Charles Raikes, judge of the Sudder Court at Agra, was working in his library on the morning of 11 May when a servant handed him a copy of the Mofussilite Extra. It contained the gist of a telegram sent the previous evening by the sister of the Meerut postmaster to a relative in Agra, warning of a large-scale rising by Indian troops.*
For Raikes, a former Commissioner of Lahore, the outbreak was not wholly unexpected. ‘It was,’ he wrote later, ‘the bursting of the thunder-cloud I had been long and anxiously watching… The fabric of the Bengal army was tottering to ruin.’ At midday Raikes and his fellow judges assembled at the Sudder Court as usual. ‘Cases were tried, pleadings heard, and decrees passed,’ he recalled. ‘But the mind of the European functionaries was, more or less, absent.’
Raikes was a senior member of the government of the North-Western Provinces, the huge British territory that stretched from the foothills of the Himalayas to Jabalpur in central India. Its seat of government was the imperial city of Agra, but it also encompassed Delhi, the great Hindu city of Benares, the strategically vital fortress of Allahabad, and the flourishing commercial centres of Mirzapur and Cawnpore. For administrative purposes the territory was divided into eight civil divisions, or commissionerships,† each containing five or six districts, with a total surface area of 72,000 square miles and a population of 30 million. At the apex of the British administration was the fifty-year-old lieutenant-governor, John Colvin. A conscientious and capable administrator who oversaw the conduct of his subordinates with ‘untiring vigilance’, Colvin lacked ‘that iron firmness – that rare self-confidence – which enables a man to impress his will upon others’.
Colvin’s first act on learning of the outbreak was to inform Calcutta. But his ability to respond to the crisis was limited. The whole North-Western Provinces contained just three European regiments: two at Meerut, which could not be contacted, and one at Agra, the 3rd Bengal Europeans.* This last corps and a battery of European artillery were counterbalanced at Agra by two regiments of native infantry: the 44th and 67th. Most of the British officials and merchants at Agra lived in the civil station to the north of the city. A full five miles separated them from the military cantonment to the south-west, but only three from the imposing red sandstone fort on the west bank of the Jumna. Its massive walls, over 25 yards high and a mile and a half in circumference, had been built by Emperor Akbar in 1565.† The maze of buildings within – from marble halls, apartments, courtyards and pavilions to simple barracks, storehouses, cells and hovels – were largely the work of his grandson, Shah Jahan, who was also responsible for the spectacular domes and minarets of the nearby Taj Mahal, built as a memorial to his beloved second wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth in 1631.
The rambling fort was an obvious place of refuge for Europeans. But Colvin was anxious to prevent panic and refused to issue the necessary orders. On 13 May, having received intelligence that the mutineers were marching on Agra, he held a council of war in Government House, a large single-storey building set in parkland dotted with thorny trees. Ominously, Colvin was either unwilling or unable to control the noisy assembly. ‘One officer rushed in to suggest we should all retire to the fort,’ recalled Raikes, ‘another to ask what was to be done at the jail, a third to speak about provisions, a fourth about the sepoy regiments in cantonments.’ Colvin had come round to the idea of abandoning the station and taking up residence in the fort. But he was strongly opposed by most of his subordinates who felt that Agra could be saved only by showing a bold front. It was eventually decided to secure the fort with a detachment of Europeans and to raise volunteer corps in the district.
The following morning, by which time it had become clear that Agra was not about to be attacked, Colvin held a parade of his troops. Addressing the Europeans first, he urged them not to distrust their Indian comrades, whom they should consider as brothers-in-arms. But the effect was rather spoilt when Colvin added that ‘the rascals at Delhi have killed a clergyman’s daughter and if you should meet them in the field you will not forget this’. Turning to the sepoys, Colvin said that ‘he fully trusted them, asked them to come forward if they had any complaints to make, and offered to discharge on the spot any man who wished to leave his colours’. None took up his offer. Instead, prompted by their officers to cheer, the sepoys ‘set up a yell’ while regarding the assembled Europeans with a ‘devilish scowl’.
Colvin was convinced that the Mogul dynasty was behind the mutinies at Delhi and Meerut. To oppose the rejuvenated Moguls, therefore, he appealed to their old enemies among the nearby princely states: in particular to Gwalior and Bharatpur. Though his country had been defeated by the British as recently as 1843, when he was still a minor, the reaction of Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior was favourable: on 13 May, the 1st Gwalior Cavalry and a battery of artillery left Gwalior for Agra, 100 miles to the north. At around the same time the Bharatpur Legion* – under the command of the assistant agent, Captain Nixon – was sent to protect the city of Mathura to the north of Agra.
Colvin’s confidence was returning. ‘I am doing everything possible here to keep together and prevent the Native troops from giving trouble,’ he cabled to Canning on the 15th, ‘and trust to succeed.’ A day later, having received details from Meerut of General Anson’s preparations to retake Delhi, he added: ‘The worst of the storm is past, and the aspect of affairs is fast brightening.’
News of the Meerut rising had reached Government House at Calcutta on 12 May. Further cables from Agra on the 13th and 14th completed the picture: Delhi was in the hands of the mutineers, Bahadur Shah had been proclaimed Emperor, and many Europeans had been killed. Canning was aghast. A month earlier he had informed Granville that the cartridge question was over. Now a key area of northern India was in rebellion and others would surely follow. Almost 1,000 miles of the Grand Trunk Road separated Calcutta from Delhi. Strung out along it were large Indian garrisons at Barrackpore, Dinapore, Benares, Allahabad, Cawnpore, Bareilly and throughout the province of Oudh. Holding them in check were just five British regiments: the 53rd and 84th Foot near Calcutta, the 10th Foot at Dinapore, the 32nd Foot at Lucknow and the 3rd Bengal Europeans at Agra.
Fortunately for Canning, the Persian War had just been brought to a successful conclusion,† and part of Sir James Outram’s force was on its way back to India. On 14 May the Governor-General cabled Lord Elphinstone in Bombay with a request to send on to Calcutta at least two British regiments and some artillery as soon as they arrived from Persia. He also sent a telegraph message to Lord Harris, the Governor of Madras, to prepare the 43rd Foot and the 1st Madras European Fusiliers for immediate embarkation, and dispatched a steamer to collect the 35th Foot from Pegu. Two days later he sent instructions to General Anson and Sir John Lawrence via Agra and Meerut: the former was to make every exertion to retake Delhi with troops from Meerut and the hills; the latter to support Anson by sending down to Delhi every man he could spare from the Punjab. Canning had already asked Elphinstone to assist Lawrence by shipping the 2nd Bombay European Fusiliers up the Indus River towards Ferozepore.
