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  If Reuben George Walker, bachelor and bastard, was in the army, there should be a note of it here, though it is not clear what name he might have enlisted under. Did he already know his surname might be Brooke? James’s version suggests not.

  James Brooke describes him as in the ‘Horse Guards’, elsewhere as in the ‘1st Horse’ and ‘1st Royals’. Given his background as a groom, this is what might well be expected, and James no doubt initially entertained an exaggerated idea of his abilities. The muster books of the 1st Regiment of Horse do indeed show a George Walker, height five foot six inches, from London, recruited in 1854. But he is posted as deceased in July 1855. The Crimean War ensured a brisk turnover of young recruits, so if there was a false report of Reuben’s death it might well hail from here, given James’s initial assumption that this was the regiment of his son. Someone simply looked up the wrong record, as is clear from the age of this George on recruitment – only eighteen. Reuben was twenty at the time.

  But if this is the false Reuben George, where is the real one? There is no trace of any other Reuben/George Walker/Brooke having obtained a discharge or pension from any other regiment. James’s account gives a clue by suggesting strongly that Reuben was posted to Gibraltar. Only a dozen regiments were assigned to the Rock between 1854 and 1857; not surprisingly, none of them is fashionable cavalry, and the 1st Horse is not among them. The regiments from the Scottish Highlands may be safely discarded. The 55th Foot, the Westmorland Regiment, initially looks promising, since Reuben George ended up living there, but proves to be a red herring. But the colony swarms with other army Walkers. The East Yorkshire Regiment boasts three concurrently but none is Reuben George. The 96th Foot has six, the 92nd runs to seven. Walkers were to nineteenth-century army adjutants what Patels are to tax inspectors today, and often little personal notes are appended to their names as a guide to telling them apart. Yet another George Walker turns up as a good bet in the humble 54th, the West Norfolk Regiment also known as the Flamers. Tracking him back, he is registered as enlisting in Cork on 25 September 1845, standing four feet six inches high. He is fourteen years old, too old, then, to be Reuben George.

  Reuben is mysteriously undocumented in an age that had already learned to worship pieces of paper. But the fanciful tale of loss, confused identities and restoration may well all be true. After all, James himself had been erroneously declared dead in India, and the false George Walker of the Horse Guards at least exists to set the whole melodrama rolling and strengthens the story that he really was searched for there. Perhaps Reuben George was not in Gibraltar at all. Perhaps it was Malta or Menorca or some other remote outcrop of empire. And what of the paternity of James? There is no reason to dismiss it out of hand. It may have been fruit of a brief phase of heterosexuality, rapidly grown out of, or of an attempt to impose on himself the conventional sexuality demanded of him by Bath society. It certainly explains the tremendous sense of shifty guilt behind the high prose in his letters about the young man. The horror of betrayal stalks his relations with the boy, and betrayal was the sin he hated and feared most in others.

  The Reuben Walker affair, moreover, does not fit the usual pattern of James’s homoerotic attachments. For one thing, Reuben is far too old to be of sexual interest to James and there are no signs of the usual itchy steaminess and plummy jocosity that mark such courtships, no poems, no lingering descriptions, no discoveries of unusual talents. Above all, he does not cling, as he clung desperately to Charley Grant and Badrudeen. All in all, it seems likely he really was Reuben’s repentant and slightly disappointed father and perhaps it was the ‘lost love’, the clergyman’s daughter, who was the mother.

  In 1857 James Brooke met a new lady-friend, Angela Burdett-Coutts, coincidentally the richest woman in England. They may have met much earlier in Bath and she may have sighed at the sight of him from afar,14 but this tradition is to be doubted as part of that fictitious romance grafted on to their relationship by later hands in order to reduce James’s life to Victorian stereotypes. Stirred by the tale of his escape from the Chinese, she invited James to dinner; the Brooke charm did the rest.

  James was always carefully solicitous of Angela. His letters are full of small signs of concern, plants, little riddles, etc. (‘Why is a Horse at full speed like a young Lady dancing? – You will answer because she gallops – but it is not that way … – Because it is Gal(h)ops.’). He gave her a Sarawak parrot, Cocky, to replace the famous one she kept in the window of her house off Piccadilly, whose principal accomplishment had been to shout out, ‘What a shocking bad hat!’ at passers-by. (St John would go one better and send her llamas from Peru.)

