Annie Besant

• 1. Introduction

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  Annie Besant was born on the 1st of October 1847 in London, the daughter of a man who held a medical degree from Trinity College Dublin and a mother who was Irish Catholic. Her father died while she was still a small child, leaving her mother to run a boarding house at Harrow School to pay for her brother Henry's education. Annie herself was fostered by Ellen Marryat, sister of the novelist Frederick Marryat, who ran a school at Charmouth. When Annie returned to her mother at age 16, she carried with her a strong sense of duty to society and the influence of the Tractarian movement.

  At age 20, in December 1867, she married the Reverend Frank Besant, a cleric who would become vicar of Sibsey in Lincolnshire. Within a few years, the marriage was in ruins. What grew from the rubble was one of the most restless, searching, and surprising public careers of the Victorian era. A woman who began as the wife of an evangelical Anglican priest would go on to be arrested for publishing a pamphlet on birth control, elected to the London School Board while most women could not even vote, and eventually elected as the first female president of the Indian National Congress in 1917.

  How did Annie Besant move from a country vicarage in Lincolnshire to the forefront of Indian independence? What drove her to abandon secularism for mysticism, and to stake her reputation on a fourteen-year-old boy she believed was the next World Teacher? The answers reveal a life that tracked nearly every major political and spiritual current of its era.

• 2. A Marriage in Ruins

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  Frank Besant was a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, ordained as a priest in 1866. Before becoming vicar of Sibsey in 1872, he had taught at Stockwell Grammar School and then at Cheltenham College. The Sibsey living had come through the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hatherley, who was a connection of Annie's own Wood family. It should have been a stable start. It was not.

  Money was a constant source of friction. Frank Besant controlled every penny Annie earned from her writing, which covered short stories, children's books, and articles. Annie, who was certain a third child would strain the household beyond its limits, found herself questioning not just her marriage but the faith that had structured her life. Her daughter Mabel's serious illness in 1871 accelerated that crisis. She consulted the theologian Edward Bouverie Pusey, who reprimanded her theological doubts in person. She attended a service at St George's Hall by the heterodox cleric Charles Voysey, who introduced her to the freethinker and publisher Thomas Scott.

  Encouraged by Scott, she wrote an anonymous pamphlet titled On the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth, published in 1872 and credited simply to "the wife of a beneficed clergyman". The marriage reached its breaking point when Frank demanded Annie attend Communion; she refused. By 1873 she had left Sibsey for London, where Moncure Conway gave her temporary shelter and the Scotts found her a small house in Colby Road, Upper Norwood.

  The separation agreement of the 25th of October 1873 gave Annie custody of their daughter Mabel. But in 1878, after her public campaigning on contraception, Frank Besant successfully argued in court that she was unfit as a mother and was awarded custody of both children. Annie's son Arthur Digby Besant, born in 1869, went on to serve as President of the Institute of Actuaries from 1924 to 1926 and later wrote The Besant Pedigree.

• 3. The Fruits of Philosophy

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  On the 2nd of August 1874, Annie Besant first heard Charles Bradlaugh speak. Within weeks she had joined the National Secular Society and launched her own career as a public orator. Her first lecture, on the 25th of August 1874, was titled "The Political Status of Women" and was delivered at the Co-operative Hall on Castle Street, Long Acre in Covent Garden. Margaret Cole called her "the finest woman orator and organiser of her day".

  Bradlaugh and Besant set up the Freethought Publishing Company at the start of 1877. Later that year they published Fruits of Philosophy, a book by the American birth-control campaigner Charles Knowlton. The book argued that working-class families could never achieve happiness until they could decide how many children they wanted. In the National Reformer, Besant and Bradlaugh declared: "We intend to publish nothing we do not think we can morally defend. All that we publish we shall defend."

  They were arrested and put on trial. Found guilty, they were released pending appeal, and the verdict was eventually overturned on a technical legal point. The trial made them household names. Besant then helped found the Malthusian League, becoming its secretary while Charles Robert Drysdale served as president. She and Bradlaugh supported the League for roughly twelve years. Her pamphlet The Law of Population, published in 1878, sold well.

  In 1878, Frank Besant used her contraception campaigning as the basis for stripping her of custody of both children. The coincidence of public victory and private loss defined much of Besant's early activism: the price of speaking freely was paid at home.

• 4. Strikes, Socialism, and School Boards

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  On the 13th of November 1887, Besant agreed to speak at a rally of London's unemployed in Trafalgar Square. Police tried to disperse the crowd, fighting broke out, troops were called, one man died, and hundreds were arrested. Besant offered herself for arrest; the police declined to take her. The day became known as Bloody Sunday. She threw herself into organising legal aid for the jailed workers and helped found the Law and Liberty League to defend freedom of expression, becoming editor of its journal, The Link.

  Besant's involvement in the London matchgirls strike of 1888 grew from a Fabian Society talk on female labour by Clementina Black. Besant wrote in The Link about conditions at the Bryant and May match factory in Bow, where mostly young women worked for very low wages under threat of occupational diseases including Phossy jaw, caused by the chemicals used to make matches. A young socialist named Herbert Burrows, who already had contacts inside the factory, drew her further into the campaign. The strike was won. Louise Raw, in Striking a Light published in 2011, has contested whether Besant actually led the strike, arguing that a proper examination of primary evidence makes that claim impossible to sustain.

  That same year, 1888, Besant was elected to the London School Board. Women at the time were still barred from parliamentary politics but had been brought into the London local electorate in 1881. Besant drove around with a red ribbon in her hair and campaigned on the slogan "No more hungry children". She came out on top of the poll in Tower Hamlets, winning more than 15,000 votes. She wrote in the National Reformer that ten years earlier a cruel law had robbed her of her own child, and now the care of 763,680 children of London was partly in her hands.

