Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  Rose was a much more attractive general for a public that shared his delusion that once the sepoys were chased away, the Indian people would simply breathe a collective sigh of relief and welcome back their colonisers. ‘Wherever the British force appears, matters at once and of themselves resume their old footing, the country people being profoundly indifferent, according to all appearance, who are their masters so long as they are allowed to remain unmolested in their fields and villages,’ declared the Bombay Times217 from its ivory tower. To them Campbell’s measures to pacify and police each province in turn seemed bewilderingly unnecessary. He had frittered away the cool winter months. His victories could have been achieved by any second-rate brigadier with half the men. Indeed, so bad was his performance, one contributor to The Times wondered whether ‘Sir Colin has been bribed by the mutineers, or promised a decoration by Russia, since he is working our ruin in this way’.218 ‘Much of the erroneousness of the estimate formed at home, relative to the facility of crushing the rebellion, has arisen from persisting in the first-formed conception of it as a purely military revolt’, the Rev. Alexander Duff explained.219 ‘They will insist on it that the people are not against us’, complained Campbell.220 The truth, as he saw it, was that Rose’s column ‘had been entirely successful as marched, but nothing more … The whole population was armed and hostile and closed round the rear of each column like the sea in a ship’s wake.’221 The result, wrote Russell, was that ‘we only hold the ground we cover with our bayonets’.

  Campbell’s principle was ‘never to give up an inch of ground once acquired’, as one officer put it, ‘which, by the bye, would have solved many a riddle the Indian public could not read, and stopped many a clamour in respect to his apparent slowness, had it been known at the time’.222 While Rose merely fought, Campbell fought, conquered and pacified. And while Rose waged war at all costs, ‘actuated by the dictates of humanity towards the foe, Sir Colin on principle refrained from risking his troops in an unequal encounter of arms’, explained Shadwell, ‘or from exposing them unduly to the climate for an object which he regarded as alone attainable by the occupation and gradual settlement of the revolted districts’.223 ‘All rational men, instead of blaming, will applaud the Commander who abandoned a mode of carrying on war that was accompanied by a useless sacrifice of human life’, contended the Glasgow Herald.224

  Unfortunately for Campbell, it was far more appealing to British officers to think of the task as a simple question of ridding India of rebellious sepoys, rather than as a gradual matter of restoring order and building trust. Not only did it sound quicker, it veiled the uncomfortable truth that the wider population was in revolt as well.

  Sir Henry Havelock Jnr promoted the reductio ad absurdum of this strain (see Plate 31). For him, Campbell’s slow-coach methods were hopelessly outdated. Mounted riflemen were the solution.* ‘There is practically no limit to what they could do for us in India against our contemptible, half-disciplined, ill-armed, disunited Asiatic enemies’, he asserted. ‘Five thousand picked British “Mounted Riflemen” might literally ride from one end of India to the other at twenty-five miles a day, carrying all before them.’225 Action, action, promptitude! That would conquer India before the natives knew what hit them. ‘One steady man with an Enfield rifle could have done more execution in the same time, with much less exertion and risk,’ argued Fortescue in support, ‘if only he could have been carried to the spot more swiftly than upon his own legs’.226 It remains a remarkably popular solution. Mounted infantry ‘would have enabled British troops more easily to hunt down, as well as dislodge, their evasive target’, wrote one recent historian.227 True, but the problem was not the dislodging, it was the hunting down, in an all too literal sense. Those squadrons Havelock managed to organise were little more than execution squads. Neither did they pacify. They quelled one patch only for it to reignite as they moved on.

  Needless to say, Havelock Jnr mourned the loss of more robust commanders. ‘Nicholson, Neill, Havelock – who had each shown by correct appreciation of their peculiar enemy, alike by rapid dash on fitting occasion, as by the most wary caution on others, each quality in its appropriate time and place – had passed away.’ He despised the Scotsman left in their place. Campbell ‘had come to look upon a battalion of British infantry as a sacred entity, whose preservation complete without detachments, intact, and, above all, unhurried in movement, was a consideration of far higher importance in his mind than the attaining of any results, however brilliant, by means of rapid, undignified, and irregular action’.228 Campbell foolishly ‘approached positions held by 20,000 or 30,000 Sepoys and rabble with the same ceremony as if they were about to be sternly defended by serried columns of French or Russians’, sneered Havelock. Would he have preferred them to have approached in a disorderly mob?

