Assassinated in India, Conservative politician who understood Ireland

This year marks both the bicentenary of the birth of Richard Southwell Bourke, who succeeded his father as the 6th Earl of Mayo in 1867, and the 150th anniversary of his death.

The leading Irish Conservative politician of the mid-19th century, he was born in Dublin on January 21 1822 and on February 8 1872 he achieved the unfortunate distinction of being the only viceroy of India to have been murdered.

Bourke was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1845 he visited Russia and published an account of his travels, ‘Saint Petersburg and Moscow; A Visit to the Court of the Czar’, in 1846. That year he was also actively engaged in famine relief in Co Kildare.

He was chief secretary for Ireland on three occasions in Derby and Disraeli’s minority administrations – 1852, 1858 and 1866 – and during his parliamentary career represented three constituencies: Co Kildare (1847-52), Coleraine (1852-57) and Cockermouth (1857-68).

When Bourke’s father became the 5th Earl of Mayo in 1849, he assumed the courtesy title of Lord Naas.

During his 21 years in Parliament, he spoke upwards of 140 times. As chief secretary, he prepared and introduced 36 bills, and carried 33 acts to completion through the House. His 133 principal speeches fill 524 columns of Hansard, and deal with every subject connected with the administration of Ireland. He did not speak on non-Irish matters.

Possessing great social charm, Naas had an attractive personality. Good-humoured and generous, he did not harbour resentments. Hard-working and clear-sighted, he was a sound administrator and possessed good judgment.

His views on most subjects were eminently sensible. For example, he firmly believed that improving tenants ought to be rewarded for their improvements, and in his first term as chief secretary he introduced tenant right and tenants’ compensation bills, neither of which unfortunately passed. Although opposed to the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, he advocated a policy of ‘levelling up’ by granting public money to all charitable institutions regardless of religious affiliation.

He had a much more accurate appreciation of Fenianism than Gladstone. When insurrection broke out in March 1867 he behaved calmly and adopted a firm but measured response that contributed to the rising’s collapse. Naas was interested in everything relating to Ireland and was invariably on top of the brief.

These qualities and his Irish experience served him well when he was appointed viceroy of India in 1868. He toured the subcontinent extensively and contemporaries claimed, perhaps with a modicum of exaggeration, that within three years he learned more about India than most civil servants (and members of the Indian Civil Service were the crème de la crème) managed in a lifetime.

He made a point of hitting the deck running, improving relations with Afghanistan as a bulwark against Russian expansionism, organising the first census, converting a deficit budget into surplus, creating a department of agriculture and commerce, extending the telegraph network, and promoting railways and irrigation.

He founded Mayo College at Ajmer, still known as the ‘Eton of India’, for the education of the Indian elite.

Mayo’s unfortunate interest in penal reform, dating from his days of chief secretary for Ireland, was responsible for his untimely death.

He was assassinated by Sher Ali Afrid on February 8 1872 while inspecting the penal settlement of Port Blair in the Andaman Islands.

Sher Ali’s motivation was not political. Although the viceroy could be regarded as the third most important person in the British Empire after the Queen and the prime minister, Sher Ali’s intentions were not to shake the Empire to its foundations. When asked why he did it, Sher Ali replied: ‘By order of God.’ He then added: ‘Among men I have no accomplice; God is my partner.’

Sher Ali had killed one of his relatives in a family feud and had been sentenced to death. On appeal the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, but Sher Ali still thought the sentence too harsh.

He wished to kill the superintendent of the prison and the viceroy as revenge for, as he saw it, the severity of his sentence. In normal circumstances he should never have had the opportunity to kill the viceroy. Sher Ali was condemned to death and hanged on March 11 1872. The last message he received before his execution was from the Countess of Mayo: ‘God forgive you, as we do.’

The Liberal government, anxious to play down the incident’s possible political significance, made no fuss and swiftly appointed a new viceroy.

The earl’s body was brought home to Ireland and was buried on April 26 1872 in the graveyard of the medieval ruins of St John’s church in Johnstown, Co Kildare, near his home at Palmerstown House.

On August 19 1875 a statue of the earl in viceregal garb was unveiled in Cockermouth, the borough where the Wyndhams, his wife’s family, held sway and which he had represented in the House of Commons for over a decade.

George Wyndham, the chief secretary for Ireland between 1900 and 1905 and an exponent of ‘Constructive Unionism’, was the earl’s nephew.

In May 2007, another statue of the earl was unearthed in Jaipur in India, after being buried for six decades. This statue had earlier been installed in the premises of Mayo Hospital, currently known as the Mahilya Chikatsalya, Jaipur. The nine-foot-tall cast-iron statue, weighing around three tons, was commissioned by the Maharaja Ram Singh ji of Jaipur, as a posthumous tribute to the earl.

To protect it from possible vandalism, this statue was buried in the grounds of the Albert Hall Museum of Jaipur at the time of Indian independence. The statue was recovered by the Jaipur Mayo Alumni Chapter and presented to Mayo College, in Ajmer.

There is a Mayo Window, and accompanying brass, at the west end of the north aisle of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin and a memorial in St Paul’s Cathedral in London.