Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  There was nothing further for Campbell to do, so he prepared to return home. On 9 May, the night before he embarked, the Highlanders honoured him with a grand farewell banquet in a hut hung with tartan, pine branches and regimental colours. Massed pipers played him in with ‘The Campbells are Coming’, while Alexis Soyer served haggis and sheep’s head broth. In return, Campbell gave his audience a heartfelt address. ‘I am now old, and shall not be called to serve any more’, he told the men:

  and nothing will remain to me but the memory of my campaigns, and of the enduring, hardy, generous soldiers with whom I have been associated, whose name and glory will long be kept alive in the hearts of our countrymen. When you go home … each to his family and his cottage, you will tell the story of your immortal advance in that victorious echelon up the heights of the Alma, and of the old brigadier who led and loved you so well. Your children and your children’s children will repeat the tale to other generations, when only a few lines of history will remain to record all the enthusiasm and discipline which have borne you so stoutly to the end of this war … Though I shall be gone, the thought of you will go with me wherever I may be, and cheer my old age with a glorious recollection of dangers confronted and hardships endured. A pipe will never sound near me without carrying me back to those bright days when I was at your head, and wore the bonnet which you gained for me, and the honourable decorations on my breast, many of which I owe to your conduct. Brave soldiers, kind comrades, farewell.231

  Once more, Campbell landed in England, sure that his career had finished. He returned as major-general, just one substantive rank up from the colonel he had been when he left in 1854. Prince Albert recommended he be pushed up a rung, and so, in June, Campbell was promoted to lieutenant-general, along with Codrington.232 He had already been made Knight Grand Cross of the Bath (for which he was charged £164 13s 4d). From the Sultan he received the Order of Mejidie (1st Class), from the King of Sardinia the Grand Cross of the Order of St Maurice and St Lazarus, and from Napoleon III the Légion d’Honneur. Glasgow feted him with dinners, granted him the freedom of the city and presented him with a grand ceremonial sword.** A year later, Oxford University flattered him with an honorary doctorate alongside Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Dr David Livingstone.

  Hardinge’s death in September 1856 left the post of commander-in-chief vacant. ‘We then went through the whole Army List’, recorded the queen, ‘and with the exception of Lord Seaton, who would be quite the right man were it not for his great age, we could find no one worth considering’,233 so the Duke of Cambridge was appointed. The office of commander-in-chief, previously answerable to the sovereign, had been subject to ministerial control since July 1855, so it was convenient for Victoria that her cousin fill the post (one which he was to retain until 1895).*** It was an even greater boon for Campbell. Since the Battle of the Alma, Cambridge had regarded Campbell as a mentor, and now the pupil was at the very top of the tree, eager to provide him with new challenges. In July 1856, Campbell accepted command of the South-Eastern District, and then (following the duke’s recommendation) took up Cambridge’s former post of Inspector-General of Infantry.234

  Meanwhile, the chance of a new foreign command increased by the day. Tensions had been rising in the East. Having formed his own religious sect/rebel army, Hung Hsiu-Chuan, Chinese fantasist and self-proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ, had conquered much of southern China. This left the British government in a quandary. Should they stand aside so that nominally Christian insurgents could overthrow the heathen emperor, or was the devil you knew preferable to an egomaniac Bible thumper?

  Crisis point came in October 1856 with the arrest by the Chinese of the crew of the Hong Kong-registered boat Arrow. The Governor of Hong Kong, John Bowring, bombarded Canton in protest. The Chinese retaliated by ransacking the British factories. When an attempt was made to poison the European population of Hong Kong by lacing their bread with arsenic, it was clear matters were getting out of hand.235 The Commons voted through a resolution condemning Bowring’s actions, but Palmerston, more attuned to the nation’s gut instincts, complained that ‘an insolent barbarian wielding authority at Canton had violated the British flag’.236 For Palmerston, war offered another chance to browbeat the Celestial Empire, renegotiate the Treaty of Nankin and extort further concessions, so he dissolved parliament and called an election. The public, craving the uncomplicated victory denied them in the Crimea, gave Palmerston a majority and an express mandate to go to war.

