Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (42 page)

For each attendant princeling an escutcheon was devised, and these were distributed reverently among the feudatories. One by one the princes were taken before the Viceroy, escorted by cavalry officers and saluted by guns, and placed before a full-length portrait of Her Imperial Majesty. The satin banner was brought in by kilted Highlanders, and the Viceroy presented it with the spoken text: ‘I present Your Highness with this banner as a personal gift from Her Majesty the Queen in commemoration of her assumption of the title of Empress of India. Her Majesty trusts that it may never be unfurled without reminding you not only of the close union between the throne of England and your loyal and princely house, but also of the earnest desire of the paramount power to see your dynasty strong, prosperous and permanent’. Then a crimson ribbon was placed around the prince’s neck, with a gold medal of the Queen’s head, and the Viceroy intoned: ‘I further decorate you, by command of Her Majesty. May this medal be long worn by yourself, and long kept as an heirloom in your family in remembrance of the auspicious date it bears’.

Then around the durbar ground the heraldics improbably fluttered, while all the British Lieutenant-Governors, curates of the Crown, stood in attendance beneath their own ceremonial ensigns. Some of the princes had brought their own pipe bands, troops of colourful retainers, or elephants, and they were dressed themselves
in stupendous fineries. Battalions of infantry stood on parade around the durbar ground, and squadrons of cavalry pawed and snorted, and trumpets blew, and guns fired, and in the centre of it all, upon a dais of gilded ironwork, dressed in flags, red and golden cloths, shields, arms, banners, with the imperial crown on a red velvet cushion—at the centre of it all Lord Lytton resplendently represented the Empress, if not corporeally, for he was a tall thin man, at least in the abstraction of royalty.

Some European witnesses thought it all rather tawdry, and others were uncomfortably reminded of the Communion service in the Book of Common Prayer (‘a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world’). Among Indians it was a great success. ‘O Mother,’ said one loyal address, adeptly catching the spirit of the occasion, ‘O beloved, residing in the Palace of London, the descendants of the great Emperor of Delhi are burnt in the fire of your might. Surely today angels will sing your Majesty’s glory in the heavenly regions.’
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In the British Army the imperial ju-ju was woven into those talismans of pride, the regimental standards. In former times the standard had been carried into battle to provide a prominent rallying-point for the regiment: the ceremony of Trooping the Colour was a drill exercise of this practical function. Through most of Victoria’s century the standards were still taken into action, but by now their exhibition was purely symbolic. Like fetishes of Africa, they embodied in themselves the spirit of loyalty, of sacrifice, of comradeship which lay at the root of the British military system, and thus of the imperial momentum.

The soldiers’ devotion to their colours was almost fanatic. Men would happily die for them (though in the Afghan War of 1839
Captain Souter, who had wound the colours of the 44th Regiment prominently around his waist, found his life spared by the Afghans because they thought he must be an officer of special importance, worth a useful ransom). We read of officers braving the most frightful hazards of assegai, jezail or dismemberment in the cause of the colours, and when at last a regiment’s standards were due for retirement, worn out themselves by these adventures, or outliving a disbanded formation, nobody would dream of burning them, or taking them as souvenirs: instead they were carried in solemn parade to the regimental church—where, hung high above the memorial chapel, and slowly disintegrating into spindrift down the years, they remained for ever in cobweb sanctity, like the bones of saints and martyrs in foreign countries.
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Guns were holy too, for reasons still more obvious. It was a disgrace to abandon any piece of equipment on the field of battle, but to abandon a gun was apostasy. It was an artillery officer’s ultimate ignominy, in fiction a favourite short-story device, in fact a permanent blot on a man’s record. Innumerable tales of imperial heroism were attached to the guns—saving them, spiking them, manning them to the death. Nothing more shocked Elphinstone’s gamer officers in Kabul than his limp agreement to hand over the ordnance to the Afghans, and nothing more distressed the officers and loyal sepoys of the Indian Army, in the flood of cautionary measures that followed the Mutiny, than their deprivation of artillery. More properly, perhaps, even than the honoured standards, the guns were a depository of the imperial faith: for they were machines as well as weapons, oiled and burnished with mid-Victorian diligence, and it was no coincidence that the Royal Artillery, bound as it were by vows to its gun-carriages and breech-blocks, was to remain into the twentieth century the most professional corps of the British armed forces.

