Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  Having thrown down the gauntlet, Mulraj appealed to disaffected Sikh officers throughout the Punjab, imploring them to widen his revolt into a full-scale rebellion that would force the British back across the Sutlej. At first they demurred, and an irregular army of three thousand “bold villains,” raised by Herbert Edwardes from the tribes of Bannu, captured a strategic fort held by troops loyal to Mulraj. They went on to besiege Multan itself, where Edwardes waited for assistance from Lahore.

  Ignoring warnings from John Lawrence and Henry’s political officers that time was of the essence, Currie temporized. A month after the murders of Anderson and Vans Agnew, he finally informed Edwardes that the rebellion would be crushed, but not “until the close of the Summer and Rainy seasons.”

  The news that no army would advance from Lahore for five or six months was all it took to set the Punjab ablaze. On June 8, a regiment of Sikh cavalry mutinied and joined the Multan rebels. When Sikhs garrisoned at Bannu followed suit, Fort Duleepghar was lost. Rebel troops then rose in Peshawar. By the time General Hugh Gough took to the field that fall, the mutineers from Multan were on the march toward a rendezvous in the central Punjab with a large rebel army, raised in the northern Hazara district after its Sikh governor declared war on the East India Company.

  Delaying that convergence became the principal objective of Gough and his sixteen thousand men for the duration of the Second Anglo-Sikh War, one of the bloodiest ever fought anywhere. In battle after battle, the British suffered grievous losses under leadership so disgraceful that there was talk of a drumhead court-martial for Gough—even his execution. (Commander in more general actions than any British officer of the nineteenth century except the Duke of Wellington, he had a penchant for softening up enemy defenses with waves of charges by infantry.)

  But delay it they did, until the decisive Battle of Gujrat, on February 21, 1849. Gough, who had just received orders recalling him to London, knew it would be his final engagement, and he rose to the opportunity to save his reputation by embracing the tactical use of artillery for the first time in his career. After a bombardment so intense that the opposing Sikh gunners abandoned their weapons and fled, the British suffered the loss of only ninety-six men, compared with more than two thousand Sikh fatalities. Eleven days later, the rebel commander agreed to terms for surrender. His army—reduced by mass desertions to ten thousand men and ten guns—handed over its arms and disbanded.

  Almost alone in pronouncing himself immune to “the hot fit of annexation” that broke out afterwards was Henry Lawrence, who had returned to India as Sir Henry following his investment in England as a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath and resumed his duties at the residency in Lahore on February 1. He blamed the war on Frederick Currie and the military. Had Multan been captured in early September, he argued, there would have been no larger insurrection. He continued to believe that “indirect rule” was the best option for the British in the Punjab, and better served the long-term interests of the country’s inhabitants. But his opinions were dismissed by Lord Dalhousie, who also rejected Lawrence’s advice that the Company army be transformed by admitting natives to the officer corps.

  “Lawrence has been greatly praised and rewarded and petted,” Dalhousie wrote to Sir George Couper, “and no doubt naturally supposes himself a king of the Punjab.” But his sovereign reign, as far as the governor was concerned, had reached its end:

  [Lawrence] took charge three days ago from Sir F. Currie, and commenced his career by proposing a Proclamation which I have forbidden and shaken him for it. It began by saying that he was anxious it should be generally known that he had returned to Lahore, desirous of bringing peace to the Punjab, and then promising all sorts of things. I told him this sort of thing would not do at all; that I had great confidence in him, but that I could not permit him to substitute himself for the Government, whose servant he was, or permit a word to be said or an act done which should raise the notion that the policy of the Government depended in any degree on the agent who represented it; or that my measures and intentions would be the least affected by the fact of his being the Resident.

  The message was clear: there would be no more Kangras. The era of romantic individualism in conducting the Company’s affairs of state had passed. Calcutta was in charge.

