from the cooking.41 Curzon’s pedagogic nature could seldom resist the temptation to correct inaccuracies or bad English. Officials, the usual victims, expected it, but authors were sometimes astonished to discover that their literacy had come under viceregal scrutiny. Curzon had little time for books in India, read on average only one a year and, explaining that he was ‘somewhat fastidious in syntax and language’, subsequently sent its author a thorough criticism of his work. Herbert Maxwell, the biographer of Wellington, received a list of grammatical quibbles which included the recommendation that a genitive absolute should be turned into a nominative, while Lionel Cust was sent a long catalogue of the misspellings, wrong tenses, incorrect use of prepositions and confused metaphors which disfigured his book on Eton. Cust thanked Curzon for the letter, which must have given him limited pleasure, and pointedly expressed his surprise at receiving such a missive ‘from one who has millions of lives depending perchance, for all we know, on every minute of his time’.42

The Viceroy’s most prolonged time-wasting exercise concerned his own title. He had been forced to call himself Curzon of Kedleston because his Howe cousin, who was also called George and who was at that time an MP, held the courtesy title of Viscount Curzon. In 1900 this cousin succeeded his father as Earl Howe and, as there was now no other Curzon in public life, the Viceroy decided to drop Kedleston from his title when signing letters and despatches. The Howes, however, objected and brought their case before the King, who sympathized with their point of view. His Majesty was ‘very much surprised’, Salisbury’s Private Secretary told Curzon, to see the abbreviated signature and wanted the matter ‘rectified’. Curzon responded with a combative letter to King Edward’s Private Secretary, Sir Francis Knollys, explaining that he had curtailed his signature partly because it saved time (he often had to sign fifty or sixty warrants a day) and partly because he had a right to do so. There was no law or custom, he argued, that compelled a peer to sign his full title, even in order to escape possible confusion with someone else. The Duke of Hamilton did not sign himself Hamilton and Brandon in case he was mistaken for the eldest son of the Duke of Abercorn, and Stanley of Alderley sighed himself Stanley even though there was another Lord Stanley in the House of Commons. Furthermore, as the Howes were the junior branch and had taken another peerage, it was too much for them to deny the use of the Curzon title to the eldest son of the senior branch.43

Even Mary, who was in Europe at the time, found this missive a ‘trifle defiant’ and advised her husband to send the King a softer letter of ‘butter and molasses’. But the cause was hopeless. Knollys engaged an anonymous genealogical expert to consider Curzon’s case and sent the commissioned memorandum, which countered his arguments in a needlessly offensive tone, to the exasperated Viceroy. It was a very Curzonian episode: too much logic, too much indignation and too little sense. The delirium of disputation had once again prevailed over the wisdom of Mr Pickwick.

The Viceroy’s life in India, he told Pearl Craigie, was ‘strenuous, unceasing, exhausting, an endless typhoon of duty’.44 He reached his desk at about ten o’clock and, with intervals for meals, a drive and perhaps a public function, rarely left it before two in the morning. He worked with enthusiasm and seldom flagged, but as time went on the self-pity burgeoned. He saw himself as a martyr, attacked in India and unappreciated at home, chained to his desk while everyone else was asleep, forced to go on and on because he was surrounded by incompetents who could not do their work properly. The self-pity went on display during his seventh budget speech when he compared himself to a toiling horse that ‘staggers and drops beneath the shafts’ of a cart. It was a constant feature of his letters to Mary, especially during her long absence in Europe in 1901. Writing from his solitude in Simla that July, he described his life as

grind, grind, grind with never a word of encouragement, on on on till the collar breaks and the poor beast stumbles and dies. I suppose it is all right and it doesn’t matter. But sometimes when I think of myself spending my heart’s blood here, and no one caring one little damn, the spirit goes out of me, and I feel like giving in. You don’t know, or perhaps you do, what my isolation has been this summer. I am crying now so that I can hardly see the page. But it has always been so. The willing horse is flogged till he drops and the work goes on.45

