Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  Currie instructed Campbell to hold a brigade in readiness. He was confident that just the sight of a column nearing the walls would precipitate Moolraj’s surrender. ‘I was not of this way of thinking’, wrote Campbell. ‘A force without the means of taking the place [i.e. siege guns] would be laughed at by the garrison.’ Should it fail, it would ‘have a bad moral effect, and encourage all the idle vagabonds of disbanded Sikhs to swarm to the standard of Moolraj’.40 Unlike Currie, Campbell did not underestimate Mooltan’s defences. According to rough plans obtained by the governor-general, it possessed a substantial fort which Thornton’s Gazetteer described as ‘a place of strength, being more regular in construction than probably any other place laid down in India by native engineers’.41 Agnew had told Currie it was ‘by far the most imposing I have seen in India, and is, I dare say, one of the strongest’.42 When Ranjeet Singh besieged it in 1818 it had cost him 19,000 men. Seconded by Brigadier Wheeler in the Jullundur Doab,Campbell advised Currie that to maintain any shred of credibility an army bearing down on Mooltan required a proper siege train of big guns.43

  Currie took no notice. On the 24th he decided that Whish would set out in two days’ time with whatever troops he could muster, encircle Mooltan and await heavy artillery.44 Campbell was furious and sulky, not least because he was not going, but mainly because he believed Whish faced humiliation. ‘All this would happen, without taking into consideration the deadly effects of the sun in this month and May, and the probability of the rain settling in and rendering our movement impracticable’, he warned. Respect for the climate had underpinned every triumphant campaign in India, but by 1848 it had become fashionable for British officers to snap their fingers at the noonday sun. Campbell was one of the few who, since Chinkiangfoo, knew the cost of mistaking foolhardiness for enthusiasm.45 His men wore helmets designed for show rather than protection, while their uniforms were still the tight-fitting style of the Peninsular War. Unbearably hot in summer, in a rainstorm soldiers dared not remove them for fear that they would shrink and they would never get them on again. The rains were due soon, at which point the vicinity of Mooltan would be inundated, forming a natural moat. Brooding all evening on these dangers, by 3 a.m. Campbell could contain himself no longer and aired his misgivings in a frank letter to Whish.

  Events were, however, about to overtake them both. Next morning, terrible news of Anderson and Vans Agnew reached Lahore. On 20 April their mosque had come under fire and by nightfall their gunners had defected, leaving them besieged. When at last the mob broke in, one soldier, with three cuts of his sword, had severed Agnew’s head from his body. Anderson was hacked to pieces. Their mutilated bodies were displayed on the city walls.46** Moolraj now appealed to rajahs across the Punjab to join him and expel the British.

  The news that Anderson and Van Agnew’s escort had rallied to Moolraj particularly discomfited Currie. ‘The whole relation was very horrible and distressing’, wrote Campbell. ‘The news received today induces Sir F. Currie to abandon the idea of sending troops to Mooltan for the present, which I was not sorry to hear, for the sun is too hot for Europeans to bear without incurring a large loss of life as well as great sickness.’ Campbell had already given a précis of events in a letter to commander-in-chief Lord Gough.*** He thanked Campbell for ‘the only clear information … of the late events’, confirmed that he was ‘entirely of the same opinion’ and requested regular updates. ‘Thank God we had Campbell there’, Gough declared after hearing that Currie’s proposed advance had been scotched.47

  On 2 May it became clear that the Sikhs had ambitions well beyond Mooltan. Two irregular cavalry troopers revealed a plot to overthrow the British in Lahore.**** Six days later Campbell arrested the ringleaders, one of whom claimed that all but two members of the Regency Council had foreknowledge of the revolt at Mooltan. If true, British rule in the Punjab was far more rickety than anyone thought. ‘We are surrounded here with treachery’, warned Lieutenant Hodson. ‘No man can say who is implicated, or how far the treason has spread. The life of no British officer, away from Lahore, is worth a week’s purchase.’48

