Viscount Valentia embodies the unapologetic, guilt-free mindset of the early-19th-century British ruling class: empire and slavery were not only profitable but morally ordained by Christian scripture.
BORN ON 4 DECEMBER 1770 as George Annesley, 2nd Earl of Mountnorris, Valentia’s aristocratic antecedents date back to Francis Annesley who was elevated to Baronhood in 1628 by King Charles I and became the 1st Viscount Valentia in 1642.
George attended the Brasenose College at Oxford but dropped out in 1789 without taking a degree. Thirteen years later, he decided to travel the world perhaps to forget the aftershocks of a scandal he was embroiled in.
His Voyages and Travels convey the impression that he led an active life punctuated by zest, adventure, curiosity, learning and politics. Later in life, he styled himself as Viscount Valentia and served as Member of Parliament for Yarmouth from 1808-10.
His personal life was marked by sleaze and scandal. In 1796, Valentia mounted a charge of criminal conspiracy against John Bellendon Gawler for having an illicit affair with his wife, Anne. At the trial, Anne claimed that Valentia was a “promiscuous homosexual.” The full text of the trial titled The Genuine Trial of John B. Gawler, Esq. for Criminal Conversation with the Right Hon. Lady Valentia, is quite an instructive study of eighteenth century English morality. The couple was legally separated but not granted divorce because the real story eventually emerged: it was George who had actually encouraged his wife’s adultery.
Valentia’s privileged birth and high peer status put him in distinguished positions throughout his life — Privy Counsellor to Ireland; Fellow of the Society of Antiquities and Fellow of Royal Society.
His death on 23 July, 1884 extinguished the Earldom of Mountnorris because he had no male heir.
AFTER DEPARTING from the Downs, the Minerva arrived at Madeira, back then a Portuguese colony. It then proceeded to Cape Palmas and then to the stunning island of St. Helena, a British colony held tenuously by a garrison. Valentia stayed for a month before reaching the Cape of Good Hope, the magic liquid key to India discovered by the Portuguese pirate Vasco da Gama three centuries ago.
Valentia gives vivid descriptions of each port and island he halted at. In each place, his eye and mind are alert to the commercial value that it brings to the ravenous and rapidly burgeoning British Empire; people, produce and place alike are evaluated solely for their exploitative potential. He is for example, anxious about the prohibitive cost of maintaining St. Helena, “a very expensive settlement to the East India Company.” He is also anxious for its garrison manned by “only one regiment of infantry and two companies of artillery.” His anxiety turns into dread when he imagines this prospect: “As St. Helena is certainly a place of great utility, and as it would be an incalculable evil if it should fall into the hands of an enemy, it ought to be properly fortified.”
This anxiety, perched on the edge of paranoia in the minds of the British nobility and the servants of the East India Company is what maintained the vise-like grip over colonies; paranoia was the motive force that ruthlessly crushed every revolt, rebellion and uprising throughout the Empire.
If paranoia preserved control, slavery oiled the Empire. Valentia, like other Europeans of his time, is unapologetically candid about the indispensability of slaves. He harbours no moral qualms. On the contrary, in his mind, the Christian doctrine has conclusively proven that select people were naturally created by God as slaves because they were fallen people. Their lot would improve only if they became Christians. Indeed, Valentia’s graphic exposition on the “just” Christian treatment of St. Helena’s slaves reads like a user manual of human exploitation at its cruellest.
It is with the highest degree of approbation that I must speak of the slave-laws of St. Helena. I am sorry, however, to observe that, prior to the time of Colonel Patton, many of the regulations have been evaded, and others openly violated. With an attention to their morals highly proper in a Christian country, it was positively ordered that the slaves should receive religious instruction, and that they should be obliged to marry. The former has been neglected ; and of a compliance with the latter, I believe there has not been a single instance for the last fifteen years. It was also ordered, that no person should be at liberty to emancipate a slave, without giving security to the Company…Yet for some time it has been customary to emancipate slaves without this security… and these people are now, in their old age, living at the expense of the Company… These crimes can be attributed only to the want of moral instruction. I have no doubt that the slave of St. Helena, were he properly taught, would soon become a valuable member of society.
Likewise, Valentia finds an excuse to justify every excess of colonialism. If the Christian scripture endorses slavery as God’s ordination, other mundane factors justify British oppression. The commonest of these: we are oppressing you for your own good; it is actually benevolence in the guise of oppression. The following is Valentina’s version.
My next changing-place was at the magnificent tope of Plassey, a place celebrated in history for the victory obtained by Lord Clive…From that period we may be considered as masters of Bengal, and to that victory we in fact owe the vast empire we now possess. By what right we concluded a treaty with a traitor to depose his sovereign…is not now to be determined: and those who might have felt repugnance at executing such a business, will still rejoice at the prosperity which it acquired and secured to their country. But not only to England has it been fortunate: the original inhabitants, the Hindoos…have equal reason to rejoice…what is almost as great a blessing, the horrors of war have been far removed from their peaceable abodes.
But we shouldn’t single out Valentia for his naked celebration of colonialism. This celebration was the zeitgeist that allowed the guilt-free induglence in the spoils of colonial exploitation.
To be continued
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