For Hindu Indians, the majority of the population, the railway did not represent progress as it did in Europe. In India the railway was seen as an attack on the caste system, as different castes would have to travel in the same compartments. In 1856 Dalhousie’s successor Lord Canning further outraged Indian notions, especially among the Brahmins in the Indian army, when he made altered conditions of service apply. Henceforth Indian troops had to go abroad as part of their service contract. It was another opportunity for the caste miscegenation forbidden by the Hindu religion.
Above all Dalhousie had angered Indians with the amount of territory he had added to British India by what he called his doctrine of lapse. As well as Burma–by the Second Burmese War in 1852, Lower Burma and the important trading station of Rangoon were annexed–British India obtained Sattara in 1848, Nagpore in 1853 and Jhansi in 1854. These were three hereditary lands of the Maratha warriors that Dalhousie took over on the grounds that each of the rulers lacked a direct descendant. Hindu policy in these circumstances was to adopt a male heir, but the governor-general would not have that. He maintained that the sovereignty of a nation ‘lapsed’ to the paramount power–the British government–in default of the natural heirs of a ruling family. Power could not pass to the adopted sons without the consent of the governor-general, and that Dalhousie would never grant.
By the 1850s no Indian ruling family of a dependent state, however princely, felt secure with Dalhousie, who had enormously extended the boundaries of British India. The final straw was the annexation of the powerful kingdom of Oude in 1856, again because there was no male heir of the body. To British eyes the administration of Oude was despicably corrupt and cruel, since the bulk of the massive taxes fell on the miserable poor, but its annexation enraged the kinsmen of the late ruler. Dalhousie himself had noted with concern that there was a great deal of unrest among the Brahmins of the Bengal army, a high proportion of whom had been recruited from Oude. A strange prophecy was circulating that a hundred years from Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757 the British would be driven out of India. When stories of the abysmal performance of the British army in the Crimea started to reach India, it encouraged the Indian troops to revolt.
The spark for mutiny was the Enfield rifles and their supposedly sacrilegious cartridges handed out to the Indian troops at Bengal. But though the tallow was withdrawn it was not soon enough to stop wild rumours sweeping the country that it marked the start of an attempt to destroy the caste system and the Hindu and Muslim faiths, and to convert India to Christianity. Panic spread throughout the country and the revolt began. The Indian Mutiny was the worst crisis the British Empire had encountered since the Napoleonic Wars. Much of India joined the rebels, leaving isolated garrisons like Cawnpore and Lucknow in British hands. But eventually, after a long siege, the British garrison at Cawnpore under Sir Hugh Wheeler was forced to surrender.
Unfortunately the siege of Cawnpore was led by a vengeful victim of Dalhousie’s lapse policy called Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the last Peishwah of Poona. Nana Sahib tricked the British garrison into letting their wives and children go by granting them a safe-conduct pass. Then, before the eyes of their husbands and fathers, as the party of women and children began sailing away downriver Nana Sahib’s soldiers opened fire on them.
Those who escaped death were dragged bleeding and terrified to a local palace and locked up. There, five of Nana Sahib’s men hacked them to death and threw their limbs, large and small, down the well of Cawnpore. When news of Cawnpore reached England from the three men who managed to escape it poisoned the attitude of the new British garrisons towards the Indians for a generation. The rage of the English soldiers when they discovered the remains of their comrades’ wives and children down the well of Cawnpore led to equally barbarous scenes of retaliation upon the Indian population–some were tied to cannons and blown up–which could likewise not be forgotten by their Indian victims.
At Lucknow, the garrison managed to hold out until help arrived with General Havelock, who had come from the Punjab. Britain had annexed the Punjab and its subject province Kashmir in north-west India only eight years before after two strenuous wars against the Sikhs, a very martial people. However, British treatment of the Punjab was very different from that of Oude and the other disaffected areas thanks to its administration by the Lawrence brothers Henry and John. The Lawrences, who had spent most of their adult lives bound up with Indian affairs, respected and admired Indian culture and deplored Dalhousie’s doctrine of lapse. The regime they created in the Punjab, which the Sikhs found acceptable, ensured that it stayed loyal to Britain. In fact the military traditions of the Sikhs and the fearless soldiers they produced became a crucial element in the maintenance of the empire–never more so than at the time of the Mutiny.
