Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, GCB,GCSI,GCIE,PC (8 November 1831 – 24 November 1891) was an English statesman, Conservative politician and poet who used the pseudonym Owen Meredith. During his tenure as Viceroy of India between 1876 and 1880, Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. He served as British Ambassador to France from 1887 to 1891.
Lytton was a protégé of Benjamin Disraeli in domestic affairs, and of Richard Lyons, 1st Viscount Lyons, who was his predecessor as Ambassador to France, in foreign affairs. His tenure as Ambassador to Paris was successful, and Lytton was afforded the rare tribute – especially for an Englishman – of a French state funeral in Paris.
Lytton's mother, who lost access to her children, satirised his father in her 1839 novel Cheveley, or the Man of Honour. His father subsequently had his mother placed under restraint, as a consequence of an assertion of her insanity, which provoked public outcry and her liberation a few weeks later. His mother chronicled this episode in her memoirs.[3][4]
In 1862, Lytton was promoted to Second Secretary in Vienna, but his success in Belgrade made Lord Russell appoint him, in 1863, as Secretary of the Legation at Copenhagen, during his tenure as which he twice acted as Chargé d'Affaires in the Schleswig-Holstein conflict.[6] In 1864, Lytton was transferred to the Greek
court to advise the young Danish Prince. In 1865, he served in Lisbon, where he concluded a major commercial treaty with Portugal,[6] and subsequently in Madrid. He subsequently became Secretary to the Embassy at Vienna and, in 1872, to Richard Lyons, 1st Viscount Lyons, who was Ambassador to Paris.[6] By 1874, Lytton was appointed British Minister Plenipotentiary at Lisbon where he remained until being appointed Governor General and Viceroy of India in 1876.[6]
Viceroy of India (1876–1880)
Midway on his journey [to India] he met, by prearrangement, in Egypt, the Prince of Wales, then returning from his tour through India. Immediately on his arrival in Calcutta he was sworn in as Governor General and Viceroy, and on 1 January 1877, surrounded by all the Princes of Hindustan, he presided at a spectacular ceremony on the plains of Delhi, which marked the Proclamation of her Majesty, Queen Victoria, as Empress of India. After this the Queen conferred upon him the honor of the Grand Cross of the civil division of the Order of the Bath. In 1879 an attempt was made to assassinate Lord Lytton, but he escaped uninjured. The principal event of his viceroyalty was the Afghan war. (The New York Times, 1891)[6]
After turning down an appointment as governor of Madras,[5] Lytton was appointed Viceroy of India in 1875 and served from 1876 to 1880.[1] His tenure was controversial for its ruthlessness in both domestic and foreign affairs.[1] In 1877, Lord Lytton convened a durbar (imperial assembly) in Delhi that was attended by around 84,000 people, including Indian princes and noblemen. In 1878, he implemented the Vernacular Press Act, which enabled the Viceroy to confiscate the press and paper of any Indian Vernacular newspaper that published content that the Government deemed to be "seditious", in response to which there was a public protest in Calcutta that was led by the Indian Association and Surendranath Banerjee.
Lytton's son-in-law, Sir Edwin Lutyens, planned and designed New Delhi.
Lord Lytton began serving Viceroy of India in 1876. The rains had been failing in parts of the Madras Presidency since 1875, and the colonial administration's poor response to the famine has been held by some as having contributed to the overall death toll of between 6.1 million and 10.3 million.[7]
Lord Lytton, as Viceroy of India, was responsible for the diversion[8] of funds from the Great Famine of 1876-78 towards the lavish Delhi Durbar in 1877. Lytton's decision to allocate resources towards the grand ceremony, which was perceived as a display of British power and wealth, further exacerbated the famine's severity, ultimately leading to substantial human suffering and loss of life.
Britain was deeply concerned throughout the 1870s about Russian attempts to increase its influence in Afghanistan, which provided a Central Asian buffer state between the Russian Empire and British India. Lytton had been given express instructions to recover the friendship of the Amir of Afghanistan, Sher Ali Khan, who was perceived at this point to have sided with Russia against Britain, and made every effort to do so for eighteen months.[5] In September 1878, Lytton sent General Sir Neville Bowles Chamberlain as an emissary to Afghanistan, but he was refused entry. Considering himself left with no real alternative, in November 1878, Lytton ordered an invasion which sparked the Second Anglo-Afghan War. The British won virtually all the major battles of this war, and in the final settlement, the Treaty of Gandamak, saw a government installed under a new amir which was both by personality and law receptive to British demands; however, the human and material costs of the conflict provoked extensive controversy, particularly among the nascent Indian press, which questioned why Lytton spent so much money prosecuting the conflict with Afghanistan instead of focusing on famine relief.[1] This, along with the massacre of British diplomat Sir Louis Cavagnari and his staff by mutinying Afghan soldiers,[5] contributed to the defeat of Disraeli's Conservative government by Gladstone's Liberals in 1880.[9]
The war was seen at the time as an ignominious but barely acceptable end to the "Great Game", closing a long chapter of conflict with the Russian Empire without even a proxy engagement. The pyrrhic victory of British arms in India was a quiet embarrassment which played a small but critical role in the nascent scramble for Africa; in this way, Lytton and his war helped shape the contours of the 20th century in dramatic and unexpected ways. Lytton resigned at the same time as the Conservative government. He was the last Viceroy of India to govern an open frontier.
