Banished potentates

Dethroning and exiling indigenous monarchs under British and French colonial rule, 1815–1955

Robert Aldrich

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526113436
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Though the overthrow and exile of Napoleon in 1815 is a familiar episode in modern history, it is not well known that just a few months later, British colonisers toppled and banished the last king in Ceylon. Beginning with that case, this volume examines the deposition and exile of indigenous monarchs by the British and French – with examples in India, Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam, Madagascar, Tunisia and Morocco – from the early nineteenth century down to the eve of decolonisation. It argues that removal of native sovereigns, and sometimes abolition of dynasties, provided a powerful strategy used by colonisers, though European overlords were seldom capable of quelling resistance in the conquered countries, or of effacing the memory of local monarchies and the legacies they left behind.

Chapter One

Thrones and dominion: European colonisers and indigenous monarchs

‘Deposed and pensioned off kings’ ran the headline over a two-page article in France’s popular Le Monde illustré in 1912. Celebrating the colonial exploits of the mother-country, which had just completed the conquest of Morocco, the journalist remarked that on occasion ‘political necessity’ had required the dethroning and banishment of indigenous rulers, some of whom, he claimed, now lived a life of leisure thanks to the pensions graciously provided by the French. Photographs showed the former Vietnamese emperor Ham Nghi, dressed in a silk tunic, and the ex-sultan of Morocco, wearing a woollen burnous. The melancholy-looking deposed sultan of Grande Comore, sitting in a grand rattan chair, appeared still regal in robes and turban. Two Africans, Dinah Salifou from Guinea and the son of Béhanzin, exiled ruler of Dahomey, were dressed in European style, the first in a dapper three-piece suit, the latter in the bemedalled uniform of a French soldier. Ago-Li-Agbo, Béhanzin’s successor, who had also been ousted, wore a distinctive dust-guard strapped over his nose. Ex-Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar, demure in a matronly dress, posed with her cute little great-niece.¹

The gallery illustrated the breadth of a French empire extending over large parts of Africa, the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, but also pointed to a strategy of imperialist rule not reserved to the French: the overthrow and exile of indigenous rulers who resisted foreign takeover, rebelled against the new masters of their countries, or were regarded by colonisers as unfit to remain on their thrones. That phenomenon provides the subject for the present volume, which examines, with varying degrees of detail, the displacement of three dozen ‘potentates’ by British and French authorities from 1815 until the 1950s.

Royal exile

Throughout history, removal from the body politic – banishment, exile, deportation, transportation – has offered a way to punish criminal offenders and political opponents. The ancient Greek city-states practised ostracism of rebels, generally sent away for ten years. Roman law included provisions for relegatio in insulam, the sending of a prisoner to a different city or province for a limited time, though without deprivation of citizenship or property, as well as permanent deportation, with consequent loss of assets and citizen rights. Early modern law perpetuated such types of punishment; Spanish legislation enacted from 1525, for instance, provided for destierro, internal exile on the Iberian peninsula, relegación or banishment to an overseas colony, and extranamiento, permanent exile from the mainland as well as the Spanish empire.² Peripheral or overseas territories – Latin America, for early modern Spanish malefactors – provided depositories for those ejected, sufficiently distant to keep undesirables from causing trouble, and with hopes of their rehabilitation and contribution to colonising endeavours.

Colonies gained notoriety as places of banishment for both common criminals and political prisoners. The British sent Irish nationalists to New South Wales in the 1790s and ‘patriot exiles’ from Canada to Tasmania in the 1830s, taking advantage of the Australian outposts that had been established in large part as penal colonies for those committed of ordinary crimes. From the early 1800s to the mid-1900s, they despatched political prisoners from South Asia to the Andaman Islands, Mauritius and the Seychelles, the ‘carceral archipelagos’ of the Indian Ocean.³ In 1871, the French deported several thousand survivors of the Paris Commune to New Caledonia, as well as over two hundred largely Berber participants in an uprising in Algeria. Motley political troublemakers from the metropole and the empire as well as common-law convicts continued to be sent by the French to the ‘green hell’ of Guiana, in South America, until the mid-twentieth century. Other countries practised similar policies and also found remote destinations for their convicts; the Russians sent political prisoners to Siberia and Sakhalin Island.⁴ Some rebels, of course, fled into voluntary exile before they were arrested, fearing for their lives and hoping to rebuild radical or nationalist movements outside their homelands; many nineteenth-century nationalists – Giuseppe Garibaldi from Italy, Adam Mickiewicz from Poland, Lajos Kossuth from Hungary – spent long years abroad because of their political views.

