Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  A logician helmsman like Mansfield was vital given the scale of the challenge. An immense tract of India, stretching from Calcutta right up the Ganges Valley, was up in arms. The two greatest rebel strongholds were Lucknow and Delhi. Attempts to retake Delhi had so far failed. The closest troops in any strength had been in the Punjab, but when the mutiny started Chief Commissioner John Lawrence saw little need to despatch more than a small force. After all, this was only a military mutiny. In an echo of his appraisal of Mooltan in 1848, Lawrence assured the then commander-in-chief, General Anson, that ‘with good management on the part of the civil officers, Delhi would open its gates on the approach of our troops’. In consequence he recommended not to bother with tents or siege artillery.25 Lawrence was reluctant to denude his region of British soldiers. Only with their help had he so far prevented outright revolt in the Punjab, by judicious disarming of the most suspect native regiments, and harsh treatment for those that rebelled. After the 55th Bengal Native Infantry rose up, the Commissioner of Peshawur, Herbert Edwardes, took forty mutineers, tied each of them over the muzzle of a cannon and, in front of 8,000 native troops, blew them to pieces. Provoked by news of the murder of British civilians, a bitter, vengeful streak was corrupting the British response. By the time General Sir Henry Barnard* set out from Umballa on 24 May to retake Delhi, he was determined ‘to burn every village within 3 miles of the road, and shoot every man not a soldier or camp follower found within these limits after a certain notice’, reported one civilian. ‘I hope it will not be ordered until we have got past … Hanging and village burning though necessary, is but a dirty business at best.’26

  Barnard’s troops, reinforced by a contingent from Meerut under Brigadier Archdale Wilson, reached Delhi on 8 June. Altogether they numbered 4,000 men. ‘Our small force … will be lost in such an extent of town’, Wilson warned.27 While his batteries opened fire, Barnard dug in on the ridge to the north-west, only to find himself soon besieged by rebels. Poorly supplied, over-crowded, and sweltering, the British were decimated by disease. On 5 July Barnard died of cholera. There followed a twelve-day interregnum under Major-General Reed, before Archdale Wilson, ‘a tall, soldierly-looking man, with a small brow, quick eye and large, feeble mouth’, took over.28 His position was perilous. ‘Our troops were toil-worn, suffering from the effects of climate and sickness, pitifully few in numbers, and daily diminishing through losses’, wrote one officer, while ‘the rebels were fighting under their native sun, were as four to one to us numerically, and were daily adding to their strength’.29 Wilson decided to sit tight.

  There was little Campbell could do for Delhi. Over 1,000 miles of rebel territory lay in his way. Troops, supplies and messages had to go via Bombay. ‘What takes place … in the North-West, in the Punjaub, or at Delhi, may become known in England as soon as at Calcutta’, Campbell told Cambridge.30 That other focus of revolt, Lucknow (the capital of Oudh), was nearer to hand, but presented difficulties of its own. In charge there at the outbreak of the mutiny had been Chief Commissioner, Sir Henry Lawrence, exiled to Lucknow following arguments with his brother John and Dalhousie. He seemed past his best. ‘Sir Henry was then only 50 years of age, but he looked an old man,’ wrote one contemporary, ‘his face bore traces of many years of toil beneath an Indian sun, and the still deeper marks of a never-ending conflict with self.’31

  Posted in Lucknow had been the 13th, 48th and 71st Bengal Native Infantry, the 7th Bengal Light Cavalry and the Oudh Native Infantry; in all, around 7,000 native troops. The only British soldiers present were a detachment of 270 men from the 32nd Foot. Twenty days after the mutiny at Meerut, the first sepoys ran amok. After killing a number of British officers they fled, but a tense month followed. Sixty-five miles away, at Bithoor, was the Nana Sahib, aggrieved at the denial of his birth right, while to the south was the indignant Ranee of Jhansi.

  Then on 5 June the sepoys in nearby Cawnpore mutinied. The British garrison of 400 men under Major-General Sir Hugh Wheeler retreated to a jumble of buildings, protected only by a hastily constructed earth parapet no taller than a dining chair. This coup encouraged the rebels across Oudh. In Lucknow, the officers’ bungalows were attacked. Placards appeared urging revolution. A local talookdar, the Maulvi of Faizabad, demanded a holy war against the British.

