This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  As this was going on, Major General Sir Henry Barnard (1799–1857) grouped his forces north of Delhi, and Lieutenant General Sir Patrick Grant arrived in Calcutta to become Commander-in-Chief of India following the death from cholera of General The Honourable George Anson(1797–1857). It is quite possible that many British casualties also came from disease rather than the fighting, a common factor in warfare at that time. By the end of June there came the notorious massacre of Europeans in Cawnpore who thought that they had been granted safe passage along the Ganges. Three days later, 30 June, the siege of Lucknow began. Later that week, now the beginning of July, Barnard also died of cholera and his place as commander of the Delhi Field Force was taken by Major General Thomas Reed (1796–1883). It is about this time, mid-July, that the British started to get a grip of their operation to put down the rebellion. On the 12th of that month, for example, Brigadier General Henry Havelock (1795–1857) overwhelmed the rebellion of Cawnpore at Fatehpur and then, three days later, at Aong and Pandu Nadi. In retaliation, Nana Sahib executed some 200 women and children. The following day Havelock advanced on Nana Sahib’s positions near Cawnpore and defeated him.

  By the end of July there was a sense of compromise among some of the Governor-General’s staff. On 31 July, Canning made his Clemency Declaration which announced that any mutineer who had not committed murder would be spared execution. British newspapers condemned Canning’s action as cowardice. By the beginning of the third week in September, Delhi was now back in the hands of British troops. By the 25th, Havelock and Sir James Outram mounted the first relief of the Lucknow Residency. There was then a setback and it was not until 17 November that the Residency was relieved yet again. One who stayed was Havelock who was to follow many heroes in the mutiny. He died of dysentery on 24 November 1857. Lucknow had become a symbol of British resistance. It was not until 24 March 1858 that the rebels were put down at Lucknow. There was not a single week without a battle or skirmish.

  The final battle for Oudh did not take place until mid-June 1858. Even so, there could be no official declaration of peace in Oudh until January 1859. Finally, on 8 July 1859, Canning was able to declare, throughout India, a state of peace.

  Eleven months earlier the 1858 India Act, which transferred the sub-continent to the British Crown and out of the hands of the East India Company, had come into power. That royal proclamation was displayed across India in November of that year along with an unconditional pardon to all mutineers save those who had either murdered or sheltered murderers. There was little mercy for the latter groups. Typical public execution was to be tied to cannon mouths and blown to pieces. So ended a black and seemingly unnecessary chapter in the history of the British Empire.

  Although the rebellion was seen as one mass demonstration, we might really see it as a series of mutinies. The evidence is weak that there was a masterminded national uprising. Inevitably, and therefore obviously, the mutinies would only take place where sepoys believed the rest of the regiment were with them. The argument in almost every case for rebellion was that the British threatened religion and caste. Whether they had a great idea what would happen once it was all over is uncertain. The inclusion of disaffected officials and even princes suggests that a wider aim was to replace the British rule. To do this there needed to be continuous order among mutineers. Caste and religion may have been the excuses the rebels spread, but there is a sense that this was almost a violent industrial revolution where the lot of the common soldier against the boss class of British rule had to succeed. This may well account for the fact that the rebellious regiments did not abandon pecking orders.

  Why did the Sepoy Rebellion fail? Part of the answer is that the Punjab did not join in and therefore the European, mainly British, troops were able to contain the uprising. Another part of the answer contradicts the question. To some extent the rebellion was a success inasmuch that the Indians did get rid of the East India Company’s rule, although that would have happened anyway. Their conditions and relations with the British improved. It was a result of the rebellion that Major General Jonathan Peel, the brother of the late Prime Minister Robert Peel, became chairman of the inquiry into the organization of the Indian army. General Peel, who was also Secretary of State for War, worked quickly through written and oral evidence and reported at the end of the first week in March 1859. His report was thorough. However, to modern eyes, it would still reflect what we might call Victorian arrogance over its subjects in the Empire. Some of the issues were attended to. Promotion of Indian noncommissioned and commissioned officers would – in theory – no longer be on seniority. A man could now be rewarded for his talents. Commanding officers were to be given more authority in order to exercise local power based upon their regimental knowledge rather than being overpowered from some central bureaucracy. The question of combining military necessity with national dress was settled. No longer were sepoys to be dressed up as a facsimile of their British counterparts.

