Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  Since the end of the First Sikh War in March 1846, the British had maintained a garrison in Lahore. It had been due to leave at the end of 1846 but that December Hardinge imposed a new agreement, the Treaty of Bhyrowal, allowing British troops to remain until the Punjab’s child king, Maharajah Duleep Singh, came of age. Hardinge’s aim was to restrain Duleep’s mother and regent, the Dowager Ranee Jind Kaur, the ‘Messalina of the Punjab’. The widow of the great Maharajah Ranjeet Singh, she was described as ‘the only person of manly understanding in the Punjab’.103** This ‘strange blend of the prostitute, the tigress and Machiavelli’s Prince’10 was pensioned off, though permitted to remain in Lahore. Power was handed to a Regency Council, supervised by the British Resident, Henry Lawrence. To ensure Lawrence’s authority, a mixture of Crown and Company soldiers under Campbell’s command would garrison Lahore at the expense of the Punjab state until the little rajah reached his majority on 4 September 1854.

  The Lahore Durbar, or Royal Court, was given leave to retain twenty-five infantry battalions and 12,000 cavalry. In addition, there were thousands of old soldiers from Sikh regiments disbanded after the war prepared to answer the call in an emergency. According to Campbell, these Sikhs were ‘in single combat as fearless as any men in the world’.11 Their tulwars (sabres) were ‘so sharp I generally mend my pencils with one when out surveying’, reported one British officer.12 ‘They had acquired, under the instruction of French officers, no small amount of tactical knowledge’, noted Campbell, ‘and being animated by the fierce fanaticism which the tenets of a proselytising and martial religion imparts, were found by our native infantry to be a more formidable and determined enemy to contend with, than any of the numerous peoples of the middle and southern portions of Hindoostan.’13 It had taken that old bruiser Hugh Gough four attempts to defeat them in 1845–46, in a war which came dangerously close to destroying the illusion of British primacy for good.

  Until he found rooms of his own, Campbell stayed in Henry Lawrence’s Lahore Residency. Henry was the middle sibling of three brothers. While he governed Lahore, his elder brother George guarded the threshold of the Khyber Pass at Peshawur. The third and youngest Lawrence brother, John, ruled Jullundur, the province where Campbell had originally been slated to command. Over the next twelve years, Campbell would lose thousands of men rescuing the Lawrences from the bullets of the natives and the contradictions of their own policies.

  With his ragged clothes, gaunt face and long beard, Henry Lawrence’s ascetic demeanour seemed a studied contradiction of his role as de facto ruler of the Punjab, a stark counterpoint to the opulence of the puppet maharajah. For Campbell he was simply ‘the king of the country, clever and good-hearted, but hot-tempered’.14 His reputation as an administrator sensitive to native concerns was already well established. Remarkably, it outlasted the Raj, independence and even the shaggy-bearded imperial revisionism of the 1970s, but his title to fame only has legitimacy in comparison with the boorishness of his contemporaries. Henry displayed a superior curiosity about the people he ruled, but often little more than a scientific desire to reorder them as one might a model farm. He had no qualms about driving the new Grand Trunk Road straight through a burial site, in the face of widespread local opposition and even after the labourers downed tools in protest.15 Nevertheless, the perception that he was attuned to Indians and their strange, savage customs persists stubbornly even in modern-day Pakistan (see Plate 10).

  Henry Lawrence, from Joseph Fayrer’s Recollections of My Life.

  The most idealistic of the three, an irrepressible sense of Christian mission enveloped Henry, springing from a faith ‘of a muscular, practical sort, almost Cromwellian’.16 He gathered a coterie of acolytes, including William Hodson, John Nicholson, Harry Lumsden and Herbert Edwardes. Under his tutelage ‘Lawrence’s Young Men’ developed into a singular group of imperialists, always ready to tame lands where commerce alone dared not venture. As Henry’s wife’s biographer wrote, ‘It was the day of subalterns; boys in age, men in character; blessed with the adventurous ardour and audacity of youth … Owing to great distances and lack of swift communication, it was the age of wide powers for the Man on the Spot.’17 They yearned to civilise India in the Anglican mould. One of Dr Arnold’s most promising pupils from Rugby, Lieutenant William Hodson, felt sure ‘a few cathedrals and venerable-looking edifices would do wonders’18 for India. In the British army this attitude was still novel. As historian Gwyn Harries Jenkins wrote, ‘The flaneur in the officers’ mess was not necessarily Thomas Arnold’s Christian gentleman, whose attitudes and behaviour were governed by his high moral sense and his devotion to manly virtues.’19 Overt religion and evangelicalism in the army was still rare, even eccentric: when quartered in India with young officers, the devout Major Conran, like a Tom Brown in uniform, had been jeered at for kneeling down in prayer.20

