Love Conquers Nothing

  It was September 20, 1777, and Francis recorded in his journal, “Lady Impey sits up with Mrs. Hastings; vulgo—toad-eating.”

  Mrs. Hastings was sitting pretty. She was the highest lady in the land, and she had an adoring husband. She would not have been normal had she not now felt her power. Malicious eyes, which kept close watch, observed that her dress, always her chief preoccupation, became more and more elaborate and individual in style. Never a slave to convention, Marian did not recognize the petty rules of fashion which governed Calcutta’s lesser lights. After all, who had a better right than the governor’s wife to set the styles?

  Moreover, as the former consort of an artist she had every claim to knowledge and taste when it came to costume. And since she was not English, why need she arrange herself like an Englishwoman? Undoubtedly she had strong ideas about the typical English toilette, and these unflattering opinions, forcefully expressed in her very German accent, must at times have made Hastings laugh immoderately.

  Other ladies powdered their hair and wore it in stiff, towering edifices, but Marian refused to disguise her chief beauty. She kept it its own red-gold, and wore it in a natural-looking coiffure with ringlets clustered carelessly about the brow. In her Zoffany portrait her hair hangs about her neck. To our eyes it looks uncombed and messy, but it couldn’t have been as messy as the conventional headdress of the day, held together as it was with some sticky concoction or other and redone only once a fortnight at the most.

  Other ladies attempted to follow whatever fashion was decreed by the latest female arrival from England. Marian would not thus follow. She thought up her own fashions, more brilliant, gorgeous, and generally noisy than English creations.

  Other ladies were presumably fond of jewels, but in deference to their husbands’ resources they controlled their fondness within reasonable limits. Marian seems not to have controlled herself at all. Hastings made a far bigger salary than anyone else in the company, and he grudged her nothing. The native rulers loved jewels and bedecked themselves and their women like Christmas trees. But Marian outblazed the Indians, and it must be admitted the Indians themselves made it all too easy for her to do this.

  Here we should remind ourselves that bribery in India was a long-established custom, accepted by everyone in high or low circles before Europeans ever arrived in the country. Rajahs and their nobles all exacted tribute; so did judges. The English who first arrived on behalf of John Company seem to have taken enthusiastically to these notions, which were after all not quite strange to contemporary England either. Bribes passed back and forth openly until Hastings’s time. Hastings deprecated the practice and attempted to reform it, on the common-sense principle that it was not good for business or government, but he did not consider an occasional exaction of tribute on his own part—for example, from some recalcitrant native ruler—as a heinous crime, nor could we expect him to share our open-and-shut attitude toward such matters. The fact that he applied any funds he gained by this method to the public interest, instead of putting them in his privy purse, shows that he was morally head and shoulders above his colleagues, at that. He was above Marian, among others.

  He forbade his wife to accept lavish gifts when they were obviously intended to prejudice him. But there were many borderline cases when he was either too busy to oversee what she did, or preferred to let her have her way, just to save time: he was always overworked. Doubtless Marian also received many presents she didn’t tell him about at all. Word went around among the native millionaires, moneylenders, and petty princes that the governor’s lady’s favor could be won by pretty gifts, and most of them promptly assumed that the governor as well smiled on such compliments and was impressed thereby. Indian potentates were not dewy-eyed, and they never gave other people credit for high principles which they themselves lacked. And so Marian collected a surprisingly large lot of costly ornaments. A description of her possessions when she had to pass through the customs in England sounds like a hashish dream. There was one riding habit encrusted with pearls which gave her quite a lot of trouble there.

  Life in Calcutta when she reigned was incredibly elaborate and luxurious. Comfortable it was not and never could be in that climate, where cesspools abounded and dead bodies sometimes remained in the streets for days, but the European residents carried on as best they could with their droves of servants and their lashings of food and drink. The general stately progress of the day’s social doings was much like that of Madras. During the evening calls which followed the ceremonial outings at dusk, gentlemen retained their hats and held them stiffly as they sat in some lady’s drawing room. If the hostess asked a caller to put down his hat, that was a tacit invitation to supper. If she didn’t, the gentleman went on holding it, that was all. A lady named Mrs. Fay, an original, lively character who wrote long letters and reported her adventures in detail, described the effect of this point of etiquette; many a gentleman she had seen in a lady’s house, she said, forlornly dangling his hat in the air, waiting in vain for permission to put it down.

