Lord William Bentinck: The Making of a Liberal Imperialist 1774 - 1839

By John Rosselli

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520313613

John Rosselli

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LORD WILLIAM BENTINCK

By the same author

•

LORD WILLIAM BENTINCK

AND THE BRITISH OCCUPATION

OF SICILY 1811-14

LORD AND LADY WILLIAM BENTINCK

Drawn in Rome, 1816, by Ingres. Musée Bonnat, Bayonne

Lord William Bentinck

THE MAKING OF

A LIBERAL IMPERIALIST

1774-1839

By

JOHN ROSSELLI

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

All rights reserved. No part of this publication

may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted in any form, or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of

the publishers.

© John Rosselli 1974

ISBN 0-520-02299-8

LC 72-95302

Printed in Great Britain

To Nicky

Contents

Preface 1

Acknowledgments 1

Abbreviations 1

PART I·THE CAREER OF A SECOND SON

A Reputation 1

Burlington House 1

A Studious Soldier 1

A Disciple of Burke 1

A Pittite in Disgrace 1

An Evangelical Couple 1

An Independent Canningite 1

A Kind of Liberal 1

A Fenland Improver 1

The Road to Calcutta 1

PART II EMPIRE AND NATIONALITY

Serving the Nation 1

The Nation in Arms: from Flanders to Sicily, 1793-1811 1

British Greatness and Indian Happiness: Madras, 1803-1807 1

‘The Queen of our Colonies’:Sicily, 1811-1814 1

The Italian Adventure, 1811-1815

‘Nationality’ for India, 1828-1839 1

A British Mughal Empire 1

‘Responsible Partners’: Native Agency and Native Agents 1

CONTENTS

Contents

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABBREVIATIONS

PART I The Career of a Second Son 1 · A REPUTATION

2-BURLINGTON HOUSE

3 · A STUDIOUS SOLDIER

4 · A DISCIPLE OF BURKE

5-A PITTITE IN DISGRACE

6 · AN EVANGELICAL COUPLE

7 · AN INDEPENDENT CANNINGITE

8 · A KIND OF LIBERAL

9-A FENLAND IMPROVER

10 -THE ROAD TO CALCUTTA

PART II Empire and Nationality 1 · SERVING THE NATION

2 · THE NATION IN ARMS: FROM FLANDERS TO SICILY, 1793-1811

3 · BRITISH GREATNESS AND INDIAN HAPPINESS: MADRAS, 1803-1807

4 · ‘THE QUEEN OF OUR COLONIES’: SICILY, 1811-1814

5 · THE ITALIAN ADVENTURE, 1811-1815

6 · ‘NATIONALITY’ FOR INDIA, 1828-1839

7-A BRITISH MUGHAL EMPIRE

8 · ‘RESPONSIBLE PARTNERS’:

9 · NATIONALITY AND CULTURE: RELIGIOUS, LINGUISTIC, AND EDUCATIONAL POLICY

10 · THE EXPANSION OF EMPIRE

PART III The Pursuit of Equity 1 · FROM CERTAINTY TO DOUBT

2 · APPRENTICESHIP IN MADRAS

3 · APPRENTICESHIP IN SICILY

4 ·DISILLUSION AND FULFILMENT:

5 ·THE SHEPHERD AND THE WOLF: JUDICIAL REFORM, 1805-1835

PART IV Steward of a Great Estate 1 · THE RIFT IN THE DARKNESS

2 · BRITISH RULE AND

3 · DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOSE BENEFIT?

PART V Governor 1 • THE WHEEL OF ADMINISTRATION

2 · HEAD OF THE SERVICE

3 • ADMINISTRATIVE GENERALSHIP

4 · A UTILITARIAN GOVERNOR-GENERAL?

PART VI Not Quite a Radical

EPILOGUE

References

EPILOGUE

INDEX

PREFACE

This is neither a biography of Lord William Bentinck nor a history of his Indian administration. It is intended as a study of his career in its historical setting.

This means, first, that I have tried to study Bentinck’s career as a whole. The book takes as the most notable phase of that career Bentinck’s seven years (1828-35) *n the Supreme Government of India. But it gives almost equal importance to his involvement in British and Italian affairs, as well as to his early Governorship of Madras in 1803—1807; it glances at minor episodes elsewhere. Its aim is to show that for a man like Bentinck Indian administration was not an exclusive speciality: his work in India can be fully understood only if we understand the continuity of his inner development and of the issues he dealt with.

Secondly, I have tried to show Bentinck’s career as that of a member —in some ways exceptional, in others representative—of a particular class. Bentinck was not just a man who happened to run a diplomatic mission or the government of British India. He was a member, relatively unprivileged, of the British landed aristocracy—in his day an allpurpose governing class whose remarkable success in maintaining itself owed much to its ability to come to terms with competing or overlapping groups: at home, the landed gentry, merchant oligarchies, the emergent industrial and professional middle classes; in India, the corporate interest of the East India Company’s services, declining or nascent Indian elites. I have therefore set out to follow Bentinck’s changing relation to these groups as well as to his own, and, from time to time, to show what one or other group was about.