Confident that the Punjab would not rise, a force was collected of partly British and partly Sikh soldiers which marched south from the Punjab to recapture Delhi, while others sailed along the Ganges to relieve the weakened defenders of Lucknow. Fortunately for the British, most of Bombay, Madras and Lower Bengal did not join the rebellion, and most independent local leaders such as the princes of Holkar and Sindhia remained allies of the British. Fortunately, too, a detachment of soldiers on its way to the Second China War could be diverted to India instead.
The Indian Mutiny dramatically demonstrated that it was absurd for most of the enormous subcontinent of India to be governed by what was essentially a commercial company, even if there was a Cabinet representative to oversee its affairs. A Conservative government, the second Derby–Disraeli administration, was now in power, Palmerston having been briefly thrown out of office in February 1858. The India Bill which dissolved the East India Company after it had ruled India for 101 years had the assent of both parties. It transferred the government of British India to the crown, which was represented by a secretary of state for India, and an expert council replaced the old Board of Control which had been composed of directors of the company. In India itself, a viceroy replaced the governor-general, and all the former presidencies such as Bombay and Madras were henceforth subordinate to his rule. The company’s army became conjoined with the British army. The son of Prime Minister George Canning, Lord ‘Clemency’ Canning, who had acted with aplomb during the Mutiny and insisted that most of the rebels be treated leniently, became the first viceroy.
But the minority Derby and Disraeli government was driven from power in 1859, and Palmerston came back for his second period as prime minister. Although it was called a Whig–Peelite coalition it was in effect the first administration of what by 1865 was becoming known as the Liberal party. A few days before Palmerston took office, at a meeting at Willis’s Rooms in London on 6 June 1859 some 300 Whigs, Peelites and Radicals had pledged themselves to work as one against Derby and Disraeli. For many years they had supported one another on the issues where they had ideas in common, such as representative government and free trade. Now there was fusion, though the tension between the disparate elements continued under Palmerston, since their leader shared none of the commitment to a wider franchise and social progress that would be an increasingly dominant theme for the new party.
In fact, regardless of party, there was a widespread consciousness among much of the House of Commons of the changing times. Dissenters or Nonconformists, whose numbers at mid-century in some cities rivalled those of the Anglicans, would make up much of the Liberal party’s supporters. It was no longer appropriate for Britain to continue to be confined within the Anglican settlement of two centuries ago. A less exclusive mood was emerging in the country. Under the Tories in 1858 a Jewish Disability Act allowing non-Christian jurors to become MPs allowed the Jewish Lionel de Rothschild to take the seat in the House of Commons he had won in 1847. In the same year the Property Qualification Act laid down that for the first time MPs did not have to be men of wealth.
William Ewart Gladstone, chancellor of the Exchequer from 1859 onwards, was one of the leaders of the progressive sect
ion of the Liberals. He clashed frequently with Palmerston, who was almost a quarter of a century older. While Gladstone’s whole life was a voyage of intellectual exploration, Palmerston’s ideas were immovable. He could not understand Gladstone’s palpably growing confidence in the perfectibility of man and democratic ideas. Gladstone was increasingly disquieted that lack of money prevented some people from voting. It offended his Christian conscience, which led him to regard all men as equal. He would soon be making speeches in favour of universal suffrage and Parliamentary reform, though Palmerston had given strict orders that all attempts at expanding the franchise were to be shot down. Palmerston even tried to stop Gladstone’s bill to reduce duty on newspapers to make them cheaper and more accessible to the working man, and sided with the House of Lords when it tried to throw it out. But Gladstone triumphed by wrapping the bill up in the budget. As a money bill, constitutionally it could not be touched by the Lords.
The natural scientist Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859, whose theories about evolution were popularized as ‘the survival of the fittest’, increased Britons’ belief in their civilization. So did writers like Lord Macaulay, the dramatic historian whose ‘Whiggish’ view of the unending progress of English history was the required reading of the day. Although the Indian Mutiny implied that the fruits of Victorian civilization might be less valued by other nations, the patriotic mission to impart material achievements to less fortunate peoples did not cease.
