Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  36 Hilton, 122.

  37 Inglis, Lady, 223.

  38 Martin, R.M., Indian Empire, VIII, 474.

  39 Lang, 147.

  40 Forrest, Selections, II, 365.

  41 Roberts, F., Forty-One Years in India, I, 367.

  42 Gordon-Alexander, 171.

  43 Lang, 147.

  44 Forbes-Mitchell, 140.

  45 Gordon-Alexander, 173.

  46 Edwardes, M., Battles, 120.

  47 Forbes-Mitchell, 144.

  48 Roberts, F., Forty-One Years in India, I, 371.

  49 Allgood, ‘Journal’, xii.

  50 Roberts, F., Forty-One Years in India, I, 372.

  51 Bourchier, 176.

  52 Maude and Sherer, II, 394.

  53 Forrest, Selections, II, 396.

  54 Maude and Sherer, II, 394.

  55 Forrest, Selections, II, 391.

  56 Knollys, I, 312.

  57 Grant, 213.

  58 Malleson, II, 279.

  59 Campbell, G., Memoirs, I, 287.

  60 PP.H/C.East India (Mutinies), 1857–58, Vol.XLIV, Pt. I, 213.

  61 Adye, 8.

  62 Bombay Times, 16 January 1858.

  63 Inglis, Lady, 216.

  64 Russell, My Indian Mutiny Diary, 75.

  65 Windham, Crimean Diary, 233.

  66 Fortescue, XIII, 329; RA/VIC/ADDE/1/838.

  67 Windham, Crimean Diary, 232.

  68 Duff, 232.

  69 Jones, O., 82.

  70 Gough, 124.

  71 Roberts, F., Forty-One Years in India, I, 381.

  72 Wood, E., Revolt in Hindustan, 240.

  73 Knollys, I, 316.

  74 Roberts, F., Forty-One Years in India, I, 384.

  75 Jones, O., 77.

  76 Jones, O., 83.

  77 Duff, 265.

  78 Roberts, F., Forty-One Years in India, I, 387.

  79 NAM/1995-11-296(VPP-Part).

  80 Pearson, 92.

  81 Napier, H.D., 96.

  82 RA/VIC/ADDE/1/834.

  83 Malleson, II, 308.

  84 RA/VIC/MAIN/Z/502/31.

  85 Verner, I, 183.

  86 BOD/MS.Eng.Hist.c.262/212.

  87 Shadwell, II, 52, 64.

  11

  Conqueror

  * * *

  ‘The suppression of mutiny … is the most arduous and delicate duty upon which an officer can be employed, and which requires, in the person who undertakes it, all the highest qualifications of an officer, and moral qualities’

  The Duke of Wellington

  * * *

  While the Gurkhas made their way south, Campbell mustered all he could at Cawnpore for the grand assault on Lucknow, requesting the (12-mile long) siege train from Agra and the Shannon’s 8in guns from Allahabad (see Plate 25).* ‘Every loop-holed house or garden wall will swarm with hidden foes’, warned the correspondent for the Bengal Hurkaru. ‘There is sound policy in Sir Colin’s waiting until he shall have got such an artillery force together as will, from its very weight of fire, drive them from their rat holes.’1 Most papers were not so forgiving. ‘The Indian press, with the self-confidence of pressmen all over the world, daily abused the C-in-C,’ recalled Gordon-Alexander, ‘but it must have been a matter of intense gratification to him that their perfectly sincere abuse assisted in misleading the enemy as to his immediate intentions and future plans.’2 As Roberts observed, ‘those who accused him of “indecision, dilatoriness, and wasting the best of the cold weather” could not have known how little he deserved their censure’.3 As Campbell explained:

  I have been detained here, by desire of the governor-general, very much longer than was convenient to enable Jung Bahadoor to join and take part in the siege of Lucknow … I hope to reduce it speedily, for the weather is getting hot, and the heat will destroy and render ineffective more men than even the fire of the enemy.4

  ‘If Sir Colin gets up here soon, and we are favoured with a fortnight’s moderate weather, I believe Lucknow will be ours,’ wrote one civilian from the Alumbagh, ‘but if not, I think we must sit here through the hot weather and rains as in Delhi and lose at least half our men, and possibly have to begin again to reconquer India.’5

