And he, perhaps, was its purest personification. Curzon was, at any rate, exceptionally, almost unnaturally, white. Someone who saw him in his prime as viceroy of India described him as having ‘the complexion of a milkmaid and the stature of Apollo’. (Years later, seeing Tommies bathing in the First World War, Curzon would be astonished how white the skins of the working class could be once scraped of grime and, one supposes, blood.) The viceroy’s bearing was conspicuously erect, the ramrod posture only partly the effect of the steel and leather backbrace he had been forced to wear since adolescence. Every day, he composed himself into an expression of stoic indifference to discomfort. It was the perfect pose of paramountcy; the burden that weighed but did not crush. Puffers of empire, like J. R. Seeley, the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, talked often and loudly of Britain’s civilizing ‘destiny’. But Curzon didn’t need lectures. He knew in his aching bones that he had been summoned to rule.
What do You think about A History Of Britain, Volume 3?