A particular cohort of willing or forced exiles is composed of monarchs, though statistically they accounted for only a very small number of political deportees or refugees, and a minuscule drop in the vast sea of migrants moving around the world in modern times. Monarchs who lost their crowns, accompanied by princely relatives, regularly washed up on foreign shores, seeking shelter when vanquished in battle or ousted by revolutionaries. Jacobites left Britain after the Glorious Revolution; Bourbons who escaped the guillotine fled France in the decade after 1789 and others followed with revolutions in the early nineteenth century.⁵ Romanovs who survived the Bolsheviks took flight from Russia after 1917, and Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns and Ottomans sped across borders after the First World War.⁶ King Zog of Albania, the only ruler of a short-lived modern dynasty, fled his country after Italy invaded in 1939.⁷ Communist takeovers in eastern Europe after the Second World War saw the departure of the kings of Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, and the Italian king went into exile after his subjects voted for a republic. There would be more royal exiles around the world in subsequent years. Trying to maintain a semblance of the life to which they had been accustomed, they continued to claim thrones, agitate for restoration, observe punctilious court protocol, bestow orders and decorations, and search for marriage partners of appropriate status to assure their lineage.

Royal exile occurred around the world.⁸ For instance, the last emperor of China, Puyi, lost his throne in the revolution of 1911–12 and was sent away from the ‘forbidden city’ in Beijing. Puyi gained a new crown when made ruler of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932, but lost his second throne, too, with Japanese defeat, and spent the rest of his life discreetly in Communist China.⁹ One newspaper article on ‘kicked-out’ rulers, published in 1936 while Puyi was still emperor of occupied Manchuria, spoke of the recently restored King George of Greece (who also later suffered a second deposition) and King Alfonso XIII of Spain, who lost his throne in 1931. It referred to the still living figures profiled in the French account a quarter-century earlier, now joined by such men as Abd el-Krim, the ‘Napoleon of the Rif’, who led a rebellion in Morocco, and the Maharajah of Indore, removed from his Indian throne because of an affaire des moeurs.¹⁰ The year that article was published saw the fall of yet another ‘exotic’ monarch, as Mussolini’s Italian troops chased Emperor Haile Selassie off the throne of Ethiopia. (He, too, would be restored, and deposed once again – proof that crowns were never secure.)¹¹

Heirs to thrones and crowned monarchs have always faced dangers from rebellious compatriots, ambitious pretenders and disaffected courtiers. Rivals eliminated competitors by sword, poison or gun. Reigning or aspirant rulers often perished, gloriously or ignominiously, in warfare. Palace intrigues and coups d’état replaced one monarch with another. Revolutions abolished monarchies, and victims did not always outrun regicidal opponents. Indeed, many rulers lost their thrones at the hands of fellow countrymen, from Mary Queen of Scots and King Charles I in Britain to Kings Louis XVI, Charles X and Louis-Philippe of France, as well as Emperor Napoleon III.¹²

In other cases, foreign conquerors played a key role in the exile of defeated enemies. Napoleon Bonaparte remains the most legendary of all the royal exiles. Vanquished and forced to abdicate by a coalition of foreign powers, Napoleon was sent to Elba, a relatively comfortable little realm near to home, but he escaped and regained his throne, only to be defeated and banished once again, this time to a far more distant domain.¹³ The image of the French emperor in 1815, boarded onto a British ship bound for St Helena, there to spend the remaining years of his life, is well known, the memory, myths and relics of his exile developed into a cult.¹⁴ Less familiar is the fact that only a few months later, the British deposed and exiled the last king of Kandy, from the island of Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka); Sri Vikrama Rajasinha is the subject of the first case study in this volume.

