Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (41 page)

Both as scholar and as priest Colenso appeared to doubt this divine right. He was anxious, of course, to convert the Africans to Christianity, but he did not wish to erode their own culture. He allowed converts to live their own way—in particular polygamously, without the degrading preliminary divorces which more rigid evangelists demanded. His very intimacy with the heathen Zulus
seemed to smack of heresy, and his concern for their traditions flew in the face of the imperial conviction. Inevitably his attitudes brought him into conflict with the Establishment, both secular and spiritual.

In 1861 he was busy translating the book of Genesis into Zulu, and the more he worked at it, the more unorthodox his reactions became. He was confronted on every page, as he later said, by the question, ‘Is all that true?’ ‘My heart answered in the words of the Prophet, “shall a man speak lies in the name of the Lord? I dare not do so”.’ From doubting the literal truth of the words of Genesis, he went on to question the authorship of the entire Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. Much of their content, he decided, was not historical at all: much more was really centuries newer than was thought. Then he discovered that the Mosaic law never existed before the captivity in Babylon, and that the book of Deuteronomy was a fake, and that the books of Chronicles were falsified for the aggrandisement of priests and Levites. All these shattering doubts he freely made public, and the public responded by assuming that his long apprenticeship with the Zulus had half paganized him. As a contemporary limerick suggested,

Like thunder upon his head came the reaction. Ripostes poured from the presses in Britain as in Africa, committees demanded his resignation,
Punch
had Archbishop Longley, the Primate of All England, writing to Colenso in severe iambics: 

In Cape Town Bishop Robert Gray, the Metropolitan of British South Africa, announced his intention of charging Colenso with heresy. He believed himself to have absolute jurisdiction over his subordinate bishops: his powers, he said, exceeded even those of the civil courts, and there could be no appeal against his decisions. Convening a court in the unfinished cathedral at Cape Town, in December 1863 he publicly deposed the Bishop of Natal from his see, and presently went on to excommunicate him too.

Colenso was undismayed. He refused to recognize the powers of Bishop Gray, and did not attend the court. The Church was part of the constitution of England, he argued, but not of South Africa, and Gray was no more entitled to charge him than he was to charge Bishop Gray. He appealed to the Crown, and in 1865 the Privy Council decided in his favour. The Crown, it decreed, ‘had no power to constitute a bishopric in a colony which had its own independent legislature’. The Church of England was not a part of the constitution in any colonial settlement, and its ministers were merely members of a voluntary association, without legal power or immunity. Bishop Gray’s metropolitan authority was therefore spurious, and his punishment of Colenso null and void.

These proceedings were as excitedly followed in Victorian England as had been the affair of Governor Eyre, and the reports of the hearings, which fill a volume of 400 pages, make curious reading. The gravamen of the charge against Colenso was ‘erroneous teaching’—refusing to believe in the eternity of future punishment, or maintaining that ‘our blessed Lord was ignorant and in error upon the subject of the authorship and age of different portions of the Pentateuch’. More relevant politically was the suggestion that he believed in the universal equality of man. It is as much an imperial as a religious anxiety that we sense in the Dean of Cape Town’s rhetorical address for the prosecution. All men, Colenso was alleged to think, stood upon the same level before God. There was no difference between them, and the whole of mankind was the recipient of God’s grace in the gospels. ‘My lords, let me call your attention to that word recipient. That is to say, as he explains it, regeneration, a death unto sin and a new birth unto righteousness, belongs to us from our birth hour, that is by man, by nature….
And further, he distinctly implies that all men, as men, have the Holy Spirit. Now, my lords, when opinions such as these are met with, the question naturally comes—what, then, is the good of being a Christian?’

Or, the Dean might have added, of having an Empire?
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When the Privy Council restored Colenso to his see, its councillors were declaring in effect that there was no such thing as an imperial church, and gradually the various colonial churches were dis-established. Bishop Gray flatly refused to accept the Council’s decision. Colenso, he said, had been ‘handed over to the power of the Evil One’, and had no place in a House of God. The mission bodies in Natal withdrew their support and their funds from Colenso, and there was an unsuccessful attempt to block his stipend from England. The first General Synod of the Anglican Church assembled in London specifically to debate the problem,
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and the newspapers celebrated the affair with learned editorials and clerical cartoons. The more insistently the law in England declared Colenso still to be the rightful Bishop of Natal, the more Bishop Gray determined that he was no such thing, and in 1869 he made the final gesture of colonial defiance, and consecrated his own rival bishop to the see.

Farcical scenes ensued. Colenso, returning from London to his little cathedral of St Peter, was theatrically anathemized by his own Dean at Sunday morning service. The Cape Town sentence was read aloud before the congregation, and the Dean added to it the rider that what the Church bound on earth was bound in heaven too. ‘That sentence stands ratified in the presence of Almighty God’, he assured the Bishop. ‘Depart! Go away from the House of God!’ The cathedral doors were locked, its harmonium was silenced, its bells were immobilized, its plate removed, and when the rival Bishop
McCrarie arrived in state from Cape Town, a rival new cathedral was hastily built for him, and dedicated to St Saviour.