  The main thrust of Peel’s commission of inquiry was to prevent another rebellion by restructuring the Indian army. Peel decided that the army could no longer have so few British soldiers. Bengal had been the centre for the rebellion. Therefore, he insisted that in future there should be no more than a two to one ratio, that is, two sepoys for every one British soldier. The army in the Madras and Bombay presidencies was considered more reliable. Here, his recommendation was that there should be three sepoys to every British soldier. Perhaps the most important recommendation was the structure of the Bengal native cavalry. There was great debate whether this should be a regular formation as with the infantry or an irregular one, that is, having their own structures and operating independently as well as, of course, being akin to what we today would call a fashionable militia. The commander-in-chief in Bombay, Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Somerset, was against irregular troops because their Indian officers tended to have a greater status and therefore power, and there was a raffishness of less formal discipline. There was always a sense of a social conceit found in a fashionable British militia well into the twentieth century. Moreover, regular soldiers tended to come from the same areas and districts, and were subject to more formal disciplines. The cavalry squadrons and regiments, certainly in the British army, had always an irregular air. Some argue this still to be the case, rather like an independent military family fighting for the common good, but in their own inimitable style.

  Somerset was overruled partly by the evidence of celebrated Sind and Punjab senior officers. These officers had confidence that their experience would not be ignored. Brigadier John Jacob, who commanded the Sind Irregular Horse, his regional commissioner, Sir Bartle Frere, the celebrated Sir John Lawrence and Brigadier General Neville Chamberlain all recommended that their very successful and very loyal Punjab Irregular Force should be used as an example for the Bengal army. The voice of the Punjab military was heard and their opinions adopted. That was all right for the cavalry. The rebellion had started in the infantry. One very good reason for having irregular forces was that they did not cost as much. They would, of course, have regular senior officers, just as the modern Territorial Army has full-time senior officers. The cavalry, for example, would be commanded by a regular officer, each squadron in the regiment would be commanded by a regular officer and the adjutant and the medical officer would also be full-time soldiers. This would not work with the infantry, or at least not the whole order of battle. Canning reflected what he called the common-sense approach. Thirty of the infantry regiments would be irregular, but the remaining twenty would be full-time. Overall there should be about 80,000 British troops in the infantry, the cavalry and the artillery, the latter entirely British.

  We are not to bother ourselves with the military pros and cons of reform after the mutiny. However, we would do well to notice the continuing nervousness of the British rulers, brought about by their need to maintain large standing armies to protect their territorial possessions, and their inability to be confident that their mixed caste
and religious soldiery would remain loyal. There was even, in the 1860s, a system of mixed regiments which, because it was good enough to inspire unity, was later seen as a threat. The thinking was that by maintaining social differences, then no one group would ever rally enough support for a rebellion. Thus the military aim of all commanders, a well-founded and competent team, was seen as being a potential danger to the Raj. We should never underestimate the long-lasting psychological effects of the Indian Mutiny on the British rulers of India, right up to the eve of independence in the summer of 1947.

  There is a footnote to the Mutiny that points to the wider Empire. Clearly the Victorian era illustrated the need to demonstrate the British ability to hold their possessions by force if required. They had, after all, been found wanting, albeit in an earlier century, in another continent. Yet it is worth pondering that it was probably just as well that the British had been kicked out of North America because they most certainly could not have raised the forces to police the colonies that they came by after the eighteenth century.

  In 1876, Victoria was created Empress of India by Disraeli and the Raj was firmly established in political as well as commercial terms in the British catalogue of imperial holdings. Various Acts of Parliament had whittled away the authority of the English East India Company and so Victoria’s translation to Empress was hardly a phenomenon. Yet today, it is too easy to think that the Empire and colonies were quite simply subsumed into the British system and that London had a cogent policy for every aspect of their possessions. India is an example of the uncertainty of possessions. In the late sixteenth century English traders had come upon its markets and potential. The fear that those markets, especially spices, could be controlled by foreign agents forced the English into setting up their businesses in Asia. In the seventeenth century the interests of the Company had grown. However, it was not until the nineteenth century that the British, through at first the Company and then more direct instruction from London, had the true Parliamentary support and nearly enough resources to talk about India as being British. India, like much of the Empire, was a commercial venture to the British which offered risk and therefore opportunity. Its strategic value was minimal other than to deny it to others, particularly the Russians and perhaps Napoleon and, unless judged from a commercial point of view and in later times, the soldiery it could provide for British wars elsewhere.

  In 1858 an Act of Parliament took away the East India Company’s territories and their soldiers, and gave them to the Crown. A council was established, with the principal Secretary of State, and this took over full government. And to show that it was now Victoria and not the East India Company who ruled, it was at this point that the title Viceroy of India first appeared. People in Britain were encouraged to go to India, to become planters. The railways were extended, forestry commissions were set up, the judicial system overhauled, canals were dug, irrigation improved. And so a new order was established; a new era in colonial living was founded.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  1861–70

  1861 was to be a miserable year for Queen Victoria. On the morning of 16 March her mother, the Duchess of Kent, died at Frogmore with Victoria at her bedside. The Queen had never before witnessed the death of another human being. The deep distress was overwhelming and for six months the Queen struggled with her grief. Some of her closest friends believed that she was ‘determined to cherish her grief’.