  The government wanted to send a Plenipotentiary Extraordinary to take a firm grasp of matters. Cambridge thought Campbell the best man for the job. ‘His very name would carry weight with it, both at home and abroad,’ the Duke told Panmure, ‘and people would know that we were in earnest’,237 but despite being asked several times, Campbell turned it down. The element of zealotry would mean bitter fighting, and attract the kind of British soldier who saw war as a crusade. Campbell had seen where that led in the Punjab. In any case, his old Walcheren fever still troubled him. ‘I am certain that at my age a fresh exposure to the tropical sun will bring on fresh attacks’, he told the duke. ‘I should be contented with a repose in my own country after an active service of nearly half a century.’238 General Ashburnham was selected instead.

  It suited the queen. She had Campbell earmarked for her own pet project: the Victoria Cross. The first presentation of the medal was to be held in Hyde Park on 26 June 1857, and she wanted her favourite Highland general to officiate. However, like many of his colleagues, Campbell thought gallantry awards superfluous. ‘The older officers did not smile upon it’, explained Fortescue. ‘They remembered the days when Englishmen were content to do their duty without hope of outward adornment to their garments.’239 The Times labelled the medal ‘a dull, heavy, tasteless affair … Valour must, and doubtless will be, still its own reward in this country, for the Victoria Cross is the shabbiest of all prizes.’240 Campbell shared that sentiment: no one from the Highland Brigade received the decoration. Even so, he managed to conquer his misgivings and, a little bowed but with eyes still bright and teeth still sound,241 took charge on the day. At the Marble Arch corner of the park, a gallery a third of a mile long, accommodating 8,000 spectators, had been constructed for the event. Lord Cardigan had the gall to attend riding his Balaklava charger, Ronald. Whatever reservations the press had about the medal, the ceremony was reported with due deference, as a blemishless celebration of British valour. Cambridge recorded that ‘all went off to perfection and entirely without accident. The queen distributed the Crosses with her own hand, and the troops marched past in excellent order.’242

  Some of the recipients’ recollections were at odds with the official version. ‘There were thousands and tens of thousands of spectators,’ remembered Lord Wantage, ‘but except a lucky few, among whom we were, everyone had to stand on the most uncomfortable sloping platforms, their toes lower than their heels, under a burning sun.’243 According to Colonel Percy, the event only narrowly avoided descending into farce. ‘Paircy, you are the senior’, Campbell allegedly told him. ‘Take charge of the recipients. I leave all to you. I don’t know anything about parades, and you do.’ Matters went from bad to worse after one drunk Royal Engineer insisted he would ‘rather be damned than have the VC and keep out in the sun’. Two soldiers had to be detailed to keep an eye on him. When it was all over, there was a stampede to the palace led by ‘the jealous, prejudiced, indignant old Scotchman Sir Colin Campbell, who did not want to leave a chance of his luncheon with royalty’, claimed Percy. Then again, Colonel Percy was rude about nearly everyone.244

  Victoria Cross Ceremony, Hyde Park, from the Illustrated London News.

  If Campbell’s thoughts were elsewhere, he had good cause. The sepoys in India had been restless for months but ‘suddenly, as a clap of thunder out of the blue’ had come ‘the news of the mutiny of Bengal regiments at Meerut, of the massacre of the officers, and of the escape of the mutinous throng up the Ganges to Delhi’,245
as the Duke of Argyll wrote. ‘The mutinies amongst the Native troops are spreading and several corps are in open revolt in Delhi’, Cambridge confirmed. While Campbell sweated in Hyde Park, the Commons held an emergency debate to consider the crisis.