  Angela had come into her money unexpectedly. Her grandfather, the eccentric Thomas Coutts, had scandalously married first his niece’s servant and then, yet more scandalously, the voluptuous and well-named actress Harriet Mellons. Harriet had inherited Thomas’s entire fortune, used part of it to recast herself as the Duchess of St Albans and left the remainder to Angela on her own death, quite ignoring the rest of her family. Angela was a startlingly plain girl, thin and spotty, but whose fortune in 1837 had been assessed at £1,800,000, including half of Coutts’ Bank, so that many eligible bachelors found her irresistibly beautiful. James’s main virtue in her eyes was that he was one of the few men she ever met not moved to attempt to marry her and her fortune. An ongoing obsession of the newspapers was her imminent marriage to any man she was glimpsed with, or even any celebrity who happened to be passing through town, however fleetingly. Rumours of a passionate affair, even a secret marriage, with the ancient Duke of Wellington had marked the days of Angela’s prime, and there is good reason to think that she indeed proposed marriage to him.

  Throughout much of her life, Angela lived with a dowdy and hypochondriac companion, Hannah Brown, who finally fulfilled her dreams by marrying a medical man and thus spares biographers the need of suspecting a lesbian relationship between the ladies. Those who despaired of finding a romance between James and Angela have even suggested that it must be Hannah who was the real love of his life, so, one way or another, biographers have found Angela a useful explanation of James’s anomalous unmarried state. Ironically, she perhaps came closest to him in spirit in the great scandal towards the end of her life when she finally married an American protégé half her age, Ashmead Bartlett, and was obliged to renounce her fortune through an obscure clause in her grandmother’s will that excluded foreign spouses.

  Apart from her extreme wealth, Angela Burdett-Coutts had the distinction of being the first known victim of a stalker, in the form of a crazed Irish lawyer named Dunn. For years he pursued and persecuted her, dogged her steps, showered her with love letters, broke into her house. He was imprisoned, released and reimprisoned, but she was horribly conscious that he might reappear at any moment and was forced to become a nervous recluse. Finally he sued her, claiming she had written him amorous verses in prison such as:

  When to Harrogate sweet papa beats a retreat,

  To take spa waters supersulphurious,

  I could hear your heart thump as we stood near the pump,

  While you bolted that stuff so injurious …

  But at last I’m relenting, my jewel, repenting

  Of all that you’ve suffered for me;

  Why, I’m even grown tender, disposed to turn lender

  Of cash, your sweet person to free.

  Send to Coutts’s your bill – there are lots in the till –

  I’ll give the clerk orders to do it;

  Then get your discharge, your dear body enlarge,

  And in Stratton-street do let me view it …15

  Angela, a very serious girl, found the public hilarity at her situation, as she was dragged through the lawcourts, harder to bear than anything else. Humour was not her strong point – all her life she had suffered jokes about her name and the East End slang for fleas, ‘coutties’. James, had he dared, could have pointed out to her that it came from the Malay kuti. Finally, Dunn switched his aff
ections to a member of the royal house and was promptly declared insane.

  Raised in a committedly Radical household, Angela took a strong interest in politics and intellectual pursuits. Regular visits were paid by Gladstone; by Dickens and Disraeli, who would put her in their novels; and by famous preachers, actors, explorers and scientists. Her bleak intelligence was much admired. She became a member of the Royal Institution, and Michael Faraday stood on her roof watching the fireworks that marked the end of the Crimean War, shouting in exultation, ‘There goes magnesium, there potassium.’

  Through her philanthropic activities she earned herself the title of ‘Queen of the Poor’, and orphanages, churches, schools, markets, colonial bishoprics and local industries all flourished under her generous support. She set up a home for fallen women with Charles Dickens. She wrote a book on practical education for the poor, full of the virtues of economy and self-discipline, but never stinted in putting her cash where her faith was. In a single act of generosity, she offered a quarter of a million pounds to buy seed potatoes for the poor in Ireland. Above all, Angela had a strong religious faith and favoured the Evangelists. Angela Burdett-Coutts was the very embodiment of a Victorian Good Woman. Given its perilous situation at that time, it is not overstating matters to call her the saviour of Sarawak.