  Ever since Henry Lawrence had heard of the mutiny at Meerut on 17 May, he had been fortifying the British Residency at Lucknow and its ancillary buildings with makeshift barricades and trenches, ready for a siege. The more turbulent Oudh became, the more this last haven was crammed with British civilians and stores. The racquets court became a hay barn and the pews and pulpit were ripped out of the church to make space for grain. British control over Oudh was contracting inexorably to this one little enclave. Disarming the remaining sepoys in Lucknow was rejected for fear it might trigger mutiny. Instead, nearly 2,000 new native recruits were raised, as well as a corps of pensioners and one of volunteer cavalry.32

  When, on 12 June, the military police mutinied, Lawrence decided to follow his brother’s example and dispense stern justice. Those few rebels captured were publicly executed. Unfortunately, ‘each victim to the law excited rather than intimidated the delinquents’, reported one British clerk. ‘It might have been seen in June 1857 that active hatred against us would be the effect of the executions.’33 Harsh measures in the Punjab, backed up by the presence of so many British troops, had worked, but in Lucknow it just looked desperate. That same day Sir Henry Lawrence reported, ‘We still hold the cantonment, as well as our two posts, but every outpost (I fear) has fallen, and we daily expect to be besieged by the confederated mutineers and their allies.’34

  Eighteen days later reports of a rebel army east of Lucknow tempted Lawrence ‘to make a strong reconnaissance in that direction’, as Colonel Inglis of the 32nd put it, ‘with the view, if possible, of meeting the force at a disadvantage’. He had just 600 troops, fewer than half of them British. Quite how leaving a defensive position to engage an enemy of unknown size, at an undetermined place, was likely to ensure Lawrence found that enemy at a disadvantage, is unclear. Back in the Punjab he had condemned commanders who ‘talked of Europeans dying of coup de soleil. As if war is to be made without loss of life!’ Still contemptuous of the climate, Lawrence did not start out until late morning. Soon his column was wilting under the midday sun. Provision of food and water was piecemeal and inadequate.

  As Inglis reported, ‘The enemy, who had up to that time eluded the vigilance of the advanced guard by concealing themselves in overwhelming numbers behind a long line of trees’,35 suddenly pounced, all 6,000 of them.** It was a disaster. According to Private Metcalfe of the 32nd, two of Lawrence’s native gun crews fired into the British lines, and then limbered up and went over to the enemy. Due to damp or bad powder, many of the British muskets misfired. The elephant pulling the sole howitzer became difficult and the weapon had to be abandoned. Having lost three of his eleven guns and over half of his force, many to sunstroke and exhaustion, Lawrence was forced into a humiliating flight back into the Residency. At the sight of his retreat the 1st, 4th and 7th Oudh Native Infantry all mutinied.36

  Sir Henry Havelock, from R.M. Martin’s The Indian Empire.

  By nightfall the British were completely surrounded. Short of men, Lawrence reluctantly evacuated his secondary outpost, the Mutchi Bhowan fort, and blew it up. Even without it, he had over a mile of ramshackle defences to man, in places only yards from rebel-held houses. Only 1,720 soldiers were available for this task (1,008 ‘Christians’, the rest loyal sepoys). There were also 1,280 non-combatants to protect, including native servants, women, children and the boys from Lucknow’s La Martinière* school.37

  Two days into the siege a shell exploded in Sir Henry’s quarters without seriously wounding him. Lawrence insisted another would never find the same spot. The next day, one did exactly that, nearly severing his left leg. After two days of agony, he died, plunging the garrison into even greater despair. Colonel Inglis
took over. Lawrence had instructed him to resist the enemy at all costs. ‘On no account were we even to think of yielding or coming to terms’, explained Lieutenant Innes. ‘If necessary we were to entrench and entrench and fight every inch of ground.’38

  Despatched to the rescue was Brigadier Henry Havelock, Adjutant-General of the Queen’s Troops in India, a gaunt, 62-year-old labelled ‘an old fossil … only fit to be turned into pipeclay’. ‘He was unpopular with his soldiers to an extraordinary degree,’ claimed one civil servant, ‘a martinet very formal and precise.’39 A devout Baptist, he was also very much the saint militant. ‘I knew him better than almost any one’, wrote Lady Canning:

  He was very small, and upright and stiff, very white and grey and really like an iron ramrod. He always dined in his sword and made his son do the same. He wore more medals than I ever saw on any one, and it was a joke that he looked as if he carried all his money round his neck.40

  Havelock set out from Calcutta on 24 June with only six guns and 2,000 men, around a quarter of them civilian volunteers. After fighting through 600 miles of rebel territory he reached Cawnpore on 17 July. What he found there changed the entire complexion of the conflict.

