Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  A union of smarting rajahs and irate sepoys would be deadly, and even before the mutiny broke out there had been signs of co-operation between them. The speed with which mutineers rallied to the old Mughal emperor, Bahadoor Shah (who still sat on the Peacock Throne in Delhi though his lands had been confiscated) was suspicious. Together with the curious proliferation of chappatis, or ‘migration of cakes’,* preceding the revolt, it implied insurrection had been brewing for some time in palace, bazaar and barracks, uniting all creeds and classes.264 ‘Gentoos and Moslems, zemindars and ryots, sultans and slaves, Brahmins and Pariahs, have for a time sunk their reciprocal hatreds of race, religion and caste, in the superior and overpowering hatred which they all feel for the proud, perfidious, remorseless and rapacious foreigners who plundered and oppressed them all’, declared Reynolds’s Newspaper. Indians would ‘unite in one holy crusade against the ruthless and impious race who had robbed and desecrated the hearths and altars of the people whom they professed to civilise and protect’.265

  As rebellion took hold, Canning’s despatches soon lost their nonchalance but while the ominous cables piled up, Palmerston, normally such a keen judge of the public mood, maintained an air of breezy optimism. For him India was a semi-detached problem. If it went badly, he could blame the East India Company. If it went well, he could claim the credit. Either way, there was a limit to what he could achieve from 5,000 miles away. Nevertheless, he saw the value in responding to the public mood with precipitate action.

  On Saturday 11 July 1857 a cable reached Horse Guards announcing the death from cholera of General Anson, commander-in-chief in India, on 27 May. It also reported that revolt had spread across northern India, and that the murder of British civilians, women and children among them, was becoming a commonplace. The prime minister remained unflappable. ‘The news is distressing by reason of the individual sufferings and deaths, but it is not really alarming as to our hold upon India’, Palmerston assured Panmure. To be on the safe side, he ordered 14,000 men east.266 His understanding was that the native troops had not so much rebelled, as disappeared. ‘The desertion of the 30,000 sepoys is better than their mutiny would have been’, Palmerston assured the editor of The Times. ‘It will save all trouble, difficulty and expense as to disbanding them; and as one European regiment is worth at least two native regiments, the 14,000 men going from hence according to arrangements already in progress will fully make up for this deficiency.’267 It would take those 14,000 men months to reach India, but as far as Whitehall was concerned, this crisis was nothing more than mischievous sepoys daring to bite the hand that fed them. A cool display of British stoicism would show them the error of their ways.

  Having heard the news from a contact at the Admiralty, Campbell set off at about 3 p.m. for Horse Guards. There he ran into General Storks, Secretary for Military Correspondence at Horse Guards, who told him Lord Panmure wanted to see him. Panmure asked Campbell to sail to India, take over as commander-in-chief, and win back the empire’s brightest jewel. ‘I at once accepted the offer, and expressed my readiness to start the same night, if necessary.’268 Commending him on his zeal, Panmure said the following morning would be just fine. ‘Never did a man proceed on a mission of duty with a lighter heart and a feeling of greater humility,’ wrote Campbell, ‘yet with a juster sense of the compliment that had been paid to a mere soldier of fortune like myself, in being named to the highest command in the gift of the Crown.’269*

  Notes

  * Campbell, Elphinstone and Raglan all said seven guns. Jocelyn, Lucan, Fraser and Carr-Laughton, and Loy Smith say nine. Robins argues ten (see TWC January 2005, 22). Shadwell (I, 330) said definitely nine: ‘This statement is made on the authority of the staff officer to whose lot it fell to superintend the disembarkation and placing of these guns in position [i.e. Shadwell himself].’

  ** In later years Campbell ‘stopped people’s mouths in London’ when he heard Lucan abused (Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 392).

  *** Lieutenant-colonel in the 4th Light Dragoons.

  * Lucan said the Turks mounted a ‘very respectable resistance … they got less credit than they deserved’ (Hansard, 19 March 1855). Nevertheless, one Russian artilleryman put the ease of taking the redoubts down ‘to the fact that the fortifications were defended not by the French or English, but by Turks, who were of course much easier to deal with’ (Kozhuzkov, 15).

  ** French Light Cavalry.

  * Another name for the plateau in front of Sebastopol.

