Cobden, Hume, Sidney Herbert, and afterwards Gladstone, as well as others of that faction, took up the cause of the pirates, and the Rajah and the naval officers who had been engaged since 1843 in suppressing the Saribas and Sekrangs were attacked with acrimony as butchers of peaceful and harmless natives—and all for the sake of extending the Sarawak raj. The _Spectator_ and the _Daily News_ bitterly assailed the Rajah, relying upon information supplied through the medium of a Singapore newspaper; and the Peace Society and the Aborigines Protection Society, laid on a false scent by those whom they should not have trusted, became scurrilous in their advocacy of cold-blooded murderers and pirates.
After having brought the "_cruel butchery_" of Beting Maru to the attention of the House of Commons on three occasions, Joseph Hume, on July 12, 1850, moved an address to her Majesty, bringing to the notice of the House "one of the most atrocious massacres that had ever taken place in his time." He supported the motion with glaring and wilful mis-statements, and brought disgraceful charges against the Rajah, whom he branded as "the promoter of deeds of bloodshed and cruelty." The Navy he charged with wholesale murder, and the poor victims of the massacre he described as a harmless and timid people.[173]
Cobden, who supported the motion, called the battle of Beting Maru a human battue, than which there was never anything more unprovoked. He could not do homage to the Rajah as a great philanthropist seeing that he had no other argument for the savages than extermination.
The Rajah was ably defended by Mr. Henry Drummond, who exposed Wise's conduct; and the motion was lost by a majority of 140 in a House of 198.
At Birmingham, Cobden asserted that the Rajah, "who had gone out to the Eastern Archipelago as a private adventurer, had seized upon a territory as large as Yorkshire, and then drove out the natives; and who, under the pretence that they were pirates, subsequently sent for our fleet and men to massacre them ... the atrocities perpetrated by Sir James Brooke in Borneo had been continually quoted in the Austrian newspapers as something which threw into the shade the horrible atrocities of Haynau himself."