Board of Control

Leadership: Robert Hobart, 4th Earl of Buckinghamshire, President (since 1812); Thomas Courtenay, Secretary (since 1812)

Territory: One modest office in Westminster, and by extension every acre the Company governs

Overview

The Board of Commissioners for the Affairs of India, called the India Board or simply the Board of Control, is the Crown’s answer to an awkward question: what does a government do when a joint-stock company has conquered an empire? Pitt’s India Act of 1784 answered it with a committee. Up to six Privy Counsellors, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a Secretary of State among them, are empowered “to superintend, direct and control all acts, operations and concerns which in any wise relate to the civil or military government or revenues” of British India. The East India Company keeps its trade, its patronage, its army and its dividends. The Board keeps the whip hand over policy, and last year’s Charter Act of 1813 lengthened the whip: the Crown’s sovereignty over the territories is now asserted in statute, and the Board’s superintendence stands confirmed over a Company that just lost its India monopoly.

The whole apparatus is astonishingly small: a president who in practice is the Board, a secretary, a counsel, and a couple of dozen clerks and précis writers in a modest office in Westminster. Nothing about it is small in effect. India is governed from Leadenhall Street, but it is directed from that office.

How the Dual Government Works

• The Court proposes; the Board disposes. Every despatch the Court of Directors sends to India goes to the Board first, which may approve it, rewrite it, or replace it wholesale. The Directors sign what comes back. The fiction that the Company governs India is maintained in the signatures and nowhere else.
• The Secret Committee is the sharper instrument: three Directors, sworn to secrecy, through whom the Board can send orders on war, diplomacy and revenue straight to the Governor-General without the Court ever seeing them. When Britain wants something done in India quietly, it travels this channel.
• Full access, one direction. The Board may call for any paper the Company holds. The Company may see only what the Board chooses to show.
• Patronage stayed with the Directors. Writerships, cadetships, the whole ladder described in East India Company, remain the Directors’ coin. The Board’s own establishment is tiny and appointments to it are ministerial favours, which is precisely why a Board appointment on a man in Calcutta reads so strangely to Company eyes: it comes from a different mint entirely.

The Establishment, 1814

What the Board Cares About in October 1814

• The Nepal war, above everything: its cost, its conduct, and whether the Company’s army is about to embarrass His Majesty’s Government on the frontier
• Charter Act implementation: how the licensed free merchants behave, what becomes of the trade, whether the Company’s revenues hold
• The missionary question and the new bishopric (see St John’s), Parliament having opened the door that Leadenhall Street spent twenty years holding shut
• Native institutions and endowments, in which the Board’s interest is newly official, the 1813 Act having put education and religion on Westminster’s books
• Anything a Governor-General does with money, which in wartime is everything

The Board’s Man in Calcutta

The Board keeps no establishment in India. Its eyes there are whatever correspondence comes home. Which makes the Honourable Frederick Cavendish’s junior correspondence appointment a genuine curiosity: the one Board post resident in Bengal, held by a twenty-two-year-old with no Haileybury behind him, and every Company man who hears of it must choose between two readings, ornament or inspector, with nothing to steer by.

What the job would entail, done properly — the duties of a correspondence clerk resident where the correspondence originates:

1. Present himself at the Government House secretariat, so his letters travel with the official packets
2. Call upon the senior servants of the Presidency and know their business
3. Read the Gazette, daily numbers and back files, for the commercial and political record
4. Call for returns and records the Board is entitled to see: revenue at the Writers Building, the courts’ business, musters and expenditure at Fort William
5. Observe works and preparations of consequence, the Nepal mobilisation and engineering works on the river being exactly the kind of expenditure Westminster reads about
6. Write memoranda home to the Secretary by every packet: trade, war, revenue, the temper of the settlement, and the state of native institutions

A conscientious holder of the post would, in short, conduct an open, official, paper-generating survey of everything in Bengal worth knowing. Every request would be noticed, because the Board’s requests always are.

History

Created 1784 by Pitt’s India Act, the compromise that ended the fight over Fox’s attempt to seize the Company outright: dual government, Crown policy on Company money. Strengthened by practice under Dundas, the first great President, who ran India policy from the office for two decades. Confirmed and extended by the Charter Act of 1813. The Board outlives every argument about it until 1858, when the Mutiny ends the experiment, the Company is abolished, and the Board’s office becomes the India Office under a Secretary of State.