Buckingham next became proprietor and editor of the Calcutta Mirror, a Liberal paper, that instantly obtained an extensive sale, and brought in to its founder a net profit of £8000 a year. But his resolute advocacy of Free Trade, free settlement, and free Press, and an exposure of the misdoings of the East India Company, brought down on him the heavy hand of Mr. John Adams, the temporary Governor-General. His paper was suppressed, and he was ordered to quit Calcutta. His little fortune was sacrificed in a vain attempt to fight the Governor and the Company, and he was thrown back on the world, almost as poor, save in experience, as when a youth he trudged from Corunna to Lisbon. He left his magnificent library at Calcutta, in the hopes of being able to return, after having obtained redress at home. But the redress he hoped for never came. Too many interests were involved to accord it to him, and his library, like his fortune and his hopes, was wrecked.
It was not till after many dreary years, that the East India Company, under pressure from the Government, could be induced, as an indemnity for the wrongs done him, to accord him an annuity of £200, in addition to one of the like amount awarded him by the British Government, "in consideration of his literary works, and useful travels in various countries," September 1st, 1851. "Pompey and Cæsar berry much alike."
"The blow to him at Calcutta was altogether a very savage one," says Mr. S. C. Hall, "but, like all injustice, it recoiled at length on those who gave it. From the hour that Buckingham was driven from that city (Calcutta), the power of the great Indian monopoly, both commercial and governmental, was doomed. It was by no means his case alone which accomplished that doom. But oppression and vindictiveness, by driving him home, made him for a time the representative there of voices that never entirely slept; whilst the impolicy that had aroused them was persevered in to the last—not ceasing, even after the trade was thrown open, but at length provoking that rebellion which was followed by John Company finally having to make an assignment of his whole estate and effects to John Bull." In England Buckingham started the Athenæum, a literary weekly, but did not long retain it in his hand; he was not, in fact, qualified for its editorship. He was a Liberal politician avant tout, and a littérateur only in a second or third place.
In 1832, the Reform Bill was passed, and the same general election that sent Wm. Cobbett to the House of Commons for Oldham, sent James S. Buckingham from Sheffield, for the avowed purpose of giving him the best standpoint possible from which to assail the East Indian monopoly. That Company had never made a more fatal mistake than when it persecuted and drove him from India. Buckingham was a theme for caricature in Punch from 1845-1848.
It is open to question whether the East India Company could have engaged J. S. Buckingham's services if, instead of hounding him out of India, they had endeavoured to secure a man of such exceptional ability and intense resolution of purpose in its service. In heart and soul he was opposed to a monopoly, and if he had been engaged, he would have accepted an engagement only for the purpose of remedying some of the abuses of their government, and rectifying some of the injustices done. But he was so utterly and conscientiously opposed to the whole system, that it is more than doubtful whether he would have met favourably any overtures made to him.
In England an excellent conception of his, which he was able to realize, was the foundation of the "British and Foreign Institute." To this he was moved by seeing so many Orientals and others adrift in London, without any centre where they could meet and communicate their ideas with statesmen and politicians of Great Britain, and where they might gather for refreshment of mind and body alike. The Duke of Cambridge became President, and the Society attracted to its soirées the literary and intellectual of all lands.
His pen and his voice were employed for some years in advocating reforms.
He died on June 20th, 1855, in his seventieth year, and his wife died in the house of her son-in-law, Henry R. Dewey, 22nd January, 1865, at the age of eighty.
It is greatly to be regretted that he did not live to complete his Memoirs. He had two sons—James, who died in Jamaica, 1867, and Leicester Forbes Young Buckingham, who ran away with an actress, Caroline Connor, and married her at Gretna Green, 5th April, 1844. She had made her first appearance on the London stage at the Haymarket Theatre in 1842. The marriage was not happy and they separated, she to return to the stage, where she acted under the name of Mrs. Buckingham White. He died at Margate 17th July, 1867.