  As Campbell had done in Chusan, the East India Company kept out of religion. Their own chaplains were banned from preaching to Indians. Upsetting the natives was bad for trade. ‘The black races’, wrote Governor-General Lord Ellenborough, ‘had better be left to a religion which makes them safe, and not unhappy subjects of a foreign power.’ ‘We must do what our religion teaches us is right and leave the rest to the wisdom of God,’ declared Hardinge, ‘but not by proselytism and zealous interferences, more especially on the part of government and its official agents. Toleration is our profession in matters of religion.’21 ‘It has been a fundamental rule … not only to exercise the most unequivocal toleration towards the natives of that country, but also to abstain most scrupulously from any interference in their cherished prejudices, whether social or religious’,22 explained another Indian army officer.

  Oblivious, the Lawrence brothers strove to stamp out the four most extreme of these cherished prejudices: slavery, female infanticide, suttee and thuggee. The first two need no explanation. Suttee (or sati)* was the Hindu practice of a widow throwing herself on to the funeral pyre of her dead husband, to burn with him. Historically, the East India Company discouraged it, but stopped short of suppressing it. A regulation of 1812 required only that a company official be present to make sure the widow was not pregnant, on drugs, aged under 16 or a mother of children under the age of 3. Thuggee (the ritual strangulation of travellers) was the modus vivendi of worshippers of the goddess Kali, though quite where thuggee stopped and common or garden highway robbery started was a vexed point.

  The morality of suppressing such barbaric practices is unarguable. The problem lay in the execution. Very few British observers appreciated how closely native belief systems and cultural traditions were intertwined, and that persuasion was often more effective than legislation. There were exceptions, like Sir John Malcolm (soldier, historian and Governor of Bombay), who advised that ‘A statesman will hesitate to effect, by forcible means, objects which are most safely and permanently secured by the slower process of moral persuasion and political management’,23 but the pace suggested by Malcolm was not nearly fast enough for British missionaries and the more progressive Brahmin scholars such as Mrityunjay Vidyalankar, so in 1829 suttee was declared illegal.24

  In addition to rising native discontent at such interference, there was the latent resentment of the ruling Sikh minority at the British occupation. It made the colonel who in Newcastle had coolly brushed aside rumours of revolt permanently apprehensive in Lahore. Campbell had barely unpacked when, on 3 March, the officers of the garrison were invited to a grand reception in the Shalimar gardens. ‘The Durbar had sent out the tents and canopies of Cashmere shawls and beautifully-worked silks from Mooltan, the property of the Maharajah’, wrote Campbell. ‘I never imagined I should have found myself walking on floors covered with shawls of Cashmere.’ But even in the midst of such luxury he was on guard: ‘It appeared to me proper to allow only half of the officers to be absent from their men … If the Sikhs wanted to murder all the officers, they could not have an easier or a better opportunity of doing so.’ Charles Napier comme
nded him on his prudence:

  In India, we who take these pains are reckoned cowards. Be assured that English officers think it a fine dashing thing to be surprised – to take no precautions. Formerly it was an axiom in war that no man was fit to be a commander who permitted himself to be surprised; but things are on a more noble footing now!25

  Ranjeet Singh’s monumental 25ft-high brick ramparts (wide enough for a gun to be wheeled along the top) provided Campbell with a fortress in Lahore strong enough to repel external aggressors, but the suspicion was that the real enemy was already within the walls. Of Campbell’s 9,000 men, only about a fifth was European and the loyalty of the rest was uncertain. That spring, the minute his divisional commander Major-General Littler had left, Campbell strengthened the guard, placing an extra 100 men at the Roshni gate and, after rumours circulated of an armed revolt, created a fast-response corps to squash any disturbance.26 Campbell’s worry was that the Sikhs:

  might come down … any night they pleased, and butcher the whole corps, officers and men, when in bed … As a precaution, I ordered a double sentry to be placed at the top of the gateway, between dark and daylight, to report any stir that might be heard in the citadel, or the tread of feet in numbers, like the march or movement of troops. This precaution will prevent our actually being taken by surprise, inasmuch as we may have time to fall in.27