Also on 16 May Canning issued a proclamation denying that the Indian government wanted to ‘interfere’ with its subjects’ religion or caste. The Governor-General ‘knows’, it stated, ‘that endeavours are [being] made to persuade Hindoos and Mussulmans, soldiers and civil subjects, that their religion is threatened secretly, as well as openly, by the acts of Government, and that the Government is seeking in various ways to entrap them into a loss of caste for purposes of its own’. Some had already been ‘deceived’ by such ‘tales’. And yet the government had ‘invariably treated the religious feelings of all its subjects with careful respect’ and would ‘never cease to do so’. The proclamation ended with a plea for all persons of ‘habitual loyalty and orderly conduct’ not to ‘listen to false guides and traitors, who would lead them into danger and disgrace’. Canning regretted not issuing the proclamation sooner, as some had urged. Whether it would have made any difference is doubtful. The mere fact that the government was prepared to respond to the rumours at all was proof enough for some Indian soldiers that they were not without foundation. That was certainly the line peddled by the army conspirators. If General Hearsey, one of the most respected officers in the Bengal Army, had not been believed when he gave similar assurances at Barrackpore in February, what hope was there for the Governor-General?
A more tangible initiative, but one that underlined earlier failings, was the passing on 16 May of an Act that gave civil and military officers increased powers of punishment and reward: on the one hand, courts martial were made easier to convene and their sentences could be carried out without confirmation from higher authority; on the other, both magistrates and commanding officers were given the summary power to promote Indian soldiers and to confer upon them the Order of Merit. But it was too little, too late.
Canning knew the only way to stamp out rebellion was by force, and he left no stone unturned in his search for reinforcements. When the monthly mail packet left Calcutta on 19 May, it carried a request for Sir Henry Ward, Governor of Ceylon, to send as many European troops as he could spare. ‘I have asked for at least 500 Europeans,’ Canning told Vernon Smith, ‘but will accept Malays in place or besides them.’ The same ship also carried letters to Lord Elgin and General Ashburnham, the leaders of a punitive expedition to China,* who were expected to call in at Ceylon en route. Canning, on his own initiative, wanted them to divert their regiments to India. To Elgin, he wrote:
Our hold of Bengal – and the Upper Provinces – depends upon the turn of a word – a look. An indiscreet or irritating phrase from a foolish Commanding Officer at the head of a mutinous or disaffected company, may, whilst the present condition of things at Delhi lasts, lead to a general rising of the Native Troops in the Lower Provinces, where we have no European strength – and where an army in rebellion would have everything its own way for weeks and months to come… I do not want aid to put down the Meerut and Delhi rebels – that will be done easily as soon as the European troops can converge upon Delhi – but not sooner. Meanwhile every hour of delay – unavoidable delay – is an encouragement to the disaffected troops in other parts; and if any one of the many unwatched regiments on this side of Agra should take heart, and give the word, there is not a fort, or cantonment, or station in the plain of the Ganges that would not be in their hands in a fortnight. It would be exactly the same in Oude.
In the event the mail packet missed the China expedition. Fortunately Canning had sent another steamer with the same messages to Singapore, and it caught up with the British force as it was passing through the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java. Elgin at once gave orders for the whole force to divert to India while he continued on to Hong Kong in the expectation that his regiments would soon rejoin him. When it became clear that this would not happen for some time, he sailed for Calcutta to await fresh troops from England.
The mail continued on to England with letters for Robert Vernon Smith, the President of the Board of Control, and Ross Mangles, the Chairman of the Court of Directors. ‘Delhi is in the hands of the five insurgent regiments & has been so since the 11th,’ Canning informed Vernon Smith. ‘Meerut is quiet & safe in possession of European troops of the station. On all sides of Delhi, but especially from the hill stations on the north… European troops & irregulars are collecting & when the Europeans are in sufficient strength they will close upon the town & crush the rebels.’ He then detailed the steps he had taken to procure troops and closed the letter with a request for yet more: ‘From England what I ask is that you immediately send out the regiments which are due to the full complement of Queen’s corps in India without making us wait for the issue of events in China, & that you will give support for the demand of 3 European regiments to be added to the Company’s army in place of the 6 [mutinous regiments] which have now erased themselves from the Army List.’ A similar appeal was directed to Mangles.
There was little more that Canning could do. The nearest reinforcements at Madras and Pegu would take at least two weeks to arrive; those from the Persian and Chinese expeditions a good deal longer. He could only wait and hope that Anson was able to retake Delhi with the troops at hand. In the meantime he was determined to put on an outward show of ‘business as usual’. He refused to alter the routine at Government House or replace its Indian guard with Europeans. The State Ball to celebrate the Queen’s Birthday went ahead as planned on 25 May, and Lady Canning continued to take her evening drives around the city. Yet many of the Europeans at Calcutta were unable to display the same sang froid. One English lady, who refused to attend the ball because she thought she would be murdered by the sepoy guard, hired two sailors to protect her for the night ‘but they got tipsy, and frightened her more than imaginary enemies’. The men were not much better: many placed their families on ships in the river and went around with loaded revolvers. A mortified Canning wrote:
I never came across such a set of old women – some of them with swords by their sides – as those who fetch & carry the news of this town amongst the clubs & gossiping ‘tiffin’ rooms of their acquaintance. Men, soldiers, whose authority on matters relating to the Army & the Sepoys is readily credited, & whose words are caught up by Newspaper caterers, are spreading not reports only – in those they themselves be deceived – but opinions as to the state of things present & future, which make me ashamed for Englishmen. And it is not the shame only, there is mischief in it. The example will be catching. Hitherto the merchants (even the native merchants, greatly as they hate the Sepoys) & the non-official community have (most of them) shown sense & calmness. But how long this will last if our officers & officials crawl about with their tails between their legs, frightening themselves and everybody else, I cannot say.
