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Edmund Burke struck even harder, telling the House of Commons that: ‘The office given to a young man going out to India is of trifling consequence. But he that goes out an insignificant boy in a few years returns a great Nabob.’55 Indian society, he declaimed, was being corrupted by the money-grabbing activities of the Company’s servants, in a clear breach of the sacred trust that one powerful nation held towards another.
This agitation produced the Regulating Act of 1773. Although each presidency retained its own governor, a governor-general based in Calcutta would rule the whole of British India, with a council of four members appointed by the Cabinet and the Company’s directors. A supreme court, its judges appointed by the Crown, could hear pleas and appeals from both British and Indians. Day-to-day control of the Company lay in the hands of its twenty-four directors, only six of whom could stand for re-election each year. The government lent the Company sufficient money to deal with its immediate debts, and limited dividend payments on its stock.56 The Regulating Act, however, failed to remedy the Company’s ills, and the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first governor-general appointed under its provisions and seen by his many critics as the arch-nabob, highlighted its deficiencies. It took Pitt’s India Act of 1784 to establish a government-appointed Board of Control, based in London, and to strengthen the powers of the governor-general, appointed and replaced by the government of the day, over the three presidencies.
This system had only three significant modifications. When its charter was renewed in 1833, the Company was compelled to give up commercial transactions in return for an annuity of £630,000, taken from the territorial revenue of India. The Governor-General of Bengal was renamed the Governor-General of India, and a governor of Bengal was created, on a par with the governors of Madras and Bombay. In 1835 the lieutenant-governorship of the North-West Provinces was introduced. Lastly, the Company’s charter was renewed in 1853, the Governor of Bengal was reduced to the status of lieutenant governor and a legislative council was established.
In the short term the 1784 mechanism worked well enough. Lord Cornwallis, the first of the new governors-general from 1786 to 1793, went far to stamping out nabobbery amongst the Company’s servants, establishing a well-paid civil service, the root of the ‘covenanted’ Indian Civil Service whose members undertook not to involve themselves in commerce. The Company’s college at Haileybury in Hertfordshire, with a syllabus that included oriental languages, was not set up till 1809, but it was clearly rooted in the impartial bureaucracy established under Cornwallis. He defended the Sultan of Travancore, a Company ally, against Hyder Ali’s son, Tipu, in the Third Mysore War (1790–92). And in 1793 he concluded the Permanent Settlement in Bengal, delegating tax-collection rights to zamindars – much as the Mughal emperor had done.
Sir John Shore, Cornwallis’s successor, ran into difficulties because none of the previous reforms had really addressed the Company’s armed forces. These had risen from 18,000 in 1763; 6,580 of them in Bengal, 9,000 in Madras and 2,550 in Bombay. By 1805 there were no less than 64,000 in Bengal, 64,000 in Madras and 26,500 in Bombay. The officers of this army, as we shall see, were subtly different from those of HM’s regiments serving in India. They were often significantly less well off, did not purchase their commissions and, long after their civilian brothers had become properly regulated, they retained a keen interest in making extra money, usually through the scam of batta, allowances over and above their pay, which once reflected genuine campaign expenses but in many cases had come to be a lucrative allowance given for no clearly defined purpose. But their promotion prospects were far poorer than those of officers in HM’s regiments: of the thousand or so officers in Bengal in 1780, there were only fifty-two posts for majors and above, and battalions, commanded by lieutenant colonels in the British service, were only captain’s commands. On three major occasions between 1766 and 1808, officers mutinied to retain their batta, and the government gave way. A rueful Shore wrote:
Whether I have pursued the most eligible plan of alleviating anarchy and confusion by temperance and moderation, or whether I should have adopted coercion, is a question on which opinion will be various. I think the wisest mode has been followed; and that severity might have occasioned the absolute disorganisation of the army, whose expectations have been too much trifled with.57
There were few similarities between Shore, a long-time servant of the Company, and his successor as governor-general, Richard Wellesley, 2nd Earl of Mornington. A scion of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy with close friends in the government, Mornington knew little of administration or of India, but had a vision that went well beyond commercial advantage. In 1799 he beat Tipu, the Sultan of Mysore, who was killed when Seringapatam was stormed, and his brother, Arthur Wellesley, was installed to supervise the new British-supported ruler. While Arthur pocketed £10,000, Richard declined the proffered £100,000, but helpfully told the Prime Minister:
You will gain credit by conferring some high and brilliant title upon me immediately. The Garter would be much more acceptable to me than an additional title, nor would any title be an object which did not raise me to the same rank which was given Lord Cornwallis.
