October 24, 2014
Lord Cornwallis has gotten a bum rap in America. He was a gifted troubleshooter who implemented a more streamlined, sustainable version of British power, so that London could emerge triumphant and dominant on the global stage after 1815.
IN ONE memorable scene in the Hollywood spectacular The Patriot, Lord Cornwallis, the corpulent, pompous, preening servant of King George III, unleashes a volley of abuse at his subordinates. He denounces them for their inability to deal with the “farmers with pitchforks” (Mel Gibson among their ranks) who comprise the American revolutionary forces. Cornwallis himself appears more concerned about the whereabouts of his dogs (gifts from the king that had been kidnapped by the insurgents) and his tailored coat and tails (held up at sea because of the need to send rearmaments instead) than about his own men. In sum, the old boy is the epitome of ancien régime loucheness and absurdity—part villain, part bumbling buffoon.
The movie’s depiction taps into a familiar vein of hostility toward him—every American schoolchild knows that 1st Marquess Cornwallis was sent by George III to snuff out the American Revolution, and that his surrender to George Washington at Yorktown on October 19, 1781, effectively signaled the end of the Revolutionary War. As Cornwallis sailed back to the Old World, the ideas of the Declaration of Independence were realized, signaling America’s birth into nationhood and its successful struggle for freedom, which would make it a beacon for many others in the world. There the tale ends.
Or does it? To dismiss Cornwallis so thoroughly comes at the expense of the next quarter century of his life—a panoramic and fascinating career that took him to India, Ireland, France and India again, in a series of bloody sagas, all of which were of world-historical significance. It also saw him play an integral part in setting the foundations for British global power for the next century and allowing Britain to recover from a defeat in America that many feared would be catastrophic—and perhaps even the beginning of the end.
It is not that Cornwallis has been misunderstood, or even so much that he has been caricatured. It is that his life has been strangely neglected. In this regard, the scant attention he has received from British historians is a more important factor than any vilification he has suffered in the United States. Despite being one of Britain’s most important generals—and certainly one of the most politically able—he has no great, iconic victories to his name. Later contemporaries such as the Duke of Wellington or Admiral Nelson have tended to steal his thunder in terms of martial glory. And despite his accomplishments as a statesman, too, he is often relegated to the role of supporting cast in the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The British public prefers the swashbuckling heroes of the period. British academics, meanwhile, are much more taken with the leaders, intellectuals or ideologues—the William Pitts, Edmund Burkes and Thomas Paines. Cornwallis seems to fall between two stools in the historical imagination.
Those interested in the various phases of Cornwallis’s life are still best served by the three-volume edition of his correspondence that was edited by Charles Ross and published in 1859. No British historian has ever attempted a comprehensive biography. The likelihood of this changing has actually decreased because of the way the historical profession has been increasingly divided into fields of domestic, foreign and imperial history—categories which would have made no sense to those who lived in Cornwallis’s era but which the aspiring historian of today is expected to operate within. The last sustained discussion of Cornwallis’s life was provided by an American couple, Franklin and Mary Wickwire, whose 1970 volume Cornwallis: The American Adventure was followed ten years later by Cornwallis: The Imperial Years, a sturdy examination of his career after the Revolutionary War. More recently, Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy gave him a sympathetic treatment in his award-winning 2013 book, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. O’Shaughnessy suggests that he enjoyed the most successful postwar career of any of the British generals who served in America.
Yet these efforts go against the tide. As William Anthony Hay noted in hisNational Interest review of O’Shaughnessy’s book, “British historians neglected a defeat that complicated the story of their country’s rise to imperial greatness, while Americans operated within the prejudices and assumptions of nineteenth-century patriotic writers.”
So the man who lost America (despite doing a better job than all of his predecessors), secured India for the British Empire, defeated the Irish Rebellion and briefly made peace with Napoleon is in danger of slipping off the historical radar as a result of Yorktown.