  Lawrence was so shocked by the terms of the annexation proclamation that he refused at first to sign it. He preferred to resign, he told Dalhousie’s chief secretary, Henry Elliot; clearly he had “no sort of influence” with the governor. Dalhousie, for his part, wished to avoid an open rupture with a well-known public figure whom Queen Victoria had lately received as an overnight guest at Windsor Castle. According to Herbert Edwardes, who was acting as Lawrence’s personal assistant, Dalhousie charged Elliot with persuading Lawrence to change his mind. Elliot, wisely, appealed to Henry’s idealism:

  “He succeeded, mainly by the very just argument that the Resident’s own favourite objects—the treatment of the vanquished with fair and even indulgent consideration, the smoothing down the inevitable pang of subjugation to those proud and brave enemies, with whose chieftains no man was so familiar as he, or could so fully appreciate what there was of noble in their character—were in imminent danger of being thwarted, if his moderating presence were removed between conqueror and conquered.”

  On March 29, the British flag was raised over the citadel of Lahore, and the following day Maharaja Duleep Singh sat for the last time on the golden throne of his father. On behalf of himself, his heirs, and his successors, the twelve-year-old monarch renounced all claims to the sovereignty of the Punjab. The Kingdom of the Sikhs was no more.

  19

  * * *

  A Giant

  NIGEL WAS ENTERING his eighth year in India when the Second Anglo-Sikh War ended, in March 1849. He was based in Kapurthala, where he had been transferred after completing work on the revenue settlement books at Hoshiarpur. Less than fifty miles away was a cantonment called Ludhiana. Though displaced by Lahore as the principal British outpost in western India, it remained the closest regional approximation of an English market town. There were books to buy in Ludhiana, and sweets, and tins of “hermetically sealed” provisions from England. There were also European doctors and dentists. Nigel would have paid a visit from time to time, and he probably had social connections there—friends of friends or colleagues.

  Ludhiana also had its Little Kabul, where a clutch of Afghans lived under British protection. Most belonged to the clan that had ruled Afghanistan, the Sadozais. It was a Sadozai, Shah Shuja, whom the British had restored to the Kabul throne in their doomed attempt to subjugate his countrymen. And it was a Sadozai whom Nigel met and befriended in Ludhiana in the spring of 1849, though how they became acquainted is anyone’s guess. Mentioned in passing by Nigel as “S—— ” in a letter written that June, he joined him on a road trip in September, traveling westward across the Punjab. It was their first immersion together in the “river of life” of the Grand Trunk Road; it would not be their last.

  The official reason for the journey seems to have been Nigel’s assignment to assist in the training of native revenue clerks in the Yousafzai district, outside Peshawar. The mysterious S—— went along to conduct some unspecified business of his own in Peshawar proper. On their way, they paid a visit to the most famous of “Henry Lawrence’s Young Men,” John Nicholson.

  The same age as Nigel, but with two years on him in India, Nicholson was the nephew of a director of the East India Company. He had relied on his uncle’s influence to secure a direct appointment to the Bengal Infantry without completing the mandatory two years of training at Addiscombe, and sailed for Calcutta a few weeks after his seventeenth birthday. He was a quiet boy but tall and strong, fast on his feet and free with his fists—“just a great big bully” according to his older sister Mary. His education was limited to the Royal School Dungannon, founded by James I for the sons of local merchants and farmers in Ulster, and he struggled for five years to master
Urdu. He was neither a reader nor much of a writer; he so detested filing official reports that he sometimes condensed them into a single sentence. One dispatch to John Lawrence read, in full, “Sir, I have the honour to inform you that I have just shot a man who came to kill me. Your Obedient Servant, John Nicholson.”

  Then there was Nicholson’s personality, described as “cool and reserved” by one fellow “political” (who liked him) and “stern and unbending” by another (who did not). No one recalled him as a man of warmth, wit, or charm—qualities that Nigel went out of his way to praise whenever he discerned them. Yet when Nigel first encountered him at the Lahore residency in the fall of 1846, he was positively smitten:

  [Nicholson] is tall and strong, with an unforced air of determination about him that excites admiration on the briefest acquaintance—a man of honesty and bravery and fine convictions, to be followed and trusted in the worst of conditions . . .