He was shocked to be created Marquess Wellesley because it was an Irish title. He quipped acidly that it was a double-gilt potato, and told the Prime Minister that:
I cannot conceal my anguish of mind … at the reception the King has given my services. I will confess openly that there had been nothing Irish or pinchbeck in my conduct or its results, I felt in equal confidence that I should find nothing Irish or pinchbeck in its reward.58
With Mysore now under the Company’s tutelage, Wellesley went on to secure Tanjore and the Carnatic, and in 1801 about half Oudh came under the Company’s control. This left the Marathas as the principal rivals of the East India Company; a powerful confederation of Hindu princes (including Holkar, Scindia, and the Bhonsla of Berar) grouped under the Peshwa of Poona, they had proved a serious challenge to the Mughals. Their wings had been clipped by the Afghan ruler of Kabul, Ahmed Shah Durrani, at the fourth battle of Panipat in 1761, which fortuitously prevented a clash between the British and the Marathas at time when the Company was not well placed to face it. The First Maratha War (1777–82), initiated by Governor-General Warren Hastings, ended in a compromise peace. The Second (1803–05) was a more extensive affair, in which Arthur Wellesley beat the Marathas at Assaye and Argaum while the Commander in Chief, Lord Lake, enjoyed victories at Delhi and Laswaree. There were peace treaties with Scindia and the Bhonsla but Holkar was not included, and the Company suffered two significant reverses, the first when Colonel Monson’s force was roughly handled, and the second when Lake’s attempt to take Bhurtpore by storm met with a bloody repulse. Mornington, his conduct the subject of increasing criticism in Britain, was replaced in 1805 by Lord Cornwallis, who had been Governor-General from 1786–93 and was now an old and dying man. It was not until the Third Maratha War (1816–19) that the Marathas were at last overcome: the Peshwa at Kirkee in November 1817; the Bhonsla at Sitabaldi later the same month; and Holkar at Mahdipore that December. These victories secured the borders of British India along the frontiers of Sind and the Punjab. In 1814–16 the Gurkhas were defeated, though with some difficulty, in the Nepal War, and while Nepal remained independent it proved a fruitful recruiting-ground for tough and martial soldiers.
But now the British suffered a major reverse that would profoundly damage their iqbal and overshadow the next decade. The steady Russian advance across Central Asia mirrored British gains in India, and by the 1830s the prospect of a Russian descent into India through Afghanistan loomed increasingly large in the minds of successive governors-general. In 1837 Alexander Burnes, a British envoy, was sent to Kabul to negotiate with the Amir Dost Mohammed. But when the amir demanded the restitution of Peshawar, seized by the Sikhs in 1834, as the price for his support, the British drew back, as they were anxious to preserve good relations with the formidable Sikh ruler, Ranjit Singh. This
induced Dost Mohammed to approach the Russians in the hope of securing a better offer; in response the Governor-General, George Eden, 1st Earl of Auckland, replaced the amir with Shah Shujah, a former ruler.
The Sikhs were persuaded to give the British free passage across the Punjab. A combined army of British and Indian forces, the Army of the Indus, concentrated at Ferozepur, marched down the Indus, crossed into Afghanistan by the Bolan Pass and reached Kandahar, where it was joined by a force from Bombay. The combined army set off for Kabul – storming the strong fortress of Ghazni on the way – and duly installed Shah Shujah on the throne. But it was clear that the new amir did not enjoy widespread support; it was equally clear that the army could not stay in Afghanistan indefinitely and much of it was sent back to India. The remainder might have been saved by firm command, but Major General William Elphinstone, sent up by Auckland, was not the man for sudden and decisive action. Emily Eden, the Governor-General’s sister, recorded that he was: ‘In a shocking state of gout, poor man – one arm in a sling and very lame but he is otherwise a young-looking general for India.’59 In November, Burnes was killed by a mob in Kabul, and Sir William Macnaghten, chief secretary to the government of India and political adviser to the force, was murdered when he went to negotiate with Akbar Khan, Dost Mohammed’s son. When the British force, numbering some 4,500 troops (amongst them only one British battalion, HM’s 44th) and 12,000 camp followers, including women and children, began to retreat on 6 January 1842 it was repeatedly attacked by the Afghans.