Commemoration
A permanent exhibition in Knebworth House, Hertfordshire, is dedicated to his diplomatic service in India. There is a monument dedicated in his name at Nahan, Himachal Pradesh, India, domestically called Delhi Gate.[10]
Domestic politics
In 1880, Lytton resigned his Viceroyalty at the same time that Benjamin Disraeli resigned the premiership. Lytton was created Earl of Lytton, in the County of Derby, and Viscount Knebworth, of Knebworth in the County of Hertford.[6] On 10 January 1881, Lytton made his maiden speech in the House of Lords, in which he censured in Gladstone's devolutionist Afghan policy. In the summer session of 1881, Lytton joined others in opposing Gladstone's second Irish Land Bill.[11] As soon as the summer session was over, he undertook "a solitary ramble about the country". He visited Oxford for the first time, went for a trip on the Thames, and then revisited the hydropathic establishment at Malvern, where he had been with his father as a boy".[12] He saw this as an antidote to the otherwise indulgent lifestyle that came with his career, and used his sojourn there to undertake a critique of a new volume of poetry by his friend Wilfrid Blunt.[13]
Ambassador to Paris: 1887–1891
Lytton was Ambassador to France from 1887 to 1891. During the second half of the 1880s, before his appointment as Ambassador in 1887, Lytton served as Secretary to the Ambassador to Paris, Lord Lyons.[14] He succeeded Lyons, as Ambassador, subsequent to the resignation of Lyons in 1887.[14][6] Lytton had previously expressed an interest in the post and enjoyed himself "once more back in his old profession".[15]
Lord Lytton died in Paris on 24 November 1891, where he was given the rare honour of a state funeral. His body was then brought back for interment in the private family mausoleum in Knebworth Park.
When Lytton was twenty-five years old, he published in London a volume of poems under the name of Owen Meredith.[1] He went on to publish several other volumes under the same name. The most popular is Lucile, a story in verse published in 1860. His poetry was extremely popular and critically commended in his own day. He was a great experimenter with form. His best work is beautiful, and much of it is of a melancholy nature, as this short extract from a poem called "A Soul's Loss" shows, where the poet bids farewell to a lover who has betrayed him:
Child, I have no lips to chide thee.
Take the blessing of a heart
(Never more to beat beside thee!)
Which in blessing breaks. Depart.
Farewell! I that deified thee
Dare not question what thou art.
Lytton underesteemed his poetic ability: in his Chronicles and Characters (1868), the poor response to which distressed him, Lytton states, 'Talk not of genius baffled. Genius is master of man./Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can'.[1] However, Lytton's poetic ability was highly esteemed by other literary personalities of the day, and Oscar Wilde dedicated his play Lady Windermere's Fan to him.
Serbski Pesme (1861). Plagiarized from a French translation of Serbian poems.[19][20]
The Ring of Ainasis (1863)
Fables in Song (1874)
Speeches of Edward Lord Lytton with some of his Political Writings, Hitherto unpublished, and a Prefactory Memoir by His Son (1874)
The Life Letters and Literary Remains of Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton (1883)
Glenaveril (1885)
After Paradise, or Legends of Exile (1887)
King Poppy: A Story Without End (partially composed in early 1870s: only first published in 1892),[1] an allegorical romance in blank verse that was Lytton's favourite of his verse romances[1]
Based on the French translation, in 1868 he published a drama titled Orval, or the Fool of Time which has been inspired by Krasiński's The Undivine Comedy to the point it has been discussed in scholarly literature as an example of a "rough translation",[21]paraphrase[22] or even plagiarism.[23]
Marriage and children
On 4 October 1864 Lytton married Edith Villiers. She was the daughter of Edward Ernest Villiers (1806–1843) and Elizabeth Charlotte Liddell and the granddaughter of George Villiers.[24]
^David Washbrook, 'Lytton, Edward Robert Bulwer-, first earl of Lytton (1831–1891)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 accessed 29 September 2008
^ abcdeDavid Washbrook, 'Lytton, Edward Robert Bulwer-, first earl of Lytton (1831–1891)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 accessed 2 Nov 2015
Further reading
Aurelia Brooks Harlan, Owen Meredith: A Critical Biography of Robert, First Earl of Lytton (1946).[1]
Lady Emily Lutyens (ed.), The Birth of Rowland: An Exchange of Letters in 1865 Between Robert Lytton and His Wife (1956).
Mary Lutyens, The Lyttons in India: An Account of Lord Lytton's Viceroyalty, 1876-1880 (1979).
The LUCILE Project an academic effort to recover the publishing history of Lucile (which went through at least 2000 editions by nearly 100 publishers).
1 Following the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny. 2 As representatives of George VI in his role as King of India (1947–50). 3 As representatives of George VI and then Elizabeth II in their roles as King and Queen of Pakistan, respectively.