Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company Read online

  The story is told with some relish by Captain Alexander Hamilton and has been embellished by later writers. ‘We may picture him with wig awry and face inflamed with the overnight’s debauch, laying down the law in the rude language of the military camp.’ Happily for history, if sadly for its popularizers, it has since been proved that if any such incident did occur it was not in a court presided over by Gary who, on closer scrutiny, emerges as a sober and trusted figure. Appointed a factor back in 1643, he had served on the Council at Surat before serving his king and then the Company again until well into his seventies. Indeed his cosmopolitan origins, his ambiguity in matters of religion, his acumen as an accountant and his impartiality during many years as Chief Justice, mark him out as one of the colony’s most influential founders. Although none of this could save him from the disgrace which eventually overtook almost every one of Bombay’s functionaries, it is further testimony to his integrity and ability that his principal detractor would be the vindictive and hot-headed Sir John Child.

  Child it would be who, during the first twenty years of the Company’s tenure of Bombay, would contrive almost to lose it twice. In 1668, when Charles II made the place over to the Company’s directors, its loss would not perhaps have greatly troubled them. Their reluctance to ease His Majesty ‘of that great burthen and expense which the keeping of it hath hitherto beene’ was probably genuine. It seemed that Bombay’s negligible trade and limited access to the mainland, plus its unhealthy climate, could never repay the cost of fortifying and garrisoning it against the marauding fleets of the Dutch and of Indian pirates. But by 1688 it was a very different story. Bombay had become a thriving colony with a population of 60,000. Briefly eclipsing even Madras, it was ‘the seat of power and trade of the English in the East Indies’. Far from being dispensable, on it seemed to hang the fate of the Company in India.

  This remarkable transformation came about thanks to a combination of vigorous moves by the Company’s servants and a dramatic change in the Indian political scene. Bombay might have had little trade but, as men like Oxenden and Aungier came from Surat to assess its potential, they soon perceived other possibilities well worth exploiting. In Surat the Company had only its factory. It was ‘the best accommodation of any in the city’ and the factors were proud of its busy courtyard, which served as a stock exchange, of the crowded warehouses, of its grand dining hall where gargantuan meals were taken at long polished tables, and of the spacious roof gardens where whatever breeze there was buffeted the cobwebs of over-indulgence. Occasionally there were picnics in the city’s formal gardens and rides down river to view the shipping at Swalley. But it was still a constricted and collegiate existence dependent alike on the indulgence of the Moghul authorities and the forbearance of the Court in London. There was no security. The factory was rented, fortunes could be made and lost but rarely enjoyed, and family life was almost unknown.

  At Bombay, on the other hand, a man could build his own house on British soil and acquire his own few acres of coconut grove. To encourage settlement the Company now permitted its employees to stay on after their term of service and even outsiders, provided their business did not compete with that of the Company, were welcome to take up residence. Administering a colony involved a host of unfamiliar responsibilities of which populating the place was by no means the least. For mortality in Bombay was probably higher than anywhere in India. ‘Three years was the average duration of European life’, declared Chaplain Anderson; ‘two mussouns [i.e. monsoons] are the age of a man’, contradicted Chaplain Ovington, adding that of English children born on the island ‘not one in twenty live beyond their infant days’. Dr Fryer, whose diagnoses invariably bear more on the man than the malady, blamed the Portuguese arrack (made apparently from jelly-fish) and ‘foul women’.

  ‘To prevent the latter of which, and to propagate their colony, the Company have sent out English women.’ They came in two varieties, ‘gentlewomen’ for the factors and officers, ‘other women’ for the troops. One ‘suit of raiment’ was allowed to each girl – and one can imagine how carefully the Company’s directors scrutinized that issue – and they were supposed to receive free board and lodging for a year and a day. This, however, was not always forthcoming. The directors preferred a quick turnover and were generally satisfied. ‘They goe pretty fast, some married, some sure, some in a fair way,’ reported one Governor. But in the mad rush to nuptials, that matching of pedigrees went by the board. ‘Be they what they will, at their arrival all pretend to be gentlewomen, high born, great parentage and relations, and scorn to marry under a factor or commissioned officer, though ready to starve.’ In vain did the Governor indent for a supply of ‘country girls’ or even ‘Hospital girls’. With the next consignment came a note that such were simply not available. And although the utmost care had been taken to select only the truly ‘civil’, they too proved highly troublesome ‘not only daily dishonouring the nation and their own sex but declaring their utmost endeavour to make their impudence more notorious’.