  Three days later the plotters were hanged. ‘This act of vigour produced an immediate and good effect,’ explained Campbell, ‘by putting a stop to the blustering and vapouring of the idle people without employ … which vapouring talk had the effect of frightening all the ladies.’ As an argument for capital punishment, it is, at best, eccentric, but Campbell was in one of his moods again. Energised by the intrigue, he claimed, as he had in Chusan, to be able to ‘go through as much exercise and fatigue as the youngest man in the force’.49

  The ranee’s complicity was assumed so this time she was banished from the Punjab altogether, to languish in Benares. This removed a potential figurehead for rebellion, but spread fear among Sikhs that after her, the maharajah would be next. A further worry was the news that Gholab Singh, Maharajah of Cashmere, having corresponded with the ranee, Moolraj and Khan Singh Man, was expanding his army. At least for the moment he seemed content to sit on the sidelines until he had a better idea of who seemed to be winning.

  British prospects looked bleak. Gough estimated that subduing Mooltan required an army of 24,000 men, seventy-eight field guns and fifty siege guns. Amassing a force of this size would seriously weaken British garrisons across India at a time when summer furloughs had already thinned the ranks. Ramadan started on 1 August, and for a month the Muslim soldiers who made up much of the Company’s army would be fasting. Added to that, transport was scarce. ‘There is no carriage whatever for these troops,’ complained the commander-in-chief, ‘the whole having been discharged; and to move without camp equipages, dhoolies,* and ample commissariat arrangements, through the hottest locality in India, at the worst season of the year would be certain annihilation.’ Gough reckoned 10,000 troops and forty-eight guns was the most he could assemble without fatally denuding the rest of India, but, as he advised Currie on 19 May:

  If I were to march 10,000 men against Moolraj [it is] doubtful whether I should do other than shut him up in his fort – the whole country, with their heads up, like a host of blood suckers anxiously awaiting results and inwardly rejoicing at the wasting ranks of the Feringhees [foreigners].50

  Campbell, Gough and Dalhousie preferred to postpone the campaign until the cool of the autumn. The governor-general felt they should only wage war once strong enough to be certain of victory. ‘Failure would have been a hundredfold more disastrous to the British power than any which temporary quiescence can produce’,51 he argued. ‘Of course we shall be violently abused for want of energy and pusillanimity, both here and at home’, he added, but ‘when October comes we will have a squaring of accounts’.52

  One abuser was Henry Lawrence, quietly fuming in England, confident that Mooltan’s ‘contemptible’ ramparts could be easily overrun. ‘Had I been at Lahore,’ he told Dalhousie, ‘I would have asked my brother to take my place, while, with two or three Assistants and half a dozen volunteer officers, I pushed down by forced marches to Mooltan.’53 He had no time for the ‘croakers at Lahore, who talked of Europeans dying of coup de soleil. As if war is to be made without loss of life!’54

  On the evening of 22 April 1848, Lieutenant Edwardes, the British Deputy Commissioner of Bunnoo, was presiding over a trial at Derajat when proceedings were interrupted. ‘Loud footsteps of someone running were heard without, came nearer as we all looked up and listened, and at last stopped before the door’, recalled Edwardes. The purdah curtain was pulled aside to reveal an exhausted messenger dripping perspiration, clutching a bag. Inside was a letter addressed to General Cortlandt, of the Sikh Durbar army in Bunnoo. ‘There was something in the kossid’s [messenger’s] manner which alike compelled me to open it’, explained Edwardes. Within he found the scrawled note from Agnew. Edwardes read it, and then calmly continued with the trial, but ‘from that moment I heard no more … In about an hour I had arranged the ways and means in my own mind, and that done, had no farther reason for con
cealment. I saw clearly what to do, and the sooner it was done the better.’ Without reference to Lahore, Edwardes decided to launch his own rescue mission, and, ‘with all the rash presumption of a subaltern, “rushed in where Generals fear to tread”’.55

  ‘Take him all in all – bodily activity, mental cultivation and warmth of heart – I have not met his equal in India’, Henry Lawrence wrote of this lieutenant,56 but given free rein in Bunnoo, Edwardes was fast developing a God complex. ‘I found five countries oppressed by one tyrant – and I removed him’, he claimed. ‘I found three Chiefs in exile – and I restored them. Those countries and those Chiefs rallied round me in the hour of need … when I held up my hand for soldiers, they came. When I left the province during an imperial war, peace reigned undisturbed behind me.’57 Next he’d be parting the Ganges.

