16

1902: Proconsular Zenith

MIDWAY THROUGH THE viceregal term of five years, George Curzon could admit to a sense of satisfaction at what he had so far accomplished. He had defeated the anti-reformist forces, he told Balfour, and felt confident he was achieving something worthwhile. Although he sometimes chafed at being so far from ‘the heart and pulse of affairs’, he was prepared to sacrifice the best of his life to India if he could leave things in a better state than he had found them.1 Each year produced a solid legislative achievement and witnessed the preparation of its successor. He claimed not to mind if the British press ignored him because he was constructing his ‘own edifice’ in India and was ‘quite content that the outside world should see and judge it when the scaffolding [was] pulled down’.2 It was thus a little premature, he thought, for Milner to be acclaimed on his return from South Africa as ‘the greatest proconsul that the empire has known’.3 He hoped the opinion would in due course be associated with himself and boasted to his father that no Viceroy had enjoyed ‘anything approaching’ his position since Lord Dalhousie.4

Curzon’s continued unpopularity with parts of the British community in India gave him a certain satisfaction, because he felt that popular regard would have implied weakness or inertia. He was proud to be told that a reformer like himself could not expect to be popular with those he was trying to reform. And in the long run the best men in India came round to his views. Sir Denzil Ibbetson spoke for many when he told the Viceroy that he had stirred up things so much at the beginning that he had made himself disliked. But by 1905 the ICS officers appreciated the administrative achievements of his rule and regarded him as the greatest Viceroy since Dalhousie.5

Although Curzon frequently complained about Britain’s lack of interest in India, he knew that his work was held in high regard by those in high positions. Appreciation of his record reached him from diverse quarters. Milner thought him a ‘great viceroy’, Haldane and the Liberal Imperialists admired him, Lord Esher told him he had ‘no superiors in the mighty roll of viceroys’.6 Curzon may have discounted the flattery of Esher, a highly agile courtier and intriguer, but in this instance it was sincere. No other Englishman, Esher told his son, possessed Curzon’s qualities as an administrator except for Cromer, and possibly none matched him as a statesman: his imagination, capacity for work and gift of expression made him perhaps the greatest of all viceroys.7

Admiration for Curzon’s talents was also shared by Hamilton and Godley, the two men he had to work through in London. The Secretary of State was astonished by his vigour and versatility, believed his ability ‘almost amounted to genius’ and predicted he would become Prime Minister. Godley agreed that he was ‘undeniably a great man’ with ‘a touch of genius’ but thought that his temperament and his sensitivity to criticism would prevent him from being a successful party leader. Both lamented the fact that these abilities were marred by a talent for antagonism. When he failed to get his own way, Hamilton complained, Curzon exhibited ‘the failings of a child’, and his sense of proportion was so deficient that he sometimes appeared ridiculous.8 A further defect was his self-importance, what Northcote called his ‘curious personal vanity, “swagger”’, which irritated people.9 Curzon’s viceregal letters justify the reproach. Even a man as patient as Hamilton could not have failed to be annoyed by the excessive use of the first person singular, by the endless references to ‘my policy’, ‘my reforms’ and people ‘following in my footsteps’, by the impression conveyed that he was playing the role of Akbar in India while no one in Britain or the rest of the empire, except for Cromer and Milner, was doing anything worthwhile. ‘Such blatant language for the glorification of self’, declared Hamilton, was ‘unworthy of a big man and amongst other drawbacks irritates my colleagues and makes my task of arguing his case before them much more difficult.’10

The year 1902 was the apogee and watershed of Curzon’s viceroyalty, one of controversial successes during which his petulance and lack of proportion were as brightly displayed as his talent and integrity. A singular achievement was his settlement of the Berar question, a problem which had bedevilled relations between the Government and the Nizam of Hyderabad for fifty years. In the eighteenth century the East India Company had organized and officered a force, later known as the Hyderabad Contingent, to act both as an ally of the British and as a military prop for the Nizam’s authority. This arrangement was altered by treaties in the following century when, in exchange for discharging the current ruler’s debts, the Company took over the Hyderabad Contingent as well as the Berar area which provided the revenues to pay for it. Since then the land, while remaining under the nominal sovereignty of the Nizam, had been administered by the British Resident in Hyderabad, who handed over to the prince certain revenues not required for the upkeep of the Contingent. The present Nizam, however, objected to this arrangement and wanted his territory back.

Curzon saw that the situation was unsatisfactory and that Hyderabad had a legitimate grievance. Since the treaties had been made, revenue from the Berar districts had increased without corresponding benefit to the Nizam. The British could quote parts of the treaties to show they had been legally in the right to withhold the extra sums, but Curzon recognized that the matter had not been dealt with ‘in strict accordance with the most scrupulous standards of British honour’.11 Yet it was now out of the question to solve the problem by acceding to the Nizam’s wishes. He refused to transfer to ‘a corrupt and inefficient rule’ nearly two million people who for fifty years had ‘enjoyed the benefits and profited by the standards of British administration’.12 Reparation should be made instead through a generous and permanent financial settlement. Although the Nizam had refused to consider the alienation of Berar, two years of famine had forced him to borrow heavily from the Government, and Curzon thought he might prove amenable to the force of his reasoning and the strength of his personality.