  The presence of a growing and, all too often, impudent population demanded all manner of judicial, fiscal and administrative institutions. Gerald Aungier, Governor from 1669-77, was not only Bombay’s ‘true founder’ but also the first of the Company’s servants to try his hand at civilian government. During the 1670s he regulated the existing magistrates’ courts and set up a Supreme Court of Judicature. For the first time in India juries were employed and, with the appointment to the bench of Henry Gary, long since superseded as Governor, was introduced the idea of separating judicial and executive authority. Orders from Surat enjoined Gary to uphold the integrity of his office and not bring the court into disrepute by showing partiality or by ‘countenancing common barristers in which sort of vermin they say Bombay is very unhappy’.

  When the Company had taken over Bombay, a plan of London as it was to be rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666 was thoughtfully sent to the new colony. Aungier took this seriously and was soon planning what he called ‘the city which, by God’s assistance, is intended to be built’. The tidal swamps must be drained, the islands linked by causeways, and there must of course be a hospital and an Anglican church. A mint, the first operated by the British in India, was established to turn the Company’s bullion exports into rupees, xeraphins, shahis and all the other exotic denominations then in use in India. Meanwhile fortifications consisting of a chain of Martello towers were erected. By 1673 they looked formidable enough to discourage a Dutch fleet from attempting to land.

  It all cost money, of course, and the directors in London were soon groaning at Aungier’s extravagance. ‘Our business is to advantage ourselves by trade’, they reminded him in 1675, ‘and what government we have is but the better to carry on and support that [trade].’ But, as Aungier might have replied, trade at Bombay had first to be created. To attract the weavers, planters, merchants and money-lenders on whom it depended, Bombay had to establish a reputation for security, religious harmony, and impartial justice. And thanks to his reforms it was doing just that. Additionally it offered a new source of income in the form of revenue. Under Portuguese rule Bombay’s residents had remitted a fourth of their crop to the government. Aungier, after meeting with the principal residents, remitted this in favour of a land tax which yielded some £1666 per annum and was based on his famous Convention, ‘a sort of Doomesday Book in which the properties of the island were registered’. It was a significant precedent. For the first time the Company was enjoying the easy pickings of land revenue. Within a decade the Governor of the Company was urging something similar on the Madras authorities. ‘People protected ought in all parts of the universe, in some way or other, to defray the charge of their protection and preservation from wrong or violence.’ If commercial activity in the East depended on the fortifying of land bases, then all who enjoyed their security must pay for it. Trade preceded the flag; taxes followed it.

  But in Bombay financial stringency remained the order of the day and, as with
the women so with the cash, scarcity bore most heavily on the troops. In the 1670s Fryer put the garrison at 300 English, 400 Topazes (Indo-Portuguese), 500 native militia and 300 Bhandaris (club-wielding toddy tappers ‘that lookt after the woods of cocoes’). The nucleus of the English contingent had originally served the Crown, having come out with Marlborough and Lucas, and although they had since transferred their loyalty to the Company they continued Royalist in their sympathies. But the high mortality meant that new recruits from England were required almost yearly and it was one such consignment which in 1674 staged the first Bombay mutiny. Absconding with their weapons, they barricaded themselves in a fort on Mazagaon (then a separate island), and listed their grievances. Aungier, to prevent the mutiny spreading, quickly conceded. The demands were not excessive – the men claimed that they were losing on the exchange rate by not being paid in rupees, that they were owed a month’s pay, that they could not afford to buy their own scarlet coats, and that inflation had pushed the price of some foodstuffs beyond their means. Aungier, a scrupulously fair governor, may even have sympathized. But mutiny was mutiny and there was even a suggestion that their commanding officer was implicated. Courts martial resulted in the execution of the ringleader, by name Forke (or sometimes Fake), and the cashiering of Captain Shaxton. The whole affair was over in a matter of weeks; but not forgotten.