This is not to say that Cornwallis was some sort of undiscovered military or strategic genius, whom historians have denigrated unfairly. But the longevity of his career, the breadth of his experience and the lessons he learned along the way do provide some useful historical instruction—not least his ability to learn from the mistakes made in one politico-military theater and apply them in a different one. One need not conjure up a staunchly revisionist version of Cornwallis as a hero, then, in order to have reason to reconsider his career. The case for Cornwallis is simple: he presided over the stabilization of the British Empire after its greatest defeat, combined minute military maneuvers with a broader political objective, and wove together tactics and strategy. That he saw British power in operation firsthand across its various global fronts—and was able to reflect on the weaknesses and strengths of the British global system—is perhaps less relevant to modern British strategists, who are dealing with a rather more trim model these days. But it may just spark some interest among theorists of American power in the twenty-first century, still struggling with the implications of American empire, and hoping to create a sustainable version of global power.
CHARLES CORNWALLIS was born the sixth child and first son of Earl Cornwallis in London on New Year’s Eve in 1738. He studied at Eton College, then Cambridge University, before seeking a military education on the Continent. He began by receiving tutelage under a senior Prussian officer and then moved to the respected military academy at Turin. He first saw action fighting for the defense of Hanover, the German protectorate of the British royal family, and fought as a volunteer in the army of Frederick the Great of Prussia during the Seven Years’ War. In 1759, he received a commission as captain and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel before the age of twenty-two.
The Cornwallis family had made its name and fortune through unstinting loyalty to the Crown over previous centuries. Yet it was not uncritical of the monarchy and leaned toward the Whig side in politics. Cornwallis took up his father’s earldom in 1762, meaning that he sat in the House of Lords and maintained a close interest in matters of state as his military career developed. He sided with a group called the “Rockinghamite Whigs,” a powerful opposition faction led by the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham. It was as a spokesman for this group that Edmund Burke made his name. On two of the defining issues of the mid-eighteenth century, the Rockinghamites were known for their opposition to George III and his government. The first was the trial of John Wilkes, a radical MP and journalist prosecuted for sedition by the government, something the Rockinghamites regarded as a tyrannical abuse of royal authority. The second was their condemnation of the Stamp Act of 1765, a direct tax imposed by England on newspapers in the American colonies, which was fiercely opposed by the colonists.
Cornwallis’s opposition to the government’s American policy was well known to George III before the war broke out in 1775. Nonetheless, as a career soldier, he offered his services to the king and was entrusted with a senior command, arriving in Cape Fear River in North Carolina in May 1776. Cornwallis was initially reluctant to condemn his superiors, Sir Henry Clinton and Sir William Howe, though their mistakes had given the revolutionaries the early impetus. The Wickwires go so far as to claim that, had Cornwallis arrived in America sooner, Washington may have been defeated—perhaps even “crushed.” This is a moot point, however. Cornwallis made colossal errors of his own, such as his failure to capitalize on his victory at the Second Battle of Trenton, where Washington escaped under the cover of darkness. Despite some of Cornwallis’s notable successes, such as his victory at the Battle of Brandywine in September 1777, Washington generally got the better of him in their encounters—culminating at Yorktown in October 1781.
FOR CORNWALLIS, the lessons of the American experience were as much political as they were military. The war had been caused by bad policy, and bad policy had made it extremely difficult to fight effectively. While the British won most of the conventional military engagements, they were operating in a hostile environment, partly of their making. Their local allies—the loyalist militias—were not only hapless on the field; their reckless behavior helped to create a growing number of irreconcilables to swell the revolutionaries’ ranks.
In trying to restore authority by cannon and sword, then, Cornwallis and his men were trying to fight their way back into a political game that had already been lost. The first lesson—as a growing number of British parliamentarians were prepared to say—was that an aggressive and overbearing version of governance on the periphery of the empire was unsustainable, and ultimately contrary to British interests. This was doubly important because of the way in which imperial overstretch was punished by other European states engaged in a broader geopolitical game with Britain. France’s involvement in America was a case in point.
Cornwallis did not, however, suddenly become a critic of imperialism or empire per se. Indeed, he was among the most effective of all British empire builders. Defeat in 1781, while hard to take, was not met with despair or capitulation. Notably, Cornwallis did his best to steer clear of the recriminations in which other senior generals engaged. More important was the fact that he began to develop a more refined and thoughtful vision of what forms of British power worked efficaciously overseas in other portions of the empire—how to combine co-option and diplomacy with the tools of compulsion, and how to avoid the stretching of military capabilities on the fringes of the empire in a way that played into the hands of more serious rivals closer to home.