The India Office was alarmed by the possibility of the Viceroy travelling all the way to Hyderabad to be rebuffed by a native prince. Recent negotiations between the Nizam and the able Resident, Colonel Barr, had ended in failure, and Hamilton warned Curzon it would be a mistake for him either to fail likewise or to succeed through coercion.13 Retired officials in London also prophesied a reverse and seemed pleased at the prospect.14 Curzon paid no attention to any of them and decided to settle the matter during a state visit at the end of March. The Nizam provided his guests with a tiger shoot and a ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ banquet during which live birds flew out of pies when the lids were cut open, but he was personally uncommunicative; Mary had prepared an alphabet of conversational topics (‘C for curries, D for diamonds, E for elephants’) but it did not last the meal, because the Nizam merely said ‘yes’ or ‘exactly’ to each remark.15 He was more responsive the next day when Curzon announced generous financial terms for a permanent lease of Berar. The Viceroy offered him an annual rent of £167,000 – as opposed to the average of £60,000 that Hyderabad had been receiving since 1860 – although for some years this sum would be used to pay off existing debts. Curzon also declared that the contentious area would never be restored to the Nizam and that, if the present offer was rejected, it was highly unlikely he would ever receive another. Confronted by an inflexible Viceroy presenting an intransigent case, the Nizam did not hesitate to accept the conditions. Curzon told Hamilton that the prince had not yielded out of deference, weakness or alarm but because he had been convinced by the arguments and believed the Viceroy to be a friend of his state. The Nizam, who had been the recipient of viceregal lectures in the past, might have given a different explanation. But twenty years later Curzon claimed that the deal had been a ‘splendid bargain’ for the prince, who ‘never ceased afterwards to express his contentment’.16 Lawrence identified the central ingredient of the success as Curzon’s personality; he was sure Lord Elgin would not have achieved it.17

During the summer following his return from Hyderabad, the Viceroy embarked upon a series of confrontations with the British army in India, the Council of India in London and his Conservative colleagues in the Cabinet. Each time he was almost entirely in the right yet marred his case by the manner in which he pursued it. In April, during the revelry that followed the arrival of a British regiment at Sialkot in the Punjab, a native cook was beaten up and taken to hospital where, after identifying his assailants as cavalrymen, he died shortly afterwards. The military authorities ordered a casual and inadequate investigation, and a court of enquiry, consisting of officers from the regiment in question, reported itself unable to discover the ruffians. News of the affair eventually reached Curzon and enraged him. Such wicked and scandalous incidents, he told Godley, gave him sleepless nights and days of misery: British soldiers, with their violence and their lust, were ‘pulling the fabric of our dominion down about our ears’. It made no difference that the perpetrators of the outrage belonged to the 9th Lancers, a fashionable regiment proud of its record in the Mutiny and elsewhere. Curzon refused to sacrifice what he regarded as ‘the most solemn obligation imposed upon the British race to the licence of even the finest regiment in the British army’.18

As with the Rangoon case, the army made little effort at any stage to discover the truth. Sir Bindon Blood, the Lieutenant-General commanding the Punjab, was surprised that the incident had caused so ‘much silly excitement at Simla’, and forwarded an army report accompanied by a complacent letter from himself suggesting that ‘the cause of the whole business was a fight among the cooks and a “plant” to get the soldiers blamed’. Writing his memoirs at the age of 90, he remained ‘fully satisfied’ that the regiment had been punished unjustlyfn1 and recalled that following the submission of the report, ‘something rude was written’ to him.20 That ‘something’ was a long and devastating minute from the Viceroy which, although the general may not have noticed it, dissected, ridiculed and demolished Blood’s case. Curzon described the exculpatory report as ‘one of the most disgraceful productions’ he had ever read, but his savage and disparaging reply managed to alienate officers who admitted Blood was in the wrong.21 The collective punishment of the regiment also provoked opposition to Curzon, even though it was proposed by the Acting Commander-in-Chief, Sir Power Palmer, and was not in any case severe: cancellation of winter leave, the main part of the sentence, was not a great hardship in India. Nevertheless, the Lancers’ sympathizers in England exaggerated the punishment, the details of which were not made public, and accused the Viceroy of vindictively penalizing an entirely innocent regiment. The distortions were spectacular even for a case involving Curzon, with some British papers claiming that his sole object was to curry favour with the native press.22 The King thought the Viceroy was in the wrong until Hamilton told him the facts. So did Lord Roberts, who like most people in England believed Curzon had ordered the punishment and asked him to remit it at the Delhi Durbar. On learning the truth, the former Commander-in-Chief admitted the regiment had got what it deserved and observed, regretfully, that Sir Bindon Blood was ‘a most disappointing man’.23

Military questions were one of the few matters that did not produce ructions between the Viceroy and the Council of India. From the beginning Curzon had been irritated by that body of retired veterans who, like judges, could not be dismissed and who could overrule the Viceroy and the Secretary of State on financial matters and on legislation. He did not care initially if they thwarted him on minor issues so long as they did not emasculate his important reforms. But he was soon unable to tolerate even their obstruction on small things. On grounds of economy they regularly turned down his requests for the establishment of posts such as a clerk of the works at Simla, a British librarian for the Imperial Library in Calcutta, or an administrator for Government House and Barrackpore. The Viceroy was then forced to restate his case, pointing out, for example, that it would be cheaper to have an Englishman running the Calcutta houses efficiently than to hand them over to an ‘incompetent babu’ who looked after them so badly that they had to be restored at great expense before his return from Simla. He usually prevailed in the end but at the cost of a good deal of labour and irritation.

