Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  A massacre would have extended to civilians as well. In Delhi, ‘all the city people found within the walls, when our troops entered, were bayoneted on the spot’, reported the Bombay Telegraph. ‘These were not mutineers, but residents of the city, who trusted to our well-known mild rule for pardon.’84 ‘No one’s life was safe’, confirmed one mutineer. ‘All able-bodied men who were seen were taken for rebels and shot.’85 Where Lucknow residents got caught up in the fighting, they received no pity. Russell saw a native boy leading an aged, blind man throw himself at the feet of an officer and beg for protection. The officer shot him.86 According to Norman, this indiscriminate slaughter was especially common among troops from Britain, ‘unused to India and apt to make no difference between loyal and disloyal natives’.87

  Since becoming commander-in-chief, Campbell had been forced to navigate a difficult cataract. He had hoped to enter Oudh with a proclamation promising ‘not to carry war to the homes of the people’, but Canning had refused.88 Campbell’s natural inclination was towards leniency: on discovering that a mutineer, promised his life if he surrendered, had given himself up only to be hanged anyway, ‘Sir Colin was extremely indignant at the transaction, which he characterised in the severest way’, recalled Russell. ‘As Sir Colin says, such conduct will leave rebels no alternative but to hold out to the last.’89 Yet he knew that if he made his sympathies too public, he risked the loyalty of his troops. The lesson from Corunna was that however well-loved a general might be, if he lost the confidence of his men, order went by the board. Restraining the troops was already proving hard. ‘Where blood-shedding and slaughter have once become universal, it is no light task to check it,’ explained Majendie, ‘and an impossible one to stop it entirely.’90 Grant had seen this first-hand when presiding at a trial of mutineers just a few days before. ‘No important evidence was forthcoming, and being principally townspeople and zemindaree men, they could not be called rebels in the strict sense of the word’, he wrote. ‘I therefore directed that they should be set at liberty.’ Minutes later a sergeant reported that the acquitted were being lynched. ‘I started off as fast as possible, and saw three poor wretches strung up to trees, quite dead, and several scoundrels belonging to my force making off’, reported Grant. ‘I tried to ascertain their names, but failed, as they soon mixed with other men in the tents.’ ‘It really sickens one to think of slaughtering any more of the poor wretched creatures’, he continued:

  If we were to put to death 10,000 more, we should not nearly have come to the end of them; and should we once come to guerrilla warfare, farewell to peace and comfort in the country for years. The Governor-General, if he has strength of mind to set aside the press, ought to issue a proclamation granting an amnesty to these wretched creatures, of whom three-fourths were forced into the Mutiny.91

  As it happened, the governor-general was edging towards leniency, or at least, away from executions and towards imprisonment. ‘I do not want more of general hanging and shooting,’ he told Lord Granville on 16 March, ‘but I do intend that large numbers of those men shall be transported.’ A new penal colony on the Andaman Islands to house them was already in the planning stage. To this end, Canning had approved a special commission for the apprehension of mutineers under the relatively liberal John Wilson of the Bengal Civil Service, who made his sympathies clear by appointing a native (the son of the former Chief Minister of Oudh) as one of his deputies. This commission would begin work in less than a fortnight, a fact Campbell must have known as he considered whether to unleash Outram or let the rebels escape.

  Canning was only reflecting the change in public mood. In the summer of 1857 press and politicians risked ostracism if they recommended mercy,* but by March 1858 sentiment had changed. ‘It seems to be very generally recognised at last, in spite of the violent councils which ruled a little while since, that it is desirable that a door of hope should be thrown upon to the mere rebels’, reported the Leicester Chronicle.92 ‘With no little astonishment, as we read speeches and leading articles, did we behold the respective positions of Sepoy and Englishman reversed,’ complained Lieutenant Majendie, ‘the former being the martyrs now, the latter the persecutors’.93 ‘At first it had been unavoidable giving no quarter, & hanging the miscreants, but now, Conciliation must be tried’, advised the queen.94 Following Palmerston’s fall from power that February, the liberally minded Lord Ellenborough had been appointed as President of the Board of Control for India. ‘It is quite impossible ever to hope to re-establish civil government in that country if the ordinary proceeding of law is to be the infliction of death’, he declared. ‘It will produce a blood feud between the natives and ourselves.’95