In this, he recognized that the spheres of domestic and foreign policy were indivisible. It was no coincidence, to men like Cornwallis, that Britain’s defeat in America had followed a particularly shabby period in domestic politics. In November 1781, for example, Marquess Rockingham linked the defeat at Yorktown to the personalistic system of government under George III—“a proscriptive system, a system of favoritism and secret government.” A few years before, in 1776, Edward Gibbon had warned in the first volume of hisHistory of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that it was not only external enemies but also the creep of decadence, and the diminution of virtue, that had led to Rome’s fall to the barbarians. In Parliament, Edmund Burke hounded the former governor-general of India, Warren Hastings, eventually instituting impeachment proceedings against him. This, in turn, provoked a wider debate about the pace at which the empire was expanding and the moral and military price that such expansionism entailed.
The gangrene in the domestic political system and the undermining of British authority overseas were two sides of the same coin. Inevitably, in the wake of the American debacle, attentions turned again to India, the jewel of the empire, where the East India Company—through which Britain governed the country—was mired in allegations of cronyism and corruption.
In 1786, after turning down two previous offers, Cornwallis was appointed as the new colonial governor-general in Bengal. For the prime minister, William Pitt, Cornwallis was a sort of eighteenth-century “special envoy” whose job was to clean up Indian governance, stabilize the country and protect British interests. It was his personal reputation for probity that had made him so attractive to the government, as the “salvation of our dying interests in Asia.” These were the words of Pitt’s close ally Henry Dundas, who also described Cornwallis’s purist credentials in memorable terms: “Here was no avarice to be gratified. Here was no beggardly mushroom kindred to be provided for—no crew of hungry followers gaping to be gorged.”
Lest there be any ambiguity, it should be made clear that Cornwallis’s record in India is no model for American foreign policy. Ultimately, this was still raw imperialism, predicated—when one scratches below the surface—on a sense of racial superiority. While Cornwallis gave a nod to the idea that Indian self-government was the ultimate end—and that “rational liberty makes peoples virtuous”—he believed that the local population was far from reaching that stage. His case was simpler: he believed the Hindu population would rather be governed by the British than the Mughal emperors. A similar logic had operated in America, in fact. As Maya Jasanoff observes in Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, the British had offered black slaves freedom in return for joining the loyalist forces. At Yorktown, Cornwallis’s ranks had been swelled by some of Thomas Jefferson’s own slaves. After defeat, he had sought to guarantee an amnesty for natives of Virginia fighting on his side, only for Washington to refuse.
Cornwallis’s approach in India also had a hard military edge. In this respect, he had learned another lesson from America that he exported to India—the need for unity of purpose between the military and political strands. His one precondition for taking up the post of governor-general was that he would also be appointed commander in chief. In fact, Pitt passed an Act of Parliament to change the rules specifically for this purpose. Furthermore, when it came to dealing with irreconcilables, Cornwallis quickly decided that his preferred method—of co-option of local power brokers—had its limits. This led him into a series of military actions against the Tipu Sultan, ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore, in the Third Mysore War (1789–1792), in which he pioneered the use of elephants to move artillery.
Britain’s sensitivity about preventing disorder in India had been heightened by the effects of the recent French Revolution, which raised the prospect of a potential war with France. Nonetheless, Cornwallis’s main interest was the stabilization, rather than further expansion, of the empire. The practical consequences of overstretch—not least the difficulties of supplying troops scattered in faraway regions—had been impressed upon him by the American experience. As one of the directors of the East India Company had put it, “The wider British dominion in India spread, the more vulnerable it becomes.” When he did eventually defeat the sultan, then, Cornwallis avoided imposing overly punitive terms—and eschewed interest in setting up “some miserable pageant of our own, to be supported by the Company’s troops and treasures, and to be plundered by its servants.”
In The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Piers Brendon elegantly describes the two sides of Cornwallis’s “fatherly governance” in India. On the one hand, he regulated the legal system and brought a kind of “Roman order,” earning him the moniker “the Justinian of India.” He also governed in a consciously more humane fashion, modernizing the civil administration and suppressing child slavery. On the other hand, he used the Indian princes in a “ruthless game of realpolitik” and acknowledged the murkier aspects of colonial governance. As he wrote in one letter back to London, in the weary tones that characterize much of his correspondence, “There is scarcely a man to be found who has held any office of consequence, that has not been driven to make money in a manner which he ought to be ashamed of.”