The Secretary of State defended his Council in March 1901, arguing that it controlled expenditure with a lighter rein than any other treasury and that it had not rejected any of Curzon’s important schemes. But the Viceroy, who reacted alike to minor checks and major reversals, was not mollified. Privately he blamed Hamilton for being weak, although the Secretary of State’s handling of his councillors was in fact diplomatic, astute and largely successful. The Viceroy, however, seems to have been justified in suspecting that retired officials sometimes envied his success. Former Residents of Hyderabad, for example, cannot have been overjoyed to find that the ‘insoluble’ problem of Berar had had a solution after all. Curzon received support for his view from Richmond Ritchie, the new Political Secretary at the India Office, who attributed the councillors’ lack of sympathy to their belief that Viceroys ‘should be run by the bigwigs’ of the ICS. It was natural, Ritchie told him, for them to feel that Curzon’s ‘energy and originality [were] an exposure of their own slavery to routine’, especially as many of his reforms might have been applied advantageously in their day. But as they did not dare to tackle him on the big questions, they tended to gang up on issues like the clerk of the works at Simla; ‘eleven old gentlemen determined to die rather than let you have your own way’, until reluctantly persuaded to be reasonable by Godley.24

In the summer of 1902, however, the Council questioned the Indian Government’s handling of the vital issues of police and educational reforms. Despite Hamilton’s assurances that Curzon remained relatively unfettered, one hostile councillor doubted privately if any Viceroy had seen so many of his proposals rejected.25 Curzon’s protests were on the whole justified, but in his exasperation he over-reacted to such an extent that he antagonized his main allies, Hamilton and Godley. At the end of May he sent them a list of twenty-two instances in which he claimed that the Council had defeated or delayed his proposals. He was working the whole day and much of the night, he told Hamilton, in difficult and hostile conditions, ‘habitually harassed, constantly weary, and often in physical distress and pain’. If, in addition to his other anxieties, he was to be ‘perpetually nagged and impeded and misunderstood’ by the Council at home, he would rather give up the task. A week later, without waiting for an answer, he returned to the attack. It was ‘really too ridiculous’, he declared, that ‘a batch of old gentlemen at home should casually stroll into the India Office, and endeavour to upset the whole apple-cart’ merely because they found an active and reforming Viceroy distasteful; so long as these absurd ideas prevailed, he added, he was not anxious to continue his work.26 Never one to soft-pedal a grievance, he broadened his complaint a fortnight later to include the Foreign Office. He had been sent out to India as an expert, he asserted, and yet his advice (on the delimitation of Aden) was treated as if it had come from ‘an impertinent schoolboy’. He was ‘not disposed … to be so treated again’ and, if this sort of thing continued, ‘some more docile victim’ would have to be found.27

Reviewing this barrage of complaint, Hamilton wondered whether Curzon was breaking down from ill health or overwork. ‘His schedule of the Council’s offences’, he told a sympathetic Godley, was ‘almost childish’. Until that moment Hamilton’s letters to the Viceroy had been gentle, appreciative and only on occasion mildly remonstrative. Deciding the time had come to be argumentative, he declared it was essential to examine reforms being applied to ‘a country of almost archaic immobility’ inhabited by a fifth of the human race. He then surveyed the list of offences, observed that the Council had accepted three-quarters of the propositions it had queried, and concluded that no minister he had ever known had had his way to such an extent as Curzon had in India. Privately he told Mary he was certain her husband would not have written those letters had he not been unwell and overstrained, and he begged her to persuade him to take more rest.28

That same summer Hamilton’s colleagues in the Cabinet also experienced the acerbity of the viceregal reproach. Had Lord Salisbury still been Prime Minister, they might have been spared because Curzon, in spite of disagreements over foreign policy, retained deep respect for the man to whom he owed every post he had ever held. But the last of the great Victorian premiers had resigned in July shortly before sending the Viceroy a valedictory of apocalyptic pessimism.

It may be a misconception – but I cannot resist the impression that we are near some great change in public affairs – in which the forces which contend for the mastery among us will be differently ranged and balanced. If so it is certainly expedient that younger men should be employed to shape the policy which will no longer depend upon the judgments formed by the experience of past times. The time will be very difficult. The large aggregations of human forces which lie around our Empire seem to draw more closely together, and to assume almost unconsciously a more and more aggressive aspect. Their junction, in menacing and dangerous masses, may be deferred for many years or may be precipitated with little notice at any moment. It is fortunate for us that the satraps of the Empire were never more conspicuous for intelligence and force than they are now – yourself, Cromer, Milner, Kitchener.29

Arthur Balfour feigned reluctance to succeed his uncle,30 but no one else of comparable stature sat on the Unionist benches apart from Chamberlain, who remained unacceptable to much of the Conservative Party. Curzon believed his old friend from the Souls had the intellect and moral character to become a great Prime Minister if he could purge himself of his intellectual nonchalance and his philosophical indifference to the mundane aspects of political life.31 Unhappily the purge did not take place. Ministers who served under A.J.B. shared Curzon’s exasperation with what he called Balfour’s ‘cultured ignorance’. Like almost everyone else, H.O. Arnold-Forster found him brilliant and delightful but added that he was ‘always far too clever to know the facts’. As Balfour’s Secretary of State for War, Arnold-Forster had the painful experience of serving a man who thought himself an expert on strategic affairs but who, according to his minister, knew ‘nothing whatever about the army’ and who in a Commons debate revealed he was ‘not even dimly acquainted’ with a military proposal he himself had sanctioned. Balfour treated the army as ‘the subject matter of the most charming dialectical exercises’ and was so pleased with his ‘little logical deductions’ that he would defend them doggedly against any argument which was based merely upon facts and experience.32

Balfour’s tone of well-born, clubbable, intellectual levity permeated his Cabinet. Asquith had identified the principle behind Salisbury’s last reshuffle as to promote ‘one’s incapables and provide for one’s family’,33 a formula which Balfour showed no desire to alter. He was linked to many of his Cabinet by ties of kinship, the Souls or the hierarchical mysteries of Etonian ritual. ‘Hotel Cecil’ was left undisturbed, Balfour’s brother remaining at the Board of Trade, a cousin in Curzon’s old post at the Foreign Office, and a cousin’s husband at the Admiralty, an arrangement which prompted the Viceroy to exercise one of his lesser talents.

