The Burma Wars: 1824-1886 (Conflicts of Empire)

by George Bruce

  9: THE SECOND WAR

  King Bagyidaw hated the very thought of his defeat and of the treaty that the British had imposed upon him. But he did not learn any lessons from it, try to profit by it through learning the principles of western diplomacy, or even try to learn something of European military science. Instead, he brooded over his misfortunes, lost his cordial, joyous manner and grew sour and bitter. The country was impoverished after two years’ war and the payment to the British of the huge indemnity; his treasury was almost bankrupt, while the loss of Arakan and Tenasserim, from which he and his family had derived much of their income, deprived his court of much of its former wealth and colour.

  The commercial treaty signed on 23 November 1826 with Britain did very little to facilitate trade between the two countries. Rice the Burmese flatly refused to export because it was the people’s staple food and at the time there was not a big enough surplus. Silver also they refused to export, because a huge amount having been handed over in part payment of the indemnity, they were anxious to conserve it for future payments, as well as to stop as much as possible the drain on the country’s silver. Teak became the main trade commodity. By one means and another the Burmese also prevented a British resident being accredited to the court, fearing that he would learn too much of their internal affairs. At the same time they flatly refused to send one to Calcutta because this was a mere dependency and not the court of St James. So from the first days of peace there was little to heal the wounds of war.

  But in 1830, two years after the advent as Governor-General of Lord William Bentinck, a statesman of liberal outlook, whose understanding of the conquered nation led to less strained relations, Major Henry Burney became the first British Resident. A scholar and linguist, he studied Burmese history and won the court’s regard, including even that of King Bagyidaw. Meantime, Bagyidaw’s increasingly frequent fits of depression worsened until he became deranged and the queen, with her brother Menthagyee, took over direction of affairs of state. ‘Their avaricious and grasping nature are involving the country in disaffection and ruin,’ reported Dr Bayfield, a member of Burney’s staff, perhaps a little oblivious of the overwhelming ruin to which the war and the indemnity had brought it.

  In 1837, Prince Tharrawaddy, the king’s brother, who had organised a large personal following of bandit chiefs, dacoits and disbanded soldiers, launched a determined rebellion against Bagyidaw and advanced upon the sacred royal palace-fortress. In no time at all the dispirited royal troops gave way and Tharrawaddy seized the throne. Burney let him know that the traditional massacre of members of the royal family capable of opposing him would be viewed by the British with marked disfavour, and thus was able to prevent it.

  Tharrawaddy now grew to believe that Burney was a spy and relations between the two became strained, not least perhaps because the king’s new ministers were mainly military commanders who wanted a last desperate war with the British, even though the odds were against them. ‘Either the golden umbrella or the grave,’ they declared.[51] Burney reported to Calcutta that Tharrawaddy was violent and warlike.

  Perhaps the evidence for this was the king’s attempt to engage European artillery experts, just as the Sikhs had done in the Punjab, to cast cannon of bigger calibre than those of the British and to instruct his gunners properly, for he believed that inferiority in this respect was the main cause of the Burmese defeat. Burney began to believe that Tharrawaddy would revoke the Yandabo Treaty and in 1837 he urged the Governor-General ‘to declare hostilities against His Majesty and frighten him into reason.’[52]

  Adoniram Judson, the American missionary whom the Burmese had imprisoned during the last war, seemingly unable to forget the misery of his confinement, went farther than this and urged the British to go to war because, surprisingly, it was ‘the best, if not the only means of eventually introducing the humanising influences of the Christian religion’.[53]

  But war did not come yet. Tharrawaddy knew for one thing that he could not rely upon the Mon people of Lower Burma, having been forced to crush a formidable rebellion there in 1838-40. He also knew how badly his own forces compared with the British. His failure to retrieve his kingdom’s lost territory caused him, like his brother Bagyidaw, to suffer deep depression and after several attempts at suicide he died insane in 1846, a victim, like his brother, of mental instability brought about largely by the reversal of Burma’s fortunes.