  Edwardes had only 1,000 Sikhs and 600 Pathans of the Durbar army to hand, a force smaller even than Agnew and Anderson’s escort, and of these only the Pathans were reliable. And he was a mere lieutenant commanding a brigade. For Edwardes this was irrelevant; action was a moral imperative. As far as he was concerned, ‘the wounded vanity of an idolatrous and hitherto conquering nation … believing itself invincible, and destined to expel Christianity from Asia’58 had brought about the First Sikh War. It was his duty to see them swiftly thwarted before they started a second. Without waiting to hear of Agnew and Anderson’s fate, Edwardes set out with his meagre band to smash Moolraj, hoist the Union Jack on Mooltan’s highest minaret, await the gracious thanks of a grateful queen and watch the medals roll in.

  Herbert Edwardes, from Emma Edwardes’s Memorials of the Life and Letters of Sir Herbert B. Edwardes.

  Currie had nothing but praise for Edwardes,59 sensing that the lieutenant’s hasty adventurism might force Gough’s hand. From his hill station John Lawrence encouraged Currie to back Edwardes’s Mooltan offensive. ‘The place can’t stand a siege. It can be shelled from a small height near it. I see great objection to this course. But I see greater ones in delay’, he advised. ‘If the garrison did not surrender at discretion, I would storm it and teach them such a lesson as should astonish the Khalsa [the Sikh army].’60 He recommended Currie send European troops to assist, though quite where Currie was to find them, or the guns to open a breach, he neglected to say.

  In contrast, Campbell reiterated his belief that a summer campaign must fail. His misgivings were confirmed when Currie discovered that Edwardes’s Sikhs were secretly in league with the rebels in Mooltan. ‘It was feared that he would not receive intimation of this treachery in his camp,’ warned Campbell, ‘and would not only himself be sacrificed, but that the fact of this defection of so large a body of Sikh troops would have the very worst possible effect upon the country’, but by now Edwardes was charging across the Punjab, and there was little Currie or Campbell could do to stop him.

  Edwardes was only doing what the Victorian public wanted. His blind optimism, the plucky amateur vanquishing his foe by wit and will, was much preferred to forethought and the steady hoarding of overwhelming resources. Britain had embraced the cult of the hero, what Thomas Carlyle called ‘the basis of all possible good, religious or social, for mankind’.61 Historian Michael Edwardes wrote: ‘The younger sons of the middle classes saw themselves, sword in hand, carving Empires out of the black lands, bringing Law to the ignorant peasant, shouldering the pack of the white man’s burden and marching into a hero’s sunset.’62

  Campbell did not fit this new paradigm. His heroism in the Peninsular War was a good deal more tempered, driven by a desire for promotion, yes, but as one tiny part of a greater offensive, never in his own self-invented, independent command. Back then, showy heroism was deemed vulgar; hence the lack of gallantry medals until mid-century, and Wellington’s reluctance to promote officers for acts of derring-do. Times had changed, and Campbell now looked cautious and old-fashioned. ‘He is not much of a Hero’, complained Carlyle’s wife Jane. ‘He may be a brave man, and a clever man at his trade; but beyond soldiering he knows nothing, and is nothing, I think.’63

  The gulf between Edwardes and Campbell was not just that between brash immaturity and ripe experience. Pitt’s Britain, the Britain of Campbell’s childhood, had been just one of several middling powers in Europe, one very nearly eclipsed by France. For Campbell there was nothing preordained about Britain’s military supremacy. Born twenty-seven years after Campbell, Edwardes, in contrast, grew up in a Britain almost boundlessly self-confident. He was emblematic of a generation whose view of war, especially colonial war, was very different. Edwardes’s aim was ‘to be a pioneer of Christian civilisation in lands where Idolatry too often occupies the Temple, Corruption the Tribunal, and Tyranny the Throne’.64 For him, Britain’s military might was God-given.