  She had much to offer James Brooke as a friend, and they are constantly meeting and corresponding at this time. Her wealth and intelligence assured excellent connections to the rich and powerful, and she was an experienced advocate of ‘petticoat politicking’ so that no door in the land was closed to her and her views. Indeed, her network extended all over Europe. When James despaired of ever interesting the British government in declaring a protectorate over his little country, she contacted her friend Louis Napoleon to arrange for the French to do so. However, since she was at least as opinionated as James was, they were incapable of discussion and whenever their ideas differed fundamentally it ended in a tremendous row where one of them flew off the handle. But she took on wholesale James’s sense of outrage and persecution over his treatment at the hands of the British government; and his Sarawak project could be made to fit in nicely with her own ideas of practical self-help and evangelisation. Angela saw James as something of a hero – believing through him implicitly in both St George and the dragon. Following the example of her practical philanthropy in Ireland, she would be moved to set up a model farm near Kuching to teach the Dayaks the virtues of enlightened agriculture. It was described, unkindly but accurately, as five hundred acres of very bad soil seeded with crops that the soil would not grow, with machines that would not work and ploughs that would not plough. The Dayaks anyway were miles away and had no interest in what was being done. James further ensured its failure by putting one of his hopeless young men in charge of it. More importantly for the moment, at the time when he was most beset by debt and worry, when Sarawak was being ravaged by cholera, when he was desperate to provide for Reuben George and he saw no other way out, she lent James £5,000 with no strings attached so he could pay off the Borneo Company. Better yet, she bought him the steamer of his dreams, an armed vessel that he named the Rainbow. It made him very happy.

  Chapter 14

  The Malay Plot

  In October 1858, James made a short speech at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. It was the sort of thing he had often done before, a mere preaching to the converted, and – of course – all about Sarawak. As he spoke, he felt ‘a creeping movement’ come over him, and walked straight to a doctor’s. He had suffered a stroke, from which he would never fully recover, but was still luckier than his old enemy Makota, who at much the same moment was drowning in the Bisayun country after being attacked by the relatives of some local girls whom he had abducted by force for a night of pleasure.

  James was now fifty-five. The rakish swagger had long disappeared. Photographs of him at this time show him as shrunken, gnome-like and dandified, with a permanently puzzled expression which may simply be short-sightedness. Whereas he had previously been obsessed by his steamer, he must now have, at any cost, the expat dream of a small country cottage with woodbine round the door. In 1859 he finally found one, in Burrator, Devonshire, and wrote to Angela.

  My little ‘Box’ – that is to be – is snugly situated under Dartmoor – a stream babbles close at hand – wood in plenty and it boasts 72 acres of land. I might have searched for ten years without meeting a place within my limits so retired, so near the world and so suited in all respects to my tastes. I have in a week’s stay derived great benefit from the bracing and elastic air and I take my daily ride and walk, to distances I little thought ever to have accomplished again. Yesterday I was five hours on pony-back on the Moor.1

  Visitors were appalled by its total desolation. He could not, of course, pay for it.

  Moreover, his peace was disturbed. Brooke Brooke’s wife had died horribly in childbirth. In England there was talk of Reuben George, and of the Rajah seeking to make Sarawak over to Great Britain, or even to foreigners. Brooke Brooke clearly suffered some kind of mental and emotional breakdown and fled back to England, leaving brother Charles in charge of the country. James would always regard that as a breach of trust and an act of desertion. Worse still, Miss Burdett-Coutts took an instant dislike to him. When he called on her uninvited, he was shown the door. There was talk of a public testimonial to raise money for James, and Brooke Brooke took it into his head that James would then finally retire and hand over the kingdom to him. The testimonial finally fell far short of the £20,000 hoped for, totalling only £8,800. Unsurprisingly, James immediately ascribed its failure to a conspiracy from the Borneo Company to keep him in dependence. Angela disapproved of the testimonial, just as she saw no reason for the Rajah to step down, and perhaps this explains James’s constant vacillation. Brooke Brooke was sent back to Sarawak on a tight rein and it was made quite clear he was undergoing continuous assessment. ‘You must trust to my love and judgement, and in due time, I propose formally to transfer the government, but not to confer upon you any power to act independently of me.’ What was he supposed to make of that?

