2. Beauty lies in the lap of terror
Art legitimises wealth, title and status for the East India Company's little aristocracy
The more ambitious among the once-declining gentlefolk of the East India Company set about establishing themselves as a new aristocracy - a petite noblesse. This was achieved by grafting onto the old, using techniques that will be familiar to readers of the novels of Austen and Thackeray and which are exhibited shamelessly in Dr William Dick’s letters to his nephew, James Munro MacNabb. The progress of Dr Dick’s daughter’s family, Harris of Belmont, was a preoccupation in his old age; he was in regular contact with George William Harris’s sister, Nancy, who had married Stephen Rumbold Lushington, an MP from a leading East India Company family, also Secretary to the Treasury in Lord Liverpool’s Government and later Governor of Madras. Dr Dick wrote to James Munro MacNabb in 1820: “I have just received a letter from Mrs Lushington informing us that her sweet Girl had just consented to become Mrs Wildman - a very judicious choice. He is a young man, has a fine Estate within seven miles of Belmont and an income of ten thousand pounds a year at least.”1 In truth, after 20 years of inflation caused by Britain’s wars against Napoleon, Wildman’s £10,000 a year might have been worth slightly less than Mr Darcy’s, but it was still a hefty sum (a good £10 million today) and the coincidence that Jane Austen lived for a time on the Lushington’s estate at Norton Court makes the comparison irresistible.2
James Beckford Wildman’s wealth came, via a twisted route, from the profits of the West Indies plantations of his godfather, William Beckford. The conduit was James’ father (also James) who had been Beckford’s agent in the West Indies and who, with the aid of his brother Thomas, a lawyer, had swindled Beckford out of his Quebec estate, one of the largest in Jamaica worked by 800 enslaved people3. His son was the beneficiary, with an income of £20,000 p.a. — twice Dr Dick’s estimate. He features in Jane Austen’s letters as the suitor of her favourite niece, Fanny Knight. Jane told Fanny: “By your description he cannot be in love with you, however he may try at it, & I could not wish the match unless there were a great deal of Love on his side”.4 Austen’s concern was for an unequal marriage in which the spirit of a young woman is shut down by an older husband and endless pregnancies, something that Fanny, wealthy in her own right, had no need to suffer. That choice — one less judicious than Dr Dick supposed — was to be made by Nancy Lushington’s daughter, her ‘sweet girl’, Mary. She was thirteen years James Wildman’s junior and endured at least 10 pregnancies of which seven resulted in children who survived to adulthood: Fanny Wildman (!) born in 1827 and who died in 1829, was not one of these.
With the Wintles in Bath, Harris in Belmont, Lushington at Norton Court, the Dicks in Tullymet and the MacNabbs exercising “taste and judgment” in the renovation and extension of Arthurstone, their seat in Perthshire, the extended family was comfortable and satisfyingly well-connected. Never satisfied, Dr William Dick and James Munro MacNabb’s father, Dr James MacNabb, had a scheme to buy the MacNabb clan’s ancient lands at Kinnell, and with it the clan chiefdom and the likelihood of a baronetcy for the younger James: “The family of the present Chief is sunk into poverty, [and] would soon be forgotten. As the Chief - and without claiming it, or making any pretensions to it, the Family in possession of the Estate, if wealthy & of the Clan, would soon be considered as the Head of it”, asserted William to James.5 Meanwhile, James was busy making his own connections; it was his coup to marry Jane Campbell, granddaughter of the Laird of Raasay and first cousin of Flora Hastings, wife of Lord Rawdon Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal. Dr Dick concurred: “Your aunt and myself most heartily congratulate you on Your marriage, and fervently pray that you and your lovely wife (for such the Duchess Of Atholl assures us she really is) may enjoy many happy years together in this World, and eternal happiness in the next - in which your most warm and worthy Friend Colonel Harris heartily joins.”6