  The governor-general had moved up to Allahabad* to be closer to the front, so on 7 February Campbell made a flying visit to discuss strategy, and the question of a pardon for the rebels. Both Outram and John Lawrence had been recommending an amnesty. ‘Why not then, when beating down all opposition with one hand, hold out the olive branch with the other?’ argued Lawrence.6 Campbell was sympathetic. Initially Canning agreed that, aside from ‘nine or ten’ regiments which would receive ‘no offer of pardon’, the rest were to be ‘allowed to retire to their homes with full pardon on laying down their arms’. However, on reflection, the governor-general decided this would only encourage the proscribed regiments to flee, and let the rest of the Lucknow rebels go unpunished. ‘We shall come to shame and contempt if we offer a compromise to Traitors who are still unbeaten and insolent before us’, he declared. ‘No power on earth will induce me to speak of terms until they have been driven from the city, or crushed within it.’7

  A disappointed Campbell returned to Cawnpore to finalise his army’s structure. Grant, now promoted major-general, would be second-in-command and lead the cavalry. Archdale Wilson would have the artillery, Robert Napier the engineers, while the three divisions of infantry were split between Outram, Walpole and Sir Edward Lugard, who had seen action in Afghanistan, both Sikh wars and in Persia as Outram’s chief of staff.8 Everyone was ready, except for Jung’s Gurkhas, who had yet to appear. Tired of waiting, Campbell assured the governor-general ‘we are able to take the strongest positions of the city without him’. ‘I am sure that, as matters stand, we do better to accept the necessity and wait for Jung Bahadoor. It would drive him wild to find himself jockeyed out of all share in the great campaign’, insisted Canning:

  I am convinced that he would break with us and go back to his hills within a week. The loss of this help would be very inconvenient, but to find ourselves on bad terms with him would be much more so. I am therefore quite reconciled to a little delay.9

  The hiatus at least allowed William Russell to catch up with Campbell. He had been rather slower off the mark than in the Crimea, this time arriving ten months after unrest broke out, but as one officer wrote, ‘Mr. Russell being with the army is a great boon to the good people at home. Many stirring incidents are recorded which but for his graphic pen, would never have been known beyond where they took place.’10

  Russell found Campbell ‘better, stronger and more vigorous than the last time I saw him’:

  His figure shows little trace of fifty years of the hardest and most varied service, beyond that which a vigorous age must carry with it; the face is marked, indeed, with many a seam across the brow, but the mouth, surmounted by a trimmed, short moustache, is clean-cut and firm, showing a perfect set of teeth as he speaks.

  ‘Now, Mr Russell, I’ll be candid with you’, said Campbell. ‘We shall make a compact. You shall know everything that is going on. You shall see all my reports, and get every information that I have myself, on the condition that you do not mention it in camp, or let it be known in any way, except in your letters to England.’

  ‘I accept the condition, sir; and I promise you it will be faithfully observed’, was Russell’s response.11

  In the field of communications, Campbell had already shown himself ahead of his time in his emphasis on telegraphy, and now he became the first British general to take an ‘embedded’ journalist. Given the time needed for Russell’s reports to reach London, to be printed, and then to filter back to India, they would be out of date by the time the rebels read them, so there was no risk from a tactical standpoint, while Campbell stood to gain from soft-soaping the most famous journalist on Britain’s biggest-selling daily newspaper.12 ‘Sir Colin will always be reckoned a great general,’ reported The Standard, ‘but he never made a finer show of generalship than when he welcomed th
e correspondent of The Times into his tent, his table and his council board.’13 Nevertheless, it was still a gamble. Russell was not there to give the Company or the military an easy time; he railed against the segregation of colonised and the colonisers, and the casual racism he encountered everywhere. His intention was to debunk the stories of native atrocities, not to act as Campbell’s PR agent.**

  After nearly three weeks’ postponement, and still no sign of the Nepalis, Campbell’s army set out from Cawnpore in the early hours of 28 February. As before, they marched for Bunthera. ‘Here such a force was collected as must have paled the cheek of Pandy’s spies when they caught sight of it’, crowed Lieutenant Majendie.14 There were close on 16,000 soldiers and Russell estimated that for every fighting man there were six or seven camp followers.15 ‘I could not but think how different campaigning is in India from what it was in the Crimea’, he reported:

  here we have barons of beef, great turkeys, which in the Irish phrase are ‘big enough to draw a gig’, mutton of grass-fed sheep, game, fish without the flavour of tin and rosin, truffled fowl, rissoles, and all the various triumphs of French cuisine, spread on snowy-white tablecloths in well-lighted tents, served by numerous hands. Here too, were beakers of pale ale from distant Trent or Glasgow, Dublin or London porter, champagne, Moselle, sherry, curious old port (rather bothered by travelling twenty miles a day on the backs of camels), plum puddings, mince-pies and other luxuries not often found in camps.16