What followed was nothing short of a disaster. Order broke down almost immediately, and Lieutenant Vincent Eyre described ‘a mingled mob of soldiers, camp-followers and baggage-cattle, preserving not even the faintest semblance of that regularity and discipline on which depended our only chance of escape from the dangers which threatened us’.60 That ‘grenadier in petticoats’, Florentia Sale, travelling with her daughter and her son-in-law, now mortally wounded, wrote in her journal for 9 January:
Before sunrise, the same confusion as yesterday. Without any orders given, or bugle sounded, three fourths of our fighting men had pushed on in advance of the camp followers. As many as could had appropriated to themselves all public yaboos [Afghan ponies] and camels, on which they mounted. A portion of the troops had also regularly moved off, the only order appearing to be: ‘Come along; we are all going, and half the men are off, with the camp followers in advance!’.
Mrs Trevor kindly rode a pony and gave up her place in the kajara [camel pannier] to [the mortally wounded Lieutenant] Sturt. Who must otherwise have been left to die on the ground. The rough motion increased his suffering and accelerated his death: but he was still conscious that his wife and I were with him: and we had the sorrowful satisfaction of giving him Christian burial.61
On 9 January many women and children were handed over to the safe-keeping of Akbar Khan, who maintained that the tribesmen were beyond his control, but there was no relief for the rest of the army. HM’s 44th, with some cavalry and horse artillery, held together well, but the native infantry were too tired, cold and hungry to care. On the 10th they were attacked where the road passed through a gorge, as Eyre related:
Fresh numbers fell with every volley, and the gorge was soon choked with the dead and the dying; the unfortunate sepoys, seeing no means of escape, and driven to utter desperation, cast away their arms and accoutrements … and along with the camp-followers, fled for their lives.62
There were further ambushes, and more fruitless negotiations with Akbar Khan. By the 13th only a handful of soldiers were left, and the last of HM’s 44th made their final stand at Gandamack, twenty-nine miles from Jalalabad and safety. There was a brief parley, and then:
The enemy, taking up their post on an opposite hill, marked off man after man, officer after officer, with unerring aim. Parties of Afghans rushed in at intervals to complete the work of extermination, but were as often driven back by that handful of invincibles. At length, nearly all being wounded more or less, a final onset on the enemy sword in hand terminated the unequal struggle … Captain Soutar alone with three or four privates were spared, and carried off captive.63
Six mounted officers rode for Jelalabad, but only one of them, Dr William Bryden, arrived there. The brave and pious Captain Henry Havelock was a staff officer to Brigadier Robert Sale, whose own regiment, HM’s 13th Light Infantry, formed the bulk of the garrison. At about 2.00 p.m. on Sunday 13 January one of his comrades saw a single horseman approaching:
As he got nearer, it was distinctly seen that he wore European clothes and was mounted on a travel-stained yaboo, which he was urging on with all the speed of which it yet remained master … He was covered with slight cuts and contusions, and dreadfully exhausted … the recital of Dr Brydon filled all hearers with horror, grief and indignation.64
The government’s hesitant response to the catastrophe exasperated Havelock and his comrades. ‘The indignation against the Governor-General and the Government, including the Commander in Chief, but chiefly the Governor-General,’ he wrote, ‘went beyond all bounds.’65 Auckland had already been scheduled for replacement, and it was not until Lord Ellenborough arrived as governor-general at the end of February that much was done. Lieutenant General Pollock, who had been appointed to replace Elphinstone even before the news of the disaster reached Calcutta, assembled an ‘Army of Retribution’ in Peshawar and pushed up through the Khyber Pass, relieving Jelalabad on 16 April. Another force marched up through the Khojak Pass to relieve Major General Nott’s garrison of Kandahar. But Pollock was hamstrung by lack of clear orders. The Commander in Chief thought it best that he should retreat, and the new governor-general was ‘scattering military orders broadcast’ without telling the Commander in Chief what he was doing. Pollock, subjected to a near fatal combination of loose direction laced with detailed interference, wrote crossly of ‘the little points that are overlooked by men who direct operations from a comfortable office hundreds of miles away’.66
