Jan Morris - Heavens Command: An Imperial Progress

In 1964 I determined to write a trilogy about the rise, climax and fall of the Victorian Empire, of which this is the opening volume self-sufficient in itself, but forming, so to speak, the left-hand panel of a triptych. I presumptuously had posterity in mind. It had occurred to me how fascinating it would be to read a book about the later Roman Empire, written by a former centurion, say, who himself remembering that dominion in the last days of its power had set out to create an evocatively retrospective portrait of it, and at the same time to express something of his own responses to its history and its meaning. Such a book would give us, I thought, a very particular view of history highly subjective of course, but authentically of the period, and illustrating perhaps the sensibility not only of the centurion himself, but of his generation of Romans.

I then set out to write something of the kind about my own empire, the empire of the British, which reached its fulfilment under Queen Victoria; and now that nearly four decades have passed since I first set typewriter to paper (for it was before the days of word-processors), already I see posterity looming up. A new millennium now approaches; a new fin-de-sicle will soon make my use of the phrase ambiguous; a new world, one might almost say, makes the Empire I grew up in almost archaeologically remote. All that being so, this evocation of half-forgotten events, loyalties and excitements may now perhaps be acquiring the relevance I imagined for it in the first place. It is not simply history: it is history seen, and felt, and imagined by someone who lived through the last years of it.

I was born in 1926. I was thus just in time to see the schoolroom maps emblazoned pole to pole in the imperial red; I was in time to witness the immense imperial organism uniting for the last time to fight the greatest war in its history; and I was in time, in 1947, to spend my 21st birthday on a British troop train travelling from Egypt (where the Empire was noticeably not wanted) to Palestine (which the Empire emphatically did not want). For the next fifteen years or so I found myself vocationally engaged in the dissolution of the British Empire, and I watched with mixed feelings the changes that were occurring in Britain itself its loss of power, its shifts of purpose, its adaptations, sometimes skilful, sometimes clumsy and reluctant, to the new balances of the world.

So my mind turned to that other, lost aesthetic, that dream of empire, which had once so seized the imagination of the nation, and was now so remote I saw it as a kind of flare, a blaze in the historical instinct of the British which flamed spectacularly during the nineteenth century between Queen Victorias accession to the throne in 1837, which begins the narrative of this book, and her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, which ends it. It was, as I interpreted it, a yearning among many British people to break out of their gentle northern setting, all greens and greys, into more vivid places, where fortunes could be made, outrageous enterprises undertaken, and the restrictive rules of scale and conduct flamboyantly disregarded. These impulses were by no means always altruistic, and were often brutal. If my book seems to display a certain sympathy for them, that is because I am a child of my times, and most of my generation have probably felt a little like that sometimes: just as that centurion of mine, I do not doubt, however tender the circumstances of his retirement, would have looked back upon the arrogant march of the legions with comradely understanding.

I dedicated the volumes of the trilogy separately; but I offer the whole work to ELIZABETH MORRIS, herself a child of Empire, as an expression of my profoundest love, gratitude and admiration.

TREFAN MORYS, 1998

WhenBritainfirst,atHeavenscommand,

Arosefromouttheazuremain,

Thiswasthecharteroftheland,

Andguardianangelssungthestrain:

Rule,Britannia,rulethewaves;

Britonsneverwillbeslaves.

J AMES T HOMSON