  Havelock might represent the extreme, but his belief that sepoys were too lamentable to require the basics of military discipline to beat them grew and prospered. Fortescue argued that during the mutiny ‘every strategical and tactical principle was disregarded and rightly disregarded, by the British commanders with practically perfect impunity’.229 If true, this surely renders any military analysis pointless. If the British could blunder in any old how and still secure victory, their tactics were irrelevant. It was precisely this attitude that had left Outram and Havelock penned in Lucknow, waiting for Campbell to rescue them.

  There was a racial basis to this thesis. It was the old story, that campaigning in India could not be compared to a ‘proper war’ against Europeans.** ‘A generation which has fresh in its memory a far more desperate contest against a European foe may feel disposed to smile at the fervour of enthusiasm displayed by their ancestors over the suppression of the Indian Mutiny’, wrote Fortescue in 1930, conveniently forgetting that 1 million Indians had fought in Flanders for the British against a European foe. As an enemy, the sepoy was dismissed as beneath contempt, yet when fighting for the British he was a fearless paragon. This was how the Victorians could explain the rebels’ defeat as a function of racial inferiority and at the same time produce books like Elliott and Knollys’ Gallant Sepoys and Sowars (1882). This idea, that Campbell’s enemy was hardly worthy of the name, was vital to the critique levelled at him by Burne, Fortescue and Havelock. What is extraordinary is that it has been so seldom challenged.

  It soon cracks under the weight of its own contradictions. Innes’s analysis of the storming of Lucknow is typical. ‘Lucknow had been taken, but the foe had not been crushed nor even punished, and they were free to re-assemble elsewhere in their thousands and tens of thousands’, he complains. Hence, Campbell’s failure to round them up needlessly prolonged the campaign. QED. But at this point Innes realises that he is suggesting the sepoy was a fearsome enemy, in turn validating Campbell’s preparedness and, God forbid, pointing to some military talent on the part of the mutineers, so on the very next page he writes, ‘After so signal a proof of the power and prowess of the British, and with no marked rallying point left to the enemy, it was reasonable to expect that they would offer but little further resistance, and gradually disperse to their homes.’230 So which was it? Was the rebel single-minded and dangerous, backed by sympathetic, stout-hearted countrymen posing a formidable guerrilla threat, or was he a coward who would bolt at the first sign of a bayonet, whose grievances did not stretch beyond the barrack room? Too many historians still cast the rebels in whichever guise best suits them at the time, moving from one to the other, as the mood takes them. So when Campbell was carefully amassing resources to storm Lucknow, the rebels were trivial and easily bested, and the commander-in-chief ridiculously timorous. Yet, when they escaped Lucknow in March, these same rebels were furious, organised and able to pose a threat for months, possibly years. Unless, that is, one had MOUNTED INFANTRY, presumably.

  Unlike his biographers, Campbell had no illusions about the long, tough business of pacification before him. ‘Still the most harassing part of the campaign was in store for us,’ he p
redicted, ‘although owing to the aspect now assumed by the Contest there was no longer the possibility of achieving those exploits by which great credit is won by individual commanders in the public eye.’231 It was unglamorous, and promised none of the glory of the set-piece battles of the previous year, yet it was vital. Campbell believed the work of pacification would require more men than the re-invasions of 1857, and so, although by 12 April 1858 he had been sent 46,528 soldiers,232 still he demanded more. In June 1858, an extra 7,000 British troops left for India, and another 2,000 the month after.233

  Given the hot weather, Campbell preferred to postpone the campaign until autumn and get his men under cover in the meantime.* ‘For the next few months they must remain quiet, if the rebels will but permit them. Rest is what they all want’, he told the Duke of Cambridge.234 The duke agreed that Campbell should resist ‘any further attempt to oblige you to keep the troops longer in the field, and that you will insist on housing the men as far as possible’.235 With royal approval, Campbell moved all he could from tents to huts. ‘This was a great change for the better. The quarters were lofty and airy, the roof was made of straw, and sufficiently thick to repel the sun’s rays, as well as to keep out the rain’, wrote one naval chaplain. ‘The sick list then began to fluctuate and at last showed a diminution.’236