James Munro MacNabb became Hastings’ private secretary. His life in India typifies that of a successful civil servant. In India, his salary was between two and four times the sum he might have earned in Scotland, had he become a doctor like his father. He lived in a large three-storied villa in Calcutta with a retinue of 41 servants and “employed ten bearers to carry him about town in his palanquin … and two hurkarrahs to run in front carrying silver sticks, which were marks of status. MacNabb also owned a coach and employed a coachman, as well as six syces (grooms) to care for the horses”.7 In England, where he travelled on furlough from 1817 to 1819, he purchased a carriage from the Prince Regent’s coachmaker while living in style at Batt’s Hotel on Dover Street. James and his wife Jane Campbell MacNabb became art collectors, owning paintings by Sir David Wilkie and lithographs and watercolours by their cousins Sir Charles D’Oyly, the opium agent of Patna, and his wife Lady Elizabeth D’Oyly; one of these was a portrait of Jane8. In the MacNabb archive at the British Library there is an album of prints they had owned by John Luard, George Chinnery, Alexander Lindsay, K.M. Campbell, Lady D’Oyly and Jai Ram Das; also a water colour by the Governor’s draftsman, the celebrated artist Sita Ram, depicting the MacNabb’s wedding procession to Government House, a grand affair at Barrackpore Park in 1820 involving many carriages and mounted troopers, with an Adjutant Bird in the foreground, the Hooghly River in the background.9
In 1818 or ‘17, while in England, and perhaps to support his claim to the Clan chiefdom, James commissioned a magnificent portrait of himself from Martin Archer Shee, the Irish painter. This was a life-size picture, 2.33m x 1.42m, with James in full clan regalia; it borrowed heavily from an earlier portrait by Henry Raeburn of Francis Mor MacNab, a work of identical proportions and similar scale, albeit for a bigger man (mor in Gaelic is big - he was 6ft 3in). Francis Mor “lived his life as the archetypal feudal chieftain and was also a noted eccentric. He had a dislike of the government involving itself in what he regarded as his affairs and this included a particular hatred of excisemen in search of the illegal whisky produced by his clansmen.”10 Francis was the man so traduced by Dr William Dick, as “the present chief … sunk into poverty”.
Numerous lithographs (and later chromolithographs) were made of Raeburn’s popular painting of 1802. Amongst the clansmen were the owners of the Dewar Whisky brand and for many years the painting hung in the company’s London office as an embodiment of Scottishness-in-a-bottle — a prototype of modern marketing, but that came later. There can be little doubt, nonetheless, that in 1818 Martin Shee was familiar with the MacNab, as Raeburn’s portrait came to be known, and no doubt also that his new work was an attempt to better it. Both portraits were shown at the Royal Academy in 1819. Nicholas Tromans describes Raeburn’s work as ‘entirely eclipsed’ by Shee’s portrait of James which, according to the Literary Chronicle, ‘attracted universal attention’.11 The differences and similarities of the two paintings are instructive however. Francis, side on, a defensive posture, right foot forward and facing the viewer, is regaled in badger sporran and the uniform of a Lieutenant Colonel of the Breadalbane Fencibles. Armed with broadsword, dirk and a cocked pistol ready to hand he glares fiercely across from the MacNab lands, an apocalyptic glen through which only a glimmer of sunlight can find its way down.
"Beauty lies in the lap of Terror”, said Sir Walter Scott of Bredalbane, the area around Kinnell, at the head of Loch Tay, where the MacNabs had their estate. Raeburn’s landscape is all terror within which Francis MacNab radiates defiance.12
Shee’s portrait promises something more approachable, with pretensions to power and, indeed, heroic beauty. The handsome figure of James Munro MacNabb is framed by a sunlit halo of energetic cumulus, with a strand of golden light falling across the strath between dark mountains: a powerful scene but less ominous and Shee’s work has one glaring fault, its inauthenticity: one has to be willing to be taken in. James is less within the landscape than on a stage set, his right foot forward, standing almost straight on and open-faced, gazing to his right, so not at the viewer but into the distance at some unseen vision — Eastwards? James is dressed in filibeg and wrapped in a belted plaid of the ancient MacNab tartan: he sports a huge goats-hair sporran with six ball-bells, no less, and a black bonnet with a fine black feather. Our distinguished civil servant, a metropolitan soigneur who never wielded a weapon in anger, is arrayed in full armament: a scabbard with a dirk, a pistol in his belt and a Jacobite basket hilt sword - the wearing of which, like the kilt, had been outlawed since Culloden, until it was adopted by officers of Highland regiments in the early 19th Century.
