All language subtitles for A.History.of.Britain.14of15.The.Empire.of.Good.Intentions.DivX5-AC3.www.MVGroup.org

(TRUMPET PLAYS)

January 1901 -

the dawn of the British Empire's
fourth century.

Few of its servants or rulers
imagined it would be its last.

Queen Victoria was barely cold in her coffin
when her Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon,

envisioned a fitting memorial
in Calcutta to the Queen Empress

who reigned over a fifth of the globe.

A learned enthusiast of Indian architecture,
Curzon's mind naturally turned

to the most beautiful memorial
in the world, the Taj Mahal.

Not least because he'd been responsible
for making it beautiful again,

cleared out the bazaar in front of it,
restored its water gardens.

Now he would build the British Taj,

faced with the same white marble
hewn from the Makrana quarries.

But the Victoria memorial would not be
a poem in stone so much as a proclamation

in domes and columns that the British Raj
was the Rome of the modern age.

But was this a time
to be spending a royal fortune

when millions of peasants were starving?

When the foundation stone was laid,

a year after Curzon left India,

with its violence and chaos,

at least 16 million Indians had perished

in the most terrible succession
of famines Asia had known for centuries.

What had happened?

The men and women who had sat
at their desks, played out their chukkas

and danced in the club were not monsters
of hard-hearted indifference.

They had, many of them,
only the very best intentions.

They had a vision that their empire
was the best the world had ever seen

because it was built on virtue.

Its power was to be measured not
in Gatling guns, but in an unselfish dedication

to eradicating poverty,
ignorance and disease.

We would take whole cultures
crippled by those maladies

and stand them on their own two feet.

In the fullness of time, so the theory went,

the millions would become
civilised enough to govern themselves,

and we would leave them,
the children of our liberal dream,

grateful, devoted, peaceful and, this was
the bonus for the modern world, free.

It didn't exactly work out like that, did it?
So what went wrong?

0n February 4th, 1834,

the young MP for Leeds made
a farewell speech to his electors.

Thomas Babington Macaulay,
"Clever Tom", boy wonder at Cambridge,

juvenile lead of the Whigs in the Commons,
ace reviewer and historian in the making,

had decided that as nice
as all this was, he needed a fortune.

India, he'd been told,
was where you got it, fast.

Just to show that he wasn't a greedy Tom,

while he was at it,
he'd do good to the natives.

He might be leaving industrial Britain,
but he was confident he'd find its products,

as well as its benevolent spirit,
alive and well in Calcutta.

May your manufactures flourish,

may your trade be extended,
may your riches increase.

May the works of your skill
and the signs of your prosperity

meet me in the furthest regions of the east.

Give me fresh cause
to be proud of the intelligence,

the industry
and the spirit of my constituency.

Macaulay's breezy optimism,
that cotton cloth and constitutionalism

were what Britain had to offer the world,
was the authentic voice of the liberal empire.

Equally sure of itself,
whether it was preaching and teaching,

at India, Ireland or darkest England,

where the natives also toiled
in filth, ignorance and disease,

and equally in need of a hefty dose
of Victorian vim and vigour.

Asia, they thought, was especially inert,
and the great principle of liberalism,

according to its founders,
was, above all, movement.

Macaulay had been
brought up a strict Christian,

but his real church
was the church of progress -

steam engines, free newspapers,
parliamentary government.

The historian in him looked
at the rise and fall of civilizations

and was jubilant that
this was Britain's time for imperial greatness.

We would share
our blessings, moral and material.

We would take ancient societies,
miserable with poverty and tyranny,

and teach them self-reliance.

And when we'd done the job,
we'd pack up and go home.

So the great principle of the British Empire
would be its own self-liquidation.

It would be like a parent,
full of bittersweet emotion

as its children were sent off into the world,
tied to the home no longer by power,

but by grateful affection.

Never had Britain had such
an abundance of clever, zealous young men,

itching to liberate Asia
from the grip of superstition and disease.

In the Governor General of India,
Lord William Bentinck,

they'd found an ardent patron.

Even the most dedicated pilgrims
in search of the relics of the Raj

are not going to make
a beeline for this statue.

I don't suppose anybody in this park
knows who Lord William Bentinck really was.

You have to look at the figures in the frieze
here to see why he's commemorated.

Bentinck was the first of the authentic
do-gooder Governors General,

and the kind of person he wanted to do
good to was this young woman in distress.

She's a young widow and she's about
to join her husband in a joint cremation,

the traditional Hindu practice of suttee.