British penetration into central Africa in the 1850s reinforced the country’s sense of superiority. Africa’s impenetrable equatorial interior had defied Europeans since Roman times. At the end of the eighteenth century a young surgeon named Mungo Park had died in his attempt to follow the uncharted Niger river to its source during his intrepid solo journey into the Gambia, and no Briton had ventured there since. Tropical disease and the lack of maps made any expedition potentially suicidal. But in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s missionaries like David Livingstone and British explorers like Sir Richard Burton and J. H. Speke at last mapped out Africa’s geographical contours. The invention and widespread use of steamships facilitated travel to Africa, while breakthroughs in medicine made it possible to survive.
There had been considerable missionary activity in southern Africa, working from the Cape northwards, ever since the British had captured it during the Napoleonic Wars, and it was their activities which reawakened interest in equatorial Africa. David Livingstone, a former mill hand from Lanarkshire in Scotland, was the most celebrated missionary of Victorian England. He became a national hero and was given a state funeral at Westminster Abbey in 1874. His statue, with its peaked tropical cap, located outside the Royal Geographical Society headquarters opposite Hyde Park, reminds us that he was also one of the nineteenth century’s most important explorers.
Having enterprisingly taken a short course in medicine because he believed it would be of use to him, but with no special knowledge of Africa, Livingstone had been sent to Bechuanaland (now Botswana) by the London Missionary Society in 1840. From there he travelled north on foot into the unknown. Using beads to barter for food, armed with his Bible and a gun, he spent the next thirty years crossing and recrossing parts of east-central Africa where no European had been before to bring her Christianity and to denounce slavery. Whereas malaria and other tropical diseases had put paid to earlier European adventurers, Livingstone’s survival was ensured by his pioneering use of quinine.
He still suffered endlessly from malaria, but the quinine enabled him to stay alive, and he refused to give up his mission. Like all missionary endeavours it was kept going purely by public subscription. And on those journeys of conversion Livingstone was the first European to discover Lake Ngami, the Victoria Falls, the Zambezi valley, Lake Nyasa and the River Luabala, which turned out to be the mighty River Congo.
From 1865 to 1871 Livingstone vanished in the jungles of Africa. Such was the world’s anxiety about the whereabouts of this amazing man that the journalist and explorer H. M. Stanley was sent out by the New York Herald to look for him. Alone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika Stanley spotted an elderly white man and it was then that he hailed him with the immortal words, ‘Dr Livingstone I presume?’
Livingstone had been intent on finding the source of the Nile, the river which flows from south to north. This had become an obsession for the Victorians, and was a mystery unsolved since Herodotus. Rumours emanating from Egyptian explorers and missionaries, and from Livingstone himself, suggesting that the source lay in the great lakes rather than in Herodotus’ four fountains at the heart of Africa, sent a number of British expeditions to Africa in the 1850s. The most talked about was that of the flamboyant Arabist Sir Richard Burton, who had entered the Holy City of Mecca in disguise, and the explorer and soldier John Hanning Speke. Together they discovered Lake Tanganyika in 1858. But it was Speke who courageously travelled on alone to find where the Nile river rises out of a great lake he named Victoria in 1862, in honour of the queen. As he made his way down waters unmapped by Europeans, Speke came upon the explorer Sir Samuel Baker, who was slowly making his way up the Nile, charting it as he went. In fact the various sources of the Nile continued to be disputed, so that in 1864 Baker would discover another source, Lake Nyanza, which he called Lake Albert in honour of the prince consort.