  For in 1682 what Fryer called ‘the not yet extinguished feud between the merchants and the soldiers’ flared again. Representing the military, Captain Richard Kegwin, formerly governor of St Helena, had come to Bombay as a freelance planter in 1676. He was soon inducted by the Company, given the job of raising a small contingent of cavalry, and then appointed to the command of the whole garrison and a seat on the governing Council. This was in 1681. In 1682 John Child, representing the merchant interest, succeeded to the Presidency of Surat which carried the additional responsibility of Governor of Bombay. Child had been factoring on the west coast for some twenty years and knew its trade as well as anyone. He had the confidence of the directors in London and a wide circle of cronies and relations in India. He would soon receive a baronetcy, a fairly normal distinction for any President in times of good Company-Crown relations; and posterity has thought well of him.

  But this favourable press seems to have resulted from an understandable but quite mistaken assumption that he was a brother of Sir Josiah Child, the Company’s thrusting chairman in the 1680s. The two men had indeed more than a name in common. To secure allies ‘I know,’ wrote a discontented Surat factor, ‘that Child at home scatters the guineas there, as the other Child does the rupees here, and both to one purpose.’ They were equally unscrupulous, equally possessive of the Company’s monopoly, and equally premature in their idea of the Company’s strength in India. But they were not related and had probably never met; and whereas Josiah’s broad entrepreneurial genius lent a degree of credibility to his proto-imperialist ambitions, the narrow horizons and factional obsessions of John boded ill for their execution.

  In 1683 John Child, obeying instructions from London where there was ‘a general and unparalleled run or demand for money upon all the public funds in this city and especially on this Company’, launched a cost-cutting policy in India and appointed his brother-in-law to see it through in Bombay as Deputy-Governor. Kegwin had his own quarrel with Child but Child stayed put in Surat. It was another rising by the Bombay garrison which precipitated Kegwin’s rebellion. Threatened with a cut in numbers, a cut in privileges, and a cut in pay, the troops turned as one on their civilian overlords, imprisoned the Deputy-Governor, and elected Kegwin their leader. There were two ships in the harbour, one of which conveniently contained £50,000 in gold. Kegwin seized it and then issued a proclamation in the King’s name terminating the Company’s rule and giving as his reasons its ‘intollerable extortions, oppressions and unjust impositions’ plus its ‘not maintaining the honour due to His Majesty’s crown’. In long letters to the King and the Duke of York he protested his loyalty and undertook to abide by their decision. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, he governed Bombay with restraint, pursued friendly relations with his Indian neighbours, and made the city a sort of free port open to all those traders whom the Company regarded as interlopers. His only act of incitement was an abortive attempt to convince the Surat factors to follow his example and arrest John Child.

  News of the revolt reached London in the summer of 1684. The King, heavily in the Company’s debt and with no fond memories of Bombay, promptly disowned the zealous Kegwin and commanded him to restore the colony to the Company. John Child must have been delighted. But the terms to be offered to Kegwin and his followers included a full pardon; and the enforcement of the order was entrusted to Sir Thomas Grantham, a royal protégé who happened to be cruising the East as a one-ship enforcement agency. At the time he was in Java hoping to avenge the Bantam factors who had just been expelled by the Dutch. Next he had an assignement in Persia – the customs dues owed to the Company at Gombroon were heavily in arrears – but by October he had cleared his backlog and, after reporting to Child at Surat, sailed on to Bombay.

  Kegwin, it seemed, was expecting him. He was permitted to land and was received courteously. ‘The monster’ whom Grantham had earlier wanted to hang showed a genuine respect for his royal commission and now became ‘a stout rebel’. By 10 November the terms of surrender were agreed; Kegwin handed over the still intact £50,000 of gold; and Grantham wrote to Child reassuring him that in spite of the rebellion having lasted nearly a year, ‘Your Honours are not much embezzled’. In two days’ time the garrison would lay down their arms and ‘march out by agreement’. But next day, when Grantham attempted to explain the terms of the surrender to a mass meeting of the men, he was shouted down. ‘They shut the gates on me, hissed, and broke out with “No Governor but Kegwin”’. Suddenly a pistol was pressed into the small of his back and, ‘but for the Providence of God Almighty’ (plus the timely action of ‘one Henry Fletcher, a Captain’), ‘I had been basely and cowardly murdered’. The assailant was disarmed, Grantham was bundled away, and under cover of darkness smuggled back aboard his ship. For the next week he stayed there.

