The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (53 page)

1
Franklin and Mary Wickwire,
Cornwallis: The Imperial Years
(University of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 79.

2
Letter from the First Earl Cornwallis to the First Duke of Newcastle, 15 July 1758.

3
Letter from Charles to William Cornwallis, 21 October 1779.

4
Franklin and Mary Wickwire,
Cornwallis and the War of Independence
(History Book Club, London, in conjunction with Faber and Faber Ltd., 1970), p. 221.

5
Ibid., p. 171.

6
Adam Hochschild,
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
(Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 184.

7
Though any enthusiasm for “Bloody Ban” must be tempered by the fact that he was a Whig rather than a Tory (indeed, his chief opponent in debating the slave trade was the Tory William Wilberforce) and as a Whig he had the temerity to criticize Arthur Wellesley's military operations in Portugal, to which criticism the Iron Duke had the perfect reply, saying that “he would much rather follow his [Tarleton's] example in the field than his advice in the senate.” Quoted in Anthony J. Scotti,
Brutal Virtue: The Myth and Reality of Banastre Tarleton
(Heritage Books, 2007), p. 242.

8
His American opponent was wily old Daniel Morgan.

9
Letter from Cornwallis to Lord Rawdon, 21 January 1781.

10
Franklin and Mary Wickwire,
Cornwallis and the War of Independence
, p. 289.

11
Franklin and Mary Wickwire,
Cornwallis: The Imperial Years
, p. 77.

12
Ibid., p. 248.

13
Geoffrey Treasure,
Who's Who in Late Hanoverian Britain
(Shepheard-Walwyn, 1997), p. 184.

14
Ibid., pp. 182 and 185.

1
Norman Lloyd Williams,
Sir Walter Raleigh
(Cassell Biographies, 1988), p. 20.

2
Kipling was not opposed to all things Irish. His son served in the Irish Guards and he wrote a history of the Irish Guards in World War I. He liked the Irishman's fighting virtues as long as they were not directed against England.

3
As for “the Irish saving civilization” during the Dark Ages, it would be more accurate to say that through Irish monks, the Catholic Church saved
civilization. A hat tip goes to the Irish, and they deserve to be bought a round at the pub, but a full genuflection belongs to the Church.

4
Paul Johnson,
Ireland: A Concise History from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day
(Academy Chicago Publishers, 1996), p. 34.

5
Peter Neville,
A Traveller's History of Ireland
, 4th ed. (Interlink Books, 2003), p. 93. Despite its title this is a rather well done, if brief (278 pages), history of Ireland.

6
The Treaty of Limerick (1691) allowed Irish Catholic soldiers and their families to exile themselves to France—the so-called “Flight of the Wild Geese”—the Wild Geese being the name given to Irish mercenaries who fought throughout Europe. It would take the lifting of penal laws against arming the Catholic Irish (in 1793, though the laws were ignored, when convenient, before that) for the British themselves to make use of these tremendous fighters.

7
Neville, op. cit., p. 114.

8
Thomas Babington Macaulay,
The History of England
, abridged and ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper (Penguin Classics, 1986), p. 146.

9
Ibid., p. 143.

10
In signing this measure into law, then-governor George Pataki discarded real history and replaced it with a paranoid, but politically popular, conspiracy theory, saying, “History teaches us the Great Irish Hunger was not the result of a massive failure of the Irish potato crop but rather was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive.” Raymond Hernandez, “New Curriculum from Albany—The Irish Potato Famine, or One View of It,”
The New York Times,
1 December 1996.

11
Michael Partridge,
Gladstone
(Routledge, 2003), p. 109.

12
John O'Beirne Ranelagh,
A Short History of Ireland
(Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 145.

13
Denis Gwynn,
The Life of John Redmond
(G. G. Harrap, 1932), p. 55.

14
John Ranelagh,
Ireland: An Illustrated History
(Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 211.

15
T. M. Kettle,
The Open Secret of Ireland
(General Books LLC, 2010), see the introduction by Redmond, p. 6.

16
This is a chapter title in Richard Bennett,
The Black and Tans: The British Special Police in Ireland
(Barnes & Noble Books, 1995), a useful, short (228 pages) history of this period, though the endless violence rather palls.