  How could Campbell square this new spirit of forgiveness with his troops’ bloodlust? By giving the impression that he was all for a pogrom, and that it was only his reluctance to incur British casualties which prevented him from allowing one. The order stopping Outram from taking the bridge did just that. Of course, one can overdo the guilt-wracked commander-in-chief, unfortunate victim of circumstance. Campbell was at heart an imperialist, just a rather more old-fashioned, laissez-faire one than the new generation. So, on his arrival in Cawnpore on 3 November 1857, we find him promptly rescinding Neill’s notorious punishment order ‘as unworthy of the English name and a Christian Government’.96 Yet at the same time he felt no hesitation in using the Bibigarh to fire up the men. He let battalions pass through its doors. ‘The sight of it to the troops and sailors was worth 10,000 men,’ Gordon-Alexander assured Campbell.97 ‘I felt that I had become a changed man’, admitted Major Ewart after his visit:

  All feeling of mercy or consideration for the mutineers had left me; I was no longer a Christian, and all I wanted was revenge. In the Crimea I had never wished to kill a Russian, or ever tried to, but now my one idea was to kill every rebel I could come across.98

  ‘At dinner this evening Sir Colin was rather silent’, wrote Russell. ‘Perhaps he was thinking that people at home would not be satisfied that more of the rebels had not fallen, for he knew that it was now impossible to prevent the greater number of them escaping.’99 So on 15 March 1858 Campbell sent Grant out with 1,100 cavalry and twelve horse guns towards Sitapore to hunt them down, while a second detachment headed down the Sandila Road. Whether, in the absence of Grant’s squadrons, more rebels escaped from Lucknow than were run to earth in the countryside is a moot point.

  The centre of town was still defiant. ‘A running fight was going on in the streets all this time,’ explained Majendie, ‘little knots of desperate rebels, here and there, shut themselves up in houses where they fought fiercely, necessitating an infinity of small sieges on our part to drive them out.’100 Campbell’s principal concern was the rebel gunpowder stockpiles. ‘We must be very cautious in that city for a long time to come; it’s full of powder and our men won’t take precautions’, he warned.101 ‘In the houses all over the town, but more especially in the Kaiserbagh, were several hundred tons of gunpowder, not in magazines, but lying loose all about’, recalled one officer. ‘This caused more damage to our men than any of their firing, for half the men were smoking, and of course great explosions resulted.’102 The Dil Khooshah was soon ‘crowded with sick soldiers, most of whom were burnt all over from head to foot by the dreadful explosions that have taken place in the city’, wrote one officer:

  They were covered with cotton wadding, and by the side of each sat a native with a paper fan to keep off the flies: the sighs and moans of these poor fellows, reduced to mere pieces of burnt flesh, were those of men who literally felt life to be a burden, men without hope of recovery to whom death could be but a relief.103

  The next day Outram crossed the Goomtee, not over the iron or stone bridges in the rear of the Kaiserbagh, but via the bridges of casks near the Sekundrabagh. From here he fought his way along the south bank of the river towards the Residency. With ‘the 23rd Fusiliers charging through the gateway … driving the enemy before them at the point of the bayonet’, the place
fell in half an hour. The Mutchi Bhowan* and the Great Imambarra yielded soon after (see Plate 30). ‘In short,’ reported Campbell, ‘the city was ours.’104

  If the intention was to hem in the mutineers, it was an odd route to take. Outram effectively herded them north-west, into the quarter of Lucknow outside British control. ‘Vast numbers, both of armed and unarmed men, are evacuating the city by the outlet they possess to the northward’, Campbell informed Canning the next day,105 with no noticeable disquiet. ‘Today’s work has not been very successful in causing loss to the enemy’, reported Russell. ‘It is evident most of them have escaped. The philanthropists who were cheering each other with the thought that there was sure “to be a good bag at Lucknow” will be disappointed.’ ‘Days ago we had the palaces and all the entrenchments,’ wrote one engineer, ‘but the Commander-in-Chief is rather a slow old gentleman, and objects to take any place until it is taken for him by some straggling party walking into it by mistake or something of that sort’.106 ‘Everybody wonders how the rebels have been allowed to escape’, complained one military chaplain. ‘Another hot weather campaign is inevitable.’107 But, once again, at the eye of the storm, Campbell remained phlegmatic. When Russell saw him that evening ‘he seemed satisfied’. ‘The runaways will go to their homes’, the commander-in-chief said.108