  Things were not well in Sarawak. There had been another failed attempt to oust Rentap from his mountain fort. Kuching was again prey to wild rumours that swept over it in waves of terror: the Chinese were coming; James was dead and it had been hushed up; the British were to be massacred and the Bruneians restored; the pirates were back on the coast.

  Real trouble, when it came, was from much closer to home – the Kuching Malays. There had long been a feud between two of the noble houses of Mukah, just up the coast. Mukah was the home of the Melanau people, and the source of sago, the rotted pith of the sago palm, and the delicious, large, edible worms that bred in it as it lay in the water. Both were important for the nutrition of Sarawak, and the rough sago was a valuable export for the Singapore refineries. The trade was crucial to Kuching. Brooke Brooke would tolerate no disruption of commerce and had imposed fines on disturbers of the peace in Mukah – even though they were subjects of the Sultan of Brunei. Charles, in his absence, went one better and even fined the Sultan’s own envoy. Unlike James, who always maintained a studied façade of politeness, neither of them bothered to hide the total contempt in which they held the Brunei aristocracy.

  Meanwhile a widespread conspiracy was hatched by the pardoned Datuk Patinggi and Sherip Masahor, co-ordinating this and other Malay resentments which may or may not have involved Brunei, to drive the British from Sarawak. For once no one revealed the plot. Brooke Brooke, absent in England, prided himself on his contacts with the Malays but Charles had spent time amongst the Dayaks, wore Dayak costume and found Malays uncongenial. There had been a fatal breakdown in the Brooke intelligence machine, which many attributed to the disappearance of James’s traditional open-house policy. But from the first the conspiracy went awry. A precipitate rising in Kanowit and the slaying of two Brooke administrators, Fox and Steel, revealed their hand too soon. Our information is principally derive
d from Charles Johnson (later Brooke), and it is striking how his melodramatic vocabulary and descriptions of politics and battle differ from those of James. ‘This was the first step of a foul conspiracy, which had been hatching for some time past in the minds of a few discontented, intriguing rascals, deep and subtle as men or devils could be.’2

  According to Charles, Kanowit was inhabited by a mix of Chinese – ‘rapscallions’ – Malays – ‘as unprincipled a set of cutthroats as could be found anywhere’ – and Dayaks – ‘troublesome and dangerous’. The Malay fortmen were unreliable – ‘slave-born followers’. Henry Steel had lived here in total isolation from other Europeans for some eight years. Charles Johnson brought in Charles Fox to help, the former missionary allegedly introduced to the delights of native female flesh by Spenser St John and now wedded to the more secular vocation of the administration.

  The sad event happened early in the afternoon. Mr. Fox had been superintending the digging of a ditch, and Mr. Steel was lounging about in the fort, both unarmed. The latter was in conversation with Abi and Talip, whom he had known and trusted for years, but their previous characters had been extremely bad. There was in a moment a simultaneous onslaught both by Steel’s companions and a party of Kanowit people; the latter rushed from a Chinaman’s house and struck Mr. Fox in the back with a spear; he fell into the fort moat and was killed. Talip drew his parang and struck at Steel, but the latter, being an active man, seized the weapon, when the handle became entangled in Talip’s clothing. Talip was overpowered but Abi, standing by, cut Steel over the head, killing him immediately. After this the watchman fired and killed one of the murderers; a Chinaman was also cut down; and then, instead of the fortmen guarding the premises, they gave it up into the hands of the assassins, who forthwith proceeded to rifle it of all its contents and burn it down. The guns were distributed to different parties. The heads of Messrs. Fox and Steel were taken by some of the Dayak enemies, and their bodies were left half buried in the ground.3