  His eldest son, the Prince of Pagan, succeeded him. Pagan Min, as he was known, has been damned by historians as a thoroughly deplorable monarch. He began his reign in the traditional way by publicly murdering by strangulation or the mallet all his royal rivals, their wives and children, in accord with a bloody but oft-followed palace tradition. Yet for the first few years of his reign he tried hard to restore good administration. He suppressed banditry upon the rivers, brought back a semblance of peace and crushed a number of rebellions, trying at the same time to rescue his country from the disgrace of being a mere dependency of Calcutta by efforts to establish direct diplomatic relations with Queen Victoria. Failing in this, however, he grew disillusioned and cynical, preferring to spend his time at cock fights, bare-fist boxing matches and at drinking bouts. Inevitably, government deteriorated and corruption, from viceroys to the humblest provincial official, grew rampant.

  Against this background of growing anarchy the second war between Britain and Burma now loomed. The Treaty of Yandabo guaranteed the security of British merchants and commerce. Merchants and traders at Rangoon were not to be harassed by undue exactions or to be oppressed in any way, but in the British view Burmese officials, in recent years especially, had gone out of their way to heap insults upon them and weigh them down with unjust exactions. Injured Burmese pride on the one hand and prickly British arrogance on the other hardly made for peace and harmony.

  Lord Dalhousie, a Scottish nobleman, aged 35, and a determined imperialist, had, since becoming Governor-General in 1848, overthrown the Sikhs in the Punjab and made Britain master of India. An eager annexationist, ready at all times to extend India’s frontiers, by 1851 he was free from other wars and ready if need be to put troops again into Burma, although he would have preferred not to.

  There had been no British representative in Rangoon for ten years. Merchants were now complaining of unjust taxes, harbour dues and levies amounting to extortion. The climax came when two British sea captains were charged with murder and various other offences and although there was no trial they were imprisoned and heavily fined.

  The two mariners appealed to the Government of India to demand compensation of £1,920 for reimbursement of the fines and for unlawful imprisonment. Lord Dalhousie cut the indemnity to be demanded from the Burmese down to £920, but said that British subjects had a right to be protected by their own government ‘from injustice, oppression and extortion’.

  Commodore Lambert, a short-tempered and impetuous naval commander, was then ordered to sail to Rangoon with a squadron of men-of-war, first ascertain that the two captains had given a true statement of what had taken place, then demand the reparation from the Burmese governor of Rangoon. ‘It is to be distinctly understood,’ Dalhousie said in his instructions, ‘that no act of hostility is to be committed at present, though the reply of the Governor should be unfavourable, nor until definite instructions regarding such hostilities shall be given by the Government of India.’[54]

  So Dalhousie already saw war likely over this trifling issue of £900 and a quarrel of two ships’ captains. But a letter to the King of Burma was first to be delivered before any act of war, should the Governor of Rangoon refuse to comply with the British demands.

  Lambert’s ship dropped anchor off Rangoon on 27 November 1851 and a number of merchants crowded on board and bombarded Lambert with complaints, some justified, others mere impudence. Among examples of the latter was that of a Mr Crisp, who having heard of the chance of war between Burma and Britain had at once sold the Burmese a cargo of arms. He now complained that they had not p
aid him and asked the British Government to intervene on his behalf.[55]

  From the moment he arrived in Rangoon, Lambert seems to have gone out of his way both to humiliate the Burmese and to create a situation where war was inevitable. First, disobeying his orders, he wrote demanding reparations before collecting the written evidence justifying it. Second, without waiting for an answer he wrote personally to the prime minister enclosing the Governor-General’s letter to the king, which he had been instructed to send only when all else failed. In a letter to the governor of Rangoon, enclosing these two letters, he said that he expected that ‘every dispatch will be used for forwarding the same, and I hold you responsible for an answer being delivered in these waters within five weeks from this day.’

