The scale of the Governor General’s establishment underlined the oddness of Auckland’s position. As his nephew and Military Secretary, Captain William Osborne, remarked, “Of all human conditions, perhaps the most brilliant and at the same time the most anomalous, is that of the Governor General of British India. A private English gentleman, and the servant of a joint stock company [that is, the East India Company], during the brief period of his government is the deputed sovereign of the greatest empire in the world; the ruler of a hundred million men.