In Trade’s keen lists, no alien herald

His trumpet blows, but Brother Gerald;

Foreign affairs have Cousin Cranborne

To hint that ne’er was greater man born;

While Cousin Selborne rules the fleet,

Even the sea is ‘Arthur’s Seat’.34

Among the other appointments Lord Lansdowne, who had been Balfour’s fagmaster at Eton, remained at the Foreign Office, while Lord Londonderry, who had been the Prime Minister’s fag at the same institution, was promoted to the Board of Education. Brodrick, who engaged A.J.B. to be best man at his second wedding, stayed at the War Office, while George Wyndham reached the Cabinet after Lady Elcho, Balfour’s confidante and Wyndham’s sister, threatened to make the premier’s life a misery if he didn’t.35 Not all this nepotism was as bad as it looked. Lansdowne and Selborne were successful ministers, and Wyndham deserved his promotion. But Gerald had been widely regarded as the weakest member of Salisbury’s Cabinet, Brodrick was floundering at the War Office, Cranborne had been hesitant and unimpressive at foreign affairs, while Londonderry’s appointment was so inexplicable it has been described as ‘Caligulan’.36

From India Curzon watched with incredulity as Balfour continued his policy of arranging cosy cabinets consisting largely of friends, relations and the sons of past colleagues. By contrast with Salisbury’s Government, in which the ministers were addressed by their official designation, cabinet meetings now degenerated, observed Hamilton, into ‘cliquey conversations between “Arthur” and “Bob” and “George” – sometimes almost unintelligible in their intimate allusions to the outer circle of the cabinet’.37 Soon after the departure of the three great figures of the nineties – Salisbury, Chamberlain and Devonshire – Balfour found senior posts for their respective heirs and overrode the King’s opposition to the elevation of Cranborne (by then the 4th Marquess of Salisbury) to the Cabinet. He was only just dissuaded from appointing the Duke of Montrose, who had never spoken in the House of Lords, as Secretary of State for Scotland.

Curzon thought it a great error for Balfour to be constantly selecting men such as Lord Bath and Lord Stanley, neither of whom had demonstrated much political talent, and giving the impression, in Brodrick’s words, that ‘blue blood [was] the only passport to promotion’.fn238 ‘I should have thought it wiser’, the Viceroy observed, ‘to democratise the Conservative Party rather than to emphasise its aristocratic flavour.’39 Yet, however much he deplored Balfour’s appointments in principle, Curzon should have been pleased that the Cabinet he had to deal with contained four of his closest friends (Balfour, Brodrick, Wyndham and Selborne) and was later reinforced by two more (Salisbury and Alfred Lyttelton). Other friends and admirers included Lansdowne and Hamilton (who were brothers-in-law) and Arnold-Forster. Yet Curzon was so unsentimental about politics that he did not value political friendship. Innocent of nepotistic tendencies himself, he preferred to deal with a competent opponent than with a less efficient friend. Loyal to them in personal matters, in politics he treated friends as he did other politicians, to be scolded and argued with until they had accepted the logic of his point of view. This uncommon attitude helps explain why he embarked on two major confrontations with Balfour’s Cabinet in the second half of 1902.

Both disputes arose from the accession of King Edward VII and the manner of its celebration by his Indian subjects. Queen Victoria’s death in January 1901 had been profoundly mourned throughout India. As Curzon put it, the figure of the Queen-Empress had had an ‘overpowering effect on the imagination of the Asiatic’:40 in Calcutta the roadside vendors of sweetstuffs voluntarily closed their booths on the day of the funeral and followed the greater part of the city’s population on to the Maidan, where the vast crowd sat mourning all day, without food, their diverse groups identified by banners such as ‘We poor Musulmans from Sialdah grieving’.41 The Queen’s interest in India and sympathy for her people had lasted till the end. In her last two years she had written the Viceroy thirty letters in her own hand, imploring him to look after the Indians, to make allowances for the princes, to do everything he could to reduce friction between the races. Her indignation was not confined to India: France was ‘utterly disgraced’, she once told the Viceroy, by her ‘monstrous treatment of poor Dreyfus’, to which Curzon replied that French acquiescence in such ‘a travesty of justice’ indicated a ‘widespread moral degeneration’ in the country.42 He was impressed that she should have continued to write to him at her age. Yet he found her handwriting almost impossible to decipher and was ‘flabbergasted’ when she complained to Hamilton that the Viceroy’s own calligraphy – clear at most times and especially bold and legible when writing to his sovereign – was difficult to read because the words ran into one another. One of the vagaries of her old age, as her Private Secretary had experienced, was that she blamed her reading problems on the handwriting of her correspondents rather than on her own declining eyesight.

Impressed by the strength of Indian feeling towards her, Curzon accepted Lawrence’s suggestion that he should build a memorial so imposing that it would not only commemorate Queen Victoria but also impress upon the Bengali people the strength of her – and the British – connection with Calcutta. It was to be a historical museum and national gallery intended to represent everything that was glorious in the British Indian past. Enemies of Britain would be included if they were honourable and valiant foes like Hyder Ali and Tippoo Sultan, but Curzon would not ‘admit so much as the fringe of the pagri [turban] of a ruffian like the Nana Sahib’, the butcher of Cawnpore.43 He wanted a building at least as fine as anything in the British empire, ‘a magnificent shell, pure and severe in its simplicity’, with galleries and corridors radiating around a central space devoted to Queen Victoria. Its architectural style was determined early on. ‘A Gothic building in India’, the Viceroy told Esher, ‘would be like putting the Taj in Hyde Park.’ The Mogul and Hindu styles were equally inappropriate because Calcutta was a European city in origin and construction, possessing little indigenous architecture of its own. To Curzon the only sensible solution seemed to be a building in Palladian or Italianate style designed by a European architect. A hundred and twenty years earlier, he remarked, he would have chosen Robert Adam, the architect of Kedleston.44

The Viceroy not only determined the style of the building and the range of its contents but characteristically decided to raise the necessary funds and to collect suitable treasures. A vast correspondence was directed at the descendants of past Governors-General asking them to bequeath portraits and other mementoes of their ancestors. ‘Curzon’s folly’ was inevitably derided by his critics who sneered that it was a memorial to himself rather than to Queen Victoria. Nonetheless, he managed to attract the enormous sum of £400,000, to which he himself generously contributed, as well as an impressive collection of exhibits which he put on display in March 1904. His successor’s lack of enthusiasm for the project, followed by the First World War, delayed completion of the hall until 1921.