This book concerns such rulers, those who lost their thrones through the actions of colonial overlords, and except for the handful who were restored, lived out their lives in near or distant exile. They were forced to abdicate formally, or arbitrarily removed from office, by invaders from far away, sent into exile as a result of conquest of their countries during the great surge of expansion that saw most of Asia and Africa, and Australasia and Oceania, divided among the great powers. These men, and a couple of women, differed from the dethroned European royals not just because of ouster by colonisers rather than compatriots (though their compatriots often aided the colonisers in their deeds). The royal refugees in Europe generally remained free men and women in the place they found abode, able to move about as they wished, keep contacts with their old countries, even work for their restoration with support from host governments. The deposed colonial rulers, by contrast, were prisoners; though not incarcerated in gaols, they were effectively kept under house arrest, restricted in movement, and forbidden to engage in political activity. European royal exiles might easily travel between London and Paris, or from the Côte d’Azur to the Algarve; if the former ‘native’ rulers moved about, it was when colonial authorities shifted them from one place to another, or only when they were given leave by their colonial masters.¹⁵

The Europeans looked for grace and favour to kinsmen in the great royal family tree that had spread over the continent. Connections of birth and marriage as well as political sentiments assured hospitality, and exiles evoked sympathy from monarchs who felt threatening shock waves when thrones tumbled elsewhere. Several Bourbon kings and Napoleon III thus found refuge from French revolutionaries and republicans in staunchly monarchist Britain, and Napoleon III’s son, the Prince Imperial, died alongside British troops in the Zulu War in 1879.¹⁶ Several rulers who lost thrones after the unification of Germany in 1871 ended up in Hapsburg Austria. Such congeniality was lacking for non-European rulers, who almost always married into their own societies and could not throw themselves onto the mercies of kin ruling elsewhere. They could, at best, count on the pity of European monarchs for ci-devant native emperors, kings, sultans and princes, even if viewed as brutal and licentious Oriental potentates or savage African chiefains. And indeed Queen Victoria, in particular, manifested remarkable sympathy for former native rulers, including those dethroned in her name.

Further differences separated the Europeans and the non-Europeans. Dethroned European rulers had often lived in cosmopolitan courts and moved about their kingdoms, and outside their lands, in great royal progresses. Non-Europeans lived in more restricted courts, in some cases seldom emerging from ‘forbidden cities’ until bustled into the palanquins, trains and ships that took them into exile. Banished European royals drifted around a continent where they nevertheless benefited from such commonalities of culture as Christian religion (though in varying denominations), the French language that long served as the elite lingua franca, and relatively familiar protocol, customs and daily life. Europeans found burgeoning communities of fellow expatriates, such as the French in London or Russians in Paris. By contrast, normally only a small band of family members and faithful courtiers and servants accompanied royals from the colonies into exile. Those banished from one colony to another encountered far different situations than their displaced European peers. They included Muslim rulers, for instance, deported to places without a mosque, ex-sovereigns who had little if any knowledge of a European language or vernacular ones spoken in their new homes, men deposed from continental kingdoms confined on small and remote islands.

Generations after the deposition of European royals, their heirs might still frequent surviving royal courts and appear as decorative members of high society. The Europeans occasionally found other career possibilities; the last Stuart pretender became a cardinal, Louis XVIII was mooted as a possible king of Poland, later royal exiles entered the world of business. Such possibilities did not exist for deported African or Asian royals. The families and successors of native ex-monarchs, as subjects of the colonial state, might realistically only hope for subaltern positions in the military or administration; most descendants faded into obscurity, and some descended into penury.

There are, of course, exceptions to those dramatic contrasts. Some deposed Indian maharajahs carried considerable fortunes with them into exile and, like European royals, found comfortable niches overseas. A few of the other exiles also accommodated relatively well to new host societies, as shown by images of a Zulu and Asante king dressed in European clothes and worshipping in Christian churches. The European and non-European royal exiles also shared certain traits. They expressed nostalgia for lost homelands and loss of status, and continuously lamented their fate. Both groups railed against the injustice of their removal, recruited support for their causes and campaigned for restoration, though seldom with success. They all faced concerns about finances, marriages, their children’s futures, and rivalries among heirs and other claimants to thrones. They resented slights to their dignity, and clung to residues of their former positions, their titles and medals and heirlooms. Many tried to preserve the languages and cultures of their ancestors, and kept as close contact with home societies as was possible or permitted. Sometimes they were eventually able to celebrate regim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Chapter One Thrones and dominion: European colonisers and indigenous monarchs
• Chapter Two The last king in Ceylon: the British and Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, 1815
• Chapter Three Kings of Orient were: royal exile in British Asia
• Chapter Four ‘Dragons of Annam’: the French and three emperors in Vietnam
• Chapter Five Out of Africa: the British, the French and African monarchs
• Chapter Six The French and the queen of Madagascar: Ranavalona III, 1897
• Chapter Seven From conquest to decolonisation: exile from French North Africa
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index