  Campbell had triple the men he had fielded in November, but Lucknow was triply reinforced. The Begum had spent five lakhs of rupees entrenching and now three massive earth ramparts protected the central rebel citadel, the Kaiserbagh. ‘The enemy, profiting by experience, had strengthened their defences by works exhibiting prodigious labour’, wrote Napier. ‘Sir Colin Campbell’s former route across the canal, where its banks shelved, was intercepted by a new line of very formidable section, flanked by strong bastions.’17 In addition, every street had been barricaded and most houses of substance loop-holed. The mutineers’ arsenal numbered more than 100 guns, commanding the key thoroughfares. Within Lucknow lay the greatest concentration of rebels yet gathered, approximately 30,000 sepoys plus 50,000 volunteers.* The latter, often dismissed as undisciplined bandits, were rated highly by Russell. ‘The great bulk of the sepoy army is supposed to be inside Lucknow,’ he wrote:

  but they will not fight as well as the matchlockmen of Oudh, who have followed the chiefs to maintain the cause of their young king … and who may fairly be regarded as engaged in a patriot war for their country and their sovereign. The sepoys during the siege of the Residency never came on as boldly as the zemindary levies and nujeebs.**18

  ‘I could not hope to invest a city having a circumference of twenty miles’.19 Campbell informed the governor-general, so instead he decided to punch through the earthworks and storm the Kaiserbagh, that ‘range of massive palaces and walled courts of vast extent, equalled perhaps, but certainly not surpassed, in any capital in Europe’.20 The question was from which direction to attack. Expecting a repeat of Campbell’s November assault, the rebels had concentrated their fortifications to the east. Outram wanted to wrong-foot them with an offensive from the north-west,21 but, as Napier warned, the ‘west side presents a great breadth of dense and almost impenetrable city’. He favoured an eastern strike, which offered ‘first, the smallest front and was therefore more easily enveloped by our attack; secondly, ground for planting our artillery, which was wanting on the west side; and thirdly, it gave also the shortest approach to the Kaiserbagh, a place to which the rebels attached the greatest importance’.22 Napier recommended Campbell occupy the Dil Khooshah, and then:

  cross the canal in the first instance at Banks’s house under cover of our artillery – and to place guns in position to bear on the mass of buildings which flank the European Infantry barracks – the Hospital – the Begum’s House and the Hurzat Gunge … and to take that mass of buildings.

  This ‘line of strong buildings, which extend to the walls of the Kaiserbagh’, would ‘secure us a covered way for our safe but irresistible progress into the heart of the enemy’s position’. At the same time, advised Napier, cavalry and artillery should skirt round, north of the Goomtee, and deploy opposite the Residency to ‘cut off the enemy’s supplies, and to deter them from bringing guns on the North side of the river to annoy us’.23

  Campbell expanded Napier’s basic plan into a two-pronged assault. Outram would take a whole infantry division and storm Lucknow from the north. ‘Mind that this is kept quiet’, Campbell instructed Russell. ‘Outram will be placed so as to command the rear of the enemy’s line, and to take their works in flank and reverse, whilst our attack is pressed with vigour from this side … as soon as the Martinière is taken.’24 Tactically it was hazardous. ‘I think of what the world would say if Outram there fell into an ambuscade, or got terribly mauled by an overwhelming body of the enemy’, wrote Russell:

  How Sir Colin would have been decried for ‘acting in opposition to the principles of war’. How the club strategists would point out ‘the absurdity, by Jove, sir! Of any man dividing his army – small enough in itself – in the face of a powerful enemy, and putting one part of it out of reach beyond an unfordable river, by gad, sir, as if he wanted it cut to pieces’.