  After Cashmere is put right he wishes for political work in one of the outlying districts of the North-West frontier—Col. Lawrence has promised him as much. He has given a good deal of thought to the means of establishing justice there, and the attitude to be taken in governing under circumstances different from those present elsewhere in India. The great thing, he says, is to gain the favour of the inhabitants through fulfilling their desire for fair treatment, rather than enforcing co-operation based upon fear of force, or ill-use, or injustice. As we ourselves must lead by example, it behooves us then to master our own inmost fears, ruling ourselves individually in the manner we mean to rule Natives collectively. Such are his intentions and beliefs, as honourable as any expressed to me in India.

  It was a philosophy of governance that by 1849 no longer held sway at the highest levels of colonial administration. Henry Lawrence’s authority had been curtailed in the war’s aftermath that spring, when the position of Punjab resident was abolished by Lord Dalhousie and replaced by a three-man Board of Administration, on which Lawrence sat with his brother John and another civilian. But the powers of Henry’s Young Men in the field, unlike those of their mentor in Lahore, were extended, permitting them to operate in tribal areas as district commissioners with even greater latitude than before.

  Nicholson was making the most of it, with exploits that thrilled the rough and ready tribesmen of the frontier. Fighting the Sikhs, he had led what he called “a very guerrilla sort of life, with seven hundred horse and foot hastily raised among the people of the country.” Now stationed at Hasan Abdal, west of Margalla Pass, he had lately put paid to the anarchy of the Sind Sagar Doab by running a sword through the most rapacious of the local “robber chiefs,” cutting off his head, and displaying it in his office after inviting every chief in the district to call on him. A few weeks before Nigel and S—— called at Hasan Abdal, an engineering officer named Alexander Taylor was relaxing in the dak bungalow there when a group of two dozen native men in saffron robes entered, saluted, and sat down silently before him. Upon asking their business, he learned that they were worshipers of Nicholson, whom they called “Nikal Seyn.” These “Nikal Seynis” were en route to meet the object of their adoration, whose heroics during the recent war had persuaded them of his divinity. They had come to the rest house, they said, to pay their respects to Taylor as a member of Nikal Seyn’s race.

  Taylor, who was in charge of supervising the extension of the Grand Trunk Road from Lahore to Peshawar, heard afterwards that Nicholson had them all flogged when they appeared on his doorstep, and sent them packing with “most fearful imprecations.”

  Their reception—which proved to them that their deity was a just God and they were unworthy—served only to redouble their zeal, and, much to Nicholson’s irritation, the Nikal Seynis flourished and gained adherents for the rest of his life. After his death, two of their leaders committed suicide by cutting their own throats, while the rest of the brotherhood were baptized as Christians, declaring that “Nikal Seyn always said that he was a man such as we are, and that he worshipped a God we could not see but who was always near us. Let us then learn to worship Nikal Seyn’s God.”

  Hasan Abdal was an idyllic place, copiously watered by springs and surrounded by loquat orchards. Nicholson had established himself at a spot where a fountain gushed from a rock and became a rivulet, over which he built a platform of planks and pitched his canvas wall tent. Revealing a sensitive side that appealed to Nigel but remained unsuspected by the world at large, he christened the cooling flow beneath him Bendemeer, after the Romantic poem Lalla Rookh, by Thomas Moore:

  There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s stream,

  And the nightingale sings round it all the day long.

  Nicholson had never met S—— . As a rule, he despised Afghans, whom he regarded as “the most vicious and blood thirsty race in existence.” He had never forgiven himself for failing in his duty of care to his men during the Afghan War at the siege of Ghazni, where six hundred British officers and Indian troops were overwhelmed by twenty thousand Afghans. Under the surrender terms, only officers were promised honorable treatment, and Nicholson had argued passionately against abandoning their Hindu enlisted men. When his superior gave the order to lay down their arms after their food and water ran out, he refused to comply. At length he obeyed, and, wrote John William Kaye in Lives of Indian Officers, “gave up his sword with bitter tears and accompanied his comrades to an almost hopeless imprisonment.” In short order, most of the native soldiers they left behind were hacked to pieces; those who survived were sold as slaves.