  ** Calthorpe claimed there were only around 300 Turks (Calthorpe, 71). Jocelyn maintains that the Turks were positioned behind the Highlanders and all bar one officer and thirty men fled at the first Russian round shot (Jocelyn, History of the Royal Artillery, 203). Some accounts assert that the Turks were only formed on the right (Russell, General Todleben’s History, 138). Colebrooke states it was ‘one battalion alone’, while Kinglake suggests Campbell had one battalion on each flank, but both fled. Shadwell writes that to start with there were Turks on both flanks (Shadwell, I, 333). Hargreave Mawson claims one battalion of Turks remained on the left flank (TWC, 1/04). Campbell wrote of Turks on both flanks, and that the Russian cavalry ‘made an attempt to turn the right flank of the 93rd on observing the flight of the Turks who had been posted there’. It is quite possible those on the left fled as well, although Campbell does not state this specifically (Shadwell, I, 333).

  *** In an idiosyncratic interpretation of these events, Hugh Small claims that Campbell, ‘who at the Alma had absurdly urged his troops not to fire their Minié rifles until they were within a yard of the enemy’, tried to prevent the 93rd from firing, but the Highlanders, in his words, ‘ignored him and the front rank let fly with their rifles’. It is one of those ‘lively and controversial’ accounts.

  * Russell changed it to ‘tipped with steel’ and then shortened it to ‘thin red line’ (Russell, The Great War with Russia, 147), so ‘thin red line’ is not to misquote Russell. It was already being referred to as ‘the famous thin red line’ in a letter to the Daily News of 10 November 1855.

  * Actually he was 62 by a few days. He may have been having a senior moment.

  ** This is how the order that Lucan received was written. Raglan said that in the original there was a full stop after ‘ordered’ and advance had a capital ‘A’, giving a rather different sense (Kinglake, IV, 224).

  *** Lucan later stated that Nolan was ‘pointing to the further end of the valley’ (Lucan, 9), though others claim his flourish was rather vaguer. Lucan also said that the ‘spot pointed at by Captain Nolan was in the direction they [the guns] would have been taken’, suggesting that Lucan thought he was to head off the Russians removing the guns, rather than attack the redoubts (Lucan, 18). Yet in his report to Raglan two days later Lucan stated that he realised the intention was to retake the guns being removed by the Russians, making his decision to advance down the valley past the guns even more peculiar (David, The Homicidal Earl, 299).

  * Sergeant-Major Nunnerley thought Nolan had been shouting ‘threes right’ and saw Nolan’s horse wheel to the right as its rider was in his death throes. Part of the squadron began to follow, towards the causeway, but Nunnerley ordered them to ‘Front Forward’ (Allwood, 102).

  ** Cardigan claimed that he rode straight back because ‘on retiring thro’ the battery from whence I came, none of our troops were to be seen’ (Letter to Kinglake, TWC October 2000).

  * A general for whom Campbell developed great respect: ‘worth a brigade in himself’ (Shadwell, I, 370).

  ** Literally ‘wolf holes’: conical pits with a big stake in the middle to deter cavalry.

  *** Lines of branches sharpened at the tips, laid to deter infantry.

  **** Adding to his woes, a rumour circulated in London on 27 October that he had died of cholera. It was a Captain Colin Campbell who had succumbed (Belfast News-Letter, 1 November 1854).

  * The daily ration set in May 1854 for the rank and file was 3lb of wood. On 16 Dec
ember it was increased by 50 per cent. At the same time, a major-general like Campbell had his allowance reduced from 110 times the standard ration to only forty times.

  ** Large cylindrical wicker containers filled with earth, used to provide cover from enemy fire.

  * The Naval Brigade, with a strong emphasis on keeping the men dry and clean, and dispensing quinine, limes and oranges to counter scurvy, was one of the healthiest. Their latrines were placed well away from camp, while they dug their own wells to provide clean water (Eggleton, 90). They had a ship anchored in Balaklava, to act as a depot, giving them far more latitude in their rations (Heath, 181). After an engagement, the cry of ‘Boots, lads, boots!’ would ring out and the sailors would collect shoes from the Russian dead. When they found insufficient timber to complete their huts in the early winter, they stole into the suburbs of Sebastopol and came back with joists, rafters, and even some window frames. They only suffered a quarter the mortality rate of the infantry (Brooks, R., 16–17, 26).

  * While the Secretary for War was responsible for military policy in the wider sense, the Secretary at War oversaw the army’s administration and organisation.