It was not until 15 September that Pollock reached Kabul after beating Akbar Khan, and Nott joined him there two days later. Pollock inflicted summary public punishment by blowing up the city’s Grand Bazaar, where the body of Macnaghten had been dragged and exposed to insult. One officer observed that collective penalties like this hurt the innocent as well as the guilty, writing that: ‘To punish the unfortunate householders of the bazaar (many a guiltless and friendly Hindu) was not distinguished retaliation for our losses.’67 The captives taken during the retreat were recovered. Young Ensign C. G. C. Stapylton of HM’s 13th wrote that the men were ‘all in Afghan costume with long beards and moustaches and it was with some difficulty that one could recognise one’s friends’. The army then withdrew through the Khyber Pass to receive a triumphal reception. A delighted Stapylton reported that:
Every regiment in Hindustan shall, on our march down, turn out and present arms to us in review order. They have also granted us six months batta, which, however, will hardly cover the losses of the officers.68
This display of gratitude was partly intended to divert attention from the fact that Auckland’s policy had foundered dismally. Shah Shujah had already been murdered by his helpful subjects, a putative replacement had wisely decided to come back with Pollock, and eventually Dost Mohammed – whose deposition had triggered the war in the first place – was allowed to return. Ellenborough announced that: ‘The Governor-General will leave it to the Afghans themselves to create a government amidst the anarchy which is the consequence of their crimes.’ The campaign sharply underlined the difficulties inherent in the existing system. Sir John Hobhouse, chairman of the East India Company, maintained, with some truth, that intervention in Afghanistan was the policy of the British government, and there is little doubt that Auckland saw it as a means of crowning his time in India with a resonant success. When the matter was discussed in Parliament in 1843 Benjamin Disraeli opined that Afghanistan, if left alone, would of itself form an admirable barrier against Russian expansion.<
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The soil is barren and unproductive. The country is interspersed by stupendous mountains … where an army must be exposed to absolute annihilation. The people are proverbially faithless … Here then are all the elements that can render the country absolutely impassable as a barrier, if we abstain from interference.69
These were wise words. But the linked problems of an unstable Afghanistan and an expansionist Russia were to cause more difficulties in the years to come.
Before the saga of the First Afghan War had reached its untidy end, Major General Sir Charles Napier was sent from Bombay to Karachi, without clear instructions but with the general task of ensuring that the local amirs did not take advantage of British misfortunes. Napier was a hard and abstemious sixty-year-old Peninsula veteran, a political radical and ‘a curious compound of modesty with strange alternations of self-exaltation and self-abasement’. But he was zealous, energetic, and tolerated no dawdling. A subordinate who reported that a mutiny had broken out was told: ‘I expect to hear that you have put down the mutiny within two hours after the receipt of this letter.’ ‘We have no right to seize Sind,’ he mused, ‘yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, humane and useful piece of rascality it will be.’
And so it was. Napier fought the amirs at Meani on 16 February 1843, and when HM’s 22nd preferred to carry on an indecisive firefight rather than charge home:
Napier himself rode slowly up and down between the two arrays, pouring out torrents of blasphemous exhortation, so close to both sides that he was actually singed by powder, and yet by some miracle unscathed by either. His appearance was so strange that the Baluchis might well have mistaken him for a demon. Beneath a huge helmet of his own contrivance there issued a fringe of long hair at the back, and in front a pair of round spectacles, an immense hooked nose, and a mane of moustache and whisker reaching to the waist. But though the opposing arrays were not ten yards apart, neither he nor his horse were touched.70