  Having conserved his troops over the summer, and with reinforcements in place, by late October Campbell was ready. His plan was to sweep north from the Ganges to the Gogra, and from there advance to the Nepalese border. ‘Considering that we now had arrived at what might be held to be the crowning Mercy of the Mutiny,’ explained Campbell, ‘I proposed … to break on the rebels simultaneously in each Province, to leave them no loopholes for escape, and to prevent them travelling from one District to another and so prolong a miserable Guerrilla War without end.’237

  Campbell had for months pressed for an amnesty as the only realistic way to subdue India, and now, as the war drew to a close, he got what he wanted. The mutiny had sealed the fate of the East India Company and, at Allahabad on 1 November, the Queen’s Proclamation transferring India to the Crown was read out. India was, as Hutchins put it, ‘psychologically annexed’. Canning was to be viceroy. The Raj had begun. But the proclamation went much further. It rejected attempts to impose Christianity on India, insisting that ‘none be molested or disquieted by reason of their religious faith or observances’. To mollify the rajahs, there was to be ‘no extension of our present territorial possessions’. Their right to pass lands to an adopted heir would be respected. Critically, Her Majesty’s ‘clemency will be extended to all offenders, save and except those who had been or shall be convicted of having directly taken part in the murder of British subjects’. ‘To all others in arms against the government, we hereby promise unconditional pardon, amnesty and oblivion of all offences against ourselves, our crown and dignity, on their return to their homes and peaceful pursuits’,238 as long as they did so by 1 January 1859.

  The proviso that murderous rebels were still fair game was suspect. ‘Everything is written, and yet nothing is written’, fumed the fugitive Begum of Oudh. ‘Let no subject be deceived by this proclamation’,239 she warned, but in the event the British proved very forgiving. ‘In all thirty-seven persons were so punished in the year 1859, and a few more in the following year’, reported one Oudh civil servant:

  A certain number of large estates were also confiscated for misconduct. But on the Sepoys the retribution was almost nil. They were either pardoned under the amnesty or allowed to come in at a later period, or never came in at all, and were lost sight of till the matter was forgotten … The men most deeply implicated in the massacres naturally kept out of the way till some months later, when our ardour for prosecuting them was somewhat cooled down.240

  With the new proclamation came a new strategy. For the past month Campbell had been systematically besieging Oudh’s fortresses. As the commander-in-chief explained to Cambridge:

  The most difficult part of the job of reduction is the fact that the large forts are in the midst of very dense bamboo jungle, which must be regularly cut down in many places before a sight even can be obtained of the stronghold it conceals. These powerful jungles have been always grown and preserved with much care by the powerful talookdars, or great feudal landholders, as a special means of defence.241

  Now he instructed that no fort was to be attacked before its owner had been presented with the queen’s edict. So when he came to the stronghold of Rajah Lall Madho at Amethee, Campbell sent over the paperwork and waited. The Rajah rode out and surrendered, but without his men. Lall then sent a vakeel back inside to ask the rest to lay down their arms, but they had already bolted, taking their artillery with them. ‘Scarcely a gun was in the place … here and there were some old brass howitzers, popguns and little mortars, and one nine pounder in position’, explained Russell:

  The Commander-in-Chief rode in with a few of his Staff, and the Rajah in attendance. The latter was pale with affright, for his Excellency, more irritated than I have ever seen him, and conscious of the trick which had been played on him, was denouncing the rajah’s conduct in terms which perhaps the latter would not have minded much had they not been accompanied by threats of unmistakeable vigour.242