By 1864, however, Prince Albert had been dead for three years. In 1861, at the age of forty-two, the prince consort had fallen victim to typhoid, scourge of rich and poor before the arrival of proper sewage disposal. Queen Victoria had always been obsessed with the unhealthy and ancient nature of the drains at Windsor, and had been putting in new ones when her husband became ill. After a locum doctor’s initial failure to diagnose typhoid, nothing could save him. Once widowed, Prince Albert’s adoring wife, mother of nine children, became a recluse, quite unable to appear at any state occasions so terrible was her grief. Colossal new buildings in London, the Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial opposite one another in Kensington, provided public expression of her unhappiness. The monarchy became extremely unpopular as the queen, soon known as the Widow of Windsor, withdrew from public life to live in the deepest seclusion. Ever after she blamed the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, for his father’s death, because she believed that Prince Albert had caught the fatal disease while visiting him.
Queen Victoria’s ten-year period of mourning coincided with a low in Britain’s external relations, when the ageing Palmerston lost his touch. He became preoccupied with the danger posed by Napoleon III to British security and–as Prince Albert’s death had removed a very useful source of information about German affairs–failed to understand the significance of what was going on in Prussia, where in September 1862 Bismarck had become first minister.
Palmerston had looked with the strongest approval on the Italian wars of unification, which began in April 1859, soon after the end of the Indian Mutiny. England preserved a decisive and helpful neutrality. The three most important members of the government, Palmerston, his foreign secretary Lord John Russell and Gladstone his chancellor of the Exchequer, had the greatest sympathy with the Italian cause–the Risorgimento or rebirth–as did most of the bien pensant, educated, anti-papal middle classes, for Britain had long been a home from home to Italian nationalist exiles. In 1861 the first Italian Parliament proclaimed Victor Emmanuel king of a unified Italy.
The Italian wars of liberation had begun after a secret deal between Napoleon III and the Italian nationalist leader Count Camillo Cavour that they should attack Austria together and drive her out of Italy. When it emerged that the price for the emperor’s help in Italy was the lands of Savoy and Nice, which brought the French frontier in the south up to the Alpine passes, Palmerston never trusted the French leader again. It confirmed the British belief that Napoleon III was a warmonger who would do anything to enlarge France’s territories. The final insult came in 1859 when the French engineer Ferdinand De Lesseps in a moment of inspiration began building the Suez Canal
–a passage by water across Egypt from the Mediterranean through to the Red Sea. Palmerston believed it was intended to threaten the British Empire in India.
So Britain began to draw apart from France, just when she might have begun to need an ally on the continent, though relations between Italy and England remained warm for over half a century. By 1859, the war scares which had alarmed Britain throughout Napoleon III’s reign brought about a Royal Commission to look into British defences. It pronounced them inadequate. Napoleon not only had a fleet of steam-powered boats, he was said to be building a huge naval base at Cherbourg just across the Channel. From there would he not one day try launching an invasion of England from Boulogne, just as his uncle had planned?
Demands for the expenditure needed to put Britain on a war footing led to endless rows between Palmerston and Gladstone. Fortifying Portsmouth and Plymouth in the manner Palmerston required would involve drastically raising the taxation that Gladstone tried every year to reduce, morally convinced as he was of the wickedness of war. With Gladstone’s encouragement, in 1860 the Radical Richard Cobden brought about the Franco-British commercial treaty reducing tariffs between the two countries, as part of their commitment to the doctrine of free trade which both men believed was the most enduring way of maintaining peace. But distrust of France continued.
In 1861 the American Civil War broke out when Abraham Lincoln became president on an anti-slavery ticket. The Southern states’ wealth depended on a slave economy if they were to run their cotton and tobacco plantations at profit, so Lincoln’s arrival in the White House prompted them to announce that they would exercise their right to secede from the Union, forming the Confederate States under the presidency of Jefferson Davis. But the Northerners refused to allow this to happen. When the Southerners tried to seize Fort Sumter near Charleston, the capital of South Carolina, civil war erupted. Despite their abhorrence of slavery, the majority of the British were sympathetic to the South. Gladstone, who was convinced of each nation’s right to self-determination, said that Jefferson Davis had created a nation, and Palmerston himself preferred the gentlemanly ways of the South and their aristocratic society to the crude energy of the Northern Yankee. Nevertheless it would have been a great mistake for Britain to take sides and be drawn into the war. Palmerston successfully insisted that Britain remained neutral.
The Story of Britain Page 70