Canning’s disgust at the panic in Calcutta may have contributed to his decision not to accept an offer from the Masonic Lodges, Trades Association, and French, Armenian and Christian communities to form a volunteer corps for the defence of the city. Such a body would, he believed, have simply alarmed the Indian community without being militarily effective. He did, however, accept the volunteers as Special Constables. This refusal, coupled with Canning’s natural reserve and outward display of unconcern, led many to conclude that he did not appreciate the seriousness of the crisis. But a private letter to Lord Granville proves that he was only too aware of the peril they were in:
If this disaffection should spread and burst out into such violence as has been exhibited at Meerut and Delhi, you may imagine the plunder, slaughter, consternation, and ruin which would ensue. The flame would spread without a check straight on end for 700 or 800 miles, over the richest tracts of India… Whether the infection will spread or not, no mortal man can say. None are more surprised at what has happened at Meerut than those who know the sepoys best; and I have lost entirely all confidence in the commanding officers of regiments, who with scarcely an exception swear to the fidelity of their men, and when a scoundrel is caught in the act have nothing to say but ‘Who’d have thought it?’
General Anson and his headquarters staff were relaxing at Simla, the picturesque hot season retreat in the foothills of the Himalayas, when an exhausted rider arrived from Ambala on the morning of 12 May. It was Captain Barnard, the son and aide-de-camp of Major-General Sir Henry Barnard, the local divisional commander. He had ridden through the night with news of a telegraph message from Delhi stating that ‘regiments there had mutinied, joined with others from Meerut, seized the bridge-of-boats, and that several officers had been killed’. A fuller account of the Meerut rising, written by one of General Hewitt’s staff officers, was brought the same day by the Ambala postmaster.
At first Anson was not unduly concerned. ‘He appears to rather pooh-pooh the thing,’ noted Colonel Keith Young, his judge advocate-general, on 13 May. Young’s wife was amazed by Anson’s decision to remain at Simla until the 14th. ‘When he first received the bad news on Tuesday morning,’ she wrote, ‘he ought to have started off at once. Colonel Becher, Quartermaster-General, did his utmost to persuade him not to lose any time: but he said no; he would wait for the dâk. What is the use of the electric telegraph if the news it brings is not at once to be attended to?’
Anson had not been entirely idle. Aware that the vast quantity of military stores at Delhi had been lost to the rebels, he at once issued orders for European troops to secure most of the great arsenals of the Punjab. ‘I have sent express,’ he wrote to Canning on the 13th, ‘to desire that the fort of Firuzpur [Ferozepore] may be secured by the 61st Foot, and the Fort at Govindgarh by the 81st. Two companies of the 8th from Jalandhar [Jullundur] to Philur [Phillour].’ He also sent an artillery officer to arrange for the dispatch of a siege-train from Phillour.
Closer at hand, in the hills near Simla, were three European infantry regiments: the 75th Foot at Kasauli, and the 1st and 2nd Bengal European Fusiliers lower down at Dagshai and Subathu respectively. On 12 May the 75th Foot were ordered down to Ambala. Over the next two days, as the seriousness of the outbreak became more apparent, the other two European regiments were given similar instructions. At the same time the Sirmur Battalion of Gurkhas at Dehra Dun and the Sappers and Miners at Rurki were directed to Meerut. The three European regiments arrived at Ambala between 14 and 16 May and linked up with the 9th Lancers and two European batteries of Bengal Horse Artillery. The Indian portion of the Ambala garrison, however, was by now deeply mistrusted. In a curious echo of events at Meerut, the 60th Native Infantry and, to a lesser extent, the 5th had behaved mutinously on 10 May and again three days later. ‘They are still doing their usual duties and will be retained as part of this force,’ recorded Anson after reaching Ambala on 15 May. ‘But it is impossible to conceal from oneself that there is some hazard in employing them on this service. The conduct of the Native Army has destroyed all confidence in any regiment, notwithstanding they may still profess to be faithful and loyal.’
The uncertain loyalty of all Indian troops at this time was underlined by the case of the Nasiri Battalion of Gurkhas. Stationed at Jutogh near Simla, the battalion was ordered on 14 May to set off the following morning to rendezvous with the siege-train at Phillour. But that afternoon reports reached Simla that the Gurkhas had ‘refused to go’ and ‘would attack Simla and loot it instead’. The deputy commissioner, Lord William Hay, tried to reassure the undefended civilians at Simla that the report was false and the regiment was ‘staunch’. But Mrs Young was unconvinced. ‘Some of the Goorkhas were seen in the bazaar laughing and talking about the Delhi business,’ she informed her sister, ‘and when an Englishman passed he was hissed at.’ Yet another report was that they ‘intended to go down as ordered, but would join either Europeans or Natives, whichever was strongest’. The Europeans at Simla were understandably alarmed and held a meeting at which it was decided to place pickets of volunteers on the roads. That night, fearful that Simla would be attacked by the Gurkhas, more than seventy civilians slept in Dr Peskett’s house. It looked like a ‘crowded steamer’ with every floor covered with bodies. ‘None of us could close our eyes all night,’ recalled Mrs Young, ‘we were all listening for the guns. But morning came quite quietly.’ During the evening of 15 May, after yet more scares, most of the European community fled Simla and spent the next five days under the protection of a friendly hill raja. The Youngs were among them. ‘I haven’t the least fear for myself,’ wrote Colonel Young on 17 May, ‘but the late dreadful excesses at Meerut and Delhi have made everybody over-anxious, and had we remained at Simla, F. [his wife] would have been about the only lady there; and as all the rest of the Head-Quarter officers had left the day before yesterday, there was no use of my staying on in an official point of view.’
Young’s explanation of his behaviour is not entirely convincing and he was later criticized by the Lahore Chronicle for not setting a better example. But the general overreaction at Simla to events at Jutogh, where the Gurkhas had simply demanded the redress of professional grievances, was perhaps understandable in the uncertain days that followed the outbreak at Meerut.
By now Anson had other – logistical – problems to contend with. On 16 May, at a meeting of senior officers at Sir Henry Barnard’s house,* he discovered that the Commissariat and Medical Departments, in particular, were ‘totally unprepared to provide for the wants of a force in the field’. He noted:
The regiments from the hills having been brought down so quickly, they had nothing with them. Tents and camp equipage were all at Kalka [in the hills]. No conveyance could be procured for it. No dhoolies for the sick, supplies difficult to collect, bazaars partially deserted, and a scarcity of contractors. The Deputy Commissary-General and Superintending Surgeon both of opinion that it would not be possible to move under from fifteen to twenty days. Ammunition for small arms and artillery also deficient. Already sent for from Phillour, and expected to arrive in two or three days.