  He then sent his interpreter to Calcutta to explain his actions. Dalhousie’s two colleagues on the Council of the East India Company would not accept the evidence he supplied to justify Lambert’s disregard of his instructions. Dalhousie himself, however, supported Lambert’s cutting short talks with the governor and sending the letter to the king at once. Meantime, Dalhousie warned Lambert that if the king failed to give a satisfactory answer, the British Government could not ‘tamely submit…’ Reparations must be exacted, but without ‘recourse to the terrible extremity of war, except in the last resort and after every other method has been tried without success.’ He objected to bombarding Rangoon because it would be ‘unjustifiable and cruel in the extreme, since the punishment would fall chiefly on the harmless population.’ Equally, he objected to the armed invasion of Rangoon or Martaban because it would ‘render inevitable the war which we desire in the first instance by less stringent measures to avert.’ He therefore advised a blockade of Rangoon after first embarking British subjects there.[56]

  But on 1 January 1852 the king answered in terms of seeming compliance. He declared that having regard to the friendship between the two countries ‘we have recalled the Governor of Rangoon to the Golden Foot’, adding that another suitable governor would be appointed while inquiries would be instituted with regard to merchants who had been unjustifiably ill-treated.

  Honour appeared to have been satisfied. Dalhousie declared that this reparation ought to be accepted as fully satisfactory and advised that the inquiry should concern only the incidents of the ships’ captains and no other matters. The shadow of war now seemed to be fading.

  The king acted quickly. A new governor arrived on 4 January, but now Commodore Lambert undid all the good that had been done. Instead of going himself to meet the new governor, he sent an assistant interpreter named Edwards to request the removal of an embargo on communication between local residents ashore and Lambert’s squadron. This the new governor immediately granted. With arrant discourtesy, Lambert then again disdained to meet the governor, but sent Captain Latter and Edwards, accompanied by two ships’ officers, to his house to deliver a letter containing the demands for a settlement. Edwards went ahead and rode into the courtyard on horseback, defying the convention that even the most senior officials of any nationality should dismount. What occurred then is described by Captain Latter:

  At the foot of the outer steps one of the Governor’s suite drew his dagger on him, threateningly asked him how he dared thus to approach the Governor’s house. Mr Edwards replied that he had no intention of entering without the Governor’s permission. On being called into the Governor’s presence, he stated that his life had been threatened, and mentioned what had occurred. The Governor sent for the offender and punished him in the presence of Mr Edwards in the usual Burmese manner, namely by having him taken by the hair of the head, swung round three times, his face dashed to the ground, himself dragged out by the hair and pitched down the stairs.[57]

  When this violent ritual had been completed, Edwards told the governor that a deputation of officers sent by Commodore Lambert would shortly arrive with a request for an interview. And now began the train of trivial circumstances that in Lambert’s hands would be fashioned into war.

  The governor, while ready to grant interviews informally to a junior official like Edwards, objected to having to disregard protocol to the point of granting the same favour to a body of senior officers, instead of a ceremonial reception, since he would lose face. He therefore told Edwards that he would accept the letter from him only. Edwards answered that this was impossible, since the deputation would be arriving at any moment, and he then left the governor’s presence.

  Shortly after, the deputation and Mr Kinkaed, an American missionary, rode together into the courtyard without dismounting. Having learnt their lesson the guards were this time more cautious, and merely asked them to wait because the governor was asleep. But the deputation apparently objected, left the courtyard and rode back to Lambert’s ship, declaring that the governor had refused to see them.

  Lambert, evidently a devout believer in gunboat diplomacy, decided to take the sternest possible action. Impatiently brushing aside the very shadow of protocol by failing to await a message from the governor, and disregarding the king entirely, he warned British residents ashore to be ready to leave Rangoon at once. Something like panic seems to have followed, because several hundred of them were rowed out to one or other of the British vessels anchored opposite Rangoon and that evening they sailed off down river.

  Directly it was dark, in his heavy-handed way Lambert played what he must have felt was his trump card by illegally ordering the seizure of the king’s yacht anchored nearby. He then issued a declaration of blockade of the Rangoon river and the Bassein and Salween rivers above Moulmein. And he capped these actions by sending a letter to the king saying that all communication between British India and the Burmese Empire was suspended.