Reflections on the fate of his greatest predecessors consoled him. They too had been calumniated or ignored but had carried on their task with fortitude, impervious to slander and resolute in their convictions. History had proved them right and would surely justify him as well. Long after he was dead the despatches would be disinterred, and people would recognize that he had been right, that things would have turned out better if his strong and courageous policies had not been sacrificed to timorous expediency. He desperately wanted to be considered ‘great’. He thought constantly about great men, not just about Hastings, Dalhousie and Canning, but about Caesar, Napoleon, Wellington and Lincoln, giants whose biographies were almost his sole recreational reading in India. He once told the journalist Valentine Chirol that he always felt himself ‘to be living the very life of all the great men’ of whom he had read in history.46 Yet among his contemporaries he really only admired Lord Cromer and Lord Milner, fellow proconsuls who, in his eyes, were also spending thankless years of uncomplaining toil in the interests of their nation. ‘I have often felt for you,’ he wrote to Milner on his return from South Africa, ‘straining at the leash on the outskirts of Empire, knowing the experience so well myself; and knowing also what it is to be thwarted and over-ruled by those who know so little at home.’47

Colleagues, friends and relations constantly urged Curzon not to work so hard. Mary forced him to break off for an afternoon drive but unsuccessfully implored him not to sit up into the small hours. When she was in England both Salisbury and Balfour told her he should work less and sleep more. In letter after letter Lord George Hamilton sent a similar message. All exhortations were useless, Mary told her father, because George said he would ‘prefer to work and die than to be idle and live. What can you do with such a man?’48

Curzon’s health held up remarkably well for the first year, but his backaches returned in the spring of 1900 accompanied by persistent insomnia. Much of the rest of that year was spent in a horizontal position, but bed gave him little rest since, by saving time on dressing and undressing, he managed to do more work in it than out.49 Although his back seldom troubled him the following year, he was then afflicted by neuritis, savage pains in his right leg that struck him when he tried to walk and deprived him of sleep. He spent an entire month in the autumn on his back, even having to berate the recalcitrant Mackworth Young from his bed. His surgeon rubbed the leg with liniment, applied fomentations and made him swallow quinine tablets and ‘other tomfoolery’, but confessed he had not ‘the ghost of a notion what to do’.50 By the end of October the pains had progressed down his leg to the ankle and instep, prompting him to tell Godley he hoped they would soon evaporate through his big toe. But the following summer they were still there, causing him agony if he had to stand for any length of time. From the lesser ailment of headaches, however, he found relief by putting plantain leaves in his topee.

The children remained healthy on the whole, but Mary seldom felt well at either Simla or Calcutta. Plagued by headaches and insomnia, she was also, according to her husband, ‘always thin and rather anaemic in India’. In 1901 he persuaded her to spend the summer in Europe in order to recover her health and become strong enough to have another baby. Much as he missed her, he did not want her to come back in August, fall ill during a bad monsoon passage and be unable to conceive the son they both craved. He was prepared to remain without her – ‘It does not much matter to a cabbage whether it leads a vegetable existence for five or six months’ – if it strengthened her chances of becoming pregnant. Mary did delay her voyage but failed to conceive on her return. Dejected and unhappy, she was certain ‘little George’ would come one day, though probably not until they went home to ‘vegetate in Scotland’. Her husband was philosophical about the disappointment, refusing to blame her for ‘the misfortunes of Nature’ and admitting that, for all he knew, it may have been his fault. “We may not be meant to have a son,’ he told her, and ‘if that is so, it only remains for us to bow our heads. After all we have a great deal and we have two precious children as it is.’51 Later he told her not to despair because Lady Chelsea had ‘produced the necessary boy at the sixth shot’, an inappropriate example as it happened because Lord Chelsea was not the child’s father.

The best years of the Curzons’ marriage were spent in India. They were often apart and, when together, were seldom alone. He admitted he was such a slave to work, living at such high tension, that he was ‘not always sufficiently considerate or understanding or fond’.52 But no one who reads the letters they wrote when apart could question the extent of their devotion. Both of them were made unhappy even by brief separations. Mary described herself as reviving like a sunflower when George was there and drooping like a crushed weed when he had gone. She did not resent seeing so little of him when they were in the same house: the important thing was to know he was close by, working in the next room, and not hundreds of miles away.53

