DALHOUSIE'S WORK IN INDIA. 417 Oudh was the enjoyment of a pension of £120,000 a year. The Marquis of Dalhousie resigned office in March 1856, being then only forty-four years of age; but he carried home. with him the seeds of a lingering illness, which resulted in his death in 1860. Excepting Cornwallis, he was the first, although Lord Dalby no means the last, of English statesmen who have fallen housie's victims to their devotion to India's needs. death, 1860. in India. Lord Dalhousie completed the fabric of British rule in India. The Empire as mapped out by Lord Wellesley and Lord His work Hastings, during the first quarter of the century, had received the addition of Sind in 1843. The Marquis of Dalhousie finally filled in the wide spaces covered by Oudh, by the Central Provinces, and by smaller States within India; together with the great outlying territories of the Punjab on the North-Western Frontier, and the richest part of British Burma beyond the sea. The great Governor-General was succeeded by his friend Lord Canning, who, at the farewell banquet in England given Earl to him by the Court of Directors, uttered these prophetic Canning, 1856-62 words, 'I wish for a peaceful term of office. But I cannot forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise, no larger than a man's hand, but which, growing larger and larger, may at last threaten to burst and overwhelm us with ruin.' In the following year, the Sepoys of the Bengal The Sepoy army mutinied, and all the valley of the Ganges from Patná to Delhi rose in rebellion. Mutiny, 1857. of the Mutiny. The various motives assigned for the Mutiny appear inade- Causes quate to the European mind. The truth seems to be that native opinion throughout India was in a ferment, predisposing men to believe the wildest stories, and to rush into action in a paroxysm of terror. Panic acts on an oriental population like drink among a European mob. The annexation policy of Lord Dalhousie, although dictated by the most enlightened considerations, was distasteful to the native mind. The spread of education, the appearance of the steam-engine and the telegraph wire, seemed simultaneous disclosures of a deep plan to substitute an English for an Indian civilisation. The Bengal Sepoys thought that they could see farther than Temper the rest of their countrymen. Most of them were Hindus of of the Sepoys. VOL. VI. 2 D The 'greased' 1857. high caste; many of thein were recruited from Oudh. They regarded our reforms on Western lines as attacks on their own nationality, and they knew at first hand what annexation meant. They believed it was by their prowess that the Punjab had been conquered, and that all India was held. The numerous dethroned princes, or their heirs and widows, were the first to learn and to take advantage of this spirit of disaffection and panic. They had heard of the Crimean war, and were told that Russia was the perpetual enemy of England. Our munificent pensions had supplied the funds with which they could buy the aid of skilful intriguers. They had much to gain, and little to lose, by a revolution. In this critical state of affairs, of which the Government had scant official knowledge, a rumour ran through the cantonments that the cartridges of the Bengal army had been greased with cartridges, the fat of cows and pigs. This was affirmed to be part of a general plot by the British Government to destroy the religion alike of the Hindu and of the Muhammadan Sepoy. As a matter of fact, cow's tallow had been culpably and ignorantly used. Steps were taken to prevent the defiling cartridges from reaching the hands and mouths of the native army. But no assurances could quiet the minds of the Sepoys. Fires occurred nightly in the native lines; officers were insulted by their men; confidence was gone, and scarcely the form of discipline remained. The events which followed form contemporary annals. Any narrative of them beyond the barest summary would involve the criticism of measures on which history has not yet pronounced her calm verdict, and would lead to personal praise or blame of still living men.1 Each episode of the Mutiny is treated in The Imperial Gazetteer of India, under the town or District where it occurred. But it may not be out of place to mention here, that the outbreak of the storm found The army the native regiments denuded of many of their best officers. drained of The administration of the great Empire, to which Dalhousie its talent. put the corner-stone, required a larger staff than the civil service could supply. The practice of selecting the ablest military men for civil posts, which had long existed, received a sudden and vast development. Oudh, the Punjab, the Central Provinces, British Burma, were administered to a large extent 1 The Mutiny of 1857 has already a copious literature. Sir John Kaye's History of the Sepoy War (3 vols.), with its able and eloquent continuation by Colonel Malleson, C.S. I., as The History of the Indian Mutiny (3 vols. ), forms the standard work. THE SEPOY MUTINY, 1857. 419 by picked officers from the Company's regiments. Some skilful commanders remained; but the native army had nevertheless been drained of many of its brightest intellects and firmest wills at the very crisis of its fate. 1 Mutiny, On the afternoon of Sunday, 10th May 1857, the Sepoys at Outbreak Meerut (Merath) broke into open mutiny. They burst into of the the jail, and rushed in a wild torrent through the cantonments, May 1857. cutting down a few Europeans whom they met. They then streamed off to the neighbouring city of Delhi, to stir up the native garrison and the criminal population of that great city, and to place themselves under the authority of the discrowned Mughal Emperor. Meerut was the largest military station in At Meerut. Northern India, with a strong European garrison of foot, horse, and guns, sufficient to overwhelm the mutineers before ever they reached Delhi. But as the Sepoys acted in irrational haste, so the British officers, in but too many cases, acted with equally irrational indecision. The news of the outbreak was telegraphed to Delhi, and nothing more was done that night. At the moment when one strong will might have saved India, no soldier in authority at Meerut seemed able to think or act. The next morning the Muhammadans of Delhi rose, and all that At Delhi. the Europeans there could do was to blow up the magazine. A rallying centre and a traditional