Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [20]
There is one other characteristic perhaps worth noting about these early colonies. Although they were commercial positions, they were ‘royal’. Throughout the empire’s life foreign territories were claimed and administered in the name of the Crown: they were sometimes even spoken of as ornaments to royal necklaces or jewels in the crown. When the English revolution overthrew and executed the king in the middle of the seventeenth century, Oliver Cromwell turned out to be as interested in imperial possessions as any king or queen: it is striking that the freedom which was said to have engulfed England in the Commonwealth in 1649 did not represent an opportunity for the British ‘dominions and territories’ overseas to make their own destinies. They were simply declared now to belong to the ‘people of England’. As it turned out, Cromwell colonized as enthusiastically as anyone – and even more brutally. His campaign to extinguish dissent in Ireland is remembered to this day for its savagery.* In 1654 he dispatched a fleet to the Caribbean with orders to seize Hispaniola, which might then be used ‘for the transplanting as much of our peoples from New England, Virginia, the Barbados, the Summer Islands [Bermuda], or from Europe, as we see requisite’. (That attack failed, although other islands were taken.) At home, the increasingly vainglorious Cromwell was travelling the familiar route from revolutionary to tyrant, cheered on by sycophants like the poet Edmund Waller, whose ‘Panegyric to my Lord Protector’ referred to England as ‘The seat of Empire’. The rumour went that parliament was considering offering him the title of emperor. The country was approaching the point where overseas possessions were a necessity of office.
Chapter Two
‘I had in the Name of His Majesty taken possession of several places upon this Coast’
Captain James Cook, 1770
The grandest imperial tableau of the eighteenth century is Benjamin West’s monumental The Death of General Wolfe. It purports to show the moment when the victor of the 1759 battle of Quebec breathed his last. In the foreground the young general’s musket and hat lie on the ground. At his feet a loyal, half-naked native American kneels, chin on hand, a ‘noble savage’ contemplating a fallen god. To the general’s right and left stand anxious red-coated officers, in front, in the tartan of the regiment he had raised to serve the British Crown, the clan chief of the Frasers; above the dying general’s head a vast Union flag thrusts heavenwards. James Wolfe lies on his side, his eyes cast upwards at the clearing sky as the dark clouds of battle drift away. A waving messenger approaches, clutching the French flag. He brings news of the extinction of French claims on Canada.
It is pure propaganda, a political pietà created to sanctify the collection of overseas possessions which during the eighteenth century the British were increasingly justified in terming an empire. There was more. Handel’s oratorios likened Britain to the biblical Israel, the captured flags of defeated enemies were laid up in St Paul’s Cathedral and statues of exotic animals demonstrated the taming of the world. Benjamin West’s painting is a fantasy, painted more than a decade after the battle: there were no Indians fighting with the British and half the officers depicted weren’t even on the battlefield at the moment of Wolfe’s death, the general having been struck by French rounds in the wrist, stomach and chest as he led a British charge. But none of that takes away from Wolfe’s achievement in defeating a French army