  Despite this double-cross, Campbell stuck to his principles, and when he reached Shankerpoor, headquarters of Beni Madho Singh, he sent Major Barrow to assure his enemy ‘that under the terms of that Proclamation his life is secured on due submission being made’, and that ‘He must therefore make the fullest submissive surrender of his forts and cannon, and come out at the head of his sepoys and armed followers, and with them lay down his arms in presence of Her Majesty’s troops.’ But during the night, ‘Beni Madho, with all his badmashes, treasure, guns, women, and baggage, steadily in the dark … moved round between Sir Hope Grant’s right flank pickets, towards the west’, as Russell reported, and slipped through unnoticed. ‘The moment the retreat was discovered this morning, we rushed into the fort and entrenched camp and found it empty. Not a soul was left, except a few feeble old men, priests, dirty fakirs, and a mad elephant with some gun-bullocks.’243

  After several days’ marching, Campbell ran Beni to ground near Doundea Khera. As before, he gave his guns the chance to do the hard work first. When he did allow the infantry forward, ‘the advance became a run’, wrote Russell:

  The men cheering broke out into a double, and at last into a regular race, Lord Clyde leading them on. But just as we got to the slope of the ridge, an immense cloud of dust, arising far away upon our left, told us that the enemy were in full flight along the banks of the Ganges.

  Campbell was unperturbed, sure that ‘most of the sepoys would go to their own homes now that Beni Madho had been compelled to abandon his sanctuary’.244 And with that he returned to Lucknow.

  The rebels were escaping rather than surrendering, but at least they were being forced northwards out of India, while behind them civil administration was being restored by means of thousands of native police recruits. By the end of November, Campbell had the south-east portion of Oudh up to the Gogra under control, while Brigadiers Hall, Barker and Troup had pacified the south-west, receiving ‘the surrender of large quantities of arms as well as the personal submission, under the terms of the Queen’s Proclamation, of numbers of rebel chiefs and their immediate followers’.245 Campbell could now turn to the area around Jhansi, as he put it, ‘to subjugate the country thoroughly, which had been brilliantly traversed, but not reduced by Sir Hugh Rose’.246

  Columns marched hither and yon, depositing small garrisons in their wake, but for the press it was all far too leisurely: ‘Lord Clyde seems determined to pursue a line of conduct which is likely to make us the laughing stock,’ declared the Bombay Times.247 Without comprehensible pitched battles, it seemed rather muddled and inept, but it got the job done. ‘The effects of our successes, such as they are, unattended by much “glory”, and a good deal of evasion on the part of our enemy, and u
nilluminated by bloodshed, is, however, considerable already,’ argued Russell, ‘as the talookdars and ranas [rajahs] are coming in numerously and making earnest professions of good will’.248

  By late November, the task of reconquest was nearly complete, and Campbell’s taste for the hunt waning, but a report that Beni Madho was camped next to the Gogra, at Byramghat, was too good to pass up, and so on 4 December he set out with a column from Lucknow, ‘in great delight at the prospect of getting hold of the rebels’.249 But by the time he got there, his quarry had fled. Then, a few days later, the Nana Sahib and Begum of Oudh were reported at Baraitch near the Nepalese border and so, on 15 December, Campbell set out again, but once again as he closed in, the rebels retreated ahead of him. The chase continued through December. British India insisted these ringleaders be brought to justice, especially the Nana Sahib, and Campbell was determined to pursue them through the festive season, if necessary. On Christmas Day, Russell:

  was horribly alarmed after breakfast by seeing Lord Clyde walking up and down, and looking at the skies inquiringly, in a manner which indicated to those who knew him well that he was preparing to march. Then it was represented to him that the men’s puddings would be spoiled, and so at last his lordship gave way.

  Early on Boxing Day they set forth and before long cornered the mutineers near Nanparah. ‘We could not make out their guns, but we could determine that the enemy were not more than 3,000 strong, of which some 800 or 900 were cavalry,’ Russell reported. ‘Elephants could be seen on the flanks, and camels and cart behind the tope.’ The rebels were easily outflanked and, as usual, fled, but while galloping over to a horse artillery officer, Campbell’s ‘charger, a perfectly sure-footed animal, put its foot in a hole, fell and threw him with great force’, recalled Russell. ‘He sat up for a moment, his face was bleeding; he tried to move his right arm, it was powerless. His shoulder was dislocated.’ He had also cracked a rib. He carried on as if nothing had happened.250