All this may seem dangerously close to war-worship, but Englishmen found it easy enough to reconcile their imperial imagery with a pre-Raphaelite vision of Christianity—the Gun beside the Light—as Cecil Spring-Rice demonstrated in the second verse of his famous patriotic hymn,
I
Vow
To
Thee
My
Country
: 

When all is said, the nearest thing the Empire had to a religion of its own, as cohesive as Catholicism or Islam, was the rite of the Anglican Church, diffused in such mysterious ways across the world. By now there were cathedrals in St Helena, Hobart, Grahamstown and Hong Kong. The Bishop of Gibraltar’s see extended from Portugal to the Caspian,
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the Bishop of Newfoundland was also Bishop of Bermuda, and the black Bishop of Sierra Leone had recently ended the worship of the monitor lizard in the Niger delta. St Paul’s Cathedral, Calcutta, took five hours to dedicate—‘for ever hereafter dedicated and consecrated’, the officiating Bishop said it was, ‘by this our definitive sentence of final decree which we make pronounce and promulge in these writings, saving and reserving unto us and our successors Bishops of Calcutta all ordinary and Episcopal Jurisdictions rights and privileges’. Bishop Colenso may have seemed a lost heretic to his Metropolitan in Cape Town, but to his Zulu disciples he was undoubtedly a high priest of the imperial conviction, and wherever the British flag flew in the world, Anglicanism was generally accepted as the outward form of its inner grace.

In Dublin the great men of the Ascendancy bowed to the Queen’s Viceroy as he entered his pew in the grim old cathedral of St Patrick, where the war memorials commemorated many a death in the imperial
cause, and the congregation optimistically sang Hymn 303 in the Church of Ireland hymnal—
Lift
thy
banners,
Church
of
Erin,
to
thine
ancient
faith
we
cling
. In Malta the sailors marched for church parade to the cool shuttered cathedral built at the express desire of Queen Adelaide on the shores of the Grand Harbour—a temple of the English way, from whose forecourt after Matins the captains could look out to their warships lying at anchor below, at whose altar commanders’ wives and bank managers’ ladies devotedly arranged the flowers, in whose front pews the Governor shared equal precedence with the Admiral Commanding, and through whose louvred windows the fine old English hymns rang lustily across the lanes of Valetta (where the Papist Maltese superstitiously crossed themselves before their images, and those ratings excused church parade that day loitered in the Gut waiting for the brothels to open).

In Madras the soldiers, the civil servants, the box-wallahs and their wives crowded stiff-collared and muslined into the garrison church of St Mary’s, within Fort St George, whose very walls breathed the antique glamour of the Raj: there were baptized the three daughters of Job Charnock, founder of Calcutta, by the Hindu mistress he had rescued from the suttee pyre—there Clive was married, and the Duke of Wellington worshipped, and eight Governors lay buried—the Princess of Tanjore had presented the altar rails, the altar piece was captured from the French at Pondicherry, and the church itself, so tradition said, had been designed not by an architect at all, but by Edward Fowle, Master Gunner of the Fort. And far away in the east the Sunday congregation crowded into the white cathedral of St Andrew’s above the Padang at Singapore—white in Anglican purity, white beside the fretted peeling presence of the city around, white against the rusty coasters lying in the roads, white for Raffles who had founded the city, and who hoped the Empire would be remembered always in ‘characters of light’—white with the linen suits of the merchants in their pews, and the vestments of the clergy beyond the lectern—white for the Great White Queen, the improving zeal of Empire, the blank pages of ledgers yet to be completed, or perhaps for the uniforms of the toiling convicts who, only twenty years before under the direction of the Royal Engineers, had created that holy building in the heat.

In any of these great churches, any Sunday morning, the empire builders assemble in their hierarchy, Europeans in the front pews, Africans, or Indians, or Chinese, or plain aborigines behind: and Lady Dicehurt envies Mrs Duncebury her pearls, and young Tom Morris sniggers at Mrs Timbury’s hat, and down they all kneel in familiar discipline, two or three hundred gathered together in the name of Empire, while the chaplain’s Oxford English echoes among the memorials: and when the time comes the choir, rising to its feet with a swishing of starched surplices and a faint emanation of gumdrops, launches into one of the full-throated anthems of Anglicanism—Wesley’s
Wilderness
, Mendelssohn’s
Oh
for
the
Wings
, or best of all, if it is nearly Christmas time in Melbourne or Toronto, Crotch’s

—a work which, with its magic ensemble of the exotic, the homely, the reverent, the funny, the lyrical and the mysterious, truly sings the ethos of Empire.
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