So, rather than striking a pose of naked highland aggression, James Munro MacNabb projects grandeur, a fair complexion and a civilised pedigree, but neither modesty nor rustic truth.13 The only question is: why the assertion of Scottishness at this time? There are few other portraits by Raeburn or Shee of dignitaries in Highland dress (Raeburn’s Sir John Sinclair of c.1796 and the Glengarry c.1812 are exceptions). Scots in Scotland generally preferred to appear as sober presbyterian burghers, not show-offs. For Eliza Harris (née Dick), the MacNab would have been the embodiment of the vulgarity she so despised in her own relatives. For James Munro MacNabb, we can suppose, the tartan, the military regalia and the landscape would procure legitimacy from the English and Indian aristocracy inhabiting Calcutta. James Munro MacNabb’s portrait was painted to be seen in India, not Britain.
James’ portrait was ahead of its time, but only just, because it anticipated by five years the portrait-in-plaid of George IV, painted by David Wilkie for the occasion of the Hanovarian royal progress through Edinburgh in 1823, when Sir Walter Scott and David Stewart orchestrated the obeisance (and legitimacy) of the leaders of the clans by persuading them to gather before George in ‘clan’ tartans of sometimes dubious heritage.
MacNabb’s new prestige portrait started a family tradition. In the Dick family, in the late eighteenth century the miniature was already an established means of overcoming the inevitable separation of children from parents in imperial occupations: after 1815 the life-size portrait expressed the family’s changed status. A full-length portrait of Eliza Harris (also by Shee, dated before 1817) adorns the dining room at Belmont House. Sir Robert Dick was painted by E.H. Green in 1830, to mark the receipt of his knighthood (engraved by Henry Haig in 1847 for a posthumous edition dedicated ‘with permission’ to Queen Victoria). Eliza Ogilvy was painted with her daughter Rose (after Rose’s death) in an oversized miniature by Robert Thorburn RA, a favourite of Victoria and Albert. Louisa Dick’s portrait, in which she is draped in many ounces of Scottish gold, was painted on or soon after her return to London in 1823 by Thomas Phillips RA. The portrait was exhibited by Phillips at the Royal Academy in 1829, so perhaps it had been left at Tullymet as a memento for her children. Phillips, more famously, painted Lord Byron in a turban, which brings to mind the story that as a schoolboy at Harrow Byron called his fellow pupil, James Munro MacNabb, “Lucretia”. Wishing to be gracious, we can speculate that this was for the beauty and virtue evident in Shee’s portrait; being crass, others have supposed that the young Byron played Tarquin.
Sadly for James, he was unable to realise his ambition to become the MacNab of MacNab: that fate fell to Sir Allan MacNab who, the story goes, had papers he intended to give to James that would have proved his case for next-in-line, but these were lost in a shipwreck in which Sir Allan died14. Even so, James would not have had the funds necessary to do the title justice - remember Dr Dick’s stipulation, “if wealthy”. This came with the advice: “let me beg of you to write in large characters paste on a Board to be hung up in your Library the following sentence from Cicero - Non intelligunt homines qua magnum vectigal sit parsimonia [Men do not understand what a great revenue is thrift]. You see I am Not disposed to give you much credit for Economy though I believe it to be the only Good quality in which you are in the least deficient.” Somehow, despite himself and his shows of palanquins and hurkarrahs, James accumulated his competency and yet made the fateful error — one common at the time — of putting all his eggs in one basket: in 1832 he lost £60,000 in a Calcutta banking failure, left India for good and was forced to sell Arthurstone, the MacNabb’s substantial estate in Couper Angus just half a day’s ride from Tullymet; and as a consequence, Tullymet was the place to which his mother Mary and sister Charlotte had to remove themselves. Still, James enjoyed a comfortable retirement in Hampshire on his annuity from the EIC, and on his death in 1860 left c. £30,000.15
Did James MacNabb ever wear a kilt in Calcutta? Possibly. Scottishness was an important reminder of family loyalties and strength, a source of confidence in the face of English arrogance, a way to imagine the empire as an enterprise of equal partners. Clearly Scottish origins were celebrated in Calcutta: Allen’s Indian Mail of February 1845 records that the annual gathering of the Sons of Caledonia at the Calcutta Town Hall, Mr Abercombie Dick in the chair … went off in a great spirit”. The assertion of Scottishness as defiant and heroic partner-in-crime rather than oppressed and downtrodden rebel is a not entirely counter-intuitive response to the process of assimilation within the ‘Great British’ superstate.