Unlike an older generation of British in India,

the likes of Macaulay and Bentinck
knew next to nothing of this kind of tradition,

nor would it have
made any difference if they had,

but they knew an abomination
when they saw it.

Never mind that there were
only 500 cremations a year,

the campaign to abolish suttee
was the campaign of their dreams,

and they went about it with a will.

Volumes were written by missionaries,
committees deliberated in parliament,

a law was passed and inspectors
were despatched to intercept widows

en route to the funeral pyre.

The 1830s were a crossroads
in the young life of the liberal empire.

Did the welfare of our native subjects
oblige us to impose

the values of the west on the east,

or should we be rebuilding
and reinvigorating Asian culture and society?

Charles Trevelyan,
another high-minded young reformer,

who was courting Macaulay's sister,

was in doubt which road to take.

The more British India
could become, the better.

For Macaulay and Trevelyan, the country
would be turned into one vast schoolroom.

Teaching for them was not just a job.

Western education was the instrument
by which India was going to be transformed

from a world of bullock carts and beggars
into the progressive Victorian dynamic world

of the telegraph and the locomotive.

English would be a way to bring Indians,

divided by so many faiths
and languages, together.

And it would help bridge the culture gap
between Europe and the subcontinent.

To those who said,
"You're destroying their own culture",

Trevelyan replied that Hinduism was...

... identified with so many
gross immoralities and physical absurdities

that it gives way at once
to the light of European science.

Here we are, on the veranda.

Late afternoon,
the perfect imperial time of day.

This is the time when words like veranda
and bungalow enter the British vocabulary.

They would make you think that
the world that the sahib built for themselves

was a marriage between
an Indian and a British lifestyle.

A bungalow, after all,
was a one-storey Indian dwelling.

But it wasn't really like that.

The British had, with the bungalow,
made a life for themselves

that was as much as possible
like the life of a country gentleman

in Buckinghamshire,
Hampshire or Lancashire.

Instead of the bustle of an Indian courtyard,

with animals inside it
and washing and cooking going on,

we have the rose garden,
the well-kept hedges,

the strictly-disciplined gardeners.

Tucked safely away behind
the walls of bungalows and barracks,

and flattered by a new class
of English-speaking merchants,

the sahibs imagined they knew everything
about this new, westernised India

which would be, as Macaulay
liked to put it, an ally not a subject.

So when Macaulay and Trevelyan
went home at the end of the 1830s

to government jobs in London,

they were confident that they had sown
the seeds of a modern, liberal India.

Everything was now in place
to ensure as much of the world as possible

would be governed
by the one mechanism capable of doing so -

the British Empire of free trade.

An educated, Anglicised India
would be a key player.

There was just one iron law -
let the market do its job.

If people clinging
to backward ways went under

in the name of the new
economic order, well, so be it.

But while the modernisers
were all looking east

to see the payoff of their great experiment,

the first great shock
to the complacency of their views

came from the opposite direction,
from the west...

...somewhere alarmingly
closer to home, from Ireland.

Many of those who look back on the disaster

thought they should have seen it coming,
seen that Ireland was India with rain.

A population explosion from
over two to over eight million in a century.

Too many bodies clinging
to unworkable little plots,

too small to make a profit
in the imperial market place.

0f course, just like India, there were islands
of modernity in the great ocean of poverty.

Rich Ireland was the east and the north,
around Dublin and Belfast,

facing the immense engine
of industrial Britain,

and supplying it with butter
and meat, linen and oatmeal.

But the west was where
Ireland's agony was felt.

Tiny scraps of land with a cabin
and a pig and only potatoes to grow

to make the difference
between survival and starvation.

By the 1840s, Irish men and women,
especially in the poorer counties of the west,

were eating between ten
and fifteen pounds of potatoes a day,

sometimes washed down
with a little buttermilk.

Then, in 1845, the Angel of Death struck

in the shape of the fungus
phytopthora infestans.

Spores grew on the underside of leaves,

the Irish wind blew them to their neighbours

and the Irish rain
made sure the crop rotted.

The infestation was so sudden
and so unprecedented,

it was impossible at first to take in
the magnitude of the disaster.

In August 1846, Father Theobald Matthew
saw the damage for himself.

On the 27th of last month,
I passed from Cork to Dublin.

This doomed plant bloomed in all
the luxuriance of an abundant harvest.

Returning on the third
of the following month,

I beheld with sorrow
one wide waste of putrefying vegetation.

In many places, the wretched people sat
on the fences of their decaying gardens,

wringing their hands and wailing bitterly
at the destruction that left them foodless.

And while this was happening,
oats, one of rich Ireland's prime exports,

were being shipped out.