The main problem was a lack of transport: three years earlier, in a cost-cutting exercise, the Company had done away with the army’s permanent establishment of draught animals. Now it was reaping the whirlwind.
Despite exhortations from Lord Canning and Sir John Lawrence to retake Delhi as quickly as possible, Anson was inclined to wait for physical and material reinforcements. ‘It becomes now a matter for your consideration,’ he wrote to Lawrence on 17 May, ‘whether it would be prudent to risk the small European force we have here in an enterprise on Delhi. I think not. It is wholly, in my opinion, insufficient for the purpose.’ When Anson added that Barnard and his senior staff officers were united in their belief that no advance could take place for at least sixteen to twenty days, Lawrence was aghast. ‘I am persuaded that all you can require to take with you must be procurable in two or three,’ he replied on the 21st. ‘We have had an extraordinarily good harvest, and supplies must be abundant between Ambalah and [Meerut]. The greater portion of the country is well cultivated. We are sending our troops in every direction without difficulty, through tracts which are comparatively desert… I would spare no expense to carry every European soldier – at any rate, to carry every other one. By alternately marching and riding, their strengths and spirits will be maintained.’
Stung by Lawrence’s reproaches and Canning’s urgings, Anson was ready to leave Ambala on 23 May. ‘I venture to say that not an hour has been lost,’ he wrote to the Governor-General, ‘and that the movement of the troops from Ambalah will have been accomplished in a space of time which was not considered possible on my arrival here.’ His force consisted of the 9th Lancers, the 75th Foot, the 1st and 2nd Bengal Europeans, two troops of Bengal Horse Artillery, the 60th Native Infantry and a squadron of the 4th Light Cavalry.* On 17 May he had received a letter from Robert Montgomery at Lahore, urging him to disarm the 5th and 60th regiments. But, having consulted both commanding officers, he did not consider this action ‘advisable or immediately necessary’. The 5th was broken up into detachments and sent into the surrounding countryside; the 60th accompanied Anson’s force because he did not know what else to do with it.†
Rid of its potentially mutinous sepoys, the Ambala station was relatively secure. Most of the women and children had been sent to Kasauli. The remaining non-combatants took refuge at night in the large entrenchment that had been constructed around the church compound. It was defended by a garrison of five hundred sick and invalid European soldiers, supported by some Patiala troops. As early as 13 May Sir John Lawrence had urged Anson to trust the three great Sikh chiefs of the Cis-Sutlej States: the Maharaja of Patiala and the Rajas of Jhind and Nabha. ‘They had survived the ruin of the old Sikh Empire,’ wrote Kaye, ‘and were grateful to us for the protection which we had afforded and the independence which we had preserved.’ Their allegiance was vital because their lands dominated the routes north to the Punjab. Yet it could not be guaranteed. Soon after receiving word of the outbreak at Delhi, Douglas Forsyth, the Deputy Commissioner of Ambala, went to sound out the ruler of Patiala. During their conversation Forsyth asked if it were true that emissaries from the King of Delhi had come to Patiala. ‘There they are,’ replied the maharaja, pointing to some men seated a short distance away. So Forsyth requested a word in private.
As soon as they were alone, he said: ‘Maharaja sahib, answer me one question: Are you for us, or against us?’
‘As long as I live I am yours,’ replied the maharaja, ‘but you know I have enemies in my own country; some of my relations are against me – my brother for one. What do you want done?’
Forsyth then asked him to send some of his troops to Karnal to keep the Grand Trunk Road open. The maharaja agreed on the understanding that European soldiers would soon be sent to support them. He knew that his own troops could not be trusted unless they were convinced the British would prevail.
While most European eyes were on General Anson and his efforts to retake Delhi, the events that would determine the immediate survival of British India were taking place in the Punjab. A recently conquered province that included the turbulent North-West Frontier with Afghanistan, the Punjab was considered the greatest security risk in the subcontinent. For that reason it contained a higher proportion of European to Indian troops than any other province: 13,335 Europeans to 50,214 natives, or more than one in four. But it also contained the warlike tribes of the North-West Frontier and, like Oudh, many thousands of demobilized soldiers. The fear among British officials, when news of the Delhi outbreak reached the Punjab on 12 May, was that the tribesmen and former members of the Sikh Army might form an unholy alliance with mutinous Bengal sepoys to oust their colonial rulers. So their priority was to nullify the threat from the Bengal troops: either by disarming them or relieving them of the responsibility of guarding key installations like forts and magazines.
Robert Montgomery and Brigadier Corbett at Lahore were the first to act. On 12 May they dispatched a company of the 81st Foot in native wagons to secure the fortress of Govindgarh near Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs, 30 miles to the east.* Early the next day, acting on intelligence that the Bengal sepoys intended to seize Lahore Fort on the 15th, they disarmed the Indian garrison at Mian Mir and thereby prevented an outbreak that could have had disastrous consequences for the British. The seriousness of the threat at Lahore was underlined the following day when spies reported that ‘all the four disarmed corps intended to desert to Ferozepore (45 miles off) that night, and seize the magazine, and thus resupply themselves with arms’. Shortly before noon, as arrangements were being made to intercept the deserters, Corbett was informed that the sepoys had jumped the gun and ‘were making off as fast as possible’. He sent six horse artillery guns in pursuit and they had the desired effect as all but a couple of hundred deserters ‘slunk back to their lines’. The others were arrested by the civil authorities on the road and at Ferozepore itself.
The existence of a plot for combined action between the native troops at Lahore and Ferozepore, the largest arsenal in upper India, is borne out by the behaviour of the sepoy regiments at the latter station. The brigadier at Ferozepore was Peter Innes, an experienced and well-respected sepoy officer, who had only arrived at the station on 11 May. A day later he received word from Lahore of the outbreaks at Meerut and Delhi, and of Corbett’s determination to disarm all the troops in the Punjab capital. Innes was in a comparatively strong position with one British regiment, the 61st Foot, and a battery of European artillery to deal with three Indian regiments. Instead of following Corbett’s example, however, he held a morning parade on 13 May to gauge the temper of his native troops. It was inconclusive and a subsequent council of war, attended by civil and military officers, agreed only to divide the two regiments with a view to disarming them a day later.