  And Victoria still saw her husband as the handsome Prince she had married twenty-one years earlier, yet, by 1861, he was portly, his hair was going and his dull complexion reflected the anxieties and workload he took so seriously as Prince Consort. He was obviously ill. He suffered bouts of vomiting and high temperatures, his gums were inflamed and his glands swollen. In November, after a visit to Sandhurst to see the new Staff College, he returned to Windsor soaked through, full of rheumatic pains and quite unable to sleep for nights on end. One of the Queen’s doctors explained that the Prince was suffering from ‘gastric fever’. This was not true, but the reason for telling him this was more than poor diagnosis. They actually believed that the Prince had typhoid, but they well knew his terrible fear of the disease and the seriousness of his illness was hidden from him. Also, the royal physicians, for all their standing, were not particularly celebrated for their accuracy in diagnosing serious illness. It is even possible that Albert had bowel cancer.

  There is also another source of Albert’s illness that suggests that he was infected before the Sandhurst visit. The Queen wished their son, Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, known as ‘Bertie’, to have a little more purpose and structure to his life, which was not always easy for a royal prince in the nineteenth century and certainly did not reflect the history of the Hanoverian Princes of Wales. Prince Albert decided that he needed discipline and arranged for the Prince of Wales to join the Grenadier Guards in Ireland. Remember, this was hardly the most boring and secluded institution in nineteenth-century England. The Grenadiers were certainly not unimaginative when it came to enjoying themselves. In fact, right into the second half of the twentieth century the only real instructions a young subaltern had on joining the Grenadiers was that he should hunt two days a week and not marry until he was twenty five. This then was the environment in which the not always sober and responsible Prince was sent to, although a junior officer called William Carington would turn out to be a good influence on the Prince. William Carington was so favoured that he became an equerry to the Queen and was later Comptroller of the Household of the Prince of Wales and Keeper of the Privy Purse. However, his brother Charles Carington was not above royal suspicion, as Victoria was to point out.

  The Prince got into a little trouble in Ireland. An ‘actress’ by the name of Nellie Clifden was slipped into the Prince’s bed, probably by William and his brother Charles. Who was to blame is not entirely certain especially as the Prince was quite capable of mismanaging his own affairs. When the Prince returned to London, Nellie went too. Ever a generous man, the Prince of Wales ‘shared’ Nellie with his dear friend, Charles Carington. Nellie was not a passing one-night fancy. When she came to London, the affair was so blatantly conducted that in the Prince’s social scene Nellie became known as the Princess of Wales. Although not an enemy of the Prince, nor of Charles, one of the lords in waiting, Lord Torrington, spread the gossip through the court so that it came to the ears of the Prince Consort, who felt it his duty to tell Victoria. There was worse to come. Nellie, it was thought, might have a child by the Prince or even claim him to be the father of a child she might have by another – even his close friend. The shock, and it was nothing less, was made worse when it became common knowledge that the arrangement, including Charles Carington’s part in it, was known in Continental Europe. Moreover, it was far more than behind-the-fan gossip because it coincided with the Queen’s insistence that it was time for the Prince to marry. His bride would be Princess Alexandra of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.

  It was this terrible constitutional and social dilemma over Nellie that sent an already ill Prince Consort to Cambridge to talk (firmly) to the Prince. His visit to the Prince’s Cambridge abode – Madingley Hall, with its basic plumbing – is said to have worsened Albert’s condition and within a month he lay dying. The Queen, according to the Carington papers, never really forgave Charles Carington and refused to prefer him when her then Prime Minister Lord Salisbury suggested he be sent to India as Viceroy.

  On 14 December 1861, Prince Albert’s breathing quickened and his doctors understood that pneumonia they could not control was with him. At some time shortly before eleven o’clock that same night, his breathing eased and then ceased. The Queen, kneeling by her husband’s bed, holding his hand, waited and then whispered, ‘Oh, yes, this is death; I know it. I have seen it before.’

  Her father had died when she was eight months old, and with her mother dying just nine months before Albert, Victoria now experienced absolute loneliness. She went into the deepest mourning, from whi
ch she never quite emerged. And she went to the place she dearly loved, her retreat, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Some close to her wondered for her sanity. At first she would see no one, not even her Prime Minister Palmerston. The scene at her much delayed Privy Council meeting only added to the bizarre stories. Ministers stood in the traditional three-quarter circle, but instead of being with them, the Queen hid in an adjacent room and they had to shout to her through the door that was left just ajar.

  At night she cried herself to sleep cuddling Albert’s red dressing gown. Wherever she went, she was never without his watch and red handkerchief. She even carried his keys. She grew thin, became abnormally weak and sometimes could scarcely walk. On occasions, she could not speak. The Queen may have been suffering from a nervous breakdown without her staff realizing what was happening. She was to write later that year, ‘For me my very misery is now a necessity and I could not exist without it.’