  Encouraging Edwardes was his conviction that the British were the master race in India, an attitude popularised by the Clapham Sect and given a philosophical basis by James Mill. William Wilberforce argued:

  Are we so little aware of the vast superiority even of European laws and institutions, and far more of British institutions, over those of Asia, as not to be prepared to predict with confidence, that the Indian community which should have exchanged its dark and bloody superstitions for the genial influence of Christian light and truth, would have experienced such an increase of civil order and security, of social pleasures and domestic comforts, as to be desirous of preserving the blessings it should have acquired …65

  An increasing number of India’s subalterns agreed. This new brand of officer ‘dislikes and despises the natives because he cannot understand them’, complained one Bombay army veteran. ‘They are, in his opinion, an inferior order of beings, to whom he is under no sort of obligation to pay the slightest respect, and he thus contracts habits of violence which never quit him, and a prejudice against the people and country which adheres to him through life.’66

  With that feeling of superiority came a desire for segregation. Charles Napier noticed the change: ‘The younger race of Europeans keep aloof from Native officers … How different this from the spirit which actuated the old men of Indian renown.’67 Recalling the old days, one native officer wrote:

  The Sahibs then could speak our language much better than they can now, and mixed more with us … I have now seen that many officers only speak to their men when obliged, and evidently show that it is irksome to them, and try to get rid of them as soon as possible.68

  It was an apartheid absent in Clive’s day. Back then, British nabobs even took Indian wives, but, as Eric Stokes put it, these colonists ‘unclouded by sentiments of racial superiority or a sense of mission, were ultimately the reflection of eighteenth-century England’.69 Campbell was a child of eighteenth-century England; Edwardes very much a product of the nineteenth.

  And so, driven by heroic impulse, religious conviction, racial superiority and military self-confidence, Edwardes strode forth. Two days after throwing his scabbard in the dust, news reached him of the murder of Anderson and Vans Agnew. ‘If indeed we have lost our two friends in Mooltan, the necessity of a hasty march towards that capital no longer exists’,70 he wrote, but, dismissing the reports as lies, he continued his advance anyway. Upon hearing that Gough was minded to postpone offensive measures until the autumn, he nearly burst with impatience. ‘As if rebellion could be put off, like a champagne tiffin, with a three-cornered note to Moolraj to name a more agreeable date!’ he raged to Hodson at Lahore:

  Postpone a rebellion! Was ever such a thing heard of? Postpone avenging the death of two British officers! Should such a thing be ever heard of in British Asia? … Action, action-promptitude: these are the watchwords of the ikbal [prestige] … I quite blush for our position in the native eye.71

  Reinforced with a native infantry battalion and six guns from Bunnoo led by Cortlandt, Edwardes thrashed 6,000 of Moolraj’s men on 18 June at Kineri. ‘The neck of the Mooltan rebellion may be considered now broken’,72 Currie reported complacently. With extra troops from loyal raj
ahs, Edwardes’s army had grown to 18,000 men and he easily beat back Moolraj in a second encounter on 1 July, but the fortress of Mooltan was still defiant. ‘Out of thirty guns, we have not one in camp that would make any impression on fortifications,’ Edwardes reported to Currie, and so he requested siege guns – as Campbell had recommended in the first place.73 Littler, Campbell and Gough thought a summer siege would be too costly in men. The Indian press condemned the commander-in-chief for treating his troops as ‘cold-weather soldiers’,74 but Gough knew that this was better than ending up with hot-weather corpses. Dalhousie agreed. ‘The success of Lieutenant Edwardes rendered it less necessary, in his Excellency’s opinion, to risk the lives of European soldiers at this season’, he wrote.75 ‘However valuable are the lives of individuals, I will not, in order to rescue them, put the interests of the State in jeopardy’, the governor-general insisted.76

  Currie chose to ignore these warnings and prepared to send troops anyway. In expectation of leading them, Campbell now performed an abrupt volte-face, forswearing his qualms and backing the expedition. In early 1847 Hardinge had promised him command of any Lahore force that took the field, but despite repeated assurances from Gough, it went to Whish instead. ‘A clear piece of jobbery’, fumed Campbell. His one consolation was that rebellion might spread. ‘Captain Abbott, in Hazarah, reports the regiment in that district to be very strongly in favour of Moolraj and most anxious to join him or to move upon Lahore’, he wrote. ‘I wish they would do so.’77