That evening, as a company of the 61st Foot was in the process of relieving the Indian guard in the entrenched magazine, the two native infantry regiments were given orders to march to separate camping grounds outside the cantonment. They started off quietly enough. But as the 45th drew level with the magazine and saw the Europeans marching in, the majority broke away, loaded their weapons, ‘and made a sudden rush on to the ramparts’. They were assisted by the men of the 57th still inside the magazine, who provided ladders that must have been prepared beforehand. However, the European troops stood firm and managed to drive off their attackers. Thereafter Innes seems to have been stricken with the same paralysis that afflicted the military authorities at Meerut. By withdrawing most of the European troops into a defensive position, he allowed the three hundred or so mutineers to sack the cantonment with impunity. The church was burnt, as were most of the officers’ bungalows and the mess house of the 61st. But not all the European inhabitants were intimidated. ‘Such cowards as the mutineers I never saw,’ wrote the Revd Maltby. ‘I saved my own house by remaining in it. They were afraid to come near, and took 3 shots at me, and had I only 50 Europeans I could have cleared the place.’ Early next morning, the mutineers fled the station with their colours, heading south-east towards Delhi. For 12 miles they were ‘vigorously pursued and cut up’ by the sowars of the 10th Light Cavalry, who, at this stage, were still loyal. Some were brought back as prisoners; others were seized and imprisoned by the Maharaja of Patiala. But the mutineers were bolstered by a number of deserters from the 57th Native Infantry and three hundred members of both regiments made it through to Delhi by late June.
Officials as far afield as Lahore and Karachi were unimpressed by Innes’s performance. ‘Our military rulers are generally infatuated,’ wrote Montgomery on 18 May. ‘They deal with mankind only on parade, and do not know human nature. A severe example of one regiment would have saved much bloodshed and a campaign. By a severe example, I mean destroying them.’ Bartle Frere, the Commissioner of Sind, was even more severe in a letter to Brigadier John Jacob. ‘Even you, who foresaw all this,’ he wrote on 3 June,
can have no idea of the utter incapacity of the Bengal officers to meet the crisis. One of their best men, Innes, was at Ferozepore… After [the mutiny on 13 May] the Brigadier allows the Colonels of the Regiments to go and reason with the men! to bring them back!! & to persuade him of their penitence!!! He finds he has the wolf by the ears. The C-in-C orders him to dismiss the men. The Brigadier delays compliance and refers again, hoping to save the honor of the regiments!!!! – & these things occur every where, & men up there [in Bengal] bother their heads to find in new cartridges, or a preaching fool of a Colonel, provocation sufficient to account for the simultaneous outbreak.
Only in Peshawar, wrote Frere two days later, had the Bengal military ‘acted with much vigour’.
The city of Peshawar was the most northerly outpost of British India. It lay at the head of a large fertile valley, almost entirely surrounded by mountains, and was less than ten miles from the entrance to the legendary Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. On both sides of the frontier lived fierce Pathan tribesmen. To police them and to prevent foreign incursion, particularly from Afghanistan, the Company had stationed a vast number of regular and irregular troops in the region. Peshawar alone had ten regiments – two of British infantry, five of native infantry, one of light cavalry and two of irregular cavalry – and four batteries of European artillery. Much of the Punjab Irregular Force was also in the vicinity.
The leading civil authorities at Peshawar were, by necessity, men of resource and determination – not least the commissioner, Herbert Edwardes. Born in Shropshire in 1819, the second son of a clergyman, he was an atypical Company officer in that he graduated from King’s College, London, before joining the 1st Bengal Europeans at the relatively late age of twenty-one. His aptitude for languages soon marked him out as an outstanding officer, and in 1846, after the Company’s victory in the Second Sikh War, he and a handful of other talented young officers were selected as political assistants to Henry Lawrence, the Resident and effective ruler of the Punjab. Known as Lawrence’s ‘Young Men’, they were given the seemingly impossible task of stabilizing the war-torn districts of a foreign country. It helped that they, like Lawrence, were all God-fearing Christians of varying degrees of fervency. Edwardes, then a 26-year-old lieutenant, was more zealous than most and saw his role of pacifier of the lawless frontier province of Bannu as that of a militant missionary: ‘officially a soldier, practically a bishop’. The risks he and the other ‘politicals’ were prepared to take were prodigious. During one cavalry charge into the camp of a refractory chieftain, he was horrified to discover that all but twelve of his Sikh escort had abandoned him. He pressed on, nevertheless, and only survived because a jezail pressed to his midriff misfired.
Edwardes’s deputy at Peshawar, John Nicholson, was even more famous. Born in Ulster in 1822, the descendant of Scottish Plantation stock, he too had served in the native infantry before becoming one of Lawrence’s acolytes. By 1848, at the age of twenty-five, he was in charge of a frontier province the size of Wales. A tall, powerful man of few words but mighty deeds, his courage and physical strength were legendary. He once rode alone into a robber village and decapitated its chief in full view of his men. On another occasion he is said to have disorientated a tiger by galloping around it in ever-decreasing circles, eventually killing it with his sabre. Some of his Sikh subordinates were so impressed they formed a religious sect called the ‘Nikal Seynis’. Their idol’s response was to have them flogged. Nicholson’s appearance was awe-inspiring. ‘He was a man cast in a giant mould,’ recorded a contemporary, ‘with massive chest and powerful limbs, and an expression ardent and commanding, with a dash of roughness; features of stern beauty, a long black beard, and deep sonorous voice. There was something of immense strength, talent, and resolution in his whole frame and manner, and a power of ruling men on high occasions which no one could escape noticing.’