Curzon had a less favourable opinion of the new King than of his mother. Edward VII had tact and bonhomie, he admitted, but he was ‘perhaps not everything that a king might or ought to be’ and he did not set ‘an irreproachable example to his subjects’.45 Besides, he did not appear to share his mother’s concern for India and was reluctant to hear from the Viceroy unless there was ‘anything of importance or interest to relate’. As he was the King-Emperor, however, Curzon tried to persuade him to come out to India for a special coronation. Although the suggestion apparently caused amusement in royal circles, Curzon saw nothing odd about it. The entire trip, he argued, need take only seven weeks and would be no more unconstitutional than a long visit by the King to Cannes.46 But in the end it was decided to invite certain Indian princes to the coronation in London and to hold a great proclamation durbar, attended by a member of the royal family, at Delhi.

Curzon was alarmed by the prospect of the princes going to London, because he thought the occasion would be an excuse for ‘all the well-known Indian flâneurs’ to revisit ‘the haunts of their pleasure or indulgence’.47 Invitations were limited, however, to a select and representative group of chiefs and senior officials. The Raja of Pudukotta, one of the most prominent flâneurs, pleaded to be allowed to join them but learnt from Lawrence that the King had ‘dispensed’ him from attending the ceremony in London and provided him instead with the opportunity of going to the Delhi Durbar.48 Several of the invitations placed their recipients in a dilemma. Some, such as the southern rulers of Cochin and Travancore, were persuaded by their brahmins that the journey would be contrary to the tenets and customs of Hinduism. Even so enlightened a man as Justice Banerjea, one of the ablest Indian judges, was obliged to tell Curzon that, much as he wanted to visit England, and highly as he appreciated the compliment, his position in his own family circle would become impossible if he crossed the sea: his daughters, he added, might even fail to find husbands as a result.49 Other devout rulers decided they could travel if they made certain arrangements: the Maharaja of Jaipur sailed to England in a chartered ship accompanied by four hundred followers and enough water from the Ganges stored in vast copper vessels to preserve them from the contaminating effects of Europe.

Hamilton was preoccupied by the problem of princely precedence and asked Curzon whether it should be calculated according to the antiquity of lineage or the size of the gun salutes. The Viceroy was more concerned about the behaviour of the chiefs in England. A sharp lookout, he warned, must be kept on Scindia’s nocturnal excursions, because the Maharaja was ‘a little devil for women’ and had apparently developed a taste for white ones. Indian soldiers, whom the King wished to have present, created a similar problem because, ‘strange as it may seem, English women of the housemaid class, and even higher’, were attracted by their uniforms and physique and offered themselves to these warriors.50

The young Maharaja of Bikanir, who had commanded his Imperial Service regiment in China in 1900 and had won Curzon’s praise for the way he governed his state, received a viceregal warning not to acquire ‘extravagant and undesirable tastes’ in Britain or to think ‘more of amusement and self-gratification than of duty’. Bikanir responded to this pedagogic homily by saying how proud he was to receive ‘such friendly and free advice’, but protested his devotion to his work, his state and his family, and said he much preferred his native existence to ‘the idle and gay life’ in London.51 In fact both existences seem to have been equally congenial to him. Hamilton was rather disgusted by the sight of ‘the smart ladies’ making a fuss over him and feared he was being corrupted by ‘the gambling, racing, fast set’ which was then enjoying ‘great favour in the highest circles’.52 This danger was exacerbated by the King’s appendicitis, which led to the coronation’s postponement for six weeks. Bikanir, however, avoided the ‘fast set’ for at least part of the time by accompanying the Maharaja of Jaipur on a visit to Kedleston, a jaunt Curzon regarded as a sort of pilgrimage, ‘a very touching mark of interest and respect’. Afterwards Jaipur told Lawrence he had watched the rabbits playing in the Derbyshire grass and ‘wondered how English Sahibs could ever go to India’; had he been one of them, he would have stayed there for ever, playing the flute and watching the animals gambolling in the sun.53

Curzon’s troubles over the coronation arose not from the behaviour of the princes but from the question of who would pay for them and the other Indian representatives. As a result of the continuing expense of the Boer War, the Government of India had agreed to pay for the voyages of the guests and a thousand soldiers (but not of course for the vessel chartered by Jaipur for himself and his followers). It was thus outraged to be told after the war was over that India would have to pay also for their expenses and entertainment in England, including £7,000 for a reception at the India Office. An official protest was sent on 10 July, followed by a letter from Curzon asking the British Government to pay the bill and telling Hamilton what a miserly impression London’s attitude would produce in India. On the same day he wrote to Balfour suggesting that India’s services during the war – saving Natal and housing thousands of Boer prisoners – merited ‘this simple act of generosity’.54 The Secretary of State, who unknown to Curzon had already asked the Treasury to pay part of the sum, was irritated by the truculent tone of the viceregal despatch; he assumed it had been written in a temper, but Godley later discovered it had been composed during an illness. Nonetheless, the logic of the case was on Curzon’s side. India was organizing its own event to mark the accession and planned to pay for the entertainment of the British guests. To Hamilton’s embarrassment it was subsequently asked to pay the entire costs of the Duke of Connaught, the King’s brother, who was coming out for the Durbar with his wife and entourage, and who expected a holiday at India’s expense afterwards. Learning of this development by telegram, Curzon suggested the Secretary of State should ponder whether it was ‘possible or practicable to make us pay for our Royal guests whom we did not invite, but who offered themselves here, at the very moment that you are declining to pay for the Indian guests whom you specially invited to England’.55