The Vicereine performed her duties with grace rather than enthusiasm, attending social functions which her husband eschewed and acting as an intermediary between him and other people. Yet although she provided him with love and support, she did not give him the frank criticism which he of all people needed. After her death Godley said she had exacerbated all Curzon’s faults and on all important occasions given him the worst possible advice.54 It was a spiteful and unfair judgement that encased one overstated truth. Incapable of self-criticism as he was, the last thing Curzon should have had was a wife who backed him up when he was wrong. Yet Mary had always let him make the decisions, from the conditions of their engagement to the decoration of their houses. Meeting her in London soon after their marriage, Consuelo Vanderbilt, then Duchess of Marlborough, observed that Mary was wholly absorbed in her husband’s career and had subordinated her personality to his to a degree that was quite un-American.55 Pearl Craigie found her ‘too languorous’ and ‘too yielding’,56 characteristics she had not possessed in her youth and which were perhaps a consequence of the discrepancy in the couple’s feelings for each other at the time of their engagement. Mary saw George as a solitary and uncompromising genius, ‘the lofty and lonely man who stood out above all the crowd’ at the Durbar, a distant ‘giant’ dwarfing the political pygmies of England.57 She followed her husband’s example of reading biographies of great men and, inevitably, discovered that he resembled them. In Lord Rosebery’s account of Napoleon’s last years she found that the author had described George exactly, the same memory, the same intellect, the same mastery of detail, the same independence of ineffectual ministers.58

In assimilating Curzon’s views, Mary acquired some of his intolerance, and her letters sometimes contain the most intemperate opinions. Her view of Lord George Hamilton as a ‘hopeless dotard’ and ‘a small-minded, ferret-faced, roving-eyed mediocrity’ went far beyond anything that even her husband at his most combative wrote about that competent and undemonstrative minister.59 Like Curzon, she was basically a kind person who disguised her sympathetic nature behind a mask of viceregal aloofness. The Reuters correspondent thought no one had a kinder heart than Mary but admitted that few people were aware of it in Simla.60 As with her husband, Mary provoked contrasting reactions to herself. On first seeing her in India, Pearl Craigie, who in spite of her own passion for Curzon was very fond of her, found Mary pretty, elegant and, she assumed, well-liked. After staying some time, however, she saw that the Vicereine could be ‘cold and arrogant’ and was surprisingly unpopular.61 Her view was confirmed by several of the staff who reported to the unhappy Lawrence that Mary’s ‘sins of omission and commission’ were having a bad effect on people in Calcutta society.62

In March 1901 Mary sailed to Europe for what she described as ‘a blank six months in search of health and progeny’. April and May were spent in England, but in June she travelled to Germany to undergo some kind of fertility ‘cure’ at Ems and to sit for the portrait painter Franz von Lenbach in Munich. She hated Ems, which she found hotter than India, and where there was nothing to do except take a special bath containing some ingredient designed ‘to work the miracle of an almost immaculate conception’.63 The visit to Munich, where the hotel manager tried to swindle her, was not much more successful. Being a portrait painter under Curzon’s instructions must have been a testing task: after one artist had been allowed to sketch him at work in India, the Viceroy examined the finished picture minutely, remarking that his mouth should be more curved and his hair should stick up more on one side before pulling up his trouser leg and exclaiming that the painter had flattered his legs. At Munich Mary was instructed not to allow Lenbach to idealize her by turning her into a Spanish saint or a Bavarian Madonna. Her husband wanted a simple, truthful picture of her face and eyes without a hat or the kind of drapery favoured by Sargent and his school. The instructions were obeyed, but the results did not please Curzon. Lenbach never painted the large portrait he intended and, of the twelve sketches the Viceroy was shown in 1904, only one was bought.64

In London Mary had virtually resumed her premarital social life of continuous visits and dinner parties. Once more the centre of attention, she charmed and flattered, making such an impression on Balfour that Lady Elcho, with whom he had a lifelong amitié amoureuse, threw a jealous tantrum.65 But her life also had a serious side, for she was acting as her husband’s emissary, talking to the King and to politicians and promoting the Viceroy’s point of view. In her letters to India she encouraged George by telling him how Salisbury, Chamberlain and other leading figures praised his work, how even the radicals admired him and why he should be jubilant about the widespread appreciation of his rule. But other news, especially of the general indifference to Indian affairs in England, depressed him. One day Lawrence found him extremely dejected by a letter from Mary describing how she had heard people were saying that ‘if a man like Lord Elgin – who had returned to what he was eminently fitted to be, a County Councillor in his Scotch town – could govern India successfully, there couldn’t be much required to be a success’.66

Mary also sent her husband advice about his future career in British politics. Winston Churchill recommended him not to serve a full term in India but to return to lead his party. Others, including Wyndham, Hamilton, George Peel and Labouchere, referred to him variously as the next Foreign Secretary, the next Tory leader and even the next Prime Minister. Curzon was receiving similar messages in India, including a letter of advice from Selborne about what he ought to do as head of the Government in London. Mary was convinced the time would soon be right for her husband to come back and wake everybody up. Unless he stayed too long in India, the future of the Conservative Party was in his hands. ‘You must not’, she insisted, ‘let another Tory Government be formed with you out of the Foreign Office.’67

