Courting India, page 36
The challenges that factors like Kerridge faced were great. The English merchants formed a small, tight-knit community within what was an unfamiliar land and culture. They lived, ate and prayed together, but their isolation was significantly more than imagined. An earlier letter, dated 10 March 1616, listed all the factors resident at the English houses in Surat, the joint base for Agra and Ajmer, Ahmedabad and Burhanpur. Surat, by far the largest, had seven factors and five attendants. The rest had six, five and three factors, with three, two and one attendant(s) respectively.17 Even within those small groups, factors rarely stayed together for long. Their letters record constant travel, moving from place to place in search of merchandise, and in the hope of selling the Company’s goods. The climate tested them constantly, as did diseases like the ‘bloody flux’ that plagued Roe and the actual plague that emptied Agra. ‘I could enlarge unto your Worships’, one of them wrote to the Company, apologising for the brevity of his letter, ‘but such is my unfortunateness after my travels, being troubled with a flux, overflowing of the spleen, and merciless cramp rending my veins in pieces, that I am scarce able to write six lines without intermission.’18
Living in such proximity was trying, particularly plagued as they were by illness and isolation. Minor injustices and resentments simmered, and blew up from time to time in vicious backbiting, if not actual violence. There was ‘a faction and general hatred among all your servants, few speaking well one of another, and crossing your business […] to your extreme prejudice’, Roe had reported back to the Company soon after reaching India.19 The arrival of letters and small home comforts – like the tobacco that Roe craved – was dependent on the Company ships, and never quite certain. Even then, the Company’s attempts at scrutiny caused resentment. ‘We have published your order for private letters to be sent open,’ the factors had written in their February 1617 letter. While some had agreed to comply, ‘others are of opinion they may be as safely delivered by private conveyances, which doubtless they will hazard […] rather than to be laid open to the general censure’.20 It appears that the Company also disapproved of the local terms they had fallen into the habit of using. ‘We have forbidden the several factors from writing words in this language and refrained it ourselves,’ Kerridge and the others reported, ‘though in our books of copies we fear there are many which by want of time for perusal we cannot rectify or express.’21
When dissatisfied employees ran away, like the unfortunate Jones who had become the point of contention between Roe and Khurram, it caused more trouble. William Peyton, who arrived in India on Roe’s fleet, wrote about ‘Mr. Barwick’s man, who had been inveigled to run away by a deserter from Captain Best who had turned Mahomedan, [and] was brought back from Surat on the 1st of October. Others afterwards ran away to Damaun, and wrote to their comrades to induce them to do the same.’22 Some, like the coachman Hemsell, left Company service for more lucrative jobs with local masters. The ones who remained often drowned their homesickness and worries in drink. George Pley, who was sent by the factors to Persia, would only half-jokingly scold his friend and colleague, William Bell, in a letter of May 1617: ‘Since my departure some among you have given out that I, being drunk, did lose a camel. Is it possible that they who daily swim in Bacchus bowls can so speak of others?’23
It was not as if either the Company or Kerridge and the other factors were unaware of the problems caused by the misbehaviour of their men. In a long letter written to the Company on 26 February that year, the factors had rushed to assure their employers that some accusations that had obviously reached London were groundless. ‘We wondered at the malice of such as informed you that all of us, or them that then lived here, should merit taxation of wicked and notorious livers.’ They could confirm that ‘your factors and factories in these parts are as well governed as if they lived in Fraunce or nearer you to give daily account of their actions’.24 Their main problem, they argued, was with the casual adventurers and sailors, rather than the Company-appointed factors themselves. Some of that was no doubt true. In December 1615, for instance, when Roe had just arrived in Ajmer, he had received a letter from Richard Baker, one of the Surat factors. It has an exasperated postscript: ‘Your Lordship’s page hath been much disordered since his recovery, both in and out of house. Complaints daily come to the house – quarrelling in the streets; making lecherous signs to women with his hands, of which diverse Banyans complain; running into their houses and putting his hands into their pots of meat and drink of purpose to anger them; beating our peons in house and other youths; which for your Lordship’s sake we have tolerated.’25 But Roe’s pageboy was a minor headache compared to the likes of Chaplain Leske or Bartholomew Merland. ‘By some of those gentlemen and landmen and many other disordered persons in this your fleet, our nation hath received the greatest disrepute that ever yet hath been conceived of them, as theft, drunkenness, quarrelling, mutiny and manslaughter,’ the factors told the Company. ‘We have experience of too many who, when they cannot please themselves elsewhere, their rendezvous is here […] It were very requisite that in all your commissions you ordered the stay of as few as possible and the remove of all such as are superfluous. Our troubles arising from complaints of our own people hath given us more vexation than all our other affairs.’26
Soon after the writing of that letter, they had been forced to undertake their most heavy-handed measure of control to date. Under the terms of its incorporation, the East India Company had the power to try and sentence Englishmen in its service under English laws. On 28 February 1617, the factors in Surat had to exercise that power to its fullest effect, deciding that the only suitable punishment for the actions of Gregory Lillington, a corporal on the ship James, was a sentence of death. Lillington’s list of misdemeanours was long, from ‘continual drunkenness’, insubordination and desertion of post, to threatening his commander with a pike.27 In Surat, he had created drunken havoc by ‘entering into houses of strangers and women to the disturbance and disorder of our nation’, so that Kerridge had to put him in irons in the English factory’s makeshift jail. Released with a promise of good behaviour, he had immediately taken to ‘drinking and quarrelling’ with another man, Henry Barton, until the two of them had gone into ‘the fields adjoining’ the English factory, where ‘he had, contrary to God’s peace and the King’s, slain the said Barton’. The execution of Lillington for Barton’s murder was the first instance of capital punishment inflicted on an Englishman in India, although it would not be the last. It was imposed under Captain Pepwell’s authority as the General of the fleet, through the power to impose martial law invested in him by James I. The order itself, however, was countersigned by East India Company factors, led by Thomas Kerridge.