Scolding Curzon for his Government’s protest, Godley let him know that he had annoyed everybody, especially Balfour and Hamilton, who was a ‘most loyal supporter’ of the Viceroy and who was ‘greatly hurt’ by his behaviour.56 The Secretary of State realized, however, that the Government would have to back down because, in the event of a public row, Parliament and public opinion would support India. He and Balfour appealed for the protest to be withdrawn, but Curzon refused unless they agreed to pay for everything including the India Office party. In early August, when he was in Mysore officiating at the coronation of the young Maharaja, Curzon received the news that the Government had capitulated. Jubilant at the outcome, he could not resist crowing about his success to Mary: ‘It is a great triumph. No one will know here how it has been obtained, but one day it will come out how by a single strong despatch and by a little courage I defeated them all.’ He was not ‘in the least disturbed’, he told her, by Hamilton’s information that the despatch had met with ‘an absolutely universal chorus of disapprobation from the cabinet’.57 As so often, he failed to gauge the effect of his actions on other people’s feelings. Godley, who warned him that members of the Government would not forget the incident, was proved right by their behaviour during the next row.

The splendorously staged pageantry of the Delhi Durbar attracted mockery as well as admiration and, like the Victoria Memorial Hall, it was criticized as a glorification of the Viceroy rather than of his sovereign. A wag dubbed it the ‘Curzonation’ and, as so frequently happened in his life, the tab followed ‘superior person’ and other phrases into the repertoire of Curzonian anecdote. Yet it would have been extraordinary had a durbar not been held for the proclamation of the King-Emperor. The installation ceremony, Curzon pointed out, was ‘a feature of a hallowed system’ in India, held not only by native chiefs but by titled noblemen and large landowners as well.58 It was thus logical to stage a royal durbar in order to impress India with the power and majesty of the Crown. Doubtless it was an exaggeration to claim for the event that ‘from the Arab sheikhs of Aden to the west to the Shan chiefs of the Mekong on the borders of China, they felt the thrill of a common loyalty and the inspiration of a single aim’.59 But few people outside Congress disputed its impact. Curzon understood the importance of oriental pageantry better than most of his countrymen and realized that to be effective the Durbar must be majestic – ‘the biggest thing ever seen in India’ – and so well executed that he must organize it himself. If the King would not come in person, then according to the constitution the Viceroy had to be the protagonist, a point imperfectly understood in India and by many people in Britain. Curzon thus hoped that the Prince of Wales would not come out and confuse matters, because it would be awkward taking precedence over the heir to the throne. In the event people were confused by the sight of the King’s brother taking second place to the Viceroy.

The planning of the Durbar occupied much of 1902. After settling the Berar question at the end of March, Curzon travelled to Agra to check the progress of his restoration programme and to Delhi, where he inspected the Durbar site. From there he journeyed up to Peshawar to inaugurate the new North-West Frontier Province and to hold a durbar for the frontier chiefs and their followers, before returning via Dehra Dun to inspect the new Imperial Cadet Corps. His visit to the Corps, which was to form his bodyguard at the Durbar, delighted him: its tone and spirit seemed admirable, and he believed its well-born apprentices were as enthusiastic about their life there as if they had been English public schoolboys. Unfortunately, it soon transpired that the Corps shared another trait popularly associated with public schoolboys. One of the cadets was found to be having an affair with the Maharaja of Alwar and was expelled from the academy. Another scandal, which provoked the sirdars of Jodhpur to petition for the removal of their Maharaja, luckily did not break until after the Durbar. Jodhpur, who had been regarded by the Viceroy as one of the finest cadets, returned to his state on holiday and was reported to have ‘embarked on a carnival of drinking and unnatural vice’. When news of the palace orgies became public, Curzon decided to take action. He removed the Maharaja from the Cadet Corps, arranged for a doctor to treat him for syphilis, and banished him from Jodhpur for two years.60

The Viceroy planned the details of the Durbar from the programme of events, which spanned a fortnight, to the architecture of the arena, the layout of the camps, and the movement and accommodation of about 150,000 people. He determined the width of the roads, the placing of the tents, the planting of the flower-beds. He also chose the hymns for the church service. Realizing it was sensible to select hymns which British soldiers could sing with ‘hearty vigour’, he had opted among others for ‘Onward! Christian Soldiers’, but cancelled it on remembering the lines – ‘Crowns and thrones may perish/Kingdoms rise and wane’ – which he deemed inappropriate for the coronation of a monarch. The scale of the entertainment was enormous. Special camps were allotted to native chiefs, heads of provincial governments, senior generals, and the residents and agents of princely states. The Viceroy’s camp consisted of no fewer than 2,774 people, containing among them 138 guests, 266 rickshaw coolies, 283 policemen and 1,190 servants. The guests included a good number of friends and relations as well as royalty, but Curzon was disappointed by one refused invitation. ‘I must go down to the Cape this winter,’ wrote Rudyard Kipling with regret, ‘when instead of seeing India consolidated I shall have the felicity of watching South Africa being slowly but scientifically wrecked …’61