Given these aims, a study of Bentinck’s career faces obvious problems. One is that of giving some account of such disparate issues as Nottinghamshire politics, the Sicilian constitutional movement, and Indian judicial reform without losing the thread of the argument. A kindred problem is that of securing the choral resonance of history without drowning out Bentinck’s individual voice. Then there is the proportion to be given to this issue and that.

In tackling these problems I have by and large avoided strict chronology and have instead dealt with Bentinck’s career by topics. After an account in Part I of Bentinck’s development up to his governorgeneralship the book consists of a series of essays on historical problems which, as I think, this one man’s career illuminates. In the words of Jacob Burckhardt, a pioneer of this kind of historiography, it is in each essay ‘as if we were to take a number of figures out of a picture, leaving the rest where it was’. The advantage of the method is coherence of argument, the inherent risk repetitiveness. I hope to have secured the one and fought off the other.

A book on a man who spent a total of eleven years as an Indian administrator—not to mention four years in command in the Mediterranean—is bound to leave something out. In India I have concentrated on internal questions in which Bentinck played a significant role. I have not dealt with external relations—with China, with Persia, or, except briefly, with the North-west border. Nor have I touched on the East India Company’s other possessions in Burma, Malaya, and Singapore. Even within India I have dealt only skimmingly with some questions (the reform of the opium monopoly, the suppression of the Thags, the details of administrative reform within the company’s services). In the Mediterranean I have virtually ignored Bentinck’s dealings with Sardinia, Corsica, Greece, the Ionian Islands, and Dalmatia for the sake of concentrating on his much more important role in Sicily and mainland Italy.

The book rests in the first place on Bentinck’s vast collection of private papers (now at Nottingham University); except in one matter, land revenue administration, I have not attempted to go through the official records of his Indian governments in their still vaster bulk. I have, however, been greatly helped by the work of students who have done just that, especially by the unpublished theses of Dr Cynthia Barrett, Dr K. N. Pandey, and Professor J. F. Hilliker among others. I have unfortunately not been able to consult the volumes—forthcoming as I write—of documents concerning Bentinck’s GovernorGeneralship edited by Professor C. H. Philips and Dr B. N. Pandey; at an early stage, through the courtesy of the editors, I was able to see some of their typescripts, but I have in the event used the original documents. On Sicilian and Italian matters the book rests on a study of the Foreign Office documents.

On all phases of Bentinck’s career I have set out to use the available published sources as well as whatever manuscript evidence I could find. More of Bentinck’s private letters turned up than might have been expected. Some have clearly been lost. I am aware of only two or three possible sources of letters to which I could not get access. One of them, the important collection of Louis-Philippe’s papers lately deposited by the Count of Paris in the Archives Nationales, is unfortunately closed to historians for some time ahead.

A word about the presentation of documentary evidence. It is the fashion among historians of British India, rather more than among modern historians at large, to reproduce the spelling and punctuation of late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century documents. I have not followed this practice. Bentinck for most of his life wrote ‘publick,’ ‘controul’, ‘oeconomy’; like other men of his day he capitalised many nouns. To reproduce such features in documents of the modern period is, I think, to meet an antiquarian taste rather than to help comprehension; to follow literally the punctuation of Bentinck’s diary entries —often non-existent—would confuse the reader. In quoting from documents I have throughout modernised spelling and punctuation; I have not, however, altered obsolete verbal forms (e.g. ‘beat’ for ‘beaten’).

On the same grounds I have not reproduced the often barbarous spelling of Indian names in contemporary British documents. Indian names appear as far as possible in the standard modern transliteration, but without diacritical marks. Indian place names follow what seems to be the English spelling now current in India. Thus we have Calcutta, not Kalkata; but Thanjavur, not Tanjore. When the current spelling seems likely to confuse I have given, at the first mention, the older spelling in square brackets.

Again as a help to comprehension, especially among Indian readers, I have either translated into English passages in Latin, French, or Italian, or else have given after each foreign phrase a translation in square brackets.

Drawing a net round Bentinck’s career seems to take a long time. The late Philip Morrell, who had access to the private papers, as early as 1909 was working on a biography; at his death in 1943 it was unfinished. My own work began as long ago as 1948, though it was afterwards set aside for ten years. A long haul such as this leaves one with a debt of gratitude to many people. Most of my debts I have recorded below. Two of them, however, I must mention here. One is to Professor Asa Briggs, who made it possible for me to return to historical work. The other is to Professor Sir Herbert Butterfield, my supervisor many years ago, whose example as an historian has led me on and whose wise advice as a friend has stayed me at crucial moments. Neither is responsible for the form or content of this book. Without them it would not have been written.

J. R.

Brighton

June 1972

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Papers in the Royal Archives, Windsor, are quoted by gracious permission of H.M. the Queen. I am grateful to the Duke of Portland for permission to use the Bentinck Papers in Nottingham University Department of MSS, and to the following persons for letting me use the collections listed after their names: Mrs Pauline Dower (papers of Sir Charles Trevelyan), the late Viscount Exmouth (Exmouth Papers), Earl Fitzwilliam and the City Librarian, Sheffield (Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments), Sir Fergus Graham, Bart. (Graham Papers), the Earl of Harewood (Canning Papers), Mrs Naomi Mitchison (letter book of Anne Dundas Strange), and Sir Harry Verney, Bart. (Claydon House Papers). Illustrations are reproduced by permission of the institutions named in the captions.