One of the most promising young staff officers in Peshawar at this time was Second-Lieutenant Frederick Sleigh Roberts of the Bengal Artillery. Born in Cawnpore in September 1832, the son of a former commander of the Peshawar Division,* Roberts had served in India for less than four years when he was appointed acting deputy assistant quartermaster-general at Peshawar in early 1856. He was aware of John Nicholson’s reputation but did not meet him until he went on a surveying expedition in the hills outside Peshawar in April 1857. Returning to his camp one evening, he found a tent pitched alongside his own: it was Nicholson’s. The two shared a meal together and Roberts wrote later:
Nicholson impressed me more profoundly than any man I had ever met before, or have ever met since. I have never seen anyone like him. He was the beau-ideal of a soldier and a gentleman. His appearance was distinguished and commanding, with a sense of power about him which to my mind was the result of his having passed so much of his life among the wild and lawless tribesmen, with whom his authority was supreme. Intercourse with this man amongst men made me more eager than ever to remain on the frontier, and I was seized with ambition to follow in his footsteps.
Nicholson was dining at Edwardes’s bungalow on the evening of 11 May 1857 when an officer burst in with the news from Delhi. The following day, having received a similar message from Meerut, Edwardes ordered the seizure of all Indian correspondence at the post office. ‘The number of seditious papers seized was alarmingly great,’ wrote Roberts. ‘They were for the most part couched in figurative and enigmatical language, but it was quite sufficiently clear from them that every Native regiment in the garrison was more or less implicated and prepared to join the rebel movement.’
Fearing outbreaks throughout the Punjab, Edwardes and Nicholson came up with the idea of forming a ‘strong moveable column’ of European and irregular troops. It ‘should take the field in the Punjab at once,’ wrote Edwardes to Sir John Lawrence on 12 May, ‘perhaps at Lahore would be best, so as to get between the stations which have mutinied and those that have not, and move on the first station that stirs next… This disaffection will never be talked down now. It must be put down – and the sooner blood be let the less of it will suffice.’ Edwardes also dispatched a rider to Kohat to fetch Brigadier Neville Chamberlain, the 37-year-old commander of the Punjab Irregular Force and yet another of Lawrence’s ‘Young Men’. ‘He was in the prime of his life, and the fulness of his active manhood,’ wrote a contemporary. ‘Of a fair stature, of a light but sinewy frame, he had every physical qualification that could make a dashing leader of Irregular Horse.’
The following morning, soon after Chamberlain’s arrival, a council of war was held in the bungalow of Major-General Thomas Reed, the local divisional commander. The principals were Reed, Edwardes, Nicholson, Chamberlain and Brigadier Sydney Cotton, the sixty-four-year-old station commander who, despite his age, was a man of ‘unusual energy and activity, a fine rider, a pattern drill, and a thorough soldier all round’. Reed, though three years younger and more experienced in war, had not aged as well as Cotton and was happy to defer to the two ‘soldier civilians’. Edwardes had, in any case, just received Lawrence’s approval of his plan for a Movable Column, and the meeting was something of a rubber-stamping exercise. Roberts, who took the minutes, was ‘greatly impressed with the calm and comprehensive view of the situation taken by Edwardes and Nicholson’. The latter told the council that he had long expected a mutiny in the Bengal Army. ‘Neither greased cartridges, the annexation of Oude, nor the paucity of European officers were the causes,’ he said. ‘For years I have watched the army and felt sure they only wanted the opportunity to try their strength with us. Mutiny is like a smallpox. It spreads quickly and must be crushed as quickly as possible.’
Their chief problem, said Nicholson, was how best to secure the Punjab with such a small number of European troops. In all stations there was a majority of Indian troops, and in some there were no European soldiers at all. ‘Edwardes and Nicholson gave it as their opinion,’ recalled Roberts, ‘that the only chance of keeping the Punjab and the frontier quiet lay in trusting the Chiefs and people, and in endeavouring to induce them to side with us against the Hindustanis. They undertook to communicate, regarding the raising of levies and fresh troops, with their friends and acquaintances along the border, who had proved such staunch allies in 1848–49, when we were fighting the Sikhs.’ They also recommended that General Reed, ‘as the senior officer in the Punjab, should join the Chief Commissioner at Rawal Pindi, leaving Brigadier Cotton in command at Peshawar’; that a Movable Column of ‘reliable troops’ should be formed at Jhelum, prepared to move ‘in any direction where its services might be required’; that regular Bengal regiments should be scattered ‘as much as possible, in order to prevent dangerous combinations’; that a detachment of Punjab irregulars from Kohat should replace the Bengal sepoys in the fort of Attock, which contained a magazine and covered the Indus crossing; and that a small guard of Pathan levies should be placed in charge of the Attock Ferry.
All these proposals were meekly agreed to by Reed and his subordinates. ‘The old General,’ read one account, ‘in his sleeping drawers and slippers, looked puzzled and almost before he knew what had taken place, the proceedings were on paper; orders out for the movement and collection of troops at various dispositions… Even at the last, the old General looked bewildered and puzzled… presiding in silence while these efforts to save India were manfully and nobly made.’ He may not have been the most vigorous general in the subcontinent, but at least he knew when to take a back seat. ‘Old Reed I don’t think much of,’ wrote Second-Lieutenant Roberts. ‘He has one good quality, namely: listening to reason, which is better than being obstinate, when ability is not combined.’ All that remained was to appoint a commander of the Movable Column. ‘It was a position for which Cotton and Nicholson would have given much,’ noted Roberts, ‘and for which they were well qualified, but there was important work for them to do at Peshawar.’ So Brigadier Chamberlain was selected by general consensus. He, in turn, appointed Roberts as his quartermaster-general.*
Reed set off by dâk to join Sir John Lawrence at Rawalpindi during the evening of 14 May. Roberts went with him, intending to link up with the northernmost elements of the Movable Column. ‘I took with me only just enough kit for a hot-weather march,’ noted Roberts, ‘and left everything standing in my house just as it was, little thinking that I should never return to it or be quartered in Peshawar again.’ They reached Attock Ferry on the Indus the following morning and met up with Chamberlain, who had brought his 2nd Punjab Cavalry from Kohat. Also there was Captain Henry Daly, commanding the Corps of Guides, who had arrived with five hundred men the day before. Daly was struck by the contrast between the two senior officers. Reed he found to be ‘a poor, weak, old gentleman in HMS, of a very different temper and style; frivolous in all points; petty, with no grasp, no knowledge; writing little notes to subordinates with much care and little grammar,’ whereas Chamberlain was ‘neither punctilious nor pedantic; a resolute, thoughtful soldier, neither brilliant nor cultivated, but sensible, grave, and solid’. His unruffled demeanour, which so impressed Daly, was largely the result of his Christian faith. Writing to his mother with news of his appointment, he begged her not to worry about the mutiny, ‘for we are in the hands of the true and only God… and the convulsion now going on around us must be intended in the end to advance His glory, and therefore as Christians and soldiers our duty is to meet the storm with calm fortitude’.