The Viceroy believed that the Durbar required more than just a pageant and a speech which, after all, could only be enjoyed vicariously by the majority of Indians. People of the East, he told Hamilton a year before the event, associated successions and coronations with the grant of privileges and the removal of disabilities. Something of this nature should therefore be announced at the Durbar. Surveying possible concessions, he thought it imprudent to extend political privileges by expanding representative institutions, adding to the number of legislative councils, or appointing natives to higher places than they then occupied. Tax reductions, which the economy could now afford, would be preferable because they would benefit everyone as well as increase the new King’s popularity. After considering the various options, he told Hamilton in September 1902 that he wished to announce at the Durbar a reduction of the salt tax together with a rise in the level of income tax exemption.62

The Secretary of State replied that he was in favour of a reduction in the salt tax but feared an awkward precedent might be established if it was associated with the accession of the monarch. Balfour, Godley, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the India Council agreed with him, and in November he rejected the Viceroy’s proposal. Curzon declared himself ‘sick at heart’ on receiving the telegram and said he would prefer not to hold the Durbar at all. He then telegraphed the King’s Private Secretary, Lord Knollys, to enlist royal support for his attempt to save the Durbar from becoming a ‘regrettable and gratuitous failure’. The Cabinet was angered by this unconstitutional step, which Lawrence defended on the grounds that the coronation was the King’s business and he was therefore entitled to be warned about the consequences of mistaken policy. The Viceroy’s secretary was also indignant at the attitude of ‘the wretched India Council’ which, as he saw, was revenging itself for its ‘humiliation over the Coronation guests’.63

The Cabinet’s attitude suggested that similar considerations may have been affecting the behaviour of some of its members. After a meeting on 19 November, Brodrick telegraphed the Viceroy to report that its opinion had been ‘unanimously unfavourable’ and to warn him ‘not to push the question to extremities’ because it would gain him nothing; Wyndham and Selborne, he added, agreed with him.64 Unperturbed by the implication that his resignation would be accepted, Curzon responded by telling Balfour he did not want to be ‘the instrument of this great failure’ and suggested that someone else should carry out the Government’s policy. The position of the Cabinet remained inflexible until it learnt from the Viceroy’s next telegram that he had not planned to reduce the tax in the King’s name but simply, as head of the Indian Government, to commemorate the event with the concession. If the ministers remained adamant despite this elucidation, he asked permission to make a general statement indicating the hope that circumstances would shortly permit financial relief. He could not conscientiously do less, he declared, because the people of India had suffered economically in recent years and now deserved their reward. The compromise, weighted as it was against the Indian Government, proved acceptable in London and elicited a kind letter from Balfour, who chided his old friend for regarding himself as injured whenever he failed to get his own way; he added, however, that no difference of opinion would diminish either the warmth of his friendship or the enthusiasm of his admiration.65

Curzon was not mollified by either the compliments or the compromise. He was particularly hurt by a letter from Brodrick informing him that the Cabinet had been prepared to throw him over. ‘What a light’, he sighed to Mary, ‘it throws upon human nature and upon friendship.’ The best way to deal with this ‘eye-opener’, he added, would be to take not the slightest notice of it and to treat the matter with ‘silent disdain’. He thus refused to write to Brodrick for three months and, when asked for an explanation, replied that he could not forget as long as he lived that the entire Cabinet, including his greatest personal friends, had been willing to break off his Indian work and ruin his career either on a point of ‘purely constitutional pedantry’ or – Brodrick was given the choice of motive – because he wished to announce at the Durbar the tax reduction he would have been allowed to make eleven weeks later in his budget speech. The episode, he added, would affect him throughout his political career.66

Brodrick retorted that for four years the Cabinet had given him loyal support and a free hand on almost every issue except ‘questions like Persia’, where Lord Salisbury had been immovable. But over the Durbar Curzon had exaggerated the importance of tax remission and had then committed the ‘capital crime’ of trying to enlist the King on his side. The War Secretary claimed to have intervened to promote the compromise, but Curzon was not impressed. To overrule the Viceroy on such an issue, he declared, and to contemplate breaking his career over it, was ‘a cruel injustice’. Mary agreed that the incident would always leave a scar.67

The row clouded the build-up to the Durbar. Lawrence thought the Viceroy was at his best during a crisis and praised his actions over the 9th Lancers and the telegram to the King. But as the ceremony approached, he noticed his chief was restless, fretful, abnormally impatient, worrying about little things, complaining about everybody’s slowness. Even after all the arrangements had been made, there were still things to be done: composing the King’s message, clearing his own speech with the India Office, planning the Connaughts’ trip (and asking them not to visit the Maharaja of Alwar because of ‘these abominable habits’ he still indulged in). All sorts of things, over which he had no control, might go wrong: there was a worry over Lord Kitchener, newly arrived as Commander-in-Chief, who was reported to be such a bad rider that he might fall off his horse in the procession. On the eve of the ceremony the Viceroy was in a dejected mood. People might sneer at the ‘Curzonation’, he told Hamilton, and scoff at his pleasure at being its central figure, but they were quite mistaken. The Cabinet’s behaviour over the salt tax had left him indifferent to the proceedings, and he looked forward with no relish to being the centre of a military society where three-quarters of the audience would be cursing him for having dared to do his duty in the case of the 9th Lancers.68

