The Honourable Company. John Keay
Keeling in 1614 with a supervisory authority to appoint regional Agents, later known as Presidents or Governors. A year later, with encouraging news of Best’s activities at Surat, the Company judged the time right to step up its investment in India; and to match Portuguese influence there, the directors hit on the idea of appealing to King James to appoint an ambassador to the court of Jehangir. This was a novel departure, especially in the context of oriental diplomacy which scarcely recognized commerce as a legitimate reason for accreditation. It seemed sensible enough, though, to King James, especially when the Company volunteered to meet all the ambassadorial expenses. Accordingly, armed with suitable presents and a long list of demands, in 1615 Sir Thomas Roe sailed for Surat. It was, according to most accounts, ‘the turning point in the history of the British in Western India’ and ‘a landmark in the relations between England and India’.
For once the directors had broken their resolution to consort only with ‘men of their own quality’. Roe, a courtier, diplomat and sometime Member of Parliament, described himself as ‘a man of quality’ which, as he proceeded to demonstrate, was a very different thing. When the Governor of Surat received him sitting down and advised him of the usual customs inspection and body search, Roe simply gathered up his entourage and returned to the fleet. Clearly the Indians did ‘not sufficiently understand the rights belonging to my qualitye’; for ‘my king’s honour was engaged more deeply than I did expect and I was resolved to rectifye all or lay my life and fortune both in the ground’. Too many money-grubbing factors – like Hawkins – had been posing as ambassadors. Roe had to make the difference in ‘quality’ plain. He saw his job as ‘repayring a ruined house and making streight that which was crooked’ by, in both speech and conduct, conveying an altogether more exalted and dignified impression of English society and sovereignty. He would make no secret of his contempt for India; it was ‘the dullest, basest place that ever I saw and maketh me weary of speaking of it’. Nor would he brook any nonsense from Moghul officials who ‘triumph over such as yield but are humble enough when they are held up’.
In such utterances there is more than a hint of that distasteful conviction of moral superiority which would one day characterize imperialistic jingo. And perhaps some sense of affinity with Roe explains the enormous importance attached to his mission in later accounts of British beginnings in India. But Roe’s posturing was based on ‘quality’ and class consciousness, not colour and race consciousness. If he was scathing about Jehangir’s subordinates he was no less disdainful of the English factors. In Gujarat, as at Bantam, representatives of the different Company voyages had been quarrelling. Roe was expected to act as peacemaker. In the event it was the universal distrust of his motives and conduct, plus the death of Aldworth (after two years of dysentery he was described as ‘more like an anatomy than a man’), which did most to unite the factors.
With matters of protocol at Surat still unresolved, Roe proceeded inland with a growing list of complaints to lay before the Emperor plus the terms of a rather one-sided treaty of trade and friendship which he hoped to persuade the Emperor to sign. His sobriety and high principles created a favourable impression. Jehangir ‘had never used any ambassadour with so much respect’, he reported. Aloof to the point of priggishness he shunned any imperial camaraderie that might prejudice his own dignity and proved more than a match for the Portuguese representatives. But during three long and weary years at court he failed to secure the desired treaty, he further alienated most of the Company’s factors, and he very nearly sabotaged the one encouraging development of the period. When his term of office ended he was generously applauded by both King and Company but it is significant that a successor was never sought and indeed Roe himself advised against it. ‘My qualitye either begets you enemies or suffers unworthily’, he told the directors; a consul on 1000 rupees a year ‘will serve you better than ten ambassadours’. Jehangir opposed any treaty that would impose limitations on his autocratic behaviour, and his court was no place for a selfless public servant; ‘no conversation,’ moaned Roe, ‘…no such entertainment as my qualitye requireth’.
In matters of trade the Ambassador’s commission forbade him to interfere with the English factors. Although he eventually prevailed on the Company to change this, and although he frequently expressed his commercial opinons with much cogency, they were neither consistent nor convincing. The man who is often credited with having established the Company’s affairs in India on a sound commercial basis in fact condemned what he called ‘the errour of factories’, advised against opening trade with Bengal and Sind (although he had at first favoured both and, from Masulipatnam, Antheuniss was strongly urging the case of Bengal) and took the gloomiest possible view of future prospects. Because English exports, other than bullion, were not in great demand in India, the trade ‘must fall to the ground by the weakness of its own legs’. ‘I hope not in success but I would not the failing were on my part’. At one point he was all for abandoning Surat as the main English port, at another he was asking for permission to build a fort there. Yet, in an oft quoted and supposedly prophetic passage, he strongly advised against fortified settlements. ‘If he [Prince Kurram, the future Shah Jehan] would offer me ten I would not accept one…for without controversy it is an errour to affect garrisons and land warrs in India’. He was thinking of the Portuguese whose ‘many rich residences and territoryes’ were the ‘beggering’ of their trade. ‘Lett this be received as a rule, that if you will profitt, seek it at sea and in quiett trade.’
This quiet maritime trade was, however, to include gratuitous assaults on both Moghul and Portuguese shipping ‘for the offensive is both the nobler and safer part’. ‘We must chasten these people…’ Goa should be blockaded and ‘if the Mogul’s shipps be taken but once in four years there shall come more clear gayne without loss of honour than will advance in seven years by trade’.
Roe was aware that his own influence at Court had as much to do with English naval prowess as with his supposed ‘qualitye’. In 1616 a fleet from England had again fallen in with a Portuguese carrack off the east African coast. ‘She was a ship of exceeding great bulk and burthen, our Charles though a ship of 1000 tons looking like a pinnace when she was beside her.’ Within an hour of the cannonade beginning Benjamin Joseph, commander of the English fleet, was slain. Again the Portuguese fought gallantly, hanging out a lantern at night so that the English could not accuse them of flight. Next day Captain Pepwell of the Globe, Floris’s old ship, was struck by ‘a great shot in his halfe deck’. His master lost an arm and ‘another had his head shot away’. But the carrack was dismasted and rather than surrender, was run aground on one of the Comoro islands. There she was set on fire to prevent the English extracting her cargo. ‘This is the greatest disaster and disgrace that has ever befallen them’, gloated Roe when he heard the news, ‘for they never lost…any such vessel as this which was esteemed invincible; and without supplies they [i.e. the Portuguese at Goa] perish utterly.’
In the same year William Keeling, while making his supervisory tour of the East, violated another Portuguese preserve by entering the Malabar ports. At Calicut he signed a treaty with the ruler, at Cranganore he left a small factory, and at Quilon he captured a Portuguese vessel. But the Dutch also had an eye on the Malabar trade and it would be some time before it figured prominently in English ambitions. The real trial of strength with the Portuguese was to take place a thousand miles away off the coast of Persia.
iv
Under the great Shah Abbas, Persia had achieved the distinction of being the one Eastern country to reverse the west-east tide of commercial endeavour by actively canvassing its exports, particularly raw silk, in Europe. As the sequel would show, the value of this trade was not inconsiderable. Yet Persia was slow to figure in the reckonings of the London Company.
Interest was first kindled when in 1611 a Persian ambassador presented himself to King James at Hampton Court. Oddly the Shah’s emissary turned out to be an Englishman. Sir Robert Sherley, one of two Catholic brothers who had entered the Shah’s service during the reign of Elizabeth, was also extremely plausible. To end Persia’s dependence on the good will of her Turkish neighbour he sought a contract for the export of raw silk direct from a Persian port to Europe. There was, though, a catch. Payment must be made in bullion and, as well as Turkish resentment, the successful contractor would have to cope with the Portuguese