The man executing government policy
at the Treasury was Charles Trevelyan.

Someone who could see a catastrophe
around the corner wrote to Trevelyan,

begging him to stop the export of oats.

I know there is a great
and serious objection

to any interference with these exports,
yet it is a most serious evil.

Trevelyan wrote back:

We beg of you
not to countenance in any way

the idea of prohibiting exportation.

The discouragement
and feeling of insecurity to the trade

would prevent its doing
even any immediate good.

If the peasants of western Ireland
weren't able to grow potatoes,

perhaps by labouring on public works,
they could earn money to buy food.

This is one of those relief projects -

a road in the Burren in County Clare
which goes absolutely nowhere.

But it didn't matter,
even these futile jobs got closed down.

So too did the soup kitchens
which the government briefly provided,

following the example
of the Quakers and others.

Now there was only one
place to go - the workhouse.

Even if you had typhus or dysenteric fever.

Workhouses like this one at Portumna
in Galway were filled to overflowing.

Workhouses had always been designed
to be as much like prisons as possible

to deter anyone
who had the slightest chance of a job.

As the famine developed,
the situation here got much worse,

the sick and the healthy placed side by side.

You'd have to be off your head
to want to cross the threshold,

but when the alternative was starvation,

multitudes were banging
at the doors begging to be let in.

After June 1847,

to get any relief you had to prove
you were at the bottom of the heap,

with no more than
a quarter of an acre to call your own.

0f course, renting one acre of bog or heath
didn't exactly make you middle class.

Hundreds of thousands of peasants were
clinging to their cabins and patches of land,

on which they hoped
one day to grow potatoes again.

Now they were faced with a terrible choice:

Either turn in that extra land to the landlords
to get poor relief or stay put and starve.

It was no choice at all.

The hungry converted themselves into the
officially landless just to get something to eat,

travelling miles to the widely-dispersed
workhouses, leaving their plots behind.

It was just the opportunity
Irish landlords had been waiting for.

Tenants who tried
to stay were forcibly evicted,

their roofs smashed in
to make sure they didn't return.

Now the landlords could stock
their acres with sheep and cattle,

so much more profitable
than peasants and pigs.

At the height of the famine, there were
too many babies dying either at birth,

or in early infancy,
for the priests to baptise them all.

Denied consecrated ground,
their fathers carried them

to a piece of no-man's land like this, on the
very rim of the island on the Atlantic shore,

and put up a rough stone marker
to mark their short, sad life.

For two million Irish men and women,
for whom it was just too exhausting

to go on fighting the uphill battle
against hunger, opportunist landlords

and the stony heartlessness
of the government,

there was one more place to trudge to -
the ports, which would carry them away

to America, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand,

and, they hoped to God,
a better chance, a better life.

It would be many generations
before Ireland's population would recover

to the numbers before
the potato blight struck.

And in the memory bank
of the Irish Diaspora,

in Boston, New York or Sydney,
the great emptying of western Ireland

was above all a British - make that
an English -plot, little short of genocide.

It certainly wasn't that.

Many of the cruelties were acts
Irishmen inflicted on each other,

just as the Highland
clearances had been horrors

committed by Scots against other Scots.

But Trevelyan and men like him did subscribe
to the "blessing in disguise" theory,

in which, as in India, the road to modernity
in overcrowded, unproductive rural economies

would always be paved
with the ruin of villages.

This is how a contemporary
English newspaper summarised it.

The truth is,
these evictions are not merely illegal,

but a natural process,
and, however much we may deplore

the misery from which they spring,
we cannot compel the Irish proprietors

to continue in their miserable holdings

the wretched swarms
of people who pay no rent

and who prevent improvement of property
as long as they remain on it.

For many Irish on both sides of the Atlantic,
Trevelyan was to blame.

John Mitchell, a journalist and the most
eloquently bitter of the Anglophobes, wrote:

I saw Trevelyan's claw
in the vitals of those children.

His red tape would draw them to death.

The price of this religious devotion
to the Victorian bible of free trade

was a million dead and another
two million uprooted as emigrants,

more than a third
of the total population of Ireland.

It was perhaps the greatest
peacetime calamity

in all of 19th-century European history.

It happened, not just on the doorstep
of the richest country in the world,

but inside our own house.

Ireland, after all,
had been part of the kingdom since 1801,

and this, nationalists would say
for generations afterwards,

was the bitter fruit of the union.

Knighted in 1848
for his sterling work on Irish relief,

Sir Charles Trevelyan
was oblivious to all this hatred.

No blots on his conscience.

"I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course",

his memorial window would proclaim

in the church
near his family's estate in Northumberland.