  It is Mrs. Fay who gives us several revealing glimpses of Mrs. Hastings, whom she did not like. Mrs. Fay, admittedly, must have been rather tiresome. She had suffered through several unusual adventures and naturally she liked to talk about them. She had been captured by Hyder Ali in company with her husband and the entire passenger list of their ship, along with the crew and the captain; they were held prisoner for a long time, and lost all their possessions before they got free. Arrived in Calcutta, she lived for a time with her husband, but he kept an Indian mistress, so Mrs. Fay at last left him and set up in business for herself. She was, one gathers, energetic and egocentric, a Brave Little Woman. Obviously she irritated Marian. Soon after arriving, when she paid her duty call on the governor’s wife and began to moan about her bad luck, Marian choked her off with a levity Mrs. Fay thought was in bad taste.

  “Come, come, my good woman,” said Mrs. Hastings in effect, “you asked for it, deliberately setting out on perilous adventures the way you did. It was your curiosity which got you into trouble.”

  Not much womanly sympathy there, said Mrs. Fay, bristling. Of course she herself was lower than the dust compared with such a great lady, but nevertheless one would have expected a little more respectful attention to an unfortunate story. And when the sufferer was a member of her own sex too! One wonders if Mrs. Fay and Mr. Francis ever had a heart-to-heart talk. It is unlikely they would have met at intimate parties; as Mrs. Fay truly observed, she was not the social equal of such highly placed officials. But there were plenty of large routs to which everyone was invited.

  At Christmas, for example, the governor and his lady were expected to invite everyone in the colony to festivities which went on all day. Francis felt called upon to give breakfast parties in his bachelor establishment, twice a week, to thirty people. Everyone entertained. There were masque balls and receptions and the inevitable amateur theatricals, and above all, card parties. When we read that it was customary for each guest at a dinner party to bring his private personal servant, who stood behind his chair and tried to grab the best piece on every serving platter for his sahib, we feel a rush of admiration for Marian, who broke down that particular piece of chi-chi by precept and example. To her parties one was requested to bring only his hookahburdar, no other servant being necessary.

  And what, you may ask, was a hookahburdar? Why, he was the man who took care of your hookah, that snakelike hubble-bubble, that water pipe which men puffed at during supper parties, card parties, theater parties, and even hairdressings. The ladies sometimes smoked them too. The ladies would prettily beg for a puff, and the gentlemen would indulgently and obligingly fit on new mouthpieces for the ladies, and everyone would laugh merrily at the faces the ladies made. A hookah needs a lot of attention at the business end, which is a long way off from the smoker. The man about town simply had to be accompanied by his hookahburdar. Marian would scarcely dare try to reform such a firmly rooted custom as that; the best she cou
ld do was to dispense with the man behind the chair.

  The common-sense economy she showed in this cutting down of fuss and expense was characteristic of the governor’s lady. She was no spendthrift; she was not carelessly generous like Hastings. She loved material possessions, whereas he really had no interest in money for itself. It was characteristic of him that he should have given away everything he owned during his early retirement to England; needy relatives and friends had never to apply to him in vain. Many a time Marian must have bewailed that wicked waste. Nor did he hesitate, in harness, to dig into his own pocket when he should have used company funds. The company was often short of cash; if Hastings himself happened to have money during a company emergency, he supplied it, and was not always overcareful to pay himself back. He was the despair of his thrifty German wife. It was the one point on which they quarreled seriously.

  Soon after they married she tried to introduce strict economy into his housekeeping. Everyone knows how ruinous it is for a bachelor to keep house, but he was a bachelor no longer and she, Marian, would change all that. Alas for her plans. At their first large dinner party her cheese-paring was so embarrassingly evident that Hastings was furious and actually rebuked his adored Marian before all the company.

