There was a moment in the long Megan and Harry interview documentary series that keeps replaying in my head. Prince Harry is talking about a meeting with his grandmother, the Queen, that had been canceled. When he asks her why, she says something to the effect of, “They tell me that my calendar is full.”
When King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215 at Runnymede, it began a slow dissolution of the divine rights accorded to British sovereigns. With each subsequent revision, the Royal family became less and less powerful. By the early 2020s, it seems, Queen Elizabeth II did not even rule over her own daily schedule. “They” did. Who is this ‘they’? The elected government.
We all abide by the social contract we have created with each other. We have agreed to rules and standards that, in theory, we all do our best to follow and uphold. As long as the leaders we choose give the appearance of being in control, we allow them to stay there. If enough people begin to doubt them and lose faith, though, revolutions and coups happen. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and, of course, the American Revolution are the ones that immediately spring to mind. What stops this from happening more than it does is the appearance of strength from whoever is in power. Governments don’t have actual strength, just the perceived semblance of it. Their power is wholly given to them by those they govern. There are always millions more followers than there are leaders. The Germans chose Hitler. They could have overthrown him anytime they chose. They chose not to.
The British Government is considered a powerful and stable world power. Well, it was, until Brexit. It now has some scrambling to do to get itself back up there. The hallowed halls of parliament have been around for centuries. In truth, though, their real government changes almost completely every few years. Like the United States, any idiot can get a seat inside those halls if elected. No matter how petty and ridiculous some of them might seem, it’s the Monarchy that gives the whole thing the illusion of permanence and weight. The perception is that no matter what happens, somebody stable, for decades Queen Elizabeth, has been in ultimate charge.
Far from legislating at all, however, the ruling Monarch is not even allowed to express a political opinion. They must remain fully neutral. The Prime Minister meets with the Monarch on a weekly basis. These meetings make it seem as if the Prime Minister and their government are carrying out the Sovereign’s wishes, but the Prime Minister does not need to pay any attention to anything that is said. The meetings are completely off-limits to observers, so nobody has any idea what it is that they talk about. The two could sit in the palace and watch cartoons together for all anyone knows. It doesn’t matter at all. So why bother?
The current King is from an (in theory) unbroken line of people stretching back a millennium who are perceived to be something more than human. People believe in their power no matter how much their brains tell them that they aren’t controlling anything. However crazy things might get, they feel that nothing truly awful is going to happen to them because, deep down, they think their King is in control.
Whether Margaret Thatcher is gutting their unions or Boris Johnson is cutting them off from the rest of Europe, Queen Elizabeth and now, King Charles, has met with them which means that everything must be fine and under control. The important part is that the people see their Prime Minister going in and then see them coming back out, having been blessed by the anointed one.
The Royal Family is paid a small fortune annually to do its one job which is to legitimize the government in the eyes of the great British unwashed. Princess Diana dared to lift the veil on the truth and now Prince Harry has ripped it right off and the people of Britain despise him for it. He is weakening their faith in what they believed were stone pillars of governance, but which turn out to be mere illusions. Megan and Harry are telling everyone that their Emperor has no clothes.
Throughout its long, storied history, the Indian subcontinent has had eras when it was unified as well as centuries when it existed as individual warring kingdoms. The last period of unity before the British Raj took over was the Mughal Empire which began in the early 1500s. A warrior chieftain from present-day Uzbekistan named Babur defeated the Sultan of Delhi and started to amass territory across the northern plains. That expansion reached its peak during the early 1700s under an emperor named Aurangzeb before it all started to unravel again. The people lost faith in the unifiers and pulled away.
While it lasted, India enjoyed a rather remarkable golden age. Under the Mughals, individual cultures were allowed to maintain their identities. Leaders prospered and, under relative peace, so did the working people. As wealth grew, the ruling class increased their patronage of artists and artisans so that literary work, textiles, painting, and architecture thrived. Considered the crowning achievement of Mughal architecture, the Taj Mahal was commissioned by Emperor Shah Jahan in 1632 as a tomb for him and his third, and favorite, wife.
Unfortunately, this very visible wealth attracted the attention of the British. They had begun trading in that part of the world in the late 1500s and formed the British East India Company in 1600. When the common people began losing faith in their Mughal leaders who were becoming ever more wealthy and ever less attentive to solving issues within their realms, the British began negotiating with the leaders of individual provinces and securing treaties that granted them sole access to resources. With each treaty, the local Sultan or Maharajah got richer and pulled further away from the central governing authority, while their local workers got poorer. The British then began building their own factories all over India and started closing Indian ones.
By 1757, the British East India Company had effectively united much of India again. They alone controlled all trade with the region. Remember, that this is the same company that had the monopoly on selling tea to the American colonies. It was their ships in Boston harbor that were boarded by the Americans who threw it all overboard in protest and helped ignite the American Revolution.
After a century of British East India Company rule which became ever more exploitive, the Indian people started to rebel against them. In 1857, following a great populist uprising called the Indian Rebellion, the British decided that India was too important to be run by anyone other than the government. They wanted India’s wealth for themselves and simply took over the company and dissolved it. Parliament governed India as a colony directly until 1947. The people who had worked for the company were absorbed into the British Military and its Civil Service. This period of British control in India lasted from 1858 until 1947 and is what we now refer to as the Raj.