The ceremony opened on 29 December with the state entry into Delhi, an imposing procession of elephants bringing the Curzons, the Connaughts and the leading princes from the railway station by a circuitous route, past the Red Fort, round the Friday Mosque, and out through the Moree Gate to the Durbar site. Mrs Wilson, the wife of an ICS officer, said she would always remember Mary in the royal procession, ‘the trailing lilacs which fell from her drooping hat forming a background to her exquisite beauty. She seemed a part of the sunshine and to emanate joy.’69 She was ‘perfectly exquisite’, Mrs Thompson, who was also married to a civil servant, noted in her diary. The elephants, surrounded by attendants with spears to prevent them from bolting, were laden with rich trappings. The Curzons themselves sat on a gold howdah underneath a gold umbrella to ward off the winter sun, and gold featured brightly on the elephants of the Maharajas; some had large gilt candelabras fastened to their tusks, Mrs Thompson observed, and looked ‘most absurd’.70

Subsequent days were taken up by cavalry and gymnastic displays, performances of massed bands, and a good deal of sport, especially polo. On the second day Curzon opened an Indian Art Exhibition designed to display all that was rare, characteristic or beautiful in Indian art from pottery to brocades. The event gave him an opportunity for one of his preceptorial lectures to the princes. If they decided to patronize Indian art, he told them, it might flourish, but if they preferred to fill their palaces with ‘flaming Brussels carpets’ and ‘Tottenham Court Road furniture’, then there was not much hope.71

The Durbar ceremony was held on New Year’s Day in a large horseshoe amphitheatre, specially built in Mogul style with Saracenic arches and cupolas tipped with gold paint. The most moving moment came at the beginning, when the band struck up ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ and over three hundred veterans of the Mutiny, most of them Indians who had fought on the British side forty-five years before, entered the arena. It was a ‘most affecting sight’, remarked Mrs Thompson, to watch these ‘little old creatures tottering and hurrying along to keep up to the time that they once marched without difficulty’. The crowd rose and cheered, but when the march was followed by ‘the wailing pathos’ of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, many of the audience broke down in tears. After this the Connaughts were received with rather less emotion, although one woman ‘obliged with a loyal tear’ because the Duke looked so like his mother. The royal couple were followed by Curzon’s carriage, escorted by the surviving members of the Imperial Cadet Corps, who looked suitably dashing on black horses with white uniforms and pale blue turbans. Mrs Thompson thought it ‘very cruel and unfair’ that the Viceroy, who had run ‘the whole thing magnificently’, did not receive a really good cheer, but perhaps she was unaware of the state of feeling over the 9th Lancers. Sympathy for the cavalrymen may also have accounted for the outbreak of coughing during Curzon’s proclamation.72

Other events included a state dinner and a state ball, where Mary appeared in her celebrated dress with its pattern of peacock feathers, a ‘Garden Party for Native Gentlemen’, a firework display, a church service and on the penultimate day a grand military review. The Viceroy took the salute on an enormous chestnut horse which he later learnt was notorious for bucking off generals; on this occasion, however, the animal merely proved to be obstinate, disliking the experience of standing alone in the open and continually edging backwards to join the horses behind. Curzon thought it ridiculous that he, a civilian unloved by the military, should be taking the salute while just behind him rode a royal and popular Field Marshal. His position became still more uncomfortable with the appearance of the 9th Lancers, whom the previous Commander-in-Chief had actually tried to ban from the ceremony.fn3 As the cavalrymen rode by in their blue and white uniforms, they were greeted by loud cheering from Europeans in the crowd and even by some of the viceregal party. Afterwards Curzon told Hamilton that as he

sat alone and unmoved on my horse, conscious of the implication of the cheers, I could not help being struck by the irony of the situation. There rode before me a long line of men, in whose ranks were most certainly two murderers. It fell to the Viceroy, who is credited by the public with the sole responsibility for their punishment, to receive their salute. I do not suppose that anybody in that vast crowd was less disturbed by the demonstration than myself. On the contrary, I felt a certain gloomy pride in having dared to do the right. But I also felt that if it could truthfully be claimed for me that ‘I have (in these cases) loved righteousness and hated iniquity’ – no one could add that in return I have been anointed with the oil of gladness above my fellows.73

On the last night of the Durbar seven soldiers from a Welsh regiment beat a native policeman to death on the Ridge outside Delhi. ‘It is a pity’, the Viceroy remarked laconically to his wife, that ‘we cannot have another Review for them to receive a popular ovation.’74

A certain amount of carping inevitably accompanied the Durbar. A group of MPs were indignant because they had not been given the best seats, while Lord Ampthill complained because he was not allowed to ride an elephant; Mary found the Ampthills so irritating she suggested they should be treated like anthills and stepped on.75 Ill-informed criticism from Britain condemned the Viceroy’s extravagance. He was compared to Nero and accused by a former Member of Parliament of squeezing £2 million from the Indian taxpayer to aggrandize himself.76 In fact the total cost of the festivities ran to £213,000, or about one-sixth of a penny for each human being in India.

No one disputed that it had been a magnificent and well-managed spectacle. ‘Everything was perfectly organised’, Mrs Wilson wrote home, ‘with that genius for big ideas and grasp of detail for which our great Viceroy is already renowned in other domains.’77 Curzon was pleased with the success, which as usual he ascribed to his habit of overseeing everything himself, but he doubted whether the Durbar had enhanced his reputation except as a first-rate organizer, ‘a magnificent State Barnum, an imperial Buffalo Bill’.78 Gertrude Bell came away with the impression that the Viceroy was ‘extremely unpopular’ and ‘yet something of a great man’.79 Balfour told Mary Elcho that friends returning from the Durbar unanimously agreed that ‘the show was the best show ever shewn’ and that George was ‘the most unpopular viceroy ever seen. Whether this is because his reforms are too good or his manners too bad seems doubtful.’80 Resentment at the treatment of the 9th Lancers was in fact stronger than either reason suggested by the Prime Minister. Lord Selborne came close to an explanation of the Durbar’s success when he complimented Curzon on his invaluable but very un-British gift of being able to take himself seriously at such a pageant.81