  Upon his return, Littler was impressed, while Henry Lawrence was ‘happy to record my opinion that the command of the garrison of Lahore could not be in better hands than those of Brigadier Campbell’.28

  It wasn’t long before matters took a turn for the worse. On 7 August 1847, a ceremony was held to elevate Tej Singh, an Anglophile member of the Regency Council, to the honorific of rajah, but instead of giving him the saffron mark, the boy maharajah, Duleep Singh, ‘folded his arms and shrunk back into his chair with a determination foreign to both his age and gentle disposition’, leaving the high priest Bhai Nidhan Singh to do the honours.29 To the British, this looked like the petulance of a child. To the Sikhs, it was a blatant act of defiance. The ranee had carefully rehearsed Tej Singh’s humiliation with her son beforehand. This stunt was swiftly followed by the arrest of a man accused of having plotted to murder Henry Lawrence and Tej Singh back in February 1847. An investigation by John Lawrence disclosed nothing more than hearsay, but it was grounds enough to pack the ranee off to Shaikpura, 25 miles away, and rid Lahore of her influence. The indignity of exile and the forced separation from her son only stoked her fury. Nevertheless, Hardinge remained nonchalant, reporting that in the Punjab, ‘Everything is perfectly quiet, and nothing has occurred worthy of remark.’30

  By early summer Henry Lawrence and Campbell were firm friends and so when Littler left for Simla,* Lawrence recommended, and got, Campbell as temporary divisional commander in his stead. Lahore seemed to agree with Campbell. His bouts of depression and fever became less frequent and though he suffered an eye problem in April 1847, it soon faded. However, he was still uncomfortable. ‘My heart is not at Lahore’, he explained:

  I cannot however, get away for another year; and I must be content to remain unsatisfied till the beginning of 1849, when I shall be able to leave this country for ever. If I have not realised my hope of joining those I love so much at home, I have been enabled by my saving to contribute much to their comfort and happiness and this knowledge must be my consolation. This time next year must see me, if alive, on my way homeward. May it be so.

  To see if he could expedite matters, that October Campbell visited Hardinge at Simla. The governor-general was due to return to Britain in the new year and promised to ‘do something better for me before he went away, but not until then’, Campbell explained, so ‘that it might not be said it had been granted by any application of mine to his lordship. I presume he will make me a first class brigadier; and this will make me my own master at Lahore, which will be very agreeable, besides adding something to my income.’31 Hardinge did promote him, but divisional command instead went to Major-General William Whish of the Indian Army, who took over on 20 January 1848, bringing with him the 53rd Foot to strengthen Campbell’s garrison, and a promising young captain called William Mansfield.**

  John Lawrence, from R. Bosworth Smith’s Life of Lord Lawrence.

  That same month a new governor-general arrived in Calcutta who was to do more than any other to drag India to the brink. The 35-year-old James Ramsay, 10th Earl of Dalhousie,* had been a wilful child; his smoking, gambling and drinking at Harrow nearly resulted in his expulsion. His studies at Christ Church, Oxford gained him a ‘gentleman’s fourth’, the perfect qualification for a career in politics, so he entered parliament. He soon joined the cabinet as President of the Board of Trade, but after Peel’s resignation as prime minister in 1846, Dalhousie was excluded from the government and so accepted the post in India instead.

  Press and politicians were all agreed. Dalhousie was being handed a colony at peace with itself: ‘He arrives at a time when the last obstacle to the complete, and apparently the final, pacification of India has been removed, when the only remaining army [i.e. the Sikh] which could create alarm had been dissolved’, announced the Friend of India on 20 January.32 His predecessor, Hardinge, went further, assuring Dalhousie that ‘it should not be necessary to fire a gun in India for seven years to come’. So confident of peace was Hardinge that he had reduced each Bengal infantry regiment from 1,000 to 800 men and each cavalry regiment from 500 to 400, and had disbanded the military transport corps.