Far more librarians and archivists of public institutions have helped me than can be listed in detail. I have had a long-standing happy relationship with the Nottingham University Department of MSS, in particular with Mrs M. A. Welch, Keeper of MSS, with her predecessor, Mr J. H. Hodson, and with Mr A. Cameron. I have also had much help from officials of the India Office Library (especially Dr R. Bingle and Mrs M. Archer), the National Library, Calcutta, the National Register of Archives, the National Library of Scotland (especially Mr A. S. Bell), the Archives Nationales, Paris (especially Mme S. d’Huart), the Uttar Pradesh State Archives, the National Maritime Museum, the libraries of Trinity College, Cambridge, Friends House, London, and the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, the Curator of King’s Lynn Museum (Miss A. S. Mottram), as well as from about one-third of the county archivists in England and from the officials of several branches of the Italian State Archives, in particular those of Turin, Milan, Florence, Naples, and Palermo. I thank them all.

Professor Kenneth Bailhatchet kindly agreed to read the whole of this book in typescript. From him and from others who have read parts of it in one form or another—Prof. Asa Briggs, Dr Percival Spear, Prof. Eric Stokes, and Prof. F. M. L. Thompson—I have had

iS much helpful comment; I remain of course wholly responsible for what follows. I am particularly grateful to Dr Spear for steady encouragement to pursue a subject he has himself been keenly interested in.

I am indebted to the following authors of unpublished theses either for permission to read their work or, where it is freely available, for encouragement to draw on it: Profs. D. E. Ginter and J. F. Hilliker, Drs C. Barrett, M. Gupta, J. H. Moses, G. Seed, and A. Siddiqi. One author of a useful thesis, Dr K. N. Pandey, I was unable to trace.

For help with finding papers, references, or illustrations, or for stimulating comments and discussions, I wish to thank Prof. M. L. Qarke, Prof. B. S. Cohn, the late Earl of Gosford, Dr Benedicte Hjejle, the late R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Mr D. Mack Smith, Dr James Maclean, Dr P. J. Marshall, Mrs Rosalind Mitchison, Prof. Morris David Morris, Dr B. N. Pandey, the late Henri Riviere, Prof. Rosario Romeo, and Dr Alex Wilson, as well as my colleagues Bruce Graham, Ranajit Guha, Anthony Low, and Peter Reeves.

Grants from the Social Science Research Council and the University of Sussex enabled me to do research in India. A grant from the British Academy and a period of leave from the university enabled me to write this book.

My wife Eleanor Timbres Rosselli has not typed, indexed, proofread, or done any of the other things historians often thank their wives for, apart from being herself. The book is dedicated to her.

J. R.

ABBREVIATIONS

The place of publication of books referred to is London unless otherwise stated. Indian newspapers referred to are in the National Library, Calcutta. Glasgow newspapers are in the British Museum Newspaper Library or the Mitchell Library, Glasgow. ‘Op. cit.’ and ‘loc cit.’ are used only when the source in question has been referred to at most a page or two earlier; otherwise the title of a source already referred to is given in shortened form.

i?

PART I

The Career of a Second Son

1 · A REPUTATION

Near the heart of Calcutta the Victoria Memorial enshrines the pomp, part reality, part fantasy, of Britain’s Indian Empire. In the gardens stand the statues of some of the men who ran it. When the West Bengal Marxists in 1969 were busy removing from public places all tokens of ‘imperialism’ these, because the Government of India owns them, were spared to stand a while longer. Among the toga’d or bearded rulers one statue commemorates Lord William Bentinck; on its base runs a famous inscription which Macaulay wrote just after Bentinck in 1835 had left his last office as Governor-General of India:

To

WILLIAM CAVENDISH BENTINCK

Who, during seven years, ruled India with eminent prudence, integrity, and benevolence:

Who, placed at the head of a great empire, never hid aside the simplicity and moderation of a private citizen:

Who infused into Oriental despotism the spirit of British freedom:

Who never forgot that the end of government is the happiness of the governed:

Who abolished cruel rites:

Who effaced humiliating distinctions:

Who gave liberty to the expression of public opinion:

Whose constant study it was to elevate the intellectual and moral character of the nations committed to his charge:

This monument

Was erected by men, who, differing in race, in manners, in language, and in religion,

Cherish, with equal veneration and gratitude, the memory of his wise, upright, and paternal administration.

A few years later Macualay drove in the point. He ended his diatribe on the imposition of British rule in Bengal by looking forward confidently to the ‘veneration … with which the latest generation of Hindus will contemplate the statue of Lord William Bentinck.’