  Having used Outram to drive the enemy north and westwards from town, Campbell continued the tactic with the Gurkhas. Jung’s troops had pushed along Havelock’s old route into town via the Charbagh Bridge and, despite a sepoy counter-attack, captured ten guns on the 17th. The next day they overran the rebel batteries that had pummelled Outram’s garrison in the Alumbagh for so long, securing the southern perimeter of Lucknow. But that still left the route north-west out of town wide open. That this was a deliberate effort on Campbell’s part was lost on Victorian historians, although it was evident to the press at the time. ‘It is an obvious source of satisfaction that the rush of the fugitive rebels should have been towards the West rather than the East’, reported The Times, which assumed Campbell’s intention was to chase them into Rohilcund: ‘Indeed the measures of the Commander-in-Chief seem to have been expressly taken with the view of placing at least this result beyond doubt.’109 If that was the plan, then stopping Outram from crossing the bridge back on the 14th made perfect sense.

  Unfortunately, despite Campbell’s best efforts to let them abscond, between 8,000 and 9,000 sepoys stood their ground at the Moosabagh, a palace a few miles to the north-west of Lucknow. On the 19th, Campbell sent Outram to take it. The rebels put on a bold front, emerging to engage the British, but Outram’s skirmishers and artillery deterred them, and after a flank attack by the 9th Lancers the mutineers fled. ‘I did all I possibly could do to prevent them,’ Campbell explained to Ellenborough:

  for I sent a very large force of cavalry and horse-artillery, with three good battalions of infantry the night before, with orders to go to the Moosabagh, for the very purpose of cutting off the fugitives, but unluckily from difficulties of ground, and perhaps from some misconception on the part of the commanding officer, these troops never appeared and were quite useless.110

  The fault lay with Brigadier William Campbell, the man charged with capturing the mutineers. ‘Where is Campbell with his cloud of cavalry, who was to have been ready on our left to follow up the pursuit?’ asked one ensign. ‘No one can tell, and no one has yet been able to tell, except that the plan of combination was spoilt.’111 ‘Brigadier Campbell was undoubtedly caught napping’, wrote another officer. ‘It was not until many thousands of the enemy had streamed out and had already crossed miles of country that the Brigade was slipped in pursuit.’112 This was the third time the rebels had been left to escape, and for a third time, there seemed to be more than mere incompetence at work. Brigadier Campbell’s ‘errors appear to have partaken of wilfulness’,113 as one contributor to the Calcutta Review wrote.

  Initially, at least, the failure was overwhelmed by the news of Lucknow’s fall.** ‘The highly important and gratifying news so long wished for has come at last’, announced the Glasgow Herald.114 Again the media declared the mutiny quashed. ‘With this success ends probably our last great definite operations against the mutineers of 1857’, announced the Caledonian Mercury.115 ‘Sweeping up the embers of revolt … is, at the worst, but a question of time’, reported the Huddersfield Chronicle. ‘The great devastating conflagration has been subdued.’116 ‘I see the wise people at home have determined the war is over, and that India is at peace’, Russell observed. ‘But many an Englishman must shed his blood, and many a pound must be spent, ere peace comes back again.’117 ‘When Lucknow is wrenched from the grasp of the rebels, and the eddying eye of the whirlpool thus fairly closed, you may see the broken waves recoil and dash off, though with greatly diminished power of mischief, in all directions over a revolted and rebellious territory’, the Rev. Alexander Duff had predicted in January 1858. ‘Then there may follow a critical period of twelve months or more for Northern and Central India. The enemy may … disperse in small bodies over the land, carrying rapine, massacre and conflagration in their train.’118 It was a remarkably accurate prophecy.

  For the moment, at least, Campbell could take pride in a triumph cheaply won: 127 officers and men had been killed, 595 wounded and thirteen missing, plus a further fifty-one Gurkhas killed and 287 wounded – inconsequential losses for the taking of an entire city, especially considering that many of those casualties were from gunpowder explosions. In addition, his army had taken 127 rebel guns, ranging from 32 to ½ pounders.119 ‘The whole affair seems to have been well-managed and was eminently successful,’ wrote Cambridge, ‘the loss on our side being very small.’120 ‘Our success at Lucknow is the crowning blow of the war,’ declared the Cheshire Observer.121 Once again, Campbell’s victory was celebrated by William McGonagall:

  ‘Twas near the Begum Kothie the battle began,

  Where innocent blood as plentiful as water ran;

  The Begum Kothie was a place of honour given to the 93rd,

  Which heroically to a man they soon did begird.