By the spring of 1857,

Trevelyan was in no doubt that Victorian
Britain was, in the best sense imaginable,

the new Rome, the Rome
before corruption and despotism set in,

a light to the nations.

And, thanks to Trevelyan's reforms,
run by a new kind of civil service -

entry by exam, not by connections.

Now, government, the dream machine
of Trevelyan and Macaulay,

needed a space that would properly
proclaim its moral and political grandeur;

not a rabbit warren
of inky-fingered scribes,

but a palace of the high-minded
and the hard-working.

And here it is, the new Foreign 0ffice,
designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott.

Swaggering enough to take its place
alongside the Topkapi in Istanbul,

Versailles or the Doge's Palace in Venice
as an indisputable house of power.

And it was a machine
whose every part interlocked

with majestic economy and precision.

0ur great banks told
native money men what Britain needed.

They told their cultivators
and lo, raw cotton and indigo dye arrived.

We shipped back to them the manufactures
produced in the workshop of the world -

locomotives taking our textiles
and heavy metal to the towns of India

and China and Latin America.

(M0RSE C0DE SIGNAL)

The globe was shrinking

and, through the modern marvel
of the electric telegraph,

this was the first empire that could boast
it was run on high-speed information,

a worldwide web of intelligence -
commercial, political, military.

So how was it,
with all this data-gathering equipment,

we managed not to hear the ominous
rumble of an earthquake in the making

right in the heart of India?

Perhaps because we were
so besotted with our shiny new toys,

we weren't looking
or listening in the right place,

weren't eavesdropping
in the bazaar and the mosque,

listening to the imams and the soothsayers.

If we had been listening,
we'd have heard, in the towns,

angry complaints about missionaries
pushing bibles in native languages,

and in the countryside,
protests about who controlled the land,

and the taxes you had to pay for it.

Mutiny, the word by which we know
the terrible slaughters of 1857,

seems to speak of rank ingratitude

for all the good
Britain was supposed to have brought India.

If you look at it from the Indian
point of view, the picture changes.

Both British and Indians
got very worked up about loyalty and honour.

What they meant
by those very highly-charged words

were two completely different sets of values -

values which were at war
with each other in 1857,

before a single shot had been fired.

The Indians, whether Hindus
or Muslims, peasants or townsmen,

lived in a world governed by ceremony,
shame, respect and passion.

The Victorians prized
moral and material self-improvement,

and above all, tight emotional discipline.

Typical, then, that in their eagerness
to issue their Indian recruits, or sepoys,

the new, improved Enfield rifle,
the army neglected to ensure

that the cartridge grease
was made of neither pig nor cow fat,

an oversight bound to offend
both Muslims and Hindus.

In fact, it was not the issue of the offending
cartridges which was the problem.

Vegetable grease was quickly substituted.

What was most offensive was the
increasingly arrogant response of the British

to matters which they regarded as trivial.

They were about to find out just what
was trivial to an Indian and what wasn't.

For generations,
the province of Awadh in northern India

had supplied the British Army
with its best sepoys,

in return for which they got to go back home

and swagger about
in the gardens of Lucknow, its principal city.

Then, in 1856, their special status
disappeared when Awadh was annexed.

Why? Because the new
Trevelyanite civil service

decided that the province
was badly administered.

The sepoys joined a long queue of people -
tax collectors, local judges,

palace courtesans -
all bitter that a perfectly workable regime

had been demolished
by the British in the name of officiousness.

Lucknow, once one of the most easygoing
places for Europeans and Indians to mix -

at cockfights, for instance -
had become a segregated city.

The tight-laced British huddled
together in their military cantonment

and in the buildings scattered
through the 37 acres of the Residency,

complete with churches,
clubs and banquet hall.

They were about to pay
the price for this distance.

Their over-reliance
on the new information technology

had fatally separated them
from the word on the street.

The sahibs said they'd built
this cordon sanitaire for the memsahibs,

who'd come out to India in record numbers.

Have to keep the ladies away
from the dirt, the squalor, the disease

and the frightful morals
of the natives, don't you know (!)

The memsahibs at Lucknow were to get
a taste of the real India with a vengeance.

Take Katherine Bartrum,
for example, 23 years old,

just married to an army surgeon, living
in a hill station 80 miles away from Lucknow.

There, with her new baby,
Kate lived the usual bungalow life,

waited on, hand and foot, by servants.

In early June, 1857,
Kate and her husband, Robert,

would have heard the incredible news
that sepoys had marched to Delhi

and persuaded the old king,
the last of the Mughals, Bahadur Shah,

to issue proclamations, calling on the
faithful to rise against the Feringhees,

the detestable foreigners.

