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.

The Statue of General James Smith-Neill and its Removal in Madras

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The recent flurry of activity all over the Western World, particularly in USA and UK, surrounding the sudden discovery that many of the heros of the Western World had a different history in pats of the conquered non white world. This demarcation between White and non White world is absolute an race was indeed the foundation of the ideology that sustained domination and conquest. For over foue hundred years Asia and Africa were subjected to untold horror--Slavery, Cultural Subversion, Racial oppression--among others and the result of western hegemony was the degradation of a whole segmen of Humanity. Unfortunately the so called "post colonial" "social science and literary theory' informed "scholars" do great harm by completely neglecting the real issues at hand and diverting their attemtion to Ideology, Identity and Imagination. Human suffering cannot become a mere discourse, a trick of language as it has in recent works. I recently read a book about the Religious policies of the Portuguese in Goa and there was no mention of the Inqusition that claimed more than 55.000 lives and was endend only due to the pressure from the East India Company Administration in Bimbay. History has to engage with truth and Memory and cannot we cannot erase the horrors of the past by resorting to censorship of public memory, It is a very cheap way of sanatizing History. The example I have chosen is the Memory of one of the most brutal Generals of the East India Company, General James Smith-Neill (1810-1857.

The Statue of General Neill standing on Mount Road, Madras

The photograph on the left is of the statue as it stood on Mount Road (now Anna Salai). The statue was inaugurated by Lord Harris, the Governor of Madras to honour the memory of James Neill who was killed on September 25 th 1857 just as he was reconquering the city of lucknow for the British from the hands of the Indian soldiers who had rebelled against the Company. The record of General Neill as a soldier is horrendous and by contemporary standards he would be quite honsstly called a "war criminal" But the English in their time saw him as an avenger who retored the dignity of the White Race and chaistised the rebels for the crime of killing women and children at Bibighar. Kanpur or Cawnpore as it was spelt in the days of the Raj.

The Uprising of 1857 remains a very contentious subject till this day in India. For one thing the Rebellion was crushed using Soldiers from Punjab, Madras and Nepal a fact that Indian historians have to expalain away in order to sustain the narrative of a Grand Revolt. The British reponse was brutal i the extrme and General Neill exemplied the Terror Tactics deployed by Lord Cannng and his Military to beat down the Indians. Neil may have been a hero to the Raj but he is certainly no hero to his victims. The question is: Does removing his statue really an act of retribution or does it play int the hands of such monsters whose record of horror is very son forgotten. Neill must be remembered for his atrocities. But today he is forgotten and Indian Historians do not even mention them. I am the only Historian who has catalogued the crimes of Heneral Neill as part of my contribution to the Commemoration f the 150th Anniversary of the Mutiny. History has the task of Memoria or remembering the past. not censoring it for the sake of virtue signaling.

James Neill reached Allahabad almost straight from the Crimean War where his unit was posted and he participated in the attack on Sebastapol. From Allahabad he marched the Madras Fussiliers toKanpur and this march was marked by brutality. Suspected rebels were rounded up and hanged without any remorse. Indian vilages were set abalze to terrorize the native population. Women and childen were not spared and it was just blood and gore all the way from Allahabad to Kanpur and thence to Lucknow. The extreme brutality of Neil's March to Lucknow is seen as revenge for the Bibighar massacre in which a Muslim butcher acting on the instigation of his lover killed the women and children who had escaped from Lucknow under the safe passage granted by the rebel leader Nana Saheb. There is absolutely no evidence to show  that Nana Sabeb was either involved in or was even aware of the event. But in the public memory of the English, Nana Saheb was Satan incarnate. On 25th September General Neill was killed by a sniper as he was entering Alam Bagh.

General Neill.'s unmarked Grave in Lucknow

General Neill was burried in an unmaked grave and the exact lcation is still a mystery and that was to protect his remains from being vandalized by his victims. The photograph on the left is the only photo showing the grave but its identification is still controversial. The Memorial set up to honour the dead of the bibighar Massacre was torn apart in 1947 soon after Independence, ninety years after the event itself. With such deep imprint, politicians and organizers of populist movements like the Black Live Matter movement have to tread cautiously.

For several decades the statue of General Neill occupied the very strategic location outside the Spencers' and on Mount Road. Severl visitors have remarked without a trace of irony about the salience and relevance of General Neill. But the advent of Nationalism changed the narrative. The blue eyed boys of the Raj became the villiams of the Indians who were keen to reinscribe themselves in History by claiming the great force of Nationalism, And Gandhi endorsed the idea in his own confused and inarticulate way: He said that the removal of the statue will not cure the "disease" it will alleviate the "agony" and "point the way to reachig the disease". How the removal of a statue will achieve all this Gandhis does not elaborate. But in his typical style of using exaggeraed and expansive hyperbole, he lit the fire. And it caught on.