  The trigger had been the introduction of the new Enfield rifle into sepoy regiments. Its cartridges were coated with fat to keep them dry. To load, the soldier had to rip the end off the cartridge with his teeth before ramming the contents down the barrel. Muslims believed the grease was pig fat, Hindus that it was beef.* If it touched their lips, they were defiled. A handful of old hands like Sir William Gomm had warned against issuing the cartridges until the fat was proved to be inoffensive, but he was ignored.246 On 26 February, the 19th Bengal Native Infantry refused the cartridges and seized their officers. Fortunately, the men were first placated and then disbanded.

  By the summer of 1857 the government thought it had overcome the sepoys’ suspicion by allowing them to grease cartridges with their own tallow or ghee, but their distrust rankled. When on 9 May eighty-five sepoys in Meerut were sentenced to hard labour and publicly clapped in irons after refusing the greased cartridges, it was the match to the tinder. ‘The anger which the news of this punishment created in the minds of the Sepoys was intense’, wrote contemporary historian Syed Ahmad Khan. ‘The prisoners on seeing their hands and feet manacled, looked at their medals and wept.’247 The next day the native cavalry stormed the gaol and released every sepoy and badmash (ruffian) in the building, unleashing a tumult of arson and murder. By the time Brigadier Archdale Wilson had roused his British troops, the mutineers had fled to Delhi, 36 miles away. The sepoys detailed to retake Delhi then also mutinied, killing most of their British officers.

  To the self-confident British officer class in India, this seemed like the tantrum of a few natives who would be quickly brought to heel, but for those with an eye for it, this was a symptom of a much deeper malaise. India was fatally divided. ‘There was no real communication between the Governors and the governed’, explained Syed Khan.248 The racial and cultural separation identified as a festering danger by Charles Napier had become ever more entrenched, as the British segregated themselves in leafy cantonments. ‘Belgravia is not so much removed from Houndsditch in feeling, modes of life, and thought, as our Eastern station from our native bazaar’, reported William Russell. ‘There is no bond of union between the two, in language, or faith or nationality.’249 Absenteeism among British officers distanced them from their sepoys still further.250 That year, 1,237 officers of the East India Company’s armies were on ‘civil employment’ or ‘detached duty’. In the Bengal Infantry, for example, of 1,404 officers, 420 were absent.251 The gulf between white and native officers was now unbridgeable. ‘I was shouted at by the Adjutant as if I had been a bullock,’ complained one 65-year-old subedar, ‘sworn at by the comanieer [commanding officer], called a fool, a donkey, a booriah [old woman].’

  Lord Ellenborough blamed aggressive Anglicanism for creating a siege mentality among the sepoys252 and encouraging the fear that the Company’s grand plan was to Christianise the entire native population. ‘I had observed the increase of late years of Padree [sic] Sahibs, who stood up in the streets of cities and told the people their cherished religion was false, entreating them to be Christians’, wrote one native officer. ‘They always said they were not employed by the Sirkar, and that they received no money from it, but could they say what they did without its permission? Everybody believed they were secretly employed by it. Why should they take such trouble if they were not ordered?’253 ‘All men, whether ignorant or well-informed, whether high or low, felt a firm conviction that the English Government was bent on interfering with their religion and with their old established customs’, confirmed Syed Khan.254

  At the very moment when the sepoys’ loyalty was being taxed as never before, the Company’s reliance on them was at its height, so short was it of British troops. ‘The Empire had nearly doubled itself within the last twenty years, and the queen’s troops have been kept at the old establishment’, Victoria warned Panmure that June, and yet they were ‘the body on whom the maintenance of that Empire depends’.255 There were just 24,263 of Her Majesty’s troops in India, plus a further 21,259 of the Company’s own European soldiers (including medical staff and veterans) as against 232,224 sepoys.256 Because the Company’s greatest fear was external threats, most white troops were stationed near the frontiers. The Punjab had the biggest concentration, 10,326.257 Meanwhile, in Bengal (the presidency including Delhi and Meerut) the number had declined worryingly, yet it was here that 135,767 sepoys were stationed, more than half the Company’s native soldiers.