  The following year, 1889, she helped Ben Tillett draft the rules for the dockers' union during the London dock strike, in which casual workers fought for what became known as the Dockers' Tanner. The dockers, like the matchgirls before them, won public support and the strike was won. At the close of 1888, Besant had shut down both her periodical Our Corner and The Link, citing financial constraints.

• 5. The Theosophical Turn

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  In 1889, Besant was asked by the Pall Mall Gazette to review The Secret Doctrine, a book by Helena Blavatsky. She sought an interview with Blavatsky, met her in Paris, and was converted. She let her Fabian Society membership lapse in 1890 and broke her ties to the Marxists. In her Autobiography, she placed the chapter on socialism immediately before one called "Through Storm to Peace", identifying theosophy as the peace she had been seeking. She had found the economic side of life lacking a spiritual dimension and searched for a belief grounded in what she called Love.

  When Blavatsky died in 1891, Besant emerged as one of the leading figures in the movement. In 1893 she represented the Theosophical Society at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, the same event at which the Indian monk Swami Vivekananda addressed the audience. She first traveled to India that same year. In September 1894 she reached Australia, lecturing in Melbourne and Sydney, and by October of that year she was writing from Dunedin, New Zealand, reporting that she had reformed the Theosophical Society in Australasia. At the Society's Australasian convention that year, her followers forced William Quan Judge to resign as vice-president; he left the Society in April 1895 along with the entire American section.

  In 1895, alongside the Theosophical Society's founder-president Henry Steel Olcott, Marie Musaeus Higgins, and Peter De Abrew, Besant helped develop Musaeus College, a Buddhist school in Colombo, Sri Lanka. In 1902, the theosophist Francesca Arundale accompanied Besant to Paris, where Besant and six friends were initiated into the first three degrees of Co-Freemasonry. Besant returned to England bearing a Charter and founded the first Lodge of International Mixed Masonry, Le Droit Humain, eventually rising to the position of Most Puissant Grand Commander of the Order.

  She became president of the Theosophical Society in 1907, with its international headquarters by then located in Adyar, Madras. In 1898 she had helped establish the Central Hindu School, and in 1908, with her express support, her close colleague Charles Webster Leadbeater was readmitted to the Society after having resigned in 1906 over a controversy involving his advice to boys in his care.

• 6. The World Teacher Project

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  In 1909, Leadbeater identified a fourteen-year-old South Indian boy named Jiddu Krishnamurti, who had been living with his father and brother on the grounds of the Theosophical Society headquarters at Adyar, as the probable "vehicle" for a coming World Teacher. Blavatsky had described this figure as early as 1889 as a torch-bearer of Truth sent by a hidden spiritual hierarchy guiding humanity's evolution, and Besant had repeated that prophecy since at least 1896.

  Krishnamurti and his younger brother Nityananda, known as Nitya, were placed under the care of theosophists and extensively prepared for Krishnamurti's future mission. Besant became their legal guardian with the father's consent; the father was very poor and at the time unable to care for the boys himself. He later reversed his decision and fought a legal battle to regain guardianship, against the wishes of the boys. Krishnamurti had developed a close bond with Besant and regarded her as a surrogate mother, a role she accepted willingly. His biological mother had died when he was ten years old.

  In 1929, twenty years after his discovery, Krishnamurti repudiated the role assigned to him. He dissolved the Order of the Star in the East, an organisation created to support the World Teacher's mission, and eventually left the Theosophical Society altogether. He spent the rest of his life as an independent speaker on philosophical, psychological, and spiritual subjects. His affection for Besant did not diminish. Concerned for his welfare after he declared his independence, she purchased six acres of land near the Theosophical Society estate that later became the headquarters of the Krishnamurti Foundation India.

• 7. India's Cause

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  As early as 1902, Besant wrote that India was not ruled for the benefit of its people but for the profit of its conquerors, and that Indians were being treated as a conquered race. When World War I broke out in 1914, she used her position as editor of the New India newspaper to attack the colonial government and demand moves toward self-rule. She adopted the Irish nationalist slogan as her own: England's need, she declared, was India's opportunity.

  In 1916, she launched the All India Home Rule League alongside Lokmanya Tilak, again drawing directly on Irish nationalist methods. This was the first political party in India to have a change of government as its central goal. Unlike the Indian National Congress, which met once a year to pass resolutions, the League operated year-round and built local branches capable of organising demonstrations and public meetings.

  In June 1917, Besant was arrested and interned at a hill station. She flew a red and green flag in defiance. The Congress and the Muslim League together threatened mass protests unless she was released. The government gave way, announcing that the ultimate aim of British rule was Indian self-government, and Besant was freed in September 1917. She was welcomed by crowds across India and in December 1917 took over the presidency of the Indian National Congress for a year. Both Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi spoke of her influence with admiration. Nehru's own tutor had been a theosophist.

  After the war, Gandhi led a new direction in the Congress, one committed to non-violent militancy. Besant, despite her radical past, was uncomfortable with the socialist leanings of the new leadership. She continued to campaign for Indian independence until the end of her life, speaking in India and on tours of Britain, writing letters and articles, and appearing on platforms in her own version of Indian dress.

  Besant died on the 20th of September 1933, at age 85, in Adyar, Madras Presidency. After her death, her colleagues Jiddu Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley, Guido Ferrando, and Rosalind Rajagopal built the Happy Valley School in California, which was later renamed the Besant Hill School of Happy Valley in her honour.