The British looted India. While the Maharajahs and the Sultans may have amassed astonishing wealth on the backs of their people, their money stayed in India. When the British took control, they did the same thing but the money left. For more than two hundred years, jewels, artwork, natural resources, and cold hard cash flowed in a steady stream back to the small island realm off the coast of Europe. When King Charles is coronated in a few months, the crown that is placed upon his head will be full of plundered gems.
My great-grandfather, William J. McElhinny, was born in Canada in 1862. His father, John, had emigrated to North America from Ireland some years before and settled in Brockville, Canada. There, he established a cabinet-making business and married my great-great grandmother Harriet Marie Van Buren who was from just over the border in northern New York state
When I was about ten, we took a family trip up to Ottawa. We drove through Windsor, Ontario where the Royal Military College of Canada is. John McElhinny had become successful enough in business that he could afford to send his son, my great-grandfather, to school there. We visited the school on a Sunday when everything except their museum was closed. My father spoke to the person at the desk and said how sorry he was that we couldn’t see any of the records. The man immediately opened a glass case and took out the old small leather-bound ledger that listed the school’s class from 1878. There was my great-grandfather’s name, William John McElhinny.
William J. McElhinny was a career military man. Beyond that, I don’t know what he was like. People called him Mac. He sometimes signed himself as that. I don’t remember my grandfather or my grandmother ever talking about him in front of us. I so wish I’d thought to ask. Mac sent my grandfather off to boarding school in England at age six and, except for the occasional visit over the years, they didn’t truly see each other again until my grandfather was twenty-four, had finished school, and entered the British Civil Service in India.
I have an almost complete record of Mac’s military promotions. He joined the College in February 1878 as a Cadet. By December he’d been promoted to Lance Corporal. Before he’d graduated, he’d become first a Corporal and then a Sergeant. He graduated on June 28, 1881, receiving a First-Class Certificate. On January 6, 1886, he was commissioned by the Royal Engineers and sent to India.
For a while there, he worked for the railways. If the British left the Indians anything after they withdrew, it was an extensive railway system that spanned the entire subcontinent. Of course, they used Indian resources and Indian labor to build it, but, still, it was nice of them not to take it when they left.
He became the assistant manager of the Oudh and Rohilkhand Railway which was an extensive network throughout northern India. Its headquarters was in Lucknow where he would eventually marry my great-grandmother Nora and where my grandfather would be born. It is also where my great-grandmother would be buried after dying at such a young age. Mac was then appointed Deputy Traffic Superintendent of the Eastern Bengal State Railway.
In 1895 he was promoted to Captain and then in 1907 was promoted again to Major. In 1911, he retired on full pension having done his twenty-five years of service, and moved back to England.
As World War I broke out, he joined the War Office in London as a Major on Staff. He then worked as the Deputy Director of Railway Transport for the Headquarters of Staff Horse Guards London where he was promoted to Brevet Lieutenant Colonel. In October of 1916, he is mentioned in the Dispatches as having done good service during the war. Three years later, he retired for good having been promoted to full Colonel.
He spent his working life in service to the Crown. Aside from the very brief time he was married to my great-grandmother, he seems to have worked and lived in the company of men. He did keep the red-bound collection of the works of Shakespeare he had given to Nora, but I wonder if he ever read them? Even now, they are in almost pristine condition. Did he ever question the work he was doing? Did he ever feel compassion for the people of India and what was being done to them?
As of 1890, 6,000 British officials along with about 70,000 European soldiers ruled over 250,000,000 Indians. By 1911, 164,000 Brits lived in India but only 4,000 were now in the Civil government and the number of soldiers had decreased to 60,000. At no point in the history of the Raj was the white population ever more than one-half of one percent of the total population. Most Indians simply believed that they were stronger. It’s the same story that’s been told throughout human history: the control of the many by the very few. My great-grandfather was one of those few.
Mac died in London on August 20, 1934, of pneumonia. My uncle Michael had been born in Windsor the previous December so it seems likely that they would have met. My mother was born nearly a year after his death, so, alas, no meeting there. Like my grandfather, my uncle was also sent off to boarding school at a young age, meaning that he never really got to hear any stories from his parents about his grandparents either.
When Nora died, Mac received a telegram that read, “The Viceroy has heard with deep regret of the death of your wife whom he well remembers at Simla and he desired me to express to you his sincere condolence.” That’s the only piece of his correspondence I have that in any way even touches upon something personal. The Viceroy was the top of the government on the ground during the Raj. They all must have socialized together and, clearly, Nora left an impression
One of the objects I have that belonged to him is his leather glasses case. On it, starting in Bombay in 1887, Mac made a list in black ink, of everywhere he was posted. He kept adding to it all the way up to his first retirement in 1911. Because of that, I know where he was and when. His military record fills in some more of his story. Who he really was besides all that, however, is still almost a total mystery to me.
I have his outline, now I just need to figure out how to color him in. I can almost accept not having much information about my great-great grandparents, but my great-grandfather is so tantalizingly close. I can almost get him. He’s just slightly out of reach.
Clearly, I am going to need to drag Michael to India to see what we can find. I’ll use any excuse for a trip, and I think that’s a pretty good one.
I continue to be amazed by how much you DO know about your family. Fascinating!
Fascinating. Hopefully when Julia sends it to Jo she may be able to help you colour.