The Neill Satyagraha in which the hret leader Kamaraj cut his political teeth was the first salvo for freedom fired in Madras which was slipping into an abyss even as this agitation unfolded. In 1937 Rajagopalachari had the Statue removed and today it stands as a museum piece in the Egmore Museum.

Mathew Noble cast two identical statues. The other one stands in Ayr, Scotland and it is on the list of statues whose removal has been deaded by the radical groips in UK. A question that we in India can legitimately ask: Who owns the Past the Pepetrators or their Victims

John Bruce: From Armagon to Madras Historical Explanation and Realities

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The East India Company, for all its notoriety, well deserved or imputed by the hind sight of History, was indeed a global trading organization with the capability to raise Capital, outfit ships and undertake perilous voyages across the world in quest of pepper, cloves and other condiment. Sitting in their palatial rooms in Leadenhall Street the Directors lorded over a large maritme empire beset with all the problems that commercial enterprises face: supply chain impedimants, rivals in competition, local adventurers out to make a quick killing, political instability and a host of other challenges. From 1600 when the Company was chartered by Queen Elizaben to 1708 when the united Company was formed to the abolition of the East India Company in 1858 was charecterized by momentous events that needed a faithful chronicler and for the first phase of its History, the Company found one in John Bruce (1745-1826).

Headquarters of the East India Company, London

John Bruce along with Rober Orme were the only two official Historiographers of the East India Company. Both were Scots and both were appointed by Henry Dundas, the Earl of Melville, the unofficial Tsar of "india Interests."Henry Dundas has been accused f favoring his fellow Scots in app  political conflicts over the Constitution, Conduct and Character of the East India Company. And the influence of Adam Smith in the field of Political Economy added intellectual strength to the crtics of the Company who wanted the East India Company to be stripped of its trede privileges, particularly the monopoly over the India Trade. And with Lord Macartney.s visit to China, the trade over China as well. To deal with the political, leagal and commercial challenges, Henry Dundas created the Office of the Historiographer whose job was to provide public defenses of Company Conduct and Character as demanded from time to time. John Bruce did his job in an admirable fashion and his work is still worth reading. His prose is rather poor while his subordiante at Leadenhall, Charles Lamb was certainly a superb essayist, Bruce wrote a heavy turgid bureaucratic prose but regnant with facts and details which makes his Annals of the Honourable East India Company published in 1810 valuable. He had at his disposal two assets:Lemon, his assistant and a veritable treasure trove of primary records under his custody. And from the sources under his custody John Bruce created a narrtive that stretched from the creation of the East India Company to the merger of the London Merchant company in 1708 and beyond almost till the Battle of Plassey, 1757.

The Board Room

The character of the East India Company bafflesd contemporaries even as it continues to facinate contemporaries. Was it a "sovereign" power? Was it a Military Power? Was it an exclusive trading Power with monopoly over the most lucrative market of the contemporary world, India? And so on. The Annals is as its name suggests, an annual yearly record of the "transactions" of the  Company both at the London end as well as the commercial end'. Based on the Reports sent to the Headquarters and the Correspondence with the factors of the Company John Bruce strings his narrative along. A minute eye for detail makes the Annals a fascinating work. My question here is simple: How does John Bruce account for the establishment of Madras. What context does he give for the momentous decision and how does he explain the shifys in Company strategies and policies towards India in general and the Coromandl coast in particular.

A feature of John Bruce's metodology is to place that East India Company squarely in a global context, a Wheels of Commerce method in the early nineteenth century. The earliest settlement of the Company was the Presidency of Surat which commanded the trade of India and even sought to enter Persia. Here the Company faced local hostility in spite of the favorable response from the Mughal Emperor Jehangir, opposition from the Dutch and resistance from the Portuguese. Hormuz held by the Portuguese wa the prize both sought. The polical climate not being conducive toward English interests, the Company established a second settlement in Masulipattinam in 1614' Once again ill luck followed the Company as the local Nayaka who was favorably disposed towards the East India Company was defeated by the Sultan of Golconda. The reason for the shift to the West coast as we can glean from the Records provided by John Bruce is clear: the callioe of the East coast had a market in Bantam, Sumatra and that invstment alone could finance the acquisition of Spices without the need for the outflow of any bullion from the Cmpany. The Dutch, in spite of the alliance in Europe through the Treaty of 1619 were in no mood to accomodate English interests and in 1623 the Amboyna Massacre made the situation difficult for the Company which had to fall back on the Coromandel Coast. With Masulipatinam abandoned, the Company set up another settlement in Armagon but here again difficulties in procuring the trading commodities prevented the Company from establishing itself. The Raja of Tanjore offered a site but bythenFrancis Day and Cogan had identifed Madras and in 1639 the Company formally took possession of the strip of Coastline on which they built the Fort later called Fort St. George.

John Bruce in spite of the distance and lack of documents embodying diverse perspectives constructed a good account of the vissistitudes of fortunes.