17
You can see an example of such men in the photo insert between pp. 96 and 97 of ibid.

1
This was Raleigh's response when told he should show less courage, while awaiting execution, because his cool-headed fortitude might provoke his enemies. Robert Lacey,
Sir Walter Raleigh
(Atheneum, 1974) p. 375.

2
The Irish (and the then Spanish ambassador) claimed the Spaniards surrendered on a condition of amnesty; the English at the time denied this. The surrendering Spanish had made a point that they had not come on orders of the king of Spain, but as soldiers fighting for the pope—which might have only deepened the hostility of the English commander, Lord Grey, a Catholic-hating Puritan. “The faith of Grey” is an Irish byword for perfidy.

3
Norman Lloyd Williams,
Sir Walter Raleigh
(Cassell Biographies, 1988), p. 33.

4
Sir Robert Naunton, quoted in ibid., p. 49.

5
That biographer is Robert Lacey in
Sir Walter Ralegh
(op. cit.)—note the alternative spelling; Raleigh's name was spelled many ways in his lifetime—see p. 75.

6
The very fact that Indians were dying mysteriously through disease at the appearance of the white man might have given credence to the godly theory, if the rule between mortals and gods was
noli me tangere
.

7
Raleigh Trevelyan,
Sir Walter Raleigh
(Henry Holt, 2002), p. 280.

1
Christopher Hibbert,
Wellington: A Personal History
(Addison Wesley, 1997), p. 3.

2
Elizabeth Longford in
Wellington: The Years of the Sword
(Harper and Row, 1969), p. 34, has him burning his violin, which is the usual account; Christopher Hibbert in op. cit., p. 11, has him giving it away.

3
Hibbert, op. cit., p. 30.

4
Ibid., p. 37.

5
“A disciplined infantry that keeps its order and reserves its fire has little to fear from cavalry.” Quoted in Geoffrey Treasure,
Who's Who in Late Hanoverian Britain
(Shepheard-Walwyn, 1997), p. 245.

6
Longford, op. cit., p. 139.

7
Treasure, op. cit., p. 243.

8
One of his tasks was convincing France to follow Britain's example in abolishing the colonial slave trade. There was no anti-slavery sentiment in France, such as there was in England, but he did get the French king to at least consider abolishing the trade in five years. J. H. Stocqueller points out that William Wilberforce and other abolitionists wanted an immediate renunciation of the slave traffic; this Wellington could not deliver, and did not himself think reasonable given French public opinion, but he did procure a promise that France's Navy would join Britain's in patrolling the African coast against slavers. See J. H. Stocqueller,
The Life of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington
(Ingram, Cooke, and Company, 1852), vol. I, pp. 355–57.

9
Robert Eccleshall and Graham Walker,
Biographical Dictionary of British Prime Ministers
(Routledge, 1998), p. 125.

10
Quoted in virtually every other Wellington biography, but see Gordon Cor-rigan,
Wellington: A Military Life
(Hambledon Continuum, 2001), p. 371, n. 11.

11
Neville Thompson,
Wellington After Waterloo
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 80.

1
Roger Ellis,
Who's Who in Victorian Britain
(Shepheard-Walwyn, 1997), p. 206.

2
Byron Farwell,
Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory
(W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), pp. 77–78.

3
Colonel Sir William F. Butler,
Sir Charles Napier
(Cornell University Library Digital Collections, no date, reprint of Macmillan's 1894 edition, originally published 1890), p. 1.