European Delhi burned,
its desperate survivors retreating up this hill

to the ridge at the north-east end of the city.

What started as a mutiny of soldiers

built like wildfire into an immense
rebellion of peasants and townspeople,

right through the mid-Ganges Valley,
the prosperous heart of India.

Lucknow would not escape the flames.

Rumour fed disobedience,
even up at the Bartrum bungalow.

With brutal speed, the world Kate
must have thought would never change,

that daily routine of sweepers,
punkah-wallahs, grooms, cooks, gardeners,

now began to crumble
under her slippered feet.

(WOMAN)
All our servants have deserted us,

and now our trials have begun in earnest.

From morning till night,
we can get no food cooked

and we have not
the means of doing it ourselves.

How we are to manage, I cannot tell.

For many nights,
we have not dared to close our eyes.

I keep a sword under the pillow
and dear R has his pistol ready

to start up at the slightest sound.

Their isolation marked them as sitting ducks.

Their only chance lay in somehow
getting through to the stronghold at Lucknow.

When Robert was called to his regiment,
Kate made her way by elephant

through hostile country to the domes
and minarets of Awadh's golden city.

8,000 sepoys were preparing
to encircle the Residency.

Within the grounds
were barely 800 British soldiers,

just 700 loyal Indian troops,
and 50 pupils from La Martini�re,

Lucknow's model western school,
who were also ready to do their bit.

(GUNSH0TS)

Soon after Kate arrived, the siege began.

When a breakout failed,

it was obvious the British wives
would be needed to nurse and cook.

The torrid heat was broken
only by torrential rain.

Above them, bullocks and horses
wandered about, mad with thirst.

Details had to be sent out
to bury the rotting carcasses.

As it got hotter, the Residency
turned into a stagnant pool of sickness.

Kate Bartrum gagged
at the overflowing latrines.

Food became dire,
covered with thick swarms of flies.

There was still champagne,
but now it was an anaesthetic

used only for the badly wounded, one
bottle drunk at a gulp before an amputation.

Kate Bartrum watched babies and mothers
die as cholera and dysentery took their toll.

She saw people go mad.

The Victorian mask was slipping.

(GUNSH0TS)

After nearly five months,
a relief force managed to break through

and evacuated the women and children.

But still the siege wore on.

It wouldn't be lifted until 1858,
the following spring.

By then, the great Indian rebellion
had been crushed.

Calcutta had remained intact
at one side of the country

and the Punjab at the other.

Troops from both converged on the centre
and then it was only a matter of time.

But then came retribution, swift and terrible.

Sepoys blown apart by cannon,
flogged to death, mutilated.

Prints, illustrating what British men
and women had suffered,

fed the calls for revenge.

Since the public expected
to see a charnel house,

photographers who came
to Lucknow obliged them,

dressing their photos
with the disinterred bones of mutineers.

Things would never be the same.

As a sop to Indian pride,
the East India Company had pretended

to govern alongside a symbolic
Mughal presence, the King of Delhi.

For a brief moment during the rebellion,
he had become an emperor again,

but now he was a wanted fugitive.

The British caught up with the pathetic
blind old man at Hummayyun's Tomb in Delhi.

As a captive, he became a figure of ridicule.

The East India Company
and the rule of the Mughals

were put to rest at the same time.

The catastrophe of the mutiny
threw into crisis all the old ideas

about how the empire should be run.

What shape it would take
in the future divided opinion.

Those divisions were personified
by the great Punch and Judy of politics

in the second half of Victoria's century,
Disraeli and Gladstone.

They'd slug it out for decades,
their views on imperial power

as conflicting
as their personal and political styles.

The man who gave
the British a real appetite for empire

was, of course, Benjamin Disraeli.

His whole career,
from taking on and tearing down

the venerated leader
of the Tory party, Sir Robert Peel,

to taking the reins of that party, was one
long virtuoso exercise in improbability,

and the most improbable feat of all
was to make the exotic, starting with himself,

domestic, national, patriotic.

When Macaulay
had made his maiden speech,

arguing for the admission
of Jews to parliament,

it's unlikely he could ever have imagined

that one would lead
the Tories in the next generation.

"Dizzy" was a baptised Jew,

a romantic novelist who compensated
for his lack of aristocratic pedigree,

or commercial fortune,
by being the attack dog of a party

not famous for verbal brilliance in the House.

He took one look at how politics
was conducted in mid-Victorian Britain

and saw that something was missing.

That something
was what he called imagination.

What does a politician do with imagination?

