Puritans and Royalists in seventeenth century Madras: The Sir Edward Winter Coup 1665

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The Company Building in Fort St. George

Old Madras was turbulent. The coup against Lord George Pigot in 1776 was preceded nearly a century earlier by an extraordinary set  of events whose place in the history of Old Madras has not been appreciated or understood. They seem to defy understanding and interpretation. The East India Copany has had an implacable record of "good goverance" in that its employees did not usurp the authority of the "Government" and stray beyon the limits of the Charter governing its corporate structure. Yet in the decades following the estblishment of fort St George we find a series of events unfolding, which even in hind sight defy comprehension. In this essay we deal with one such event.

Sir Edward Winter was Governor of Fort St George twice: 1661 to 1665 by right and from 1665 to 1688 by usurpation and force. This event remains singularly difficult for historians to understand as records are few and the protagonists of the unseemly sequence of events were less than savory. Sir Edward Winter was partonizing a set of Cloth Merchants whose names are, Timanna and Verona Kasi. It was the system of arbitrary purchase that Pitt tried to stop by allowing the merchants to bring their wares directly to the Sea Gate Market for sales. This system essentially by passed vested interests and made he procurement more transparent. And we have already witnessed the back lash in the form of Left and Right hand castes, in an earlier blog. These two Chief Merchants close to Edward Winter were given the authority to buy cloth on behalf of the company and these two in turn outsourced the contract to 16 weavers thereby making enormous profits and obviously Winter and his two agents became enormously wealthy. The East India company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was an elaborate set of intricate relationships that nested between social grioups, individual ties of clientelle and professional associations. While prosopographical details do suggest such a pattern in London, the same is the case in George Town and research into this aspect has not yet begun. When compaints about these two particular merchants reached London and suspicions of rent seeking and corrupt dealings were made public, the Company decided to recall Sir Edward Winter and replace him with George Foxcroft. Foxcroft had faught in the armies of Oliver Cromwell and perhaps carried his Puritan ideology with him.

The time line against which the events in Madras played themselves out is significant. The Civil War had ended with the beheading of Charles I on January 30, 1649, the short lived experiment of God's Englishman, Oliver Cromwell had ended and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 was mere five years in the past. John Milton another Puritan said: What stirs as Englishman sooner to rebellion is violent heavy hands upon their goods and purses". Foxcroft had set out from England with explicit orders to curtail the notorious Private Trade carried out by Interlopers and he was even authorised to seize them and consficicate their goods. And from the records it appears he intended to do just that and men like Sir Edward Winter were obviously going to be hard hit. In fact the Company sent out Nicholas Buckeridge to investigate Sir Edward Winter and his trading activities. However, nothing came of this venture as Buckeridge hmself was guilty of similar misconduct both at Surat and Persia, So the Inquiry was discretely scuttled. A sign of weakness that Sir Edward Winter did not hesitate to exploit.

If George Foxcroft was a Leveller, Edward Winter was a Royalists and given the charged political climate, a Puritan Governor and a Royalist second in command would find the going tough. A peculiar decision taken by the Board was to retain Sir Edward Winter as the Second in Council which essentially made him, a former Governor, as powerful as the incumbent one. What happened in Fort St George within the span of three short months is not quite clear. A clear factional division solidified in the Council which consisted of William Blake, William Jearsey, Charles Proby, John Neclaks, and Jeremy Sambrooke with Winter as Second in Council. In addition there was another man whose role even in death was significant, William Dawes. This Dawes was the husband of Ascentia Dawes whose murder of an Indian woman was one of the first trial by jury brought before the Mayor's Court and in the previous essay on the Mayor's Court we dealt with this issue. An interesting set of men on a collision course is how we can see the train of events as they unfolded.

The early chronicler, John Bruce saw the conflict in terms of personality traits: the intemperance of Sir Edward Winter and the imprudence of Mr Foxcroft were driving the conflict. The immediate provocation was an exchange of words between Winter and Nathaniel Foxcroft the son of the Governor and an appointed Factor of the company. He declared much to the chagrin of the Royalists assembled around the Company Table that no King had any right to the Throne except that confirmed by might. This innocuous statement contained within it the gist of the political philosophy of the Levellers and as Christopher Hill has argued Levellers rejected Monarchy as unChristian. And Nathaniel went on to add that private interest superceded the interests of the Sovereign. Taking exception to these or rather using these statments as the pretext, Sir Edward Winter on September 14, 1665 Edward Winter along with his conspirators Fransis Chuseman, the Commander of the Guards,attacked George Foxcroft and the Council when a Meeting was in progress. In the melee William Dawes was killed Foxcroft wounded and the regime of the duly appointed Governor was over. Sir Edwars Winter ordered that Foxcroft and his son be arrested and they were cofined, perhaps in the building that I have shown.

Immediately after this bloody Coup, Sir REdward Winter wrote a long letter and curiously enough he directed the letter to the King and the Archbishop and cleverly insinuated that he acted in defence of King and Church. His strategy succeeded as for over three years he remained the Governor and only when rumours began circulating that he was in correspondence with the Dutch in Ceylon for handing over the Fort that the Company acted and sent a fleet of five ships to remove Winter and reinstate Foxcroft.

This episode clearly demonstrates what we have been arguing throughout that the Company in the Asian world was riven with factional and political rivalries that often erupted into open confrontation and this trend is again seen a century later when Lord George Pigot was deposed.

