ABSTRACT

‘Poor brave Clara,’ wrote Charles Elliot from Texas to his sister on 15 April 1843. ‘According to her last letter,’ he continued,

this was the very last day of her departure from England – and a bitter bitter hour it must have been to her. She is coming too to a wretched country in a wretched condition, but I know she will be glad to share my exile and I can only hope that it will not be for long.

Elliot had arrived in Texas on 23 August 1842 and his appointment as chargé d’affaires and consul general in Texas was to last until 1846; it was, indeed, a long and hard exile – starting with some unproductive weeks of ill health. 1 Clara might have felt that Charles was exaggerating before she arrived to join him, but she wrote to Emma on 16 July 1843:

Dearest Emma, what shall I say about this place? Certainly nothing that can please or gratify you. If Charles had committed murder, theft, or any other grave crime & been sent to Botany Bay, it is more than possible we should have found there a more desirable place of residence than Galveston.

My description to Harriet is not at all exaggerated. If nature was smiling around us, we might forget the want of decencies, servants, amusements, distraction of every kind – but all is blank. Not a tree, or a shrub, or a … [?] upon the ground – nothing, nothing but sand. If our house had been placed upon the Desert of Egypt (I have passed over it) we should have but there as much to gratify the eye as here.

But that is not all – Charles and Harper [the butler] have managed to spend in their muddling way, more money than the 5 children & I did in England in the same number of months & I am bound to say, it does not surprise me that there must have been roguery & carelessness. The bare necessities of life are moderate enough, but to get (with great difficulty) a person to cook your dinner badly, you must give £80 per annum & the veriest servant to clean your house costs £45 per annum. Louise who I thought expensive in England is dirt cheap here, acting too frequently, as Butler, House Maid, Nursery Maid and Washerwoman.

…We have sent Harper off. I always suspected he was fond of the bottle, but it did not enter into my calculation that he would be invited hourly to drink a glass with the respectable colonels & generals of this Republic for the express purpose of worming out from him in his excitement, poor Charley’s proceedings & supposed opinions. Dearest Emma, you may depend upon it that I never will be persuaded to be separated from Charley again unless it be for good. I have much cause to regret I did not accompany him, but we must make up for the first year by greater carefulness than ever. The children’s £500 or £800 if necessary shall never be touched by us, if even I go without clothing which I am sure would be very pleasant just now for the heat is intolerable. My poor Liver is affected by it, & I have this moment been obliged to leave off writing whilst Louise has been playing the drum upon my back – a real relief for the moment….

It is obvious that Charles and Clara consoled themselves to some extent, as expatriates often do, by being able to let their hair down within the family circle about the wretchedness of the place to which they were posted. In a letter mostly about China, Charles gave a typically pithy view of Texans:

No language can convey to you any adequate idea of the wretchedness of life in this raw country, and as for the people, I hardly know whether I can better describe them than to tell you a mot of mine to Clara the other day. She said that they were half savage and I said no they were savage and a half. That is, entirely savage in one sense and only half civilised which is being half savage. 2

In another letter, Charles was to refer to Texas as a ‘den of villains, misery, murder & musquitoes’. 3 Texas was to be admitted to the State of Union as the 28th state in 1845, but at the time that Elliot arrived to take up his position it was an independent republic, having secured its freedom from Mexico as recently as 1836. Elliot did his best as Britain’s first representative in Texas, and he was much involved, as an honest broker, in a crucial period of its history, but his ‘exile’ there was inextricably bound up with his service in China and the way it was perceived in Britain. 4 He made that clear in that same letter to Emma of 6 September 1843:

… Here I will not remain and that I have plainly told Lord Aberdeen. I came because I said that it was necessary to stand to my guns (with all the obloquy that I was suffering under at that time). But it was not my intention to be consenting to my disgrace and punishment by sitting down contentedly in a den of thieves. It is the plain fact that the country is deeply indebted to me for I saved the China trade in its hour of peril. I conquered it afterwards – and I left behind me in China the only effectual guarantee for the maintenance of that conquest. Besides, too I have done the Government very substantial service since I have been here, and it is not right that Mr Percy Doyle [acting British chargé d’affaires in Mexico] should be left to carry out negotiations, commenced through me and entirely without help from England. If they do not like to send [promote] me to Mexico, a la bonne desir [that’s up to them]. But they cannot expect me to play 2nd fiddle to Percy Doyle; and he, too, performing on my violin. That may not be.

Three weeks later, it was clear that Charles was not going to get the Mexico job – there were too many other contenders. Intimation of the rejection came, as Clara wrote to Emma on 24 September, wrapped in soothing words:

He adds that no one can be more sensible of the injustice with which Charley was treated by the public in consequence of his proceedings in China but thinks that all that prejudice has been removed & is sure it has always been his desire and the other members of the Govt to place Charley’s conduct in the most favorable point of view …