  The next day, 7 January, at dawn, the squadron sailed down river with the King of Burma’s ship in tow, and dropped anchor below the town of Dalla on the opposite shore. The governor of Dalla now interceded with Lambert, who said that out of his personal regard for him, he would reopen negotiations with his colleague, if that official would first come aboard his ship and ‘express his regret for the insult he had offered to the British flag’ by refusing to meet the deputation.

  It was high-handed stuff indeed, but some time later the aged governor of Dalla hobbled back on board with a letter saying that the governor of Rangoon really was asleep, that he didn’t want to see subordinate officers, and politely invited Lambert to visit him to settle all matters together, instead of leaving it to inferiors. Though he knew full well that this was the correct course, Lambert rejected the invitation, seemingly wishing to humble the Rangoon governor. And he sent a message saying that suitable measures would be taken unless the governor came on board his ship by noon next day.

  Early in the morning of 8 January, the Dalla governor again came on board, this time to plead with Lambert to release the king’s ship, because now being anchored in waters under his jurisdiction he would be held responsible, and punishment for its loss visited in part at least upon him. Lambert said no, and merely extended his ultimatum from noon till sunset. The day passed in waiting, then just before sunset Lambert received a message from the governor of Rangoon threatening to open fire upon him should he attempt to tow the king’s ship out of the river. Lieutenant William Laurie, of the Madras Artillery, declared that the hot-tempered Lambert replied that ‘if even a pistol were fired he would level the stockades with the ground.’

  At dawn on 9 January 1852, Lambert ordered the squadron and the merchantmen to pass down the river. ‘At length, the Hermes came in sight, rounding the point with the Burmese prize-vessel in tow,’ reported Laurie.[58]

  As she passed the stockade, guns in rapid succession were opened on the vessels of war; at the same time, volleys of musketry were discharged upon them. The Fox immediately returned the enemy’s fire by a terrific broadside; she likewise thundered forth against the war-boats which had ventured into the river.

  The Hermes came up and poured forth her shot and shell into the line of stockade. The Phlegethon steamer,
likewise, did vast destruction to the works. For nearly two hours were our vessels employed in spreading ruin and dismay around. During the conflict, a large gun-boat, having on board a gun of considerable calibre and upwards of sixty armed men, was sunk by a broadside, when nearly all on board perished. Altogether about 300 of the enemy were killed and about the same number wounded, in this first encounter with the Burmese.

  And so began Commodore Lambert’s war, a consequence of his arrogance and hot temper — ‘the terrible extremity of war’ which Dalhousie had expressly warned him to try to avoid. While the gun-smoke still swirled between the ships and the stockades Lambert sent a letter to Mr Hillady, secretary to the Government of India. ‘It is with deep regret that I have had to commence hostilities with the Burmese nation, but I am confident that the Marquis of Dalhousie and the Government of India will see it was unavoidable, and necessary to vindicate the honour of the British flag,’[59] he wrote.

  Having by seizure of the king’s personal ship while the two nations were still at peace committed an act of piracy, Lambert had every reason to shout about the honour of the flag. And whatever happened, he was determined upon war. But on 11 January, despite the damage and loss of life done by the naval bombardment, the governor of Rangoon still looked to negotiations, rather than war. Four non-British foreign merchants in Rangoon, with the governor’s approval, sent Lambert a petition stating that the governor agreed to pay the £900 demanded as compensation; to agree to a British Resident and to have a Residency house built, and to abide by the provisions of the Yandabo Treaty. The petitioners ‘most humbly entreated’ Lambert to have pity upon them, and to save them from ruin and destruction.

  This petition, sent with the governor’s approval, Lambert ignored. Yet, as Dalhousie stated in a minute to his colleagues on the Council on 22 January 1852, it left the door open for negotiations and the restoration of harmony between the two peoples. Dalhousie’s criticism, expurgated in great part from the Government Blue Book published later to justify the war when an outcry followed in Parliament, declared that Lambert himself bore the entire responsibility for the succession of hostile acts which, unfortunately, both sides had undertaken. For Dalhousie believed that Lambert had no cause to seize the king’s ship and that by doing so he made a move that inevitably caused the Burmese to react in a hostile way, as a result of which the two nations were now faced with the threat of war.