By 1840, when Macaulay thus rashly took to prophecy, Bentinck was dead. He had died in Paris the year before. Through a wandering life he had carefully preserved his papers. His widow got them together; she meant to have his biography written. But she too died within four years; no biography ever came out.¹

For lack of a record setting out his whole career Bentinck’s reputation has ever since been fragmented. He appears in historical works on such disparate subjects as the Peninsular War, the Italian Risorgimento, and the North Indian agrarian economy; historians’ interpretations of his character and work are strikingly at variance. Within the last few years one author has dismissed him as ‘an ambitious opportunist with little political judgment and perhaps not even wholly sane’;² for another he showed ‘genius’ and ‘his achievement has not been surpassed by any British administrator [of India] before or after him.’³ Bentinck was a controversial figure in his lifetime; so he has remained.

Bentinck, the second son of the Duke of Portland (Prime Minister in 1783 and again in 1807-9), lived through a quarter-century of war that scattered men over the world and brought them forward early. Even in that mobile age—when Wellington made his name in India and Talleyrand found refuge in America—his career was unusually broken up. It was not easy to make a coherent story out of a youthful Governorship of Madras (cut short after four years in 1803-7), followed by a stormy proconsulship in Sicily and mainland Italy in 1811-15, and then, after long delay, by a return to India as GovernorGeneral in 1828-35. Bentinck had, besides, served as a young Army officer in the Low Countries, Ireland, Northern Italy, Egypt, and the Iberian Peninsula. At home he was a member of Parliament, an agricultural entrepreneur, and a promoter of fen drainage and steam navigation. In time he travelled over four continents and served in three. It was a life dispersed.

At his death Bentinck was remembered chiefly as GovernorGeneral of India. His tenure was known to have marked important reforms: he had abolished widows’ self-immolation, begun to suppress the religiously dedicated murderers called Thags, brought forward Indians in the administration, and virtually freed the Indian press.

At the same time he had made himself deeply unpopular with British civil servants and officers in India by an economy drive which cut their allowances. They nicknamed him—whose family had come over to England in 1688 with William of Orange—‘the Clipping Dutchman’; they openly wished he would drown in the Ganges or break his neck in the mountains. In the folk memory of the British services traces of the ‘clipping’ with its attendant bitterness survived down to the Second World War.⁴ The obituaries in the Calcutta press—written and read for the most part by Englishmen—uneasily mirrored this dual reputation. On the one hand the newspapers felt the need to apologise for Bentinck’s ‘failings’—chiefly his zeal in putting through the economy drive; on the other hand the missionary papers praised him for having given Indians ‘the sense that their country was still their own, and their rulers were likewise their stewards’.⁵

Even in this there may have been a touch of obituarist’s piety; writing a few years earlier at the close of Bentinck’s term, a civil servant had publicly dismissed him as ‘the busy meddling governor of detail’; ‘to a certain extent’ Bentinck had meant well, but his mind, a ‘strange mixture’ of greatness and ‘inferiority’, fitted him at best to rule over ‘a small island in the West Indies’. He spoke for others.⁶ In London Edward Thornton, an official at the East India House, wrote off Bentinck’s administration, one or two displays of ‘extravagance’ apart, as ‘almost a blank’.⁷

In Victorian times Bentinck’s reputation was a party matter. According to a Liberal commentator (who ranked him with such great humanitarian reformers as Wilberforce and Shaftesbury in having benefited mankind) ‘the Whigs would regard his rule [in India] as a pattem of what is good; the Tories would denounce it as an example of what is bad’.⁸ Indeed a Tory historian attacked Bentinck’s ‘total want of military capacity’ and blamed his ‘unstatesmanlike retrenchments’ for the disasters of the First Afghan War.⁹ Historians with Indian experience, however, even when they blamed this or that act of policy, gave him an honourable place among British rulers; one of them called Bentinck’s term ‘the most memorable period of improvement’ in the first half of the century.¹⁰

This last view has ever since gained ground. For several reasons— the spread of liberalism, the rise of a Westernised Indian intelligentsia, the decline of empire, and the closer study of sources—it has become orthodoxy to see the social and educational changes of the 1830s as a turning point in Indian history. The mid-twentieth-century Liberal view has been put by Percival Spear. Completely reversing Thornton’s judgment, he sees Bentinck as the most important if not the ablest of nineteenth-century governors. Bentinck ‘commenced a political and social revolution and introduced a new era’. His decisiveness led him at times into hasty acts, but it was on the whole an ‘unmixed good for India’ whose welfare Bentinck had steadily at heart. The dislike he incurred among the British came about not in spite but ‘because of his courage and public spirit’. Spear has also been influential in presenting Bentinck as a man moved by Benthamite Radical doctrine.¹¹

This still leaves open the question: how far was Bentinck an imperialist? Writing in 1892 at the height of the last period of European imperial expansion, the author of the ‘Rulers of India’ volume on Bentinck found it necessary to apologise for ‘the absence of foreign adventure and territorial conquest’ and the prevalence during his rule of ‘unattractive internal reform’: set beside the exploits of Lord Wellesley and other conquerors it might ‘seem commonplace’.¹² An eminent Indian nationalist historian, however, has since reversed both diagnosis and judgment: Bentinck’s annexations of Indian States, though unspectacular compared with earlier and later conquests, still ‘fairly illustrate’ the British policy of ‘aggressive imperialism’.¹³ Whether Bentinck should or should not be thought of as an imperialist (‘of free trade’ or of some other kind) remains largely uninvestigated.