  Clearly not all of Kegwin’s men shared their commander’s touching regard for the royal command. A few days later Kegwin wrote to Grantham that he fully anticipated ‘being put in irons [by them] or having my throat cut’. Nevertheless he patiently set about winning them over, a task in which old Henry Gary, still a local resident, assisted. ‘They begin to grow colder,’ reported Kegwin on the 15th. On the 16th he was even more optimistic and by the 18th he could announce ‘there is not now a dissenting person’; Grantham might come ashore again. On the 18th he did so and a further agreement was signed by both parties. This document, supposed to be one of surrender, in fact contains nothing in the way of condemnation or recrimination and is totally taken up with pledges of pardon and indemnity. All the rebels were to go scot free, none of their transactions could be held against them, and no monies or goods could be reclaimed from them. Kegwin was even confirmed in the salary he had paid himself, congratulated on his ‘dutiful compliance’, and guaranteed a passage home at the Company’s expense.

  He sailed with Grantham but, before leaving India, the ship called again at Surat to ensure that Child ‘do ratify, sign and confirm’ the agreement ‘in as large and ample a manner and form as is usual in law’. Child obliged – he had little choice – but not without registering his disapproval. Spluttering with rage he addressed the Company.

  Kegwin, the notorious naughty rascal, is on board the Charles II, as impudent as hell, glorying in his roguery, being secure under Sir Thomas’ [Grantham’s] protection…We cannot but see that he will get out of our hands, but indeed it’s ten thousand pities he should escape the halter, being the very false rascal without whom the revolt on Bombay would not have been.

  Curiously, aboard the Charles II there was also a real ‘monster’. Purchased by Grantham in India, this poor creature must have been su
ffering from some extreme form of goitre for, we are told, ‘he had the perfect shape of a child [no pun intended, I think] growing out of his chest as an excrescency, all but the head’. Perhaps this curiosity was intended for the King. His Majesty was keen on exotic species and was endlessly badgering the Company for birds and deer for his Birdcage Walk menagerie. In the previous year he had written off for ‘one Male and two Female Blacks’. They were for purposes of pageantry rather than experimental genetics ‘but they must be Dwarfs and of the least size that you can procure’. The King, however, was not amused by Grantham’s ‘monster’ who, although baptized, passed the rest of his days being ‘exposed to the sight of the people for profit’.

  In Child’s book, such a fate would have been too good for Kegwin; that ‘naughty rascal’ had escaped his clutches, but there remained the greybearded Gary whom Child considered ‘a great encourager of the rebels’ and therefore another ‘very naughty man’. In spite of the general pardon and a personal commendation from Grantham, Gary became a marked man. At last, in 1689, a trumped up charge of treason was brought against him. At the time Bombay was being besieged by the Moghul fleet; Gary’s plantation had been ravaged and his house gutted. Not surprisingly the ‘mercurial’ old man decided it was time to move on. He retired, probably to Goa, reflecting surely that the colony he had handed over to the Company twenty-five years before was this time done for.

  ii

  In 1687, two years after Kegwin’s rebellion, orders had come from the Company in London that Bombay was to supersede Surat as their headquarters on the west coast of India. Accordingly John Child, now a baronet and with authority over all the Company’s establishments in India, was to move to Bombay Castle. Bombay would become the Presidency, Surat a mere Agency. ‘Though our business is only trade and security, not conquest,’ explained the directors, ‘yet we dare not trade boldly or leave great stocks where we have not the security of a fort’. This harder line was echoed in instructions to Madras ‘of which we claim the sovereignty, and will maintain and defend against all persons, and govern by our laws without any appeal to any prince or potentate whatsoever’. And it was also at this juncture that the need for a fortified settlement in Bengal was being urged.