Reed, Chamberlain and Roberts arrived at Rawalpindi during the evening of 16 May. Two days later Chamberlain was joined at Sir John Lawrence’s residence by Daly and Edwardes: the former had just marched in with his Guides; the latter had been summoned from Peshawar because Lawrence was uneasy about his plan to raise more Pathan levies. Daly’s diary entry for 18 May reads: ‘Started at 1 a.m. Overtaken within 4 or 5 miles of Pindi by Edwardes, travelling down in a buggy to consult Sir John. I jumped into the buggy and went with him to Sir John’s – reached at 5 a.m. Chamberlain in bed at the door. Sir John in bed within, called us and began conversing on affairs with his old frankness and cordiality. Affairs are bad.’
During the subsequent discussions it was agreed that, in line with Canning’s request, the capture of Delhi was to have priority over the Punjab. This, in effect, meant sending most of the regiments earmarked for the Movable Column down to Ambala to join Anson. The Punjab would, as a result, be dangerously denuded of trustworthy troops and the only solution was to raise more irregulars. With the survival of British India at stake, it was considered to be a risk worth taking. As at Peshawar, the civilian officials were the chief decision-makers, and General Reed, the senior officer in the Punjab, was not even present during the key debates. Daly, who was, recorded:
In the sort of Council of Discussion at Sir John’s, the line of operations was fixed on, papers actually written by Edwardes, and then the remark – ‘Now let us send for the Dictator’ [Edwardes’s ironic nickname for Reed]. Thus, cut-and-dried affairs are put affirmatively to the General… Sir John, full of pluck, fearing no responsibility; without communication or means of communication with the Governor-General, he has raised and is raising large bodies of troops, passing all the best corps of the Punjab Irregular Force towards India.
The first to move were Daly’s Guides, who set off from Rawalpindi in the late evening of 19 May.
Edwardes returned to Peshawar on 21 May to find Nicholson ‘immersed in cares and anxieties’: the Bengal regiments were on the verge of mutiny, and the Pathans, convinced the British Raj was finished, were refusing to enlist. As a result of the council of war of 13 May, the regiment considered to be the most disaffected at Peshawar, the 64th Native Infantry, had been broken up and sent to join detachments of the more reliable Kelat-i-Ghilzie irregulars at various stations in the Khyber Pass. On 18 May conspirators in the 51st Native Infantry at Peshawar sent a letter to the headquarters of both regiments at Fort Shubkudr. It claimed to have been written on behalf of the whole Peshawar cantonment and warned that cartridges would have to be bitten on 22 May. ‘O brother!’ it continued. ‘The religion of Hindoos and Mahommedans is all one. Therefore all you soldiers should know this. Here all the sepoys are at the bidding of the Jemadar, Subadoor, Buhadoor, and Havildar-Major. All are discontented with this business, whether small or great. What more need be written? Do as you think best.’ A postscript in a different hand urged the regiments to march into Peshawar on the 21st.
The bearer of the letter, a Brahman priest, gave it to a sepoy of the 64th. He or one of his comrades turned it over to the commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Garrett. Edwardes was particularly surprised by this act of loyalty because the earlier seizure of mutinous correspondence between Muslim ‘bigots’ at Patna and sepoys of the 64th had convinced him that the regiment was ripe for mutiny. The letters had also alluded to a lengthy correspondence between the same native soldiers and ‘Hindoostanee fanatics in [nearby] Swat and Sitana’. The letter from the 51st was given up, Edwardes concluded, because the 64th knew the Kelat-i-Ghilzie regiment would not rise with them. The other possibility is that the letter was handed to a member of the regiment who was neither part of the conspiracy nor sufficiently disaffected to keep it secret. To Edwardes the letter proved ‘beyond a doubt that whatever moved the Mahommedans, the Hindoos were moved by the cartridges’. He is right in the sense that the majority were being manipulated by the minority. For the conspirators at Peshawar knew only too well that cartridges were no longer ‘bitten’; for the rising to succeed, however, a religious cause that embraced both faiths was essential.
That night Edwardes and Nicholson went to bed fully dressed and with weapons to hand. They were woken at midnight with the news that a detachment of the 55th Native Infantry at Nowshera, 22 miles down the Peshawar Valley, had mutinied, and the 10th Irregular Cavalry had refused to act against it. They at once roused Brigadier Cotton and told him that it was imperative to disarm the five regular Bengal regiments at Peshawar – the 21st, 24th 27th, 51st Native Infantry and 5th Light Cavalry – before the mutiny could spread. He agreed, but exempted the senior regiment of native infantry, the 21st, on the basis that it had not been implicated in the mutinous correspondence. The commanding officers of all nine regiments still at Peshawar, two of them British, were then summoned to Cotton’s quarters to hear the news. ‘A most painful scene ensued,’ wrote Edwardes. ‘The commandants of those regiments which were to be disarmed unanimously and violently declared their implicit confidence in their men. One advised conciliation, and another threatened us that his men would resist and take the guns.’ This, for Edwardes, was the clincher, and he interrupted the heated discussion with the observation that ‘the matter rested entirely with Brigadier Cotton’. To which Cotton responded: ‘Then the troops as originally determined will be disarmed. No more discussion, gentlemen! These are my orders and I must have them obeyed.’
It was now six in the morning and within an hour the two wings of the cantonment had formed up on separate parade-grounds. Each wing was covered by a British infantry regiment and half the artillery, their muskets loaded and cannon primed. Edwardes and Cotton dealt with the right wing, Nicholson the left, both parties accompanied by a troop of irregular cavalry and a line of empty ammunition wagons. As each earmarked regiment was approached, the order was given to pile arms. The sepoys and sowars responded without hesitation. ‘It was a painful and affecting thing to see them putting their own firelocks into the artillery wagons,’ wrote Edwardes to his wife, ‘weapons which they had used honourably for years. The officers of a cavalry regiment [the 5th Light Cavalry], a very fine set of fellows, threw in their own swords with those of their men, and even tore off their spurs. It was impossible not to feel for and with them; but duty must be done, and I know that we shall never regret the counsel that we gave.’ The beneficial effect of this decisive action was immediate. ‘As we rode down to the disarming,’ recalled Edwardes, ‘a very few chiefs and yeomen of the country attended us, and I remember, judging by their faces, that they came to see which way the tide would turn. As we rode back friends were as thick as summer flies, and levies began from that moment to come in.’