  * While it was impossible to backdate substantive rank, it was possible to backdate local rank (McGuigan, 85). Campbell had been given the local rank of lieutenant-general in January.

  ** ‘Those whom God would destroy, he first makes mad.’

  *** Over winter Campbell had been reinforced by the 14th and 39th Foot. On 20 December he was given the reserve battalion of the 71st Highlanders, and on 4 February the 1/71st (see Plate 19). These last two were amalgamated into one battalion on 13 February (Oatts, 186; Anon., Regimental Records, 121; Cavendish, 107).

  * Organised by the new chief engineer Sir Harry Jones, who, as a young lieutenant, Campbell had seen wounded at the breach at San Sebastian.

  ** One account claimed that a Frenchman was knocking on a door with the butt of his musket and it went off, the bullet passing through the neck of one Highlander and hitting the man behind (USJ, August 1855, 536).

  * Two officers living in the same house died shortly afterwards of cholera, suggesting that was the cause (Pakenham, IV, 32). Florence Nightingale insisted that a ‘medical man in camp’ told her ‘The diarrhoea was slight – but he was so depressed by our defeat of Waterloo Day … that he sank rapidly without sufficient physical reason. It was not Cholera’ (Nightingale, 132).

  ** In late January 1855, when Lord Derby was approached by the queen to form a government, Ellenborough had advised him to recall Raglan immediately, to make him commander-in-chief in London, and then to place Campbell in charge of the army in the Crimea. Derby approved of Raglan’s recall but thought it impossible to get rid of Hardinge as commander-in-chief in London (Vincent, 128; Bilcliffe, 34).

  * Part of a crenellated parapet between two embrasures.

  ** Campbell told the Duke of Argyll that ‘a serious mistake had been made in not employing fresher troops than the Light Division’ (Campbell, G., Autobiography, I, 601).

  * According to Windham, Campbell was sent a verbal order to attack, but refused to do so unless it was reiterated in writing. Windham himself said in retrospect that he was being rather gung-ho (Windham, Crimean Diary, 210–12).

  ** Jocelyn (History of the Royal Artillery, 434) states that it was Corporal J. Ross of the Royal Sappers and Miners who discovered the Redan abandoned, and told Campbell after 3 a.m.

  *** Campbell became godfather to Keppel’s son in late 1862 (Stuart, 201).

  * Lieutenant Tryon saw one Frenchman ‘with a Russian helmet on, a woman’s yellow petticoat with a coloured body, and cross belted all over, with high boots and spurs and swords and bayonets stuck in the gown to such an extent that made you fancy you had met a female war hedgehog’ (Brooks, R., 25). Colonel Robertson found six Frenchmen making off with a grand piano (Robertson, J., 187).

  * Campbell later surprised Palmerston by chatting to the French ambassador’s wife in her native tongue. ‘Why Sir Colin, they told me you could not speak French’, the prime minister exclaimed (Shadwell, I, 395; see also Campbell, G., Autobiography, I, 586).

  * It was not all one-sided. Papers such as the Inverness Advertiser and Northern Ensign criticised the Lowland landlords and their extermination of Highland life.

  ** Many sources refer to Campbell talking with a pronounced Scottish accent (e.g. Paget, 64; Percy, 203; Robson, 288; Wynter, 73). Campbell was so incensed by the letter that he asked the Duke of Cambridge to contradict it publicly (RA/VIC/ADDE/1/438).

  * One version claimed that, soon after Colin’s birth, his father had lost all his money, both parents had subsequently died and Colin had been brought up by two maiden aunts who procured his first commission (Low, II, 373). This myth was repeated in a very ragged obituary in the Standard (15 August 1863). In fact, Colin’s father died on 28 December 1858 at Granton on the Isle of Mull, aged 91 (Reynolds’s Newspaper, 16 August 1863; Glasgow Herald, 17 August 1863).

  ** This stems from an article in the Inverness Courier that claimed Colonel John Campbell was Colin’s real father, that he had had a ‘Scotch marriage’ with Colin’s mother, and that Colin took the name MacLiver because the colonel was on foreign service at the time of his birth. Colin then changed his surname to Campbell on the colonel’s return. The Illustrated London News (22 January 1859) called this tale ‘inconsistent’ and so it is.

  *** Bombay Times, 18 December 1858. This was also the version repeated to the Duke of Argyll during a visit to Mull (Campbell, G., Autobiography, II, 84).