Then there was the endless wrangling over merchandise. Figuring out what would sell back home was a challenge. At one point in 1618, a letter to the Company by the factor John Browne who was in Ahmedabad with Roe desperately mentions a new idea. He was sending the Company some fruit conserves this time, he wrote, some dried ambo or mango. ‘I cannot tell what esteeme they wilbe in England’, he admitted, ‘but here highly esteemed’.28 Figuring out what would sell in India was even worse. Roe, who had to sit through Muqarrab Khan’s well-meaning advice about the terrible quality of English merchandise, was painfully aware of that. ‘In England they think all things are rare here, and everything good enough,’ he grumbled to the factors.29 What he had been sent for the court ‘is much fitter for some poor fair’. ‘I wonder from what advice, from what judgment, this can proceed, to send hither that which only brings us scorn; knives, drink, rusty old rotten pictures, not worth one pice, coral bracelets for children, dear and unvendible, and finally horse-collars of scurf of amber, such as halalcores will not look on, and brittle glasses.’ Arriving just before Nowruz, when people were eager to buy the new English merchandise as gifts, it had made them the laughing-stock of the court and ‘the scorn of nations, so unworthy of merchants that our enemies have moved upon that advantage to turn us out’.30
The factors knew that, but their hands were tied. Repeatedly, they asked the Company to send better merchandise, in collective and individual letters, like the one that Francis Fettiplace sent in 1616: ‘This King desireth unheard of and rare things, but such as are either rich or full of cunning, good art and work, which he can as well discern from bad as we ourselves, and careth as little for things of mean value; and as is the King, so are his subjects.’31 Repeatedly, their advice was disregarded. Cheap, ill-packed goods arrived with every fleet. There is more than a little frustration in the factors’ letter to the Company of 26 February, when they pointed out, ‘The looking-glasses lose their foil, come broken and defaced, the frames also unremediable with warping crack the stands. The knives by their ill packing came so exceedingly eaten with rust as a long time it hath been two men’s endeavours to clean them.’32 They would still try to dispose of those, so long as further supply of the same kind did not spoil the market completely. Their tone is familiar, and timeless. It is the scrupulous politeness of people trying very hard in professional correspondence with superiors not to state the obvious, again: ‘wherein and whatsoever else not here mentioned our letters of the 10th March, of the 7th November, and the present, will rightly inform you what is fitting to be sent.’ In other words, the Company would have known what to send if only those in power had bothered to pay any actual attention to the paperwork that they demanded.
For the individual factors, struggling to deliver the Company’s expected returns, the pressure only served to intensify their mistrust of the native Indians who surrounded and outnumbered them. Of the cluster of letters that were being written in the English factories across western India that early summer of 1617 by Kerridge, Roe and others, one was by James Bickford, a factor resident in Ahmedabad, addressed to Sir Thomas Smythe. Bickford worried that the Company would hold his colleagues and him responsible for the poor quality of merchandise they were sending back to England. But the Company’s advice on what was to be bought was always changeable, and had come too late, and he had ended up having to compete with local buyers. The goods from England had not sold well either. ‘I cannot advise you exactly what commodities are vendible here,’ he wrote in despair, ‘Amadavad vending but little of anything.’ Bickford took out his frustration on the locals whose lack of cooperation, both as buyers and sellers, stood in the way of the profit that the Company in London expected him to make: ‘the people of this country being generally all so base, and thieves they are all from the beggar to the king, and live as fishes do in the sea; the great one[s] eat up the little; for first the farmer robs the peasant, the gentleman robs the farmer, the greater robs the lesser, and the king robs all’.33
It was a familiar image. Behind Bickford’s predictable accusations against Indians is a deeply ingrained frustration with the rich and the powerful whose roots are firmly English. We know very little about James Bickford, but men just like him would have been among the audience who watched Shakespeare’s Pericles, the story of another seafaring man, at the Globe Theatre in London in 1608/09. ‘Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea’, says a fisherman in the play. ‘Why, as men do a-land’, says another, riffing off a popular proverb to raise a knowing laugh from his audience:
the great ones eat up the
little ones: I can compare our rich misers to
nothing so fitly as to a whale; a’ plays and
tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at
last devours them all at a mouthful: such whales
have I heard on o’ the land, who never leave gaping
till they’ve swallowed the whole parish, church,
steeple, bells, and all.34
If only the king understood what was going on, they could ‘purge the land of these drones that rob the bee of her honey’, they exclaim, but that was a fantasy even within a stage play. As for Bickford himself, in 1623 the Court of the East India Company would deny him his due wages, because he stood accused of spending an unauthorised 400 rupees (£40) on clothing.35 The whales of the land were nothing if not protective of their own rights.