Cotton’s thoughts now turned to the 55th Native Infantry. After its minor mutiny on the 21st, the detachment at Nowshera had been brought back under the control of its officers and that night was ordered to rejoin the main body of the regiment at Hoti Mardan. But Cotton suspected that the whole regiment was disaffected, and, the following evening, he dispatched a small force to disarm it. Commanded by Colonel Chute of the 70th Foot, the force comprised three hundred British soldiers, eight guns and four hundred irregular horsemen. Nicholson went along as political officer. Resting up by day, the force began its final march to Hoti Mardan during the night of 24 May. But news of its approach was not welcomed by the colonel of the 55th, Henry Spottiswoode,* who had earlier begged Cotton not to act against men in whom he had ‘implicit confidence’. When his Indian officers now came to ask him why British troops were approaching, he was unable to satisfy them and the regiment passed beyond his control. In despair he blew his brains out.
At daybreak, as the head of Chute’s column came in sight of the ‘rude’ star-shaped fort at Hoti Mardan, the men of the 55th hastily left, but in good order and with colours flying, each man laden with as much ammunition and treasure as he could carry. Chute ordered a halt: his infantry were done up after the long march and in no condition for a pursuit in the heat of the day. But Nicholson was determined not to let the mutineers get away and, with Chute’s permission, gave chase with the cavalry.
On observing the pursuing column of horsemen, headed by Nicholson’s distinctive grey charger, the 55th’s Indian officers ordered their men to halt and prepare to receive cavalry. They did so in parade-ground fashion but were still in the act of loading when the cavalry’s flashing sabres swept in amongst them. The line began to disintegrate, and the sepoys fled in panic into the broken countryside, hotly pursued by Nicholson and his riders. ‘They were hunted out of villages,’ wrote Edwardes in his official report, ‘and grappled with in ravines, and hunted over the ridges all that day from Fort Mardan to the borders of Swat, and found respite only in the failing light.’
By the time an exhausted Nicholson returned to Hoti Mardan, he had been in the saddle for twenty hours and had covered more than 70 miles. ‘The 55th fought determinedly,’ he wrote to Edwardes on 26 May, ‘as men, who have no chance of escape but by their own exertions, always do.’ One hundred and twenty mutineers had been killed and a similar number captured with the regimental colours and two hundred muskets. Most of the damage had been done by Nicholson and his mounted police; the sowars of the 10th Irregulars, by contrast, had only ‘pretended to act’. The surviving mutineers fled to the Lund Khur Hills in Swat, but were expelled within a month by the local chiefs. They made for Kashmir because they believed its Hindu ruler, Maharaja Golab Singh, was sympathetic to their cause. But their route was blocked by Hazara tribesmen, and those not taken prisoner and executed were forced north into the mountains and defiles of Kohistan. Some died of starvation and exposure, others were drowned in mountain torrents. Only a few survived capture by agreeing to convert to Islam, thereby forfeiting the religion and caste they had allegedly rebelled to protect.
At first, as a warning to others, all one hundred and twenty sepoys captured by Nicholson were sentenced to be blown away from guns. But petitions for partial clemency were submitted by both Nicholson and Sir John Lawrence. ‘The officers [of the 55th] all concur in stating that the Sikhs were on their side to the last,’ wrote Nicholson to Edwardes. ‘I would, therefore, temper stern justice with mercy, and spare the Sikhs and young recruits. Blow away all the rest by all means, but spare boys scarcely out of their childhood, and men who were really loyal and respectful up to the moment when they allowed themselves to be carried away in a panic by the mass.’
Edwardes and the military authorities concurred and forty were selected for execution. They were not the first Indian troops to be put to death at Peshawar. A few days after the general disarmament, when it became clear that their treasonable correspondence had been intercepted, the subedar-major and two hundred and fifty men of the 51st Native Infantry had fled into the mountains. Many were returned by Pathan tribesmen, including the subedar-major, who was hanged on 29 May. Five days later four NCOs and eight sepoys suffered the same punishment.
The execution of the forty mutineers of the 55th took place a week later on the parade-ground of the 87th Foot. The whole Peshawar garrison had been formed into three sides of an open square. The fourth was made up of forty cannon. Watching eagerly from the edge of the parade-ground were thousands of civilian spectators. Once the sentence had been read, the guns were primed with powder but no shot, and the prisoners were led forward. Each one was tied by the wrists to the upper part of the gun’s wheels so that the muzzle pressed into the pit of his stomach. The artillery officer then gave the word and the guns were fired simultaneously. At first the smoke obscured all view. As it cleared, the only visible remnants of the prisoners were their arms, still attached to the guns. Then here and there, having been shot hundreds of feet into the air, fell a number of slightly blackened but otherwise intact heads. Apart from that there was nothing. The bystanders reacted with a collective gasp; the Indian troops were dumbstruck.
Many commentators have vilified the British for blowing mutineers from guns. But the practice needs to be seen in context: it was a punishment first used in India not by the British but by the Moguls; it was regarded by Indian troops as an instantaneous and honourable ‘soldier’s death’ and infinitely preferable to the degradation of death by hanging; and, as Lawrence makes clear, it was used not as an act of vengeance but of deterrence, pour encourager les autres. Moreover, such ruthless acts were generally popular with the apprehensive European community in India at this time. ‘I fancy you will ere long hear of some sharp and decisive punishments amongst the mutinous prisoners at Lahore, Ferozepore and Peshawur,’ wrote the superintending surgeon at Sialkot to a nephew. ‘Mercy to them is out of the question; firmness and decision, and the fate of our empire all require the last penalty, and die they must. Maudlin humanity and over-indulgent sentimental feelings have placed us in our present position. Had we been rigid, stern and unhesitating in our rule our present difficulties would never have shown themselves.’