In the hands of a mere showman, not a lot,
but behind the parliamentary performer,

the flamboyant wag in the cherry-red
waistcoats and the glossy curls,

was a political tactician of pure genius,

someone who could take
imagination and turn it into power.

Disraeli's appeal was being not Gladstone,

not being the high-minded,
morally-driven do-gooder.

When Queen Victoria complained

she hated being "addressed
like a public meeting" by Gladstone,

she voiced the irritation
of millions of her subjects.

How the two of them
spent their hours tells you everything.

Gladstone, when he allowed himself
time off from the despatch boxes,

unbuttoning his cuffs and chopping down
trees at Hawarden, his estate in Flintshire.

Disraeli, on working days at Hughenden,
his house near High Wycombe,

strolled the terrace, amidst his peacocks...

and then perused the odd document or two
between daydreams in the study,

where "I like to watch the sunbeams
on the bindings on the books".

Like the master psychologist he was,

Disraeli had cottoned onto the insight, so
obvious to us but shocking to the Victorians,

that in the dawning age of mass politics,

not everyone wanted to be political;

that rather than struggle
relentlessly to BE good,

many people would be happier
to have good done F0R them.

The new voter might actually prefer physical
betterment over the moral regeneration

the Liberals were always going on about,

might want to opt for the kind of things
that Disraeli's government would give them:

Better food, cleaner water
and the gaudy oompah of empire

over the pious cant of liberty.

In Disraeli's vision for post-mutiny India,
the Queen would rule as Empress,

and Britain would swerve sharply
away from Macaulay's wishful thinking

that the best thing for Indians would be
to turn them into brown Englishmen.

Let them instead be Indians and be
delivered to the tender care of sahib fathers,

the Viceroys and their teams of prefects,

the district commissioners,
magistrates and collectors,

who in return for their children
being good boys and girls,

would promise to deliver peace,
good health and a bowl of rice.

For Disraeli and the Tories,
the goal was more empire, not less.

Now what India needed was an
extravaganza to celebrate her new dominion,

and who better
to organise one than the noble,

though irredeemably bad poet,
the Earl of Lytton?

Lytton's India would be a new old India,
a combination of tigers and peddlers,

holy men and native princes,
bejewelled, feudal and loyal,

the Queen Empress promising to protect
the ancient usages and customs of India.

The bond would be sealed
at a durbar, a great assembly,

camped on the most sacred site
of the Raj, Delhi Ridge,

where the British had precariously
held out during the mutiny,

and which, along with Lucknow, had become
a place of pilgrimage in the 20 years since.

Spectacle would wipe out
the memory of slaughter.

0n New Year's Day, 1877,
thousands watched Lytton step onto a dais,

its banners designed
by Rudyard Kipling's father,

and receive, on behalf of the Empress,
the homage of 300 Indian noblemen,

the Nizams and Gaekwars
and Maharajahs.

The show had to be sufficiently
over the top if it was to impress them

with the stupendous invincibility of the Raj.

As Lytton put it:

The further east you go, the greater
becomes the importance of a bit of bunting.

The banquet, the most expensive
in British history, went on for a week.

During that week,
thousands of the Queen Empress's subjects

in Madras and Mysore starved to death.

No reason, Lytton thought,
to let it spoil the party.

The monsoon had failed in south India.

Lytton's council knew
that the situation might get desperate,

but though they were supposed to be
the new kind of "benevolent" ruler,

when it came to action,
they stuck to the old rules.

0nce again, there would be
no interference in the grain markets.

0nce again,
famine relief works were overwhelmed,

prompting Lytton's enforcer,
Sir Richard Temple,

playing the part Trevelyan had played earlier
in Ireland, to introduce the distance test,

which insisted that starving applicants travel
at least ten miles to dormitory camps

in order to sign on for hard labour.

The task of saving life, irrespective of cost,

is one which it is
beyond our power to undertake.

The embarrassment
of debt and the weight of taxation

would soon be more fatal
than the famine itself.

What made the scale
of suffering so obscene

was that it happened during a time
of grain surplus in other parts of India.

So fanatically devoted to the iron law
of the market was the government,

that it refused to liberate those supplies for
fear that it would artificially bring down prices.

So common sense and common humanity
was sacrificed to the fetish of the market,

and millions were abandoned to perish.

Five million died in 1877
of starvation and cholera.

Horrified missionaries would use
relatively portable cameras to record sights

that otherwise no one
in Britain might believe.

They saw peasants drop dead in front of
troops guarding stockpiles of rice and grain.