  The position of the garrison at Cawnpore had been desperate from the start. Wheeler had nearly 500 civilians, 400 of them women and children, but only 300 British troops and 100 sepoys to guard them. His entrenchment was pitiful. ‘The difficulty, in my mind’, wrote William Russell when he saw it, ‘was to believe it could ever have been defended at all.’41 Against Wheeler were ranged 3,000 mutineers, led by the Nana Sahib. After three weeks’ siege, ‘the situation was critical in the extreme’, explained Amelia Bennett. ‘Our ammunition was fast coming to an end, and our food supply had run out.’

  Wheeler agreed to surrender to the Nana on 27 June, in exchange for safe passage to Allahabad. ‘The flag of truce was hoisted, and the roaring of the cannons having ceased, a weight seemed to have been taken off our hearts’, recalled Mrs Bennett. ‘The joy was general, and everybody seemed to have at once forgotten their past sufferings.’ Boats were assembled at the Satichaura Ghat, ready for the evacuees, but when they were about to cast off, the native boatmen leapt into the water:

  Immediately a volley of bullets assailed us, followed by a hail of shot and grape which struck the boats … In a few minutes pandemonium reigned. Several of the boats were seen to be wrapped in flames, and the sick and wounded were burnt to death … The cavalry waded into the river with drawn swords and cut down those who were still alive, while the infantry boarded the boats to loot … The water was red with blood, and the smoke from the heavy firing of the cannon and muskets and the fire from the burning boats, lay like dense clouds over and around us … My heart beat like a sledge hammer and my temples throbbed with pain, but there I sat, gripping my little sister’s hand, while the bullets fell like hail around me, praying fervently to God for mercy.42

  Just four British men escaped. The surviving women and children were removed to the Bibigarh (The House of the Ladies), where they were joined on 11 July by a further forty-seven British fugitives from Futtehghur. But when Havelock reached Cawnpore six days later, he found the Bibigarh deserted, its floor covered with blood, human hair and discarded shoes, many of them children’s. Nearby was a well. ‘When we got to the coping of the well, and looked over, we saw, at no great depth, a ghastly tangle of naked limbs’, reported one soldier.43

  Punch, ‘Justice’, 12 September 1857.

  The bodies bore ‘marks of the most indecent and inhuman treatment it is possible to conceive’, reported The Times.* The ‘culprits of Cawnpore might almost be trusted to the mercies of a jury of Quaker ladies’ and still receive ‘the ultimate punishment’, the paper declared.44 ‘The cruelties of the sepoys have inflamed the nation to a degree unprecedented in my memory’, wrote Thomas Macaulay.45 ‘Never did the cry for blood swell so loud as among these Christians and Englishmen,’ declared Macaulay’s nephew.46 ‘By demonstrating that they had failed to be impressed by the display of Christian conduct with which British rule had provided them’, argued historian Francis Hutchins, ‘Indians revealed quite simply that they were the incarnation of Satanic evil.’47

  ‘Cawnpore was only a sample of what was perpetrated’, claimed the Earl of Shaftesbury. He explained that Lady Canning had written to him describing women arriving in Calcutta with their ears and noses cut off, and of parents forced to eat the flesh of their own children before being burnt alive. Action was vital lest ‘the faith of Christ was trampled under foot’, declared his lordship.48 ‘At length, when crowds of widows and orphans returned to England unmutilated … people began to question how far their credulity had been imposed upon’,49 noted one contemporary historian. Eventually, Shaftesbury admitted that no such letter existed.50 ‘I … grieve … to think how much additional pain must be given by the strange delight in exaggerating horrors already so terrible’, wrote Lady Canning.51

  The mood of vengeance was stoked easily enough without resorting to half-truths. Punch published its bloodthirstiest cartoon ever: a lantern-jawed Justice, sword raised, foot atop a mound of dead sepoys, while to one side bare-breasted Indian mothers huddle, sheltering their infants, and in the background files of cannon with mutineers roped over the muzzles stand ready to fire.52 If any British soldier ‘should in future be accused of cruelty’, declared the Morning Post, ‘it need only be replied – Remember Cawnpore!’53 As one of the Lucknow garrison wrote, ‘Cawnpore was afterwards the war-whoop for atrocities which the British soldier will disown in the next generation.’54