  Overseas campaigns had reduced the white garrison still further. Two cavalry regiments sent to the Crimea had not been replaced, while four infantry regiments were off fighting in Persia. A single British battalion at Dinapore, a small detachment at Cawnpore and a weak battalion at Agra was all that guarded the 900-mile Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta up the Ganges Valley. Delhi had no British regiments at all. The sepoys had been trained by the British and armed with modern weapons, so if rebellion spread and the native regiments mutinied en masse, the colonists could not hope to stop them.

  Giving heart to the sepoys was Britain’s indifferent martial record over the past twenty years. ‘Ever since the reverses at Caubul first taught the natives of India that an English army might be annihilated,’ explained one Indian civil servant, ‘it has only been a question of time with the Sepoys when they should make Bengal, as was Caubul, the grave of the white man.’258 The inconclusive Crimean War had further tarnished the British reputation, while the need to withdraw troops from India to fight the Russians had destroyed the myth that Victoria’s battalions were infinite.

  The government in India and London preferred to take a rose-tinted view of the matter. Mutiny at Meerut, though disturbing, did not appear to sound the death knell of British India. Isolated mutinies had been erupting for years. Campbell had experienced one himself. Such outbreaks had been limited and were rarely violent. When Panmure asked his cousin Dalhousie for his opinion, the ex-governor-general dismissed the native regiments as incapable of combined action, and declared the whole affair exaggerated.259 London society was equally sanguine. ‘We should as soon have thought of losing Manchester as India’, remarked Lady Carrington.260 The initially optimistic reports from the new governor-general, Charles Canning, seemed to validate that confidence, but Canning had a perverse motive to underplay the crisis. The cost of sending British troops to India to suppress a mutiny would be met by the East India Company, encouraging its governor-general ‘to be careful of the Company’s pockets, and to keep his requirements as low as possible’, as Lord Clarendon observed.261 Canning did not want to panic London into dispatching a dozen battalions only to find when they arrived that the crisis had passed, but he still got the bill.

  A cartoon marking Campbell’s acceptance of command in India. (Punch, 25 July 1857)

  In any case, the impression in Britain was that this was a purely military mutiny. The idea that disquiet stretched beyond the native army was barely contemplated, despite the evidence to the contrary. India’s independent nawabs and rajahs were every bit as resentful as the sepoys and increasingly fearful of the British appetite for territory. The Company had always honoured the convention that a rajah could adopt an heir if he lacked male issue, but while governor-general, Dalhousie had refused to respect the practice, and had started annexing their intestate kingdoms, arguing that the Company alone could fill the power vacuum. This left a growing band of disgruntled and dispossessed rajahs with nothing more to lose. The Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the Peishwah of the Maratha Confederacy, was typical. Though the Peishwah had been exiled to Bithoor and deprived of his lands after the Third Maratha War of 1817–18, he had retained a sizeable pension from the British. Upon his death, his heir, the Nana Sahib, was told the pension and title of Peishwah were forfeit. The aggrieved Nana petitioned the East Indi
a Company for restitution, and sent courtiers to London to lobby on his behalf, but all were rebuffed. Dalhousie pulled the same trick in Jhansi. Following the death of the rajah in 1853, the governor-general refused to recognise his adopted son, preferring instead to confiscate the whole province. The ranee, like Jind Kaur in Lahore, was pensioned off, left with little to do but contemplate revenge.

  Dalhousie’s most contentious land grab was Oudh. Here the governor-general did not bother to wait for the Nawab to die. He simply argued maladministration and in 1856 snatched the kingdom. Oudh’s landowners and gentry, though not the losers by annexation, were still furious. ‘The minds of all the Talookdars [landowners] and head men were excited against the Sirkar, who they considered had acted without honour and had been very hard on the Nawab’, explained one native officer. ‘There were plenty of interested people to keep alive this feeling.’262 The Nawab was exiled and his army of 60,000 men disbanded. Only about half were recruited into company regiments or local police, leaving 30,000 disaffected and unemployed ex-soldiers.263 Ill feeling in Oudh was especially corrosive. Almost three-quarters of Bengal’s sepoys hailed from there, and through them resentment seeped out across the presidency.