For years the schism rocked the little town, and made it far more famous for the presence of Colenso than for the memory of its old Boer heroes. Each bishop had his own fanatic following: when they met each other they did not speak, and when McCrorie once inadvertently bowed to Colenso, he excused himself with the apology that ‘my feelings as a gentleman overcame my feeling as a Christian’. Colenso became a martyr to some, a traitor to others—snubbed by civic dignitaries, adored by doting congregations, the subject of innumerable sermons, debates, scholarly papers, theological exchanges, insulting diatribes and maidenly odes. Through it all he maintained his friendship with the Zulus, even during years when the British Empire was actually at war with them, and when he died in 1883, the most celebrated of all imperial churchmen, they laid him under the altar of his own little cathedral beneath the single word
Sobantu.
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These imperial disputes were comprehensible only to the elect, and so were many of the Empire’s lesser mysticisms: for by now, as the Queen’s reign approached its voluptuous climax, the Empire itself had become a kind of faith. Not many of the subject peoples shared this concept in its full and hazy glory, nor many foreigners either: but the British came to believe in it fervently, and propagated it with such zeal that the sacramental nature of the British Empire, all its panoply of pomp and power, its constantly reiterated declarations of duty, its belief in its own infallibility, its ritual air of amplitude and dedication, itself became in the last decades of Victoria’s century one of the ruling factors of the world.

An increasingly sacrosanct article of this faith was the monarchy—‘commonly hidden like a mystery’, as Walter Bagehot had said of it, ‘sometimes paraded like a pageant’. Queen Victoria had not, of
course, always been a semi-sacred figure. She was an interesting curiosity to Emily Eden; she was subject to scurrilous criticism throughout the first half of her reign; she was highly unpopular when, upon the death of her dear Albert, she withdrew weeded into privacy. But now, as she came into her own as a person, so she assumed too the mantle of imperial fulfilment. It was Benjamin Disraeli, during his second and greater Premiership, who achieved this apotheosis. Himself a romancer, an adventurer, a Jew, an exotic, he inspired Victoria with the vision of imperial splendour, diamond-starred, universal, upheld by elephants, emus and giraffes, attended by turbanned lancers and respectful aborigines. It was upon Disraeli’s inspiration that Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, a sublimation prosaically achieved by a far from unanimous vote in the House of Commons, but rapturously received by the Queen. An Empress she was by Act of Parliament, and as an Empress she bore herself ever after. She signed herself VRI with satisfaction, she loved to have Indians around her court, and she became to the aficionados of Empire far more than a mere constitutional monarch, but a vital item of dogma.

This was a novel kind of religion for the English. Not since the days of Elizabeth I had they revered a monarch so, or responded with such devotion to the spirit of kingship, and it was especially in the imperial context that Victoria achieved this charisma. The Empire gave her the eponym Great White Queen, endowing her with a legendary force not unlike Moby Dick’s, and it was the Empire which made of her an unorthodox Earth-Mother, ample, experienced, kindly, wise, to whose serge skirts the heathen or ignorant might cling in sanctuary, and beneath whose stern admonishment tyrants and rebels alike might reform themselves.

The Queen’s symbolism was accepted as magic in many different ways. The English themselves, with their well-known taste for the arcane, were still half-bemused by hereditary notions of divine right, now extended to embrace British sovereignty as a whole. Many of the rituals of empire, conducted wherever the British served or settled, were like libations to an unseen but ever-present divinity—Toasting the Queen, in the hot hush of the regimental mess, while the punkahs creaked heavily above the candles, and on the sudden
silence the buzz of the crickets sounded—mounting the Queen’s Guard, with all the formalistic stamping and shouting which was the liturgy of the British Army—praying for the Queen’s Majesty—saluting the Queen’s statue—issuing commands, in the depths of the forest or the icy expanses of the Arctic, in the Queen’s Name—even curtseying in one’s best rose-strewn hat to the Queen’s Governor, who might not be very godlike in himself, but was by virtue of his office anointed with a divine unguent.

Simpler subjects of the Empire believed the Queen to be wonderworking in a more literal way, and worshipped her at shrines. Notables of Sind, on ceremonial occasions, bowed low before her portrait, which was veiled from the eyes of lesser citizens, and offertories of many kinds reached her from afar—wild beasts, ivory caskets, thrones of buffalo hide, or the bag of flour which, in 1849, came to her from the first water-mill ever to be owned by Maoris. For twenty-five years after the death of her chief representative in Bombay, Sir Robert Grant, the sepoy guards at Government House at Poona presented arms to any cat leaving the palace after dark, it being understood that His Excellency’s soul, and thus Her Majesty’s authority, had transmigrated felinely. Even the estranged Irish received the Queen with reverence, when she visited Dublin soon after the Great Famine, and the Sioux and Cree of the Canadian wilderness hailed her as the White Mother, the ultimate squaw, hitherto personified chiefly by mountain peaks, particularly imposing pine-trees, or spectral bison. In India the Queen was seen as the direct spiritual successor of the Moghuls, and of royal houses more ancient still, and there her elevation to Empresshood was celebrated with a Durbar that was a very Mass of the imperial rite, in which all the principal acolytes were princes themselves.

This occasion figures in every Anglo-Indian memoir of the period, and was the model for several royal durbars to come, at which the oblational nature of the Raj was re-affirmed from reign to reign. Queen Victoria did not attend herself—she never went out of Europe—but so powerful was her presence by proxy that for years afterwards Indians claimed to have seen her there. The Durbar symbolically marked the end of the Moghul dynasty, poor Bahadur having died at last in his eighty-eighth year: the conquerors from
Persia were to be succeeded in the continuum of Indian royalty by the benevolent tyrants from England. To impress this providential process upon the minds of the Indian princes, themselves eager practitioners of the royalty cult, there was mounted upon the plains of Delhi, within sight of the Red Fort, the most flamboyant pageant even India had ever seen. Its focus was the Queen’s viceroy. Lord Lytton the poet, and it was Lytton himself who decreed its style, encouraged by the romantic Disraeli far away. It was to be a pseudo-feudal, pseudo-religious ceremony. The princes of India were paying homage to their supreme prince, Kaisar-i-Hind, Victoria RI, and they were to do so in all the splendour of their lesser princeships. The taste for the mediaeval had died out in England, but it triumphantly survived in India, that last resort of magnificence, and Lord Lytton saw the Durbar in chivalric terms.