Curzon told Mary he ought to stay in India, where he could ‘do permanent good to the Empire’, and to others he argued that there was no point returning to take a cabinet post which could equally well be filled by other people. Besides, there was no obvious ministry for him to occupy. Lansdowne was an ideal Foreign Secretary ‘in these abdicating days’ and in any case showed no inclination to retire, while the War Office would be such an awful undertaking that he would as soon ‘build and row a trireme down the Thames’.68 Thanking Selborne for his advice, he replied that it would not be for him, because he would be worn out long before he had the chance of becoming Prime Minister. Moreover, he rightly doubted whether India, ‘where one is almost despotic’, was the perfect training for premiers.69 Yet he confessed that the idea of true leadership, ‘which does not always seem to be lying about’, had its attractions, and admitted to Dawkins that, if the present ministry fell and the Liberals were unable to form a government, he would like to lead a cross-party administration of Unionistsfn1 and Liberal Imperialists. He would insist, he added, on a small cabinet run on different lines in which he would be ‘prime minister in reality instead of in name’ and where he ‘would be just as much behind every department’ as he was in India.70 The fact that he could even think of treating men like Asquith, Grey and Haldane as if they were members of the Viceroy’s Council is almost incredible.

Curzon sometimes felt nostalgia for Britain, but it was the grouse moors and the cricket pitches he missed rather than politics or society. Reading about England on his Simla hilltop made him despondent and censorious. He was ‘a little struck’, he told Alfred Lyttelton, by ‘the apparent dying out of high ideals, real nobility of thought and utterance in political life’, although he admitted that from a distance he might have lost perspective.71 The increasing frivolity of society, however, shocked him far more. People in London, reported Mary, ‘were just flirting and dining and dawdling’, reverence had disappeared from people’s lives since the Queen’s death, and ‘Edward the Caresser’ had become an object of ridicule.72 This moral disintegration was epitomized for her by Asquith, who, under Margot’s influence, was supposed to have lost ‘that old strong granite sense of right and his abomination of the disreputable’ and was now fat, over-amorous and too fond of champagne.73 The Souls were dead, reported Lyttelton, and the racing set now dominated the fashionable world. The chief agent for this change, apparently, was the passion for Bridge, a great intellectual leveller enjoyed by the hard-headed and the inarticulate as well as by indolent former Souls like Balfour who played a good deal because it saved ‘the effort of conversation’.74 Curzon deplored the advent of Bridge and, like Campbell-Bannerman, made no effort to penetrate its ‘dismal mysteries’.75 On hearing of a Bridge scandal at Chatsworth, he exclaimed, ‘Good God, what is society coming to, rotten to the core, neither purpose nor duty nor morality nor even common honesty in it.’ When they returned to London, he told Mary, they must stay on the fringe of society, not at its hub.76

From someone who for many years had managed to combine hard work and social frivolity, such views sound curious and hypocritical. Curzon had always enjoyed gossip and risqué stories, and he still derived amusement from the letters of Sir Schomberg McDonnell, Lord Salisbury’s Private Secretary, who recounted the affairs and elopements of their acquaintances in Britain. The newly acquired disapproval seems to have been as much a result of his own change of circumstances as of a sudden moral decadence in Britain. Curzon adored his wife and probably remained faithful to her during their long separations in 1901 and 1904. Infidelity, indeed, would have been impossible without the connivance of his ADCs, and he was too conscious of his position and its prestige to risk a scandal. But if his moral outlook had changed, his nature remained the same. He was still what Pearl Craigie quaintly called ‘very uxorious in his mind and oriental in his instincts’,77 and the effort to control his own nature made him deprecate those who indulged theirs. Yet he evidently wished that the uxorious did not always have to take precedence over the oriental. Describing an erotic dream he experienced in September 1901 to its protagonist, Ettie Grenfell, he wrote:

For a whole night I have dreamed of you – no hope of reciprocity – they were wonderful dreams, lovers’ dreams, in which things uncontemplated in life were realized in that glowing fancy haze. Now that I am awake again and am respectable, it is a heavy shock to find that there is no love, no triumph, no embrace; not even the fugitive consolation of a kiss.78