4
It should be added that he disdained clerics.

5
Butler, op. cit., p. 215.

6
Farwell, op. cit., p. 70.

7
Lieutenant-General Sir William Napier,
The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier, G.C.B.
(John Murray, 1857), vol. II, p. 153.

8
Farwell, op. cit., p. 81.

9
Butler, op. cit., p. 113.

10
Napier, op. cit., vol. II, p. 356.

11
Butler, op. cit., p. 147.

12
Napier, op. cit., vol. IV, p. 343.

13
Farwell, op. cit., p. 94.

14
Butler, op. cit., p. 174.

15
Ibid., p. 186.

16
Ibid., p. 199.

1
Speech delivered in the House of Commons, 10 July 1833.

2
Some modern historians have made unconvincing attempts to debunk the first-hand testimony of one of the survivors, John Zephaniah Holwell, an upright surgeon, civil servant, and occasional military officer of the East India Company who wrote a thoroughly believable and meticulous account of the incident (including the names of the dead).

3
Napoleon's invasion of Egypt (1798–1801), was, in part, an attempt to establish a route to supply anti-British Indian rulers.

4
Lawrence James,
Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India
(St. Martin's Press, 1997), p. 98.

5
Francis Yeats-Brown,
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
(Blue Ribbon Books, 1933), pp. 34–35.

6
The other ranks were a different and more brutish story entirely, of course.

7
James, op. cit., p. 415.

8
Andrew Roberts,
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900
(HarperCollins, 2007), p. 150. His is the best, short summary of the events at Amritsar; for a detailed examination of Amritsar, the most authoritative
recent book is Nigel Collett's
The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer
(Hambledon Continuum, 2006).

9
Nigel Collett,
The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer
(Hambledon Continuum, 2006), p. 424.

10
Speech at Winchester House, 23 February 1931.

1
Thomas Babington Macaulay,
Essay on Clive
(Longmans' English Classics, Longmans, Green and Co., 1928), p. 5.

2
Mark Bence-Jones,
Clive of India
(Book Club Associates, London, 1974), p. 3.

3
Robert Harvey,
Clive: The Life and Death of a British Emperor
(Hodder & Stoughton, 1998), p. 43.

4
The Mahrattas fed their horses opium, giving new meaning to the expression, “get off your high horse.”

5
Once, during the final campaign against Chanda Sahib, Clive stumbled behind enemy lines into a gang of six armed Frenchmen, but managed to convince them they were surrounded: three surrendered and three fled. Clive led a charmed life on the battlefield.

6
Macaulay, op. cit., p. 43.

7
Harvey, op. cit., p. 346.

8
Bence-Jones, op. cit., p. 287.

1
Byron Farwell,
Armies of the Raj: From the Great Indian Mutiny to Independence: 1858–1947
(W. W. Norton & Company, 1989) p. 205.

2
This had originally been remarked of another parliamentarian and then adopted to describe Curzon, which it did most perfectly.

3
David Gilmour,
Curzon: Imperial Statesman
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 5.

4
Ibid., p. 45.

5
James Morris,
Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat
(The Folio Society, 1992), p. 79.

6
Gilmour, op. cit., p. 36. Curzon remarried, but never gained the male heir for which he hoped and never regained the happiness his first wife had given him.

7
Ibid., p. 432.

8
He wanted to decline, but his wife prevailed upon him to accept.

9
Chris Wrigley,
Winston Churchill: A Biographical Companion
(ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2002), p. 150.

1
Philip Warner,
Auchinleck: The Lonely Soldier
(Cassell & Co., 1981), pp. 211–12.

2
He made a few himself, including an arrow-flight sound simulator to accompany a shipboard showing of the Douglas Fairbanks version of
Robin Hood
.

3
Philip Ziegler,
Mountbatten: The Official Biography
(Collins, 1985), p. 104.

4
Unlike the American government, Mountbatten defended French imperialism as well, thinking the French necessary and rightful allies in the fight to get the Japanese out of Indochina.