The Mayor's Court in Old Madras: Sovereignty, Law and Justice

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An arial view of Fort St George

A Street view of Fort St George 1785
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Urban scape, Madras White Town
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The early chorincles of Fort St. George refer to the Mayor's Court which was constituted in 1672. The location of the Court was somewhere in the area known as Sea Gate adjacent to which was the Choultry Court. There are references to the both the Courts and though the exact location of these institutions have not been identified we learn a graeat deal from the availbale historical records. I have access only to the public records as the rest of the archival material is found only in the British Library, London. Streyensham Master, the Governor was eager the have institutions thta could settle disputes and render the emerging settlement a tad governable.

The problem faced by the Company then for which legal precedents did not exist was: What laws can be used to administer Justice and by whose authority. In the Eighteenth Century, the Company was faced with a real dilemma: Did the Company have legal power over its employees and by extension over its "native" subjects living within its terrotorial limits. And how is Crminal Law to be administered. Treat "natives" equally or was a racial difference invented to discriminate between the English/European and the indigenous population. And the Company itself was not sure about the extent of its powers. Did the Charter given by Elizabeth, James I and later Charles II allow the Company to excercise judicial power over serious offences, including ones that called for or deserved the capital punishment. As a prelude to settling this  legal concumdrum, a beginning was made by establishing the Mayor's Court in Madras.

Let me just a century in order to give some persepctive. In the nineteenth century when the ideology of Racism and White Supremacy became the established credo, violence by the Britishers against the "natives" was treated very lightly. Te Sahib's boot only ruptured the malaria infected spllen of the native and the killing of an Indian was treated at best as "man slaughter" not murder. Again, it was the much reviled  Lord Curzon who insisted on Indians being treated fairly under the law. In the Eighteenth century George Town, Madras,  as indeed was the situation i n England too, violent crime was frequent and the Mayor's Court gradually won jurisdiction over grave and serious crimes.

Institutions were still  in their infancy and so we cannot expect well developed Juridical doctrines ' The Company bought a set of Law Books which included Coke's Digest to instruct its Mayor and 12 Aldermen who sat with him on the Bench. The Court met twice a week and strangely enough Trial by Jury was introduced as a procedure of administering Justice. In 1686 a Court of Admiralty was also established to adjudicat cases involving Ships, Maritime Commerce and the conduct of Sailors. This Court was ssentially a Company Court and the surviving records show that it tried to fulfill its mandate against great odds. Obviously differences over Jurisdiction between the Mayor's Court and the Admiralty Court did exist and eventually the Admiralty Court began to function, inexplicably, as the Appelate Court.

There are two episodes in the early history of the Mayor's Court in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries  both of which involved English defendents and "native" victims. One of these cases in well known. Ascentia Dawes killed her slave girl and was tried by Jury which found her guilty. But the Governor confused over the jurisdiction over the case eferred it to the Directors in London and Ascentia Dawes was set free. In perhaps the first of several"boot and spleen" cases in India, in October 1676 Manuel de Lima killed his servant. Spent 2 years in Jail and as equired by the then existing law, six of the jurors were of Portuguese origin sourced from Sam Thome, a Portuguese settlement close to Fort Saint George. He was found guilty and Strenysham Master ordered the execution of the man.An interesting legal argument was advanced by the condemned man in his appeal and one that bedeviled Colonial Jurisprudence for centuries. Hr claimed that neither he nor his victim, Pero Rangull, wer subjects of "His Majesty" and therefore the Mayor's Court had no Jurisdiction. In the eighteenth century the Mayor's Court tried to act in a fair manner, ostensibly without racial or cultural bias. An English pirate, Roger Bullmore, was executed after a Trial presidd over by the Governor and Council. Here the Governor was excercising Martial law delegated to him by the original charter. It was a different matter if civilians were involved.

In yet another serious incident, two white employees of the Company killed  a merchant in a Garden House. They tried to implicate the Dubash of the Merchant in the crime and escape punishment. The Governor and Council established that the men had indeed committed the crime and not the Dubas and though he was sentenced to death, the Governor commuted the punishment on the ground of jurisdiction. Without a positive regulation empowering him to carry out the death sentence, the Governor was reluctant to carry it out.

Throughout the Eighteenth century we have a number of interesting cases. Mostly the litigants who came before the mayor's court were Indian merchants who used the Court to enforce the settlement of debts and legal instruments. Disputes over carrigage of goods emanating even from Burma were settled in the Court. However, all was not well within the Institution itself/ As we have shown in an earlier Blog on Sir Strange, there was a lot of interpersonal problems among the Aldermen which could not be settled. In 1754 four aldermen--Percival, Edwards, Fairfields,and Browning compalined that their colleague, Ephrain Issac had cast serious aspersions on their professional competence and by implication their integrity. In spite of all efforts to bring about order the Governor and his Coucil failed as Ephrain insisted that as an Alderman the Local Government had no jurisdiction to try him even on a minor charge of "misdemenour'. The Report states that Ephrain was mischievous and "turbulent'.

I have given just a glimpse of the legal issues prevailing in 18th Century Madras. Problems among the "native" population were settled by the age old method of arbitration by community leaders acting under the direction of the Peddanayakkar. Breach of contracts, circulation of forged cowles/ intruments, property disputes were settled using the traditional institutions which relied on Customary Law. Towards the end of the Century, however with the establishent of the Sudder Adalat a degree of consistency was introduced.

We have not been able to determine the location of the Mayor's Court. But it was certainly within Fort St George, near the Sea Gate  and hence I have included two contemporary paintings of that are.