  This taught her a lesson. Thenceforth she practiced her little economies in a less public manner. She took to hoarding, like a jackdaw or like a spendthrift’s wife. Jewels were a great help in her secret campaign; after all, they are investments, and she loved them anyway. She collected more and more jewels and other costly things: enormous diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, pearls by the hundred with which she embroidered her clothes; carved ivory furniture, those lovely Mughul enamel bibelots, and countless Indian gauzes and brocades heavy with gold and silver.

  Oh, Marian enjoyed her life as the governor’s lady. She exacted everything she could from it; not only jewels and brocades, but a more shadowy kind of tribute as well. Mrs. Fay again comes forward to tell us how Mrs. Hastings comported herself. She “… expects to be treated with the most profound respect and deference.…” At a party one evening Mrs. Fay’s companion asked her if she had paid her respects as yet to the Lady Governess, who was present. “I answered in the negative, having had no opportunity, as she had not chanced to look towards me when I was prepared to do so. ‘Oh,’ replied the kind old lady, ‘you must fix your eyes on her and never take them off till she notices you; Miss C—— has done this, and so have I: it is absolutely necessary to avoid giving offence.’ I followed her prudent advice, and was soon honoured with a complacent glance, which I returned, as became me, by a most respectful bend. Not long after she walked over to our side, and conversed very affably with me.”

  During this time Philip Francis was pursuing his way vigorously, never losing sight of his twin objects of getting ahead and bedeviling Hastings. He was making good progress in both, and he never missed a trick. It is very likely that he was not quite unknown to the man Hicky—James Augustus, not to be confused with the ebullient William Hickey—who began publishing a newspaper in Calcutta in 1780. This paper, the Bengal Gazette, was lively. Its editor indulged in scandalmongering to a degree which takes away the breath of a reader conditioned to our less lusty age, in which awkward libel laws abound. No such laws constricted Mr. Hicky. Many of the hapless victims of his wit have been forgotten along with their resentment, but it is significant that he seldom slipped up on a chance to sideswipe the Hastings couple, especially the lady. He shared Mr. Francis’s sentiments, too, about Chief Justice Impey, who had recently incurred the wrath of Junius by finding for the plaintiff in a case we will discuss in the next chapter, when Francis was sued for damages.

  For example, there was the Gazette’s skit on the “Pul-bandi” contract which had been given to a cousin of Impey’s, to keep the bridges and embankments of Burdwan in repair. As long as two years before, Junius had noted, “Poolbundy of Burdwan given for two years to Mr. Frazer; one lakh and twenty thousand the first and eighty thousand the second; job, job.… The present shameless contract is a clear £15,000 in the contractor’s pocket.…”

  Junius never forgot anything he could use. Perhaps by coincidence the Gazette, printed, in 1780, a satirical piece in which a “displaced civilian,” looking for work, was advised: “Pay your constant devoirs to Marian Allypore” (Alipore being the district where the Hastings lived), “or sell yourself soul and body to Poolbundy.”

  Though no one else was sacred to him, Hicky never attacked Francis. It looks very much as if Junius was at it again, using the press for all it was worth. There is evidence, too, picked up with loving, scholarly care by Mr. Busteed, that the council’s stormy petrel was in constant communication with Edmund Burke at home, either directly or through friends. When all this plotting came to fruition in Westminster Hall, Burke sounded at times as if he were acting as Francis’s mouthpiece. He was fully informed of many small scandals which only Francis could have retailed, and the language in which he was informed sometimes slipped through in his oratory like echoes of Francis’s Calcutta journal.

  However, all this is anticipating. For the moment Francis was doing as he liked and wanted. Like Marian, he was riding high. He had survived the scandal of the damage suit, he was a senior member of council, and he was needling Hastings with great success. Then he overreached himself, in the matter of the duel.