By historians of India Bentinck’s share in European affairs has been almost wholly ignored. It has drawn very mixed notice from a few British and Italian historians. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars Bentinck was one of the first to raise the standard of Italian independence and unity; he had previously helped to bring about a liberal constitution in Sicily, then a virtual British protectorate. Some of the bold steps he took to these ends—at times in defiance of his own government—were presumably in the mind of the diarist Charles Greville when he wrote of Bentinck (his maternal uncle) as a man who ‘is not right-headed, and has committed some great blunder or other in every public situation in which he has been placed’.¹⁴

This attitude has persisted in historians who have looked at Bentinck’s doings either, like one or two early British and Austrian writers,¹⁵ from the point of view of Queen Maria Carolina (whom he expelled from her Sicilian kingdom), or, like the great diplomatic historian Sir Charles Webster, with Britain’s European policy in mind; for Webster Bentinck was ‘a brilliant and unbalanced egoist, all the more dangerous because he was also imbued with a species of idealism’.¹⁶ Yet for a Liberal historian of European nationalist movements Bentinck’s Sicilian policy was ‘enlightened’; the constitution remained ‘a signpost to the whole Italian Liberal movement’.¹⁷ At the same time another British historian of far from Liberal persuasion could describe Bentinck as uncommonly capable and far-sighted—because he was study ing Bentinck’s mission to the Spanish Junta at the start of the Peninsular War rather than his more controversial Italian career.¹⁸

To Italian historians Bentinck was for long something of a puzzle, in part because the Sicilian movement which he helped along—and which aimed at the island’s independence from the mainland—did not fit Risorgimento orthodoxy. From 1890 to the Second World War a string of historians interested in the secret societies concluded that ‘English gold’, liberally administered by Bentinck, had had much to do with stirring up and even with founding Italian conspiratorial groups at the end of the Napoleonic period. A great historian, Croce, concluded on the one hand that Bentinck’s Sicilian career was evidence for a persistent British design on the island, on the other that the attempt to raise and unite mainland Italy in 1814 was no more than ‘a headlong sally or an adventure’.¹⁹ More recently Marxist historians have tended to write down the importance of the moderate aristocratic groups on which Bentinck relied both in Sicily and on the mainland and hence of his Italian career as a whole.

To survey Bentinck’s role in historiography is not to mock at historians’ disagreements—a game far too easy—but to bring out how fragmented views of a career such as this must lead to discord and bafflement: all the more when the subject is by temperament a forerunner, that is, a man who grasps at more than he can fully understand, and who starts more than he can finish. The present work attempts to study and interpret Bentinck’s career as a whole.

In this interpretation the main themes of his career are two. An able, energetic, not particularly intellectual man of high birth but no fortune grows from a youthful passion for ideological war against the France of the Revolution and Napoleon to a liberalism advanced for his time and class. A man who has fastened early on the idea of the nation united and independent tries to apply it, first in Italy, then in India, each time within a vision of Britain as imperial benefactor. The book follows, through diverse scenes and activities, the making of an early Liberal Imperialist.

2-BURLINGTON HOUSE

British officials in India often appear in historical works like demigods out of nowhere. They arrive, carry out their tasks, and depart. At most we glimpse their home background; their function, as the historian sees it, is to govern India and no more. Yet when we look at British India in the first half of the nineteenth century, before the Indian Civil Service came to be a career for which the universities prepared their best men, an historical perspective of this kind is likely to distort.

A younger son of the aristocracy like Bentinck went out to India partly to make money, partly because it was his birthright to share—if he had the least capacity—in running Britain and her empire. Service in India was not fundamentally different from any of the tasks Bentinck could and did set his hand to. His two spells there should be seen, not as peaks emerging from a mist, but as episodes—his GovernorGeneralship as the crowning episode—in a career no more diverse than those of many men of his class and time.

To understand that career we should see Bentinck at the intersection of several overlapping circles—circles of family, of class, of political or territorial connection, of religious persuasion, of school and Army friendship, and only lastly of ideological conviction.

He was a Bentinck; a younger son; a member of the Whig aristocracy; born of a Prime Minister and party leader; in the personal and ideological crisis brought on by the French Revolution, a Portland Whig and ultimate follower of the younger Pitt; afterwards related, through his brother, to Canning, and through his wife to militant Evangelicals; involved, through his family, with the concerns of Nottinghamshire, and later, through his own activity, with those of the Fens and of Glasgow; increasingly identified, as time went on, with Evangelicals and other Westernising reformers in the East India Company; in his many sojourns on the post-Napoleonic Continent a member of the international liberal aristocracy of which his great friend King Louis-Philippe was for a time the exemplar. We will trace his progress, not as a lone comet, but as a sharer—in some ways uncommon—in all these groups.