Florence Nightingale, moved to
indignation by reports of the famine,

called it "a hideous record
of human suffering and destruction

"the world has never seen before".

For William Gladstone, the lessons
of India and Ireland were very clear.

Disraeli's glitzy paternalism
was not the answer.

For Gladstone, it was morally inexcusable.

But Liberalism needed to be something more

than the old mantra of liberty,
free trade and righteousness.

It needed to nail its colours
to the mast of political justice.

Surely it was the sense
of being robbed of that justice

which drove men to fury and violence.

So Gladstone's new testament
would be the idea that government,

even self-government
within the empire, or home rule,

should be the instrument of justice.

William Ewart Gladstone was a politician
whose career had always been shaped

by religious revelation,

for whom the Bible was not just
a sacred text but a guide to politics.

0nce the truth
had been revealed to Gladstone,

he felt obliged,
like the carriers of the first gospels,

to preach to the unbelievers,
to bring others to the light.

And did he preach it!

A great whistle-stop
railway campaign in the north,

Lancashire, Scotland, where,
with the wind in his hair and fire in his belly,

the locomotive-driven prophet
appearing before the immense flock

rained down hellfire on the immorality
and indifference of Disraeli's government

to human suffering.

Gladstone swept to victory in 1880.

But he knew he had no time to celebrate,
he had to grasp the nettle.

Ireland is at your door.
Providence has placed it there.

Law and legislature
have made a compact between you,

and you must face these obligations.

Even if he'd wanted to look the other way,
political reality made it impossible.

Ireland now boasted a block of 59 MPs

who had no intention of allowing
London to neglect Irish affairs.

At their vanguard
was Charles Stewart Parnell,

whose fate would be tied to Gladstone's
as he inched towards home rule.

A Protestant landowner
from County Wicklow and an MP,

Parnell was the most unlikely incarnation
of Irish anger, hopes and dreams.

At this distance, without the sound
of his voice, or his presence,

it's hard to recapture what made
this patrician so charismatic a leader.

Perhaps it's because he went
so much against the grain,

did and said things
a gentleman was not supposed to do;

a landlord who burned
for the sufferings of the landless;

an Irishman who could play
the parliamentary game

like a Friday night fiddler,

that Parnell was such a god,
in the pub and at the racetrack -

and a god all too obviously
made of flesh and blood.

Parnell's power to sway
the Liberals and Gladstone

came because he was riding
two political horses:

The well-behaved mare of the ballot box

and the fiery stallion
of countryside violence.

This had been triggered by a collapse
in demand for Irish cattle and butter.

Small farmers found themselves
struggling to pay their rents.

Large numbers faced eviction.

They fought back with ferocity -
cattle maiming,

arson, murder.

Parnell, as President
of the National Land League,

was the mouthpiece for airing
the grievances of the rural population.

In 1881, in an effort
to pre-empt more violence,

Gladstone pushed through a land act
which theoretically gave the government

the right to intervene
in landlord-tenant relations.

Suspicions, though,
had a way of overcoming trust.

0n the Irish side, it was thought that without
the threat of violence, boycotts, strikes,

hits on landlords, the British would
never get really serious about land reform.

0n the British side, Gladstone was told
by the hardliners in his government

to get tough on militants.

As the apparent figurehead of the militants,

Parnell was thrown into Kilmainham Jail.

But Gladstone realised it was a futile gesture

and that dialogue was the only way forward.

Then, just when it seemed
that progress might be possible,

on May 6th, 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish
and his Under-Secretary, Thomas Burke,

were attacked and stabbed repeatedly
while walking in Dublin's Phoenix Park.

Gladstone took it personally.

Frederick Cavendish
was not just the Chief Secretary for Ireland,

he was also, for Gladstone, family,
his wife Catherine's nephew.

Parnell was horrified,
offered Gladstone his resignation

and assumed that the Phoenix Park
murders had all but killed off

any serious chance of collaboration.

But Gladstone did exactly what the hard men
of both sides did not expect him to do.

He rejected the resignation
and began a correspondence with Parnell

which made their relationship much closer.

Parnell's importance to Gladstone
was that he alone could translate the fury

of Irish grievances
into something politically constructive.

Gladstone's importance to Parnell
was that he was the first British politician

to take seriously
the nationalist dream of home rule.

By the mid-1880s,
Gladstone became more adamant

that by embracing the cause of home rule,
he was doing God's work in Ireland.

He was indeed in another world, combing
his library at Hawarden for Irish history.

For all the prayers and the penance,
he was only being realistic

when he told
the House of Commons that this was:

One of the golden moments of our history,

one of those opportunities
which may come and may go,

but which rarely return.