  It was one of the seasonal illnesses from which he was suffering which pushed Francis off balance. His temper was always fiery, as we know, but his judgment for the most part was cool. During the heat of that summer, however, he overstepped the bounds and got into a position where he simply had to challenge the governor general.

  As soon as the thing was said, both Hastings and Francis must have been astonished that they had let themselves in for such a violent means of settling their long-standing differences. Neither was the dueling type. It was precipitated because Francis obstructed a military move which Hastings considered vitally necessary; this, too, after he had given his word to keep the peace in council, and not to interfere in Hastings’s conduct of the current war against the Mahrattas. Hastings wrote a hostile minute which Junius felt in honor bound to challenge, and there it was.

  The affair was some weeks in the boiling up. Before the encounter took place, Hastings, without telling Marian what was happening, took her up-river to Chinsura, and left her there, ostensibly because she needed a holiday from the oppressive Calcutta weather. His letter to her after the event was calm and correct, like all his behavior:

  Calcutta, Thursday morning.

  My dearest Marian,

  I have desired Sir John Day to inform you that I have had a meeting this morning with Mr. Francis, who has received a wound in his side, but I hope not dangerous. I shall know the state of it presently and will write to you again. He is at Belvedere, and Drs. Campbell and Francis are both gone to attend to him there. I am well and unhurt. But you must be content to hear this good from me: you cannot see me. I cannot leave Calcutta while Mr. Francis is in any danger. But I wish you to stay at Chinsura. I hope in a few days to have ye pleasure of meeting you there. Make my compts. to Mr. Rose, but do not mention what has passed. My Marian, you have occupied all my thoughts for these two days past and unremittedly.

  Yours ever, my most beloved,

  W.H.

  As duels go, it had been a grave affair, the more so as neither of the chief actors in it had ever fought in this way before. It must have been very tense, but the proceedings could hardly be called efficient. “When the pistols were delivered by the seconds,” wrote Colonel Pearse, Hastings’s second, “Mr. Francis said he was quite unacquainted with these matters, and had never fired a pistol in his life, and Mr. Hastings told him he believed he had no advantage in that respect, as he could not recollect that he had ever fired a pistol above once or twice.” The gentlemen stood fourteen paces apart and “presented” arms, but Francis twice had to signal that he wasn’t ready, and on the third attempt Hastings courteously waited, since
Francis’s powder was not dry enough to fire, until substitute powder could be provided. Then they rearranged themselves, and Francis got in his shot first. It went wide. Hastings took aim more deliberately—he would, of course—and his shot went home.

  “Mr. Francis staggered, and, in attempting to sit down, he fell and said he was a dead man. Mr. Hastings hearing this, cried out, ‘Good God. I hope not,’ and immediately went up to him.…”

  Well, Francis wasn’t dead, but as far as Calcutta went he was finished. As soon as he could wind up his affairs and travel, he went back to England. There he burrowed away assiduously, and there at last he had the satisfaction of seeing, his enemy impeached. There, too, Marian’s thrift may have atoned for the sins which helped to ruin her husband.

  But again we anticipate. Let us leave Marian for the moment at the height of her glory, the acknowledged queen of Calcutta. Let us look at her, languishing at ease in her boudoir, playing a strange game. None of us, I venture to say, would have the imagination to invent it, even if we had the material. She has filled a bowl with pearls and then placed two kittens on top of them. That is what I said—pearls and kittens.

  The kittens find the pearls difficult to stand on. They flounder about, unable to get clawhold either on the slippery globes or the equally slippery inside of the bowl. Marian laughs delightedly and claps her hands.

  It was a childish amusement, perhaps, but one must admit it was an original idea.

  2. THE PRINCESS

  Now let us look at another Calcutta lady who flourished about the same time. It does not seem to have struck contemporary chroniclers that her early career was parallel in its outlines to that of Marian. Yet it was. Perhaps the coincidences were obscured by the wide discrepancy which existed between the women’s social standings, as well as their ages. Moreover, nothing could have been less similar than their ultimate fates, and it is usually man’s conclusion one notices, rather than his beginning.