name were thus given to the revolt, which forthwith spread like wild-fire through the North-Western Provinces and Oudh down into Lower Bengal. The same narrative must suffice for all the outbreaks, although each episode has its own story of sadness and devotion. The Sepoys rose on their officers, usually without warning, sometimes Spread after protestations of fidelity. The Europeans, or persons of Mutiny, Christian faith, were frequently massacred; occasionally, also, summer the women and children. The jail was broken open, the treasury of 1857. plundered, and the mutineers marched off to some centre of revolt, to join in what had now become a national war. of the the Sikhs. In the Punjab the Sepoys were anticipated by measures of repression and disarmament, carried out by Sir John Lawrence and his lieutenants, among whom Edwardes and Nicholson stand conspicuous. The Sikh population never wavered. Loyalty of Crowds of willing recruits came down from the Afghán hills. And thus the Punjab, instead of being itself a source of danger, was able to furnish a portion of its own garrison for the siege of Delhi. In Lower Bengal many of the Sepoys mutinied, and then dispersed in different directions. The native armies of Madras and Bombay remained true to their See article MEERUT, The Imperial Gazetteer of India. colours. In Central India, the contingents of some of the great chiefs sooner or later joined the rebels, but the Muhammadan State of Haidarábád was kept loyal by the authority of its able minister, the late Sir Sálar Jang. The main interest of the Sepoy War gathers round the three Cawnpur. cities of Cawnpur, Lucknow, and Delhi. Cawnpur contained one of the great native garrisons of India. At Bithúr, not far off, was the palace of Dundhu Panth, the heir of the last Peshwá (ante, pp. 324, 402), who had inherited his savings, but had failed to procure a continuance of his pension; and whose more familiar name of Nána Sahib will ever be handed down to infamy. At first the Nána was profuse in his professions of loyalty; but when the Sepoys at Cawnpur mutinied on the 6th June, he put himself at their head, and was proclaimed Peshwá of the Maráthás. Nána Our illchosen position. Massacre of Cawn pur. Lucknow. Lawrence. The Europeans at Cawnpur, numbering more women and children than fighting men, shut themselves up in an ill-chosen hasty entrenchment, where they heroically bore a siege for nineteen days under the sun of a tropical June. Every one had courage and endurance to suffer or to die; but the directing mind was again absent. On the 27th June, trusting to a safe-conduct from the Nána as far as Allahábád, they surrendered, and, to the number of 450, embarked in boats on the Ganges. Forthwith a murderous fire was opened upon them from the river bank. Only a single boat escaped, and but four men, who swam across to the protection of a friendly Rájá, ultimately survived to tell the tale. The rest of the men were massacred on the spot. The women and children, numbering 125, were reserved for the same fate on the 15th July, when the avenging army of Havelock was at hand.1 Sir Henry Lawrence, the Chief Commissioner of Oudh, had foreseen the storm. He fortified and provisioned the Residency at Lucknow, and thither he retired with all the European inhabitants and a weak British regiment on 2nd July. Two days later, he was mortally wounded by a shell. Whatever Sir Henry opinion may be formed of Sir Henry Lawrence's capacity as a soldier in his one unfortunate engagement, he clearly perceived the main strategic and political points in the struggle. Lawrence had deliberately chosen his position; and the little garrison held out under unparalleled hardships and against enormous odds, until relieved by Havelock and Outram on 25th September. But the relieving force was itself invested by fresh swarms of rebels; and it was not until November that See article CAWNPUR, The Imperial Gazetteer of India. SUPFRESSION OF THE MUTINY. 421 Sir Colin Campbell (afterwards Lord Clyde) cut his way into Lucknow, and effected the final deliverance of the garrison 1 (16th November 1857). Our troops then withdrew to more urgent work, and did not finally re-occupy Lucknow till March 1858. The siege of Delhi began on 8th June, one month after Siege of the original outbreak at Meerut. Siege in the proper sense Delhi, June to of the word it was not; for the British army, encamped on Sept. the historic ridge,' at no time exceeded 8000 men, while the 1857. rebels within the walls were more than 30,000 strong. In the middle of August, Nicholson arrived with a reinforcement from Nicholson. the Punjab; but his own inspiring presence was even more valuable than the reinforcement he brought. On 14th September the assault was delivered, and after six days' desperate fighting in the streets, Delhi was again won. Nicholson fell at the head of the storming party. Hodson, the intrepid leader of a corps of irregular horse, hunted down next day the old Mughal Emperor, Bahádur Sháh, and his sons. The Emperor was afterwards sent a State prisoner to Rangoon, where he lived till 1862. As the mob pressed in on the guard around the Emperor's sons, near Delhi, Hodson found it necessary to shoot down the princes (who had been captured unconditionally) with his own hand.2 After the fall of Delhi and the final relief of Lucknow, the Oudh reduced war loses its dramatic interest, although fighting went on in various parts of the country for eighteen months longer. The population of Oudh and Rohilkhand, stimulated by the presence of the Begam of Oudh, the Nawab of Bareilly, and. Nána Sahib himself, had joined the mutinous Sepoys en masse. In this quarter of India alone, it was the revolt of a people rather than the mutiny of an army that had to be quelled. Sir Colin Campbell (afterwards Lord Clyde) conducted the by Lord campaign in Oudh, which lasted through two cold seasons. Clyde. Valuable assistance was lent by Sir Jang Bahadur of Nepál, at the head of his gallant Gurkhas. Town after town was occupied, fort after fort was stormed, until the last gun had been re-captured, and the last fugitive had been chased across the frontier by January 1859. In the meanwhile, Sir Hugh Rose (afterwards Lord Strath- Sir Hugh nairn), with another army from Bombay, was conducting an Rose in equally brilliant campaign in Central India. His most formid- India. 1 See article LUCKNOW, The Imperial Gazetteer of India. Central |