  Very few contradicted the mob. The Tablet was one honourable exception, warning that ‘England would lose nothing by keeping her soldiers within the rules of civilised warfare … We should remember that the sepoys have been under our own training, and that we are only reaping what we ourselves have sowed.’ The queen too was forgiving and philosophical, in private at least. ‘Of course the mere murdering (I mean shooting or stabbing) of innocent women and children is very shocking in itself, but in civil War this will happen’, she told Lady Canning. ‘Badajoz and St. Sebastian, I fear, were two examples which would equal much that has occurred in India, and these examples the Duke of Wellington could not prevent – and they were the acts of British Soldiers, not of black blood.’55

  A handful of parliamentarians called for moderation. ‘In the name of England … there had been practised tortures little less horrible than those which we now deplored’, pointed out Sir John Pakington.56 ‘I protest against meeting atrocities by atrocities’, declared Disraeli:

  I have heard things said and seen things written of late which would make me almost suppose that the religious opinions of the people of England had undergone some sudden change, and that, instead of bowing before the name of Jesus, we were preparing to revive the worship of Moloch.57

  His voice was lost in the uproar. ‘When the rebellion has been crushed from the Himalayas to Camorin, when every gibbet is red with blood, when every bayonet creaks beneath its ghastly burden, when the ground in front of every cannon is strewn with rags, and flesh, and shattered bone – then talk of mercy’, insisted the student debaters at the Oxford Union. ‘Then you may find some to listen. This is not the time.’58

  Newspapers competed to publish the most lurid stories. In Jhansi, sepoys ‘tore the children limb by limb’ and ‘made mothers kill their own children’, reported the Hampshire Advertiser and Salisbury Guardian. It never seemed to occur to the editor to ask how their contributor had lived to tell the tale. Without any accredited witnesses to the slaughter at the Bibigarh, accounts of Cawnpore became ever more sensational.* Every report had to mention at least one blood-spattered Bible, open at a comforting chapter.** Even The Times was swept along by the tide, calling one description of the charnel house ‘painfully interesting’.59 ‘It is impossible that the British public can hear too much of the frightful Cawnpore massacres’, declared the Lancaster Gazette.60 ‘The blood of our poor, dead countrywomen
and their children … cries up from the reddened earth for vengeance and we say that the English heart is not in its right place that does not echo and re-echo the cry.’*** ‘It was as though a cultural floodgate had been opened to allow every forbidden sadistic nightmare suddenly to surge up into uncensored public view’, writes mutiny historian Christopher Herbert. Something very dark and unpleasant at the core of the British soul had been stripped bare, a ‘deep, indelible vein of Old Testament religiosity which caused impulses of retributive violence to pulse strongly in the same Victorian middle class psyche that regarded the abhorrence of violence as one of its cardinal values’.61

  This was a qualitative shift from the attitudes Campbell had encountered as an ensign. On the way to Corunna, there was mourning but no elevated sense of atrocity or vengeance when soldiers’ wives were cut down by French cavalry. Fifty years on, British women had become defenceless innocents, marooned in an alien land. ‘The peculiar aggravation of the Cawnpore massacres was this; that the deed was done by a subject race,’ wrote Russell, ‘by black men who dared to shed the blood of their masters and mistresses, and to butcher poor helpless ladies and children, who were the women and offspring of the dominant or conquering people.’62 The slaughter had ‘broken the spell of inviolability that seemed to attach to an Englishman’, as The Times put it.63

  The ire of the British press was as nothing to the passions stirred in India. ‘The indignity which had been put upon a proud people by a race whom we regarded as inferior in every sense was maddening’, explained Wolseley. ‘The idea that a native should have dared to put his hands upon an Englishwoman was too much for our insular pride … Had any English bishop visited that scene of butchery when I saw it, I verily believe that he would have buckled on a sword.’64 Many who dismissed Indian culture as degenerate now argued, without a shred of irony, for merciless revenge as the only culturally sensitive response. ‘Punishment, summary, decisive and even severe, is the native’s ideal of justice,’ claimed Lieutenant Majendie, ‘and that mercy which precedes the show of might is as a pearl thrown before swine.’65 ‘As regards torturing the murderers of the women and children; if it be right otherwise, I do not think we should refrain from it, because it is as Native custom’, argued John Nicholson:****