  The vanguard left Bunthera on 2 March, followed by the rest of the army the next day. The Dil Khooshah presented no difficulties and the rebels there rapidly withdrew. The British found its once opulent grounds dilapidated and forlorn. After nine months of fighting, ‘everything was fast going to decay; the irrigation canals were choked up, the fountains were dry, the statues falling to pieces, the lattices in the kiosks broken’. Inside the main building were ‘heaps of ruin, broken mirror frames, crystals of chandeliers,* tapestries, pictures, beds of furniture’.25 Campbell’s intention was to halt there, but he found himself within range of enemy artillery along the line of the canal. ‘These guns commanded the plateau, and compelled me to retire the camp as far back as it was possible’, he explained. Without the pressing urgency of a garrison to rescue, or a Gwalior Contingent prowling the countryside, Campbell could take his time, so here he stayed, waiting for Brigadier Franks’s 4th Division and the remainder of the siege train to close up. Franks arrived on 5 March with 5,893 men, 3,019 of them Gurkhas kitted out in loose blue trousers, red jackets and green turbans.26 ‘They are a rum-looking little lot, few of them over 5ft 2,’ wrote one engineer, ‘but are said to fight well, although their officers are very bad. They will be of much use in preventing the escape of mutineers, but I fear not much else.’27

  Campbell was not prepared to wait any longer for the rest of Jung’s Nepalis. Two bridges of casks, each 135ft long, were thrown over the Goomtee and on the morning of the 6th, Outram’s force, including Walpole’s 3rd Division and Grant’s cavalry, marched across.28 ‘What a mighty impedimentum of baggage, deserts of camels, wildernesses of elephants, all pouring towards the river’, wrote Russell. ‘The column and its dependencies were four hours crossing over; as to the baggage, it was not clear of the bridge even at night.’29 Next the force took a long circuit towards the village of Ismailganj, ‘partly to be out of the reach of the guns of the Martinière and partly to escape the observation of the enemy’, as Colonel Jones explained.30 They had not gone far before they discovered a 400-strong detachment of enemy cavalry. The Bays (2nd Dragoon Guards) having landed only four months before and being ‘anxious to signalise themselves in their first action’,31 charged down the road towards the rebels. They ended up badly mauled. ‘The Chief was very angry at the loss of horses and saddles,’ wrote Gordon-Alexander, ‘most of the animals, when they had thrown their riders, galloping after the flying rebels.’32 Good horses were even more difficult to find than good troopers.

  Outram camped near the Fyzabad Road, about a mile west of Chinhut, and waited for the siege guns under Lieutenant-Colonel Riddell.33 For those who had watched Nicholson fall upon Delhi pell-mell, the lead
en pace was infuriating. ‘I for one cannot see what Sir Colin is up to, but I suppose he has some plan or other of his own. All I can say is that he seems to be wasting valuable time’, complained one civilian engineer:

  We have now something like 30,000 men of sorts here and hereabouts, and I feel sure that if Sir Colin would make up his mind, as they did in Delhi at last, and as they should have done months before – to lose a good lot – he will go in and take the place, but every day he sits quietly here the enemy will increase in numbers.

  There was a reason for Campbell’s sluggishness. He wanted his artillery to remove the need for street fighting. Once the big guns had reached Outram on 8 March, all was ready: ‘I directed Sir James Outram to arrange his batteries during the succeeding night, and to attack the enemy’s position – the key of which was the Chukkur Walla Kotee [The Yellow House, grandstand of the royal racecourse].’34 By the early afternoon, the Yellow House was Outram’s, and he was able ‘to bring his right shoulders [sic] forward, occupying the Fyzabad Road, and to plant his batteries for the purpose of enfilading the works on the canal’.35 Next came the Badshahbagh, ‘an extensive enclosure surrounded with massive walls, the interior of which contained a number of small summer palaces with prettily laid out walks radiating in every direction, shaded by splendid orange trees and decorated with fountains and beds of flowers’.36 ‘It is, I believe, mentioned in the Arabian Nights as one of the wonders of India,’ observed one engineer, ‘and although I visited it under rather disadvantageous circumstances, viz. a pretty steady shower of every sort of missile, from musket bullets to 24lb shot, I had time to admire it very much.’37 ‘The fortified gates of the strong-walled enclosure were blown open, and the garden occupied’, Outram reported.38 He soon commanded the ground all the way down to the riverbank, and from here his guns could begin firing on the heart of Lucknow.