The Bentincks were the type of the Great Revolution family. Their ancestor Hans Bentinck had come over from the Netherlands as William Ill’s great friend; several of his descendants bore the name William. This first English Bentinck won great offices and estates and the earldom of Portland. By 1774, when Lord William was born, the family had several branches on either side of the North Sea. His immediate branch held the Portland title, elevated since 1716 into a dukedom. They were territorial, hence political magnates. The third duke, Bentinck’s father, held vast though at that time ill-managed and ruinously expensive estates: Welbeck, in the agricultural and coal country of North Nottinghamshire, carrying with it as a rule one of the Nottinghamshire seats in the Commons; Bulstrode, in Buckinghamshire, which carried with it one of the Buckinghamshire seats; Bothal in Northumberland; a large slice of the London parish of St. Marylebone, then entering its great period of development. Their town mansion, Burlington House in Piccadilly, they held on loan from their near relations the Cavendishes, dukes of Devonshire.

Bentincks and Cavendishes were related twice over: the third duchess, Bentinck’s mother, was Devonshire’s sister (hence sister-inlaw of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire); Portland’s mother, the energetic Margaret Harley—grand-daughter of Queen Anne’s Prime Minister—was a Cavendish by descent and had brought with her the Cavendish estates at Welbeck and elsewhere. Portland in 1801 —though his wife by then was dead and he had suffered a painful political breach with Devonshire—changed the family name to Cavendish- Bentinck, thus signalling the confluence of families as their names and those of their estates are perpetuated today in the Marylebone addresses of doctors’ consulting rooms.

Great families like this—a match for some Continental royalty, if only in the scale of their lands and debts—easily developed a special face and character. Disraeli indeed, two generations on, was to introduce Queen Victoria to ‘one of the most singular species in Your Majesty’s dominions, the Bentinck’.¹ They could by then strike an historian as eccentrics who ‘did everything with an intensity surpassing that of normal men… passionate in friendship, implacable in enmity’? In the late eighteenth century as in the mid-nineteenth several of the men in the family showed uncommon obstinacy. The third duke, in his despondent way, endured much before he made up his mind to break with Charles James Fox in 1794 over British policy towards revolutionary France. A politically estranged though still affectionate friend thought Lord Titchfield, the duke’s eldest son, ‘a fool of the most hopeless sort… obstinate as a mule, and stone deaf to everything but his own crotchet’;³ Titchfield himself when fourth duke explained that ‘what other people term obstinacy, we Bentincks consider to be justifiable firmness’.⁴ Lord William Bentinck was to incur the same kind of criticism, and answer it in much the same way.

Extreme shyness, too, ran in the family in the third duke’s time, perhaps intertwined with a strain of depressiveness, though not yet at the pitch of revulsion from human contact which made the fifth duke (Disraeli’s bugbear, a sufferer from a painful, perhaps psychosomatic skin complaint) build high glass walls round his town garden and spend years having underground rooms dug at Welbeck.⁵ The third duke’s ‘embarrassment in speaking in public’ was well known; so were his bouts of indecision and his silences. When his friends in 1792 were pressing him hard to break with Fox he could scarcely reply at all, and sat for two hours with ‘intervals of ten and fifteen minutes’ silence’: ‘I, although I have often seen him benumbed and paralysed, never saw him, or anyone else, so completely so before … nothing could be so painful…’⁶ He presently undertook to speak in the Lords but failed to do so from ‘mere nerves, and the horror of public speaking’; afterwards he was ‘miserable’ and ‘looked … like Johnny when he has had an accident in his breeches …’⁷ Yet what exasperated friends took to be dithering may have been Portland’s way of putting off a hurtful resolution. He was a much more diligent, less volatile leader than Fox; his silences over the three years of the 1791-4 party crisis, though they cost him much, kept his options open. Their source may have been the same that enabled him, when cut for the stone in old age, to lie ‘seven minutes under the knife without a groan’.⁸

Portland’s timidity may have been the strength of the stubborn weak. He himself urged his eldest son to be a little more sanguine: ‘What despondencies! What fears! What doubts!’ Titchfield had shown —even about his happy marriage.⁹ Lord William, the second son, was later to admit to ‘a great deal of irritable shyness’;¹⁰ a young man who became a great friend was disconcerted at first by ‘a cold forbidding manner, which intimidates most around him’.¹¹ Moments in Bentinck’s life rather bore out the description a Madras botanist gave of the plant (Bentinckia conda panna) he proposed to name after the young Governor: ‘opposita, dichotoma, rigida’.¹² The stereotype of the seemingly cold, no doubt unhappy English gentleman found in some of the Bentincks a distilled embodiment.

Yet, as often happens with families that strike outsiders as odd, they seem to have had their own inward norm. In their own terms they were affectionate and close.

The raffishness and irreligión of the Georgian aristocracy have been much exaggerated in popular legend. Many families led sober lives in harmony with what they understood as Christian doctrine. The deepening of religious feeling which affected so many towards the turn of the century—it caused even the adulterous Lady Bessborough to feel repeated twinges of guilt and to discuss the need for Sunday observance¹³ —in others worked on an extant ground of steady Anglican faith and a morality tinged with the bourgeois virtues of moderation and industry. By 1808 the philosopher James Mackintosh could exclaim at ‘the diffusion of the religious spirit among the people, and its prevalence among men of rank and opulence’.¹⁴ To a Bentinck like Lord William this meant no doubt an intenser, but not a new experience.