When Roe had first received his commission, his diplomatic Instructions from James I, mediated through the Secretary of State, Sir Ralph Winwood, had set out the terms of his appointment clearly. As James’s representative, he was reminded that he now represented his king’s ‘honour and dignity, both as we are a soveraine Prince and a professed Christian’. At the same time, he had to use all means possible ‘to advance the Trade of the East India Company’. The orders for his day-to-day work, it was made clear, came from them, and he was answerable to them as much as he was to the king. ‘We do therin referre you to such further direccions and prescripcions as you shall in that behalf at present or hereafter receive from the said Companie,’ his Instructions noted, ‘from which, either towardes the persons of their factors or their Goodes, you are in no wise to digresse, as you will answeare the Contrarie at your perill.’36 On the surface, then, the challenge that Roe faced was of having two masters. He had to deliver the Company’s trading interests on the one hand, and represent James I and England in his ambassadorial capacity on the other. Roe’s understanding of that dual position marks his actions every time he gripes at the English factors, or bristles at a perceived slight at the Mughal court.37
Yet the reality was that the interests of the English Crown and the Company were fairly closely aligned, even if they did not always see eye to eye. Prominent members of the East India Company were also powerful figures within the state, some directly as privy councillors or members of parliament, others through their financial power and networks of connections. James I and Charles I freely accepted cash gifts and loans from the Company, even if they both encroached on the Company’s business occasionally by encouraging other speculative trade ventures in Asia. When it came to negotiating England’s position in the wider world, as Roe’s own career shows, trade and politics shared innumerable links, from the deeply personal incentives that drove individual figures caught up in those transactions, to the larger arguments of ‘public weal’ and national interest.
Even though it had its own challenges, therefore, Roe’s problem was not so much that duality of his employment, as it was the fractures within the institutions that employed him. His frustration with the way in which his own authority had been circumscribed by the Company was compounded by the fact that exactly the same frustration was stirring up discontent in others as well. Kerridge and Captain Pepwell were equally convinced that they were being denied the authority that would allow them to function effectively. ‘If the General command all, the factor is discouraged,’ Roe informed his mentor, patron and ‘civil father’, Sir Thomas Smythe, in a private letter, while ‘if the factor be absolute, he of the first port [the chief factor] may wrong all others and disfurnish the accomplishment of the voyage, which this commander complains of.’38
The Company’s strategy of controlling their employees by dispersing authority and encouraging mutual surveillance made matters worse. Generals of the fleets, like Keeling and Pepwell, were either suspected of working hand-in-hand with the factors, or complained that the factors did not recognise their authority. Roe did the same, scrupulously poring over the accounts sent to him by the factors and pulling them up for any evidence of suspected wrongdoing. Among the many grievances that he put to the factors, for instance, is his complaint that they had been spending excessive amounts on medicine. Medical treatment ‘must needs be allowed all men whom God chastens, but if it be spent upon voluptuousness under that colour, I account it an extreme abuse’. He had heard that the Burhanpur factor, Lawrence Waldoe, had spent 180 rupees for thrice-weekly sandalwood baths. Sandalwood was often prescribed in traditional Indian medicine, but was the scale of this treatment really necessary? ‘I assure you, howsoever, it is more by 160 than I have spent since my arrival’, he wrote, ‘and I know I have had more cause […]. But he is gone home, and it is too late to examine it or to advise home; else, I assure you, I would some way for example have called it in question.’39
By this point in his embassy, however, Roe was beginning to suspect that the strategy was intentional, and designed by the Company to prevent exactly the collusion and undercutting they feared. ‘It shall be the better for you if we wrangle’, he observed, ‘so you shall be sure it will procure wariness, and care by emulation.’ His role was to allow the dissension to continue, without allowing it to get out of hand. It is hard not to hear in this an echo of his fellow Inns of Court man, Sir Francis Bacon, who, in the middle of one of James I’s many wrangles with his English subjects, had advised the king that the ‘cunning maxim of “Separa et impera” [divide and rule]’ might be better used to control his subjects’ dissatisfactions, ‘which would have been more dangerous, if it had gone out by little and little’.40 Various manifestations of that inherited strategy would radically shape the fortunes of India under British rule in years to come.