HAVING LOST his wife in 1779—and much of his enthusiasm for life—Cornwallis approached his duties with a growing distaste for politicking and jobbery. That said, his soldierly distaste for dirty tactics did not blind him to their necessity. By the time he left India in 1794, he was ready for a quiet life with a government pension. To his chagrin, his reputation as a fixer of complex politico-military problems where British interests were under threat was now higher than anyone else’s.
It was to Ireland, on the brink of rebellion and civil war, and expecting a French invasion at any moment, that he was sent next. Once again, Prime Minister Pitt had been forced to ask him to accept the offer of the Lord Lieutenancy (essentially the same position as that of governor-general) three times. Once again, he sought assurances that he would have full military and political command. It was only in May 1798, when the long-expected Irish Rebellion eventually broke out, that Cornwallis finally relented, grumbling and complaining every step of the way.
The day Cornwallis was sworn in, June 21, 1798, insurgents in Wexford were defeated decisively in the famous Battle of Vinegar Hill, near Enniscorthy, marking a turning point in the rebellion. Government forces now had the upper hand, but, as Cornwallis observed from Dublin Castle, the country was “streaming with blood.” As in America, he lay much of the blame on loyalist forces who were “more numerous and powerful, and a thousand times more ferocious.” He was shocked above all by the brutality of the counterinsurgency, complaining that “the only engines of government were the bayonet, the torch and the cat o’ nine tails.”
He wrote despairingly:
The conversation of the principal persons of the country all tends to encourage the system of blood, and the conversation even at my table, where you will suppose I do all I can to prevent it, always turns on hanging, shooting, burning, &c, &c, and if a [Catholic] priest has been put to death, the greatest joy is expressed by the whole company. So much for Ireland and my wretched situation.
The first and most important thing Cornwallis did in Ireland was to rein in the loyalists and bring an end to the “numberless murders which are hourly committed by our people without any process or examination whatever.” He still executed many of the ringleaders of the rebellion who had conspired directly with the French, but he was also known for his leniency when dealing with the rank and file—meaning that he faced censure from loyalists for being too weak.
The second aspect of his approach, in cooperation with William Pitt and the young chief secretary of Ireland, Lord Castlereagh, was to recognize that the whole system of Irish governance was faulty. These three men shared the view that the greatest enemy to stability in Ireland came from the privileged members of the colonial elite and their unwillingness to reform Irish governance. “The patriotic Irish gentlemen who are so enraged at the insolent interference of England in the management of their affairs,” Cornwallis remarked disdainfully, “if they ever dare to go to their country-houses, barricade their ground-floor, and beg for a garrison of English Militia or Scottish Fencibles.”
Thus, Cornwallis and his allies attempted nothing less than their own revolution in Irish affairs—the aims of which were never fully realized but which were to change the course of Irish history forever. The first step was to abolish the old Irish colonial parliament through an Act of Union between Britain and Ireland, which came into being in 1801. The second part of the policy was more ambitious. It was to consummate the Act of Union with an Act of Catholic Emancipation by which Irish Catholics—the vast majority of the population—would be allowed to participate fully in the newly constituted political system for the first time.
Notably, it was the hawks in the British cabinet—concerned above all with the need to prosecute the war with France—who were foremost in making the case for political equality in Ireland. Napoleon’s forces had already made three attempts to land in Ireland between 1796 and 1798, hoping to take advantage of Irish discontent. Put plainly, it was a grave threat to British national security that a large section of the Irish population felt alienated from the state. “Holding Ireland on our present tenure,” said Cornwallis, “how are we to make head against all Europe leagued for our destruction?”
Modern theorists of security studies might categorize such an approach as one of “smart power.” The novelist Sir Walter Scott, later reflecting on the career of Cornwallis and those who took their lead from him, had perhaps a better name for it: “Common sense.”