In his boyhood the family, though closely bound up with Fox and the Devonshires, shared in none of their free ways. At Bulstrode and Welbeck all was ‘moderation and innocence—sixpenny cribbage and dancing with the children the evening amusement’.¹⁵ There were no known adulteries, no excessive drinking, no gambling on any but the most domestic scale. Lord Edward, the duke’s brother, was a gambler, perpetually in debt, and a burden; but he was mostly away. Portland’s own debts had other causes.

The duchess seems to have set the tone. Her standards were strict. A bonhomous friend of the duke was put off by her ‘cold and particular ways’;¹⁶ because she would not receive Mrs Fitzherbert, her husband and the Prince of Wales had at one time been estranged for two years.¹⁷ Her letters to the duke are sensible and terse; even her playfulness was brisk. ‘What a wicked man you are not to have wrote me one letter all this time. …’ T am unreasonable enough to hope, wish, and expect to hear from you again today.’ When she was pregnant with William and the duke was out foxhunting: ‘The lady hares I suppose are in my situation therefore it is inhuman to chase them.’ She wrote about children’s colds, worms, and fevers, her visits to the opera, her daily walks ‘above Hampstead’, always lucidly and briefly. She was consulted about arrangements for her brother Devonshire’s wedding to Georgiana Spencer: ‘I shall be cautious how I give my advice as it can only be from civility that it is asked.’ Terseness could grow ruthless: ‘Topham Beauclerk is dead which everybody is glad of.’¹⁸

The clear stream of her extant correspondence only once touches a deeper note. In ‘the times we live in’ (a decade before the French Revolution) it was quite wrong to let the ten-year-old Titchfield think he had five or six horses of his own—to ride perhaps six weeks in the year. She would rather shoot them than let him go on with more than one or two at most. The outburst went on:

I see all this with the more concern and fear, because I think he, from not having been treated so much as a child as he ought to have been, has none of the timidity and backwardness so amiable in youth, and which all would have if properly brought up, for I am well convinced that it was designed by Providence that shyness in our first years should be a check upon our actions till we had gained experience and judgment: and they who move with meekness will pass through this world with more credit and satisfaction to themselves, and in the end applause from those one would wish to have applause from, than they who do not, I am very sure. I feel what I have said very strongly, rather more so than is comfortable to me…

Had the duchess been touched by the early Evangelical revival? She was too controlled to go on about it like later Evangelicals. This solitary outburst with its praise of meekness at least raises the question.

The duke and duchess had six children: besides Titchfield and Lord William there were two younger boys, Lord Frederick and Lord Charles, and two girls, Lady Charlotte and Lady Mary. Frederick and Charles grew up to pursue routine careers in the Army: both deviated from their parents’ morality by figuring extensively in the memoirs of the courtesan Harriette Wilson—as younger sons they may not have been able to buy her off"; Charles married Lord Wellesley’s natural daughter after a scandalous elopement and divorce. Charlotte married Charles Greville, a Nottinghamshire connection, and became the mother of the famous diarist. Mary died unmarried.

All the children seem to have been fundamentally strong and healthy; all lived into middle age at least. Their upbringing was that of their class and time. In the late summer and autumn the family withdrew to Welbeck; there there might be in one day ‘sailing, riding, driving, cricket playing, and kite flying …’.²⁰ Frederick as a young man kept his elder brother posted with accounts of foxhunting. ‘We ran into him (where do you think? I’ll be hanged if I knew at first, for a thick fog covered the atmosphere with carbonic acid) at last by the intervention of nitrogen, we found ourselves in Rufford Park in at the death.’ Another day the fox leapt up on a beam in Kirton church porch and was ‘pulled down into the midst of… the hounds… by Mat the whipper-in’. As a schoolboy a few years earlier Frederick had told his brother at the front: ‘I am very glad to hear you do not spare those French rascals. Pray kill six or seven for my sake.’²¹ Mary as a girl was full of news of forthcoming marriages and just how many thousands of pounds the brides had. The family were to have gone to see the menagerie at Osterley but as Lady Druce ‘has kicked the bucket Mama thinks it won’t be decent to go …’.²²

In their own terms, then, a cheerful family. Yet the two eldest boys, Titchfield and William, stood somewhat apart. Titchfield, always withdrawn, perhaps marked by the family’s worst financial straits—he was the only one old enough fully to have taken them in—was to spend his adult life single-mindedly rebuilding its fortunes. Whether because of some reluctance in Titchfield or for other reasons, William, the second son, came—it appears—to play the role in which families often cast the eldest: the exemplary child, who does well, behaves well, feels responsible, and is consulted.

Of William’s earliest years almost nothing is known. He was born at Burlington House on 14 September 1774. He was a fine healthy child.²³ When he was seven it was time for him to join Titchfield at the Rev. Samuel Goodenough’s school, ten miles west at Ealing.

The lives of magnates like the Bentincks were surrounded and eased by men who were neither servants nor equals. Lawyers looked after estates and shares; other lawyers dealt with political organisation; clergymen acted as secretaries or tutors. In a society based on rank and degree these men were deferential without necessarily being servile. They prospered: through the duke’s patronage some of the lawyers got seats in the Commons or on the bench, the clergymen canonries and bishoprics; their sons might go to school with the young Bentincks and rise into the gentry or the peerage.