  And the 4th Punjaub Rifles were their companions in glory,

  And are worthy of their names enrolled in story,

  Because they performed prodigious wonders in the fight,

  By killing and scattering the Sepoys left and right.

  The 93rd Highlanders bivouacked in a garden surrounded by mud walls,

  Determined to capture the Begum Kothie no matter what befalls –,

  A place strongly fortified and of enormous strength,

  And protected by strong earthworks of very great length.

  …

  But barrier after barrier soon was passed;

  And the brave men no doubt felt a little harassed,

  But they fought desperately and overturned their foes at every point,

  And put the rebels to flight by shot and bayonet conjoint.*

  The East India Company voted Campbell an annuity of £2,000, Horse Guards promoted him to full general (substantive and not just local rank) and the queen insisted he receive a peerage immediately: ‘If necessary, a further step could be given him later.’122 The problem was that there was already a Baron Campbell. ‘If I were you’, advised the Duke of Cambridge, ‘I should wish to be called up by the title Lord Clyde of Lucknow. I think it would be a charming title, associated with the part of Scotland from whence you sprung, and with the great operation in the East in which you have been engaged.’123 Annoyingly, Lucknow had already been tagged to Havelock’s baronetcy, so Campbell chose Clydesdale instead,** though he made a point of continuing to sign himself plain ‘C. Campbell’. ‘I have neither wife nor child; my means had made me independent of the income of my profession; beside which I deem myself rich because I have no wants’, he stated, ‘I should therefore have been very grateful to have been left without other rank than my professional one.’124

  This personal aversion to honours was all very well, but the rest o
f the army would rather it was not extended to them too. Honours were a powerful motivation for the soldier. Indeed, one honour in particular – the Victoria Cross – had become an obsession. Its effect on a man’s standing had only become clear after the first awards ceremony in June 1857. Since then, competition for the medal had become intense. ‘They seem more anxious to obtain this distinction than any mark of honour which has yet been given to them’, wrote Grant.125 Those who got it, flaunted it. Captain Maude, finding his plain metal cross too understated, commissioned Spinks to make a version studded with diamonds.126 The Rev. J.R. Baldwin, after meeting Thomas Kavanagh (‘one of the most conceited persons I ever knew’), remembered ‘seeing V.C. on his slippers, as well as on all other articles in ordinary use’.127 This exhibitionism confirmed Campbell’s fears. ‘It is probable that the spirit of the order seemed to him injudicious,’ wrote one civil servant, ‘as tempting men to seek for distinction by a single daring act, rather than by steady perseverance in ordinary duty.’128 He ‘thinks this race after the Victoria Cross is destructive to discipline and is determined to discountenance it’, confirmed Russell.129 Campbell ‘looked upon it as quite unnecessary in the British Army’, explained another general, ‘the soldiers of which he thought, rather required restraining than egging on to do gallant deeds’.

  Campbell was especially loath to award it to senior officers and, off his own bat, decided that generals were ineligible. He rejected Outram’s candidature on these grounds, even after Horse Guards confirmed it was admissible.130 Staff officers, in his opinion, had the least excuse to be distracted by deeds of derring-do.131 ‘Since the institution of the Victoria Cross, advantage has been taken by young aides-de-camp and other staff officers to place themselves in prominent situations, for the purpose of attracting attention’, he wrote. ‘To them life is of little value as compared with the gain of public honour.’ He particularly objected to the VC recommendation from Henry Havelock for his own son and ADC. Havelock Junior, finding the 64th Foot lying down to avoid a nearby enemy 24-pounder, had supposedly ridden in front of them and led them towards the gun ‘until it was mastered by a rush’. By singling out Havelock, ‘it is made to appear to the world that a regiment should have proved wanting in courage except for an accidental circumstance’, complained Campbell. ‘Such a reflection is most galling to a regiment of British soldiers, indeed almost intolerable.’132 But by 1858 the Havelock name was beyond criticism and Sir Henry Havelock, Jnr got his cross.