The appreciation of difference was a driver of the social and geographical mobility of the imperial class. This was one of the ways — with English collusion — that the Dicks and MacNabbs made their century-long transition from being Scottish, genteel and poor to becoming British, middle class and well-to-do. Calcutta and Madras were stepping stones to Cheltenham, Hertfordshire and The Albany in Piccadilly, a convenient stroll from dinner at the Athenaeum, itself an important connection with educated Edinburgh society which did not actually necessitate living in North Britain, as Scotland had come to be known. The private wealth extracted from India was more commonly invested in property in the Home Counties of England, rather than Scotland, but also in East India Company stock guaranteeing 10 guineas a share and, from the 1840s onwards, profits from India were invested in finance, insurance and the railway boom, so stoking up the second phase of the industrial revolution. One of the less well-known but critical historical roles of The Company was that it became a flux that welded together the disparate parts of a ‘British’ nation. Whether Scottish, English, Irish or Welsh, the network of connections made in Company service persisted on returning home and was consolidated through marriage, commercial enterprises, a consistent political outlook, shared fears and hopes for family members, and like tastes in fine art and entertainment.
© William Owen 2024 - All rights reserved
Unpublished letter, Dr William Dick to James Munro MacNabb, Tullymet July 12th 1820. MacNabb Archive, BL. Wildman owned Chilham Castle, a Jacobean palace in Kent.
Pride and Prejudice was completed in 1797, first published in 1813.
There is a detailed description of Beckford Wildman’s interests in and public statements on slavery in UCL’s Legacies of British Slavery
Five letters from Jane Austen to her niece, Fanny Knight; printed in facsimile, Clarendon Press 1924.
Dick referred in his letter to the situation of Sir John MacGregor Murray who, after his clan were outlawed for their part in the ‘45 rebellion, nonetheless succeed to the Chiefdom and was awarded a baronetcy in 1795.
Dr William Dick to James MacNabb, Tullymet July 12th 1820. BL MacNabb papers.
E.M. Collingham, Curry, A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, OUP, 2006
D’Oyly , ‘a witty socialite and accomplished artist’ was Opium Agent in Patna from 1821 to 1831. His gentility did not extend to his occupation. Amitav Ghosh, in Smoke and Ashes, describes D’Oyly as ‘a figure of terror who, in the words of a Telegu traveller, tours the country with a posse of armed men to collect [opium] even by force'. The story was originally quoted in Matthew Wormer, 'Opium, Economic Thought, and the Making of Britain's Free Trade Empire, 1773-1839' (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 2022), p. 221.
A carriage procession in Barrackpore Park showing Government House from the south west, a garden house and tents behind. ‘April XI 1820’. Water-colour; 13.4 by 24 cm. Hastings’ draftsman Sita Ram. BL f.26
https://www.scottish-places.info/people/famousfirst3036.html
Tromans, N., in Henry Raeburn: Context, Reception and Reputation, edited by Vicky Coltman and Stephen Lloyd. Troman states that the MacNab was ‘probably’ exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819, although if the earlier date of 1802 for the MacNab is correct, this change ‘probable’ to ‘possible’.
There are other versions of this phrase (inserting ‘horror’ for ‘terror’). This one comes from Scott’s The Fair Maid of Perth, “It is in such favoured regions that the traveller finds what the poet Gray, or some one else, has termed beauty lying in the lap of terror.”; ‘some one else’ may be Ann Radcliffe.
The only extended period James is known to have spent in Scotland was with his paternal grandfather in Pitlochry, before his eighth birthday, where he would have acquired his Scots accent, before being sent to Harrow in 1798.
After years of research, in 1953 James’ grandson, Archibald Corrie, was recognised by the Lord Lyon as 22nd Chief of MacNabb.
Arthurstone was sold in 1837. Elliot MacNaghten, Abercromby Dick’s friend and a member of the India Council, was one of three executors of James Munro MacNabb’s will.