Samuel Goodenough was one such. A former under-master at Westminster—Portland’s old school—with a reputation as a classical tutor, he had started in 1772 taking ten (later twelve) small pupils from aristocratic families and preparing them for Westminster. It was an intimate establishment, not perhaps greatly unlike keeping a tutor at home. Goodenough was a genuine scholar; in later years he made enough of a mark as a botanist to become vice-president of the Royal Society. Yet he went on considering himself the Bentincks’ ‘faithful servant’, feared his ‘heart would burst’ when he officiated at Titch- field’s wedding, and was at length pushed by the duke’s ‘interest’ up the ladder of Church preferment to the bishopric of Carlisle.²⁴

His educational methods were enlightened. He taught reading and writing by what would now be called the ‘building’ method of recognising whole words instead of bothering about letters or rules. The curriculum included classics, English, French, Scripture, history, dancing, fencing and probably arithmetic. Only Bentinck’s earliest progress is documented. At seven he showed some ‘inattention and a sort of giddiness’; perhaps more significantly, he ‘cannot bear to be turned back when he attempts to say a lesson⁹ , and got ‘very angry’ when thus thwarted. To judge by Goodenough’s sensible letters and the number of bills for torn breeches, these schooldays must have been happy enough.²⁵

The next step was Westminster. Bentinck went there at an uncertain date, probably when he was about 11; he must have left at 16 or 17 to join the Army. The school where he spent his adolescence was, like the few other public schools of the time, a mixture of the regimental mess and the Dyak longhouse with a tinge of academic learning. Politically it was Whig; socially, a hierarchy tempered by anarchic outbursts. Boys lived in long rooms where the seniors hogged the fireplaces while others made coffee or blacked shoes. Boys frequented playhouses; in 1779 six of them were tried for a violent assault on an outsider; sometimes they rioted against inadequate meals or coals. Apart from the usual servitude of fag to fagmaster, bullying could be so rough that after one thrashing young Edward Paget nearly died. Vincent, the headmaster, was something of a flogger; even he had trouble keeping order.²⁶

Such a school, untouched by the high-minded reforming movements of the nineteenth century, was perhaps as yet a stage rather than a forcing-house for young males of the governing class. Of its emotional significance for a shy stubborn boy we know nothing—though Bentinck was anyhow willing in later years to act as steward at the anniversary dinner. What we do know is that, typically, among his contemporaries were boys whose careers were to intertwine with his. All his brothers were there; so was a close boyhood friend, Fred Hotham, son of one of Portland’s retainer-followers; so were three future companions-in-arms, Edward Paget, Stapleton Cotton, and Robert Wilson. Charles Abbot was to be Speaker of the Commons, Charles Arbuthnot a high civil servant and fellow speculator in the Norfolk Marshland. Henry Bunbury as Secretary at War was to be almost the only Minister to share Bentinck’s views on Sicily (where he had been just before Bentinck’s time) and on Italian independence; as a Fenland landowner he was to work together with Bentinck on the politics of drainage. Amherst was to precede Bentinck in Sicily and Bengal; Paget and Cotton (Lord Combermere) were Commanders-in- Chief in India just before or during his time. These were not all necessarily friends. But they shared a matrix.²⁷

Bentinck emerged as a young adult near the start of the 1790s, a tormented decade during which the country experienced war, invasion threatened or attempted in Ireland and in Britain itself, mutiny in the Fleet, all this at a time of rapid population and industrial growth in the midst of inflation and repeated seasons of acute distress. The governing class faced a chain of revolts in Ireland: most of them took seriously the threat of subversion at home from the spread of democratic ideas and the examples of the French Revolution. Portland, first as Whig party leader and then, from 1794, as Home Secretary, in his low-keyed way was at the heart of the struggle. ‘We live in times of violence and of extremes’, Fox admitted late in 1793, though he tried to keep his head; four years later so equable a man as Cornwallis could see the country as ‘torn … by faction, without an Army, without money’, dependent on a Navy which had just mutinied and which perhaps could not be paid: ‘How are we to get out of this cursed war without a revolution?’²⁸

For Bentinck as for many contemporaries these years were deeply formative. Within the family he emerged as the son of whom much was expected, eldest perhaps in authority though not in years. He embarked on a double career, as soldier and as politician. The ties he made as a soldier were among his few close friendships; the war was to take him over much of Europe and the Middle East. In politics ties of family and Nottinghamshire connection first made at this time shaped much of his career; more important, the crisis of 1791-4 within the Whig Party precipitated him into all-out support for the war and for Pitt. A soldier and a Pittite he remained until very late in life, arguably throughout. Through the influence of Burke the Whig crisis—we shall see—appears to have implanted in Bentinck the idea of nationality, which he was strikingly to pioneer in Italy. Finally, these were years when religious fervour was spreading through the upper classes—when, for instance, the future Elizabeth Fry, the Quaker banker’s daughter, got rid of her new ‘purple boots laced with