  Though Nigel knew of Nicholson’s capture and imprisonment during the Afghan War, he seems to have been unaware of an incident following his release, as he rode alongside Ensign Julian Dennys in the rear guard of the avenging army’s withdrawal down the Khyber. Upon emerging from a narrow gorge into a small valley, Dennys spotted what appeared to be a naked body lying among the rocks on its far side. Cantering over, they found the corpse of a European, stripped of everything but a fragment of shirt, his genitals severed and stuffed in his mouth. Dennys, the first to dismount, remarked to Nicholson that the texture of the shirt was too fine to belong to a private soldier. Nicholson stared at the dead man.

  “For a moment,” wrote Dennys, “he could not speak.” Nicholson stood gazing at the mutilated remains of his seventeen-year-old brother, Alexander.

  Any awkwardness that Nicholson might have felt in welcoming S—— was dispelled when it emerged that both men shared a common acquaintance in the late Eldred Pottinger, who had served as a military adviser to the Afghans during the Persian siege of S—— ’s hometown of Herat ten years before.

  “[Nicholson] is rather shy about telling ‘war stories,’” wrote Nigel afterwards. “But he set aside his habitual reserve when it emerged that S—— had long enjoyed friendly relations with Major Pottinger, one of Capt. Nicholson’s fellow captives when he was marched from Cabul to Bamiyan as a hostage during the Afghan War. They joined in reminiscence about the works and deeds of that gallant officer, now deceased, who left India for China some years ago, and contracted Fever there.”

  Nigel took advantage of Nicholson’s loquaciousness to ask him about his recapture of Attock Fort the year before, perhaps the most far-famed example of his derring-do. With time of the essence, and Nicholson the only officer available to lead an expedition to regain control of the road from Lahore to Peshawar, he had risen from a sickbed, so weakened with fever that George Lawrence judged him unfit to sit a horse. Yet he rode fifty miles under cover of darkness at the head of forty-odd Pashtun irregulars, setting so brisk a pace that nearly half of them fell far behind.

  When the vanguard reached the bridge of boats that crossed the Indus to the fort, there was no question of waiting for the stragglers. Daylight drew nearer by the minute. Any chance of success depended on the element of surprise. What transpired, wrote Nigel, was “altogether miraculous”—the capture, without firing a single shot, of a fortress enclosing an area as large as the City of London, garrisoned by a th
ousand Sikh troops. Nicholson had ridden boldly through the main gate, commanding the sentries to join his force and take up arms themselves against the rebels within. He repeated the stratagem at an inner gate, only to encounter resistance at the final portal. When the sentries there aimed their rifles at him, he dismounted, seized the weapon of the nearest Sikh, and ordered his followers to arrest the captain of the guard. Ordered to lay down arms, the rebels obeyed to the last man.

  “As strong and fine a word as ‘Valour’ does injustice to the conduct of such a one as Capt. Nicholson,” wrote Nigel. “You will forgive me if I take the liberty of borrowing from Scripture, to aver that in this day too, it seems to me, there are ‘giants in the earth!’”

  When Nigel and S—— bade farewell to Nicholson, he told them that he was about to go on home leave. He had completed the requisite ten years of service with the Company that entitled him to a paid furlough in England. It meant losing his appointment as assistant commissioner, but he was needed at home to comfort his grieving mother, a widow who had lost a second son in India earlier that year. William Nicholson, who was stationed at an outpost on the west bank of the Indus in Sindh, died there under mysterious circumstances on June 1, aged twenty. A few days before, after failing to appear at parade, he had been discovered semiconscious in his room. He had two broken ribs, and his body was covered with bruises. The only explanation he provided before lapsing into a coma was that he had dreamed of a fall from a great height. The officer who wrote to Mrs. Nicholson to inform her of his death suggested that William must have walked out of a window in his sleep, fallen from the veranda below and down a cliff, then crawled back somehow to his bed.