  **** Its fourteen members included one duke, one marquess, three earls, one viscount, three barons and four knights. There was only one man without a title.

  * There was so much wood about that the French used it to make a ballroom (Stephenson, 154).

  ** Hardinge had suggested postponing the creation of the two corps pending the incorporation of the German and Swiss troops expected in the spring (RA/VIC/MAIN/E6/68).

  * Campbell had been expecting peace before he returned to the Crimea, and in a letter to Colonel Eyre dated 25 January talked of setting off on a tour of southern Germany or Italy once the fighting was over (Shadwell, I, 396).

  ** It was the sort of sword Liberace would have taken to a Rob Roy pageant. When Campbell was home during the winter of 1855/56, Glaswegians had wanted to present him with a gold-mounted snuff horn and a gold quaich. Campbell narrowly avoided having to accept the sort of object best kept in a cupboard and used occasionally to scare small children.

  *** She was very proactive in suggesting changes in the army. In February 1857 she recommended the introduction of compulsory moustaches (Sheppard, I, 182).

  * Their fears were magnified by the sheer quantity of fat used. ‘After ramming down the ball, the muzzle of the musket is covered with it’ (Thompson, 33).

  * A form of culinary chain letter. Indians would cook batches, distribute them, and the recipients would cook more, distribute them and so on, giving rise to a wave of chapattis across India. Even those who cooked them did not seem to be aware of their significance, which is still unclear, but the British suspected it was a sign of organised dissent.

  * Campbell later told Hope Grant, ‘I should as soon have thought to be made Archbishop of Canterbury’ (Grant, 177). This sounds like false modesty from a man who had been hanging round Horse Guards that afternoon. He wrote that he accepted ‘not for money’s sake’, because his investments gave him an income of £1,900 per year, but ‘simply as a duty which I could not as a soldier decline’ (NLS/MS.2257, Haythorne). Leaving for India that same day, from a nineteenth-century perspective, would be like someone today offering to leave in five minutes – witness the shock in the Reform Club when Phileas Fogg offers to leave that same evening on his trip round the world, in the Jules Verne novel published sixteen years later.

  1 Spilsbury, 138.

  2 Shadwell, I, 330.

  3 Munro, 29; Shadwell, I, 328; Calthorpe, 69.

  4 PP/General Orders,
55.

  5 Kinglake, V, 40.

  6 Hansard/HL/Deb.19/3/55. Vol. 137. cc. 730–73.

  7 Lucan, 23.

  8 Heath, 92–3.

  9 Paget, 64.

  10 Hargreave Mawson, 10; Shadwell, I, 332.

  11 Paget, 161.

  12 Munro, 33.

  13 Calthorpe, 70.

  14 Figes, 243.

  15 Ryzhov, 28.

  16 Calthorpe, 71.

  17 Paget, 166.

  18 Russell, The War, 224.

  19 Russell, The Great War with Russia, 145.

  20 Munro, 41–3.

  21 Tisdall, 95.

  22 Munro, 34; Shadwell, I, 333.

  23 Russell, The Great War with Russia, 142.

  24 Patterson, 43.

  25 Strachan, From Waterloo to Balaklava, 29.

  26 Cavendish, 100.

  27 Calthorpe, 73.

  28 Tisdall, 96.

  29 Russell, The War, 227.

  30 Burgoyne, 122.

  31 Munro, 36.

  32 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 93.

  33 Wilson, 35.

  34 Ewart, I, 267.

  35 Euston, 28.

  36 Paget, 175.

  37 Munro, 44.

  38 Franks, 70.

  39 Shadwell, I, 334.

  40 Lucan, 8.

  41 Spilsbury, 152.

  42 Austin, 21.

  43 Paget, 202.

  44 Lucan, 9–30.

  45 Paget, 180.

  46 Phillips, 96.

  47 Lamb, 348.

  48 Paget, 180.

  49 Russell, The War, 231.

  50 Paget, 69.

  51 Paget, 190.

  52 Ryzhov, 30.

  53 Phillips, 96.

  54 Paget, 192.

  55 The Times, 11 November 1854.

  56 Calthorpe, 69.

  57 Paget, 72.

  58 Lucan, 11.

  59 Woodham-Smith, 259.

  60 RA/VIC/MAIN/QVJ(W).12/11/54.

  61 Anon., Letters from the Crimea, II, 131.

  62 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 284.

  63 Colebrooke, 58.

  64 Shadwell, I, 344.