How ironic, then, that it was King George III who exploded in anger when he learned that Pitt was planning an Act of Catholic Emancipation to win Irish loyalty! The king believed such an act contradicted his Coronation Oath to uphold the Protestant constitution of Britain—and, worse still, a reward for the disloyalty shown by the Irish. And so, in the midst of the war with Napoleon, George III vetoed the measure and forced Pitt, Cornwallis and Castlereagh to resign. “It is too mortifying a reflexion—when all the difficulties were surmounted . . . that the fatal blow should be struck from that quarter most interested to avert it, and that Ireland is again to become a millstone about the neck of Britain, and to be plunged into all its former horrors and miseries,” remarked a deflated Cornwallis, defeated once again by the dunderheaded policies of George III.
DESPITE HIS hope that he would then be allowed to retire, Cornwallis’s career was not quite over yet. In 1802, he was sent as a plenipotentiary to France to negotiate with Napoleon and signed the short-lived Treaty of Amiens—the subsequent collapse of which he could not have prevented. In 1805, when Pitt returned to office, he appointed Cornwallis as governor-general of India once again, with a mandate to curb the expansionist campaigns of his predecessor in the post—Lord Wellesley, the older brother of the future Duke of Wellington. But his tenure was short-lived. Just three months after arriving, he caught a fever and died at Ghazipur on the Ganges, where he was buried. His epitaph did not mention his time in America.
In Cornwallis we do not have a Marlborough or a Wellington. His career was bookended by the defeat at Yorktown and the failed Treaty of Amiens. He did not die gloriously in battle, but instead faded out of view at the end of a long and complicated career in which he had grown ever more disillusioned. His bold vision of religious equality in Ireland may, some argue, have “solved” the Irish question, but it remained just that—a vision.
Nonetheless, while Cornwallis could boast few spectacular “victories,” he did have achievements to his name that stood the test of time. For one thing, he stabilized Britain’s international standing after Yorktown. He used the American lesson to identify—and begin to eradicate—the self-defeating features of the British global system. Cornwallis was the troubleshooter who implemented a more streamlined and more sustainable version of British power, steering it away from energy-sapping conflicts on its periphery, so that it could emerge triumphant and dominant on the global stage after 1815. Rather than simple retrenchment, this was an achievement of rebalancing, which aimed at “grand bargains” but also recognized the need to use power selectively but decisively.
Cornwallis’s willingness to learn from his own mistakes and those of others was another feature of his creed. He developed a coherent sense of what might be called “grand strategy,” but this never constituted a tactical blueprint—what had worked in India would not necessarily work in Ireland. It is hard to imagine a modern “special envoy” combining military and political command in the way that Cornwallis did, but his insistence that these strands needed to operate in harmony is a lesson we repeatedly seem to have to relearn. There were also more subtle strains to his thinking—such as his ability to combine diplomacy with force, and his capacity to distinguish between constructive co-option and counterproductive corruption. One might also remark on his ability to distinguish between vested interests and the national interest, and on his recognition of the need for internal political harmony as a precondition of external security. Beyond that, the modern parallels should probably stop; few these days would have the stomach for the techniques of late eighteenth-century counterinsurgency, as applied in Ireland in 1798 (even those willing to countenance waterboarding in the twenty-first century).
The lessons, if there are any, are bigger than one man. Nonetheless, the longevity of Cornwallis’s career, and the existence of both successes and failures in it, says something about the business of great-power politics—a game in which patience is a virtue, “solutions” are often elusive and victories sometimes identifiable only in hindsight, and in which one is sometimes forced to court the people one would prefer to repudiate, both at home and abroad.
In closing, perhaps one final word on George III is merited, to whom Cornwallis was unfailingly loyal, but by whom he was periodically exasperated. Many years later, in 1945, Britain’s recently appointed Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, the Labour Party’s most ferocious cold warrior, entertained a delegation of American trade unionists at the Foreign Office. As the meeting began, one of the Americans asked: “What do you have a picture of that son-of-a-bitch there for?” Surprised by the question, Bevin turned around to see a portrait of George III, only to snap back: “If it hadn’t been for that son-of-a-bitch, you would still be a part of the British Empire.” If he could have been present, Cornwallis might well have been inclined to agree.
John Bew is a reader in the War Studies Department at King’s College London and director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence. He was the 2013–2014 Henry A. Kissinger Chair at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. He is the author of Castlereagh: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2012) and the forthcoming Realpolitik: A History (Oxford University Press, 2015).
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