The speech lasted three and a half hours,

as if Gladstone could overcome
the adverse arithmetic of the lobby

by sheer force of oratory.

With the tragic hindsight we have
of the miseries that ensued on his failure,

nothing rings more powerfully true
than his moving appeal

to ditch history and memory
for the sake of the future.

Ireland was asking, he said:

For what I call
a blessed oblivion of the past.

She asks also a boon for the future.

That boon will be born
to us in respect of honour,

no less than a boon to her in respect
of happiness, prosperity and peace.

Such, sir, is her prayer.

Think, I beseech you, think well,
think wisely, think not for the moment,

but for the years
to come before you reject this bill.

The prayer was not answered.

In 1886, the bill went down to defeat.

So too did Gladstone and his party.

It would be six years before he'd
be back in power for the last time,

with the chances of success even slimmer.

By that time,
Parnell's reputation had been destroyed.

In 1890, the husband of Katherine 0'Shea,
his mistress, brought a divorce action

based on Parnell's adultery with her.

A year later, deserted by his followers,
disowned by the Catholic clergy,

he died in her arms.

New liberalism was now high
on the octane of imperial conquest

or concerned with social conditions at home.

Its politicians were just humouring
Gladstone with another doom reading

in 1893 of the Home Rule Bill.

The grand old man died five years later.

But he'd been right, the chance
of satisfying Irish self-government

inside the United Kingdom
would never be realised.

We're still living
with the consequences of that defeat.

The failure of Home Rule
was more than just the death rattle

of Gladstone's project for Ireland.

It spelled the end of the whole Liberal dream
of an English-speaking empire

grounded on English justice
and buoyed up by the great miracle

of the Victorian industrial economy;

an empire whose pupil colonies
would be educated and legislated

into free self-government,
Macaulay's vision of a half a century earlier.

(GUNSH0T)

The empire, rolling from war to war,
painting Africa as well as Asia red,

now seemed to be in the hands of men
like Lord Salisbury and Cecil Rhodes,

who made no bones
about ruling by the sword,

making it clear to westernised natives that
if they thought they'd have an equal share

in law and legislation, they could think again.

It was no wonder, then,
that those who in an earlier generation

would have hoped to see
the Liberal dream realised,

now turn their backs on it
as a bankrupt fraud.

The Tories wouldn't give them prosperity

and the Liberals couldn't give them
justice and self-government.

It was time to fend for themselves.

In Britain, the working class
finally had had enough of hand-me-downs

from the conscience-stricken
middle-class liberals.

They created their own Labour Party.

In India, the writing was on the wall
when militant Hindu nationalists

adopted a campaign and a word that had
begun its life in Ireland - the boycott.

The entire premise of the Macaulay vision
had been that subject peoples

would yearn to join
the world of the British consumer,

and here they were saying "No thanks" to
the salesmen of the workshop of the world.

Self-sufficient handcrafts
would challenge imperial commerce.

That's why Gandhi put the spinning wheel
at the centre of the Indian flag.

You wouldn't know this if you got a seat
at the last of the great durbars in 1911,

actually featuring a King Emperor, George V,

present and in person,
held yet again on the dusty Delhi Ridge

where the martyrs of the mutiny
had held out.

Three years later, the empire would ask its
loyal subjects to line up for king and country.

Millions did from Ireland and from India.

0ut of the carnage of world war
came a reborn Islamic militancy.

And a revolutionary Irish republicanism,
eager to escape the clutches of empire.

This is the 0zymandias of the Raj.

In 1947, when India became independent,

all New Delhi's statues of the King Emperors
and viceroys and generals,

the great and the good and the not so good,
were rounded up and taken here,

to the empire's theme park, the Durbar Field,

where they were interned like so many
forlorn hostages to that old joker, history.

Was that it, then?

Where Macaulay and Gladstone and the other
high priests of the great Victorian mission

kidding not just the natives but themselves?

In the end, were they just
window dressers of a regime

that was really all about money and power,

and when both gave out,
just cut their losses and slunk home?

Maybe, but before we write
their ideals off completely,

we should take note
of what rose from their defeat -

cycles of religious hatred,
sectarian wars and massacres,

epidemics and destitution.

Not all them, I think, exclusively our fault.

Perhaps the last word on the British Empire
hasn't been written, after all,

at least if that empire is thought of, not in
terms of scarlet tunics and flashing sabres,

but language, law and liberal democracy.

Perhaps the marriage of east and west does
have a future if we're prepared to fight for it,

not just in Calcutta and Karachi, but also
in Leicester, 0ldham, Bradford and Burnley.