  With Hardinge went Henry Lawrence, sailing for England on sick leave. His brother John took over in Lahore until the new Resident, Sir Frederick Currie, arrived. He was just as convinced of an Englishman’s God-given right to rule as his brother. ‘We are here through our moral superiority, by force of circumstances and by the will of Providence’, he wrote.33 However, he displayed rather less patience with the subtleties of the court. Because his tenure was only temporary, he rushed through reforms, including a reduction in the tithe demanded from the peasantry. Like so many British schemes in India, it was well intentioned but poorly researched. Incompetent assessments aroused indignation. The tithe, previously paid in kind, was now to be in cash, but many villagers had only produce to offer. John’s overhaul of the customs system was more sure-footed, but taken together his policies curtailed the state’s income. Consequently the armies of the Durbar were further reduced, placing another 10,000 unemployed Sikh soldiers on the streets.

  Currie’s arrival in early 1848 meant that John had to return to Jullundur. John shared Campbell’s spartan tendencies and the two had got on well. ‘I am most sorry that John Lawrence is going away’, wrote Campbell, ‘because he is not only a nice, friendly and honest fellow, but he is the sort of political authority with whom I would like to have to act if any disturbance were to arise during my stay in the Punjab.’34 Currie (‘a regular Pecksniff’ according to John Lawrence) dismissed such talk of unrest. ‘Perfect tranquillity prevails, at present, throughout all the territories under the Lahore government’, he assured Dalhousie.35

  One of Currie’s first acts was to settle the problem of Mooltan. Dewan Moolraj, the Hindu governor of the province, had grown increasingly disenchanted with the Lawrences’ reign. The Sikh War had cost him one-third of his realm, yet the revenues demanded by Lahore increased. Fed up, in December 1847 he offered his resignation. John Lawrence refused to accept it, but in March 1848 Currie announced Moolraj could stand down and be replaced by a new Sikh governor, Khan Singh Man, formerly a general under Ranjeet Singh. With Singh would go two advisers, Mr Patrick Vans Agnew of the Bengal Civil Service and Lieutenant W.A. Anderson of the 1st Bombay Fusiliers.** ‘Administration will be really conducted by the British Agent [Vans Agnew] though in the name and with the instrumentality of the Sirdar [Khan Singh Man] and his subordinates’, Currie explained.36 Agnew and Anderson took with them 600 Gurkhas, 700 native cavalry and 100 artillerymen with six guns. They reached Mooltan on 17 April and encamped at the Eid Ga
h mosque. Moolraj agreed to give up power, so the next day Agnew and Anderson entered the citadel with two companies of Gurkhas and twenty-five cavalry troopers. Having received the keys from Moolraj, they left the Gurkhas to secure the fort and then called out the native guard to offer them jobs in the new garrison.

  Currie’s cipher had plans of his own. In cahoots with Moolraj* and the exiled Ranee of Lahore, Khan Singh Man had bribed the troops in the escort.37 What happened next, whether part of the plot or not, was a shambles. As Agnew and Anderson were leaving the fort via the drawbridge, a soldier, Umeer Chund, wounded Agnew with a long spear. Agnew struck the man with his riding crop but Chund drew his sword and slashed at him until a cavalry trooper flung Chund into the ditch. Moolraj rode off to his summer palace, while his personal sowars (Indian troopers) launched themselves at Anderson, cutting him down and leaving him for dead. The Gurkhas extricated Anderson and carried him away on a stretcher, while Agnew escaped on Singh’s elephant. Anderson was left with sword cuts to his neck and legs, and Agnew with a serious shoulder injury. Under fire from matchlockmen and guns in Moolraj’s summer palace, they retreated to the Eid Gah mosque, from where they sent word of their predicament to Lahore, 200 miles away.

  ‘Fears entertained for the safety of Messrs Agnew and Anderson’, recorded Campbell on 23 April. ‘A report from the former, dated the 19th, had been received, giving an account of his having been cut down when leaving the fort or citadel of Mooltan … and of Lieutenant Anderson having been similarly treated.’38 Agnew’s note, written in a meticulous clerk’s roundhand, was buoyant and matter-of-fact. ‘We were attacked by a couple of soldiers, who taking us unawares, succeeded in wounding us both pretty sharply’, he explained. ‘The whole Mooltan troops have mutinied, but we hope to get them round.’ Underneath was a hastily scrawled postscript; its tone was very different. Agnew begged for a regiment to march on Mooltan immediately: ‘If you can spare another, pray send it also.’39