By mid June 1857 Delhi and large swathes of northern and central India were under rebel control and the revolt was spreading by the day.* In an attempt to suppress it, every European soldier that arrived at Calcutta was immediately dispatched up-country, leaving the Christian inhabitants of the capital understandably nervous.
‘We are very weak here where we ought to be… as strong as possible,’ wrote J. P. Grant, a member of the Supreme Council, to Lord Canning. ‘We have as enemies three Native Infantry regiments and a half… one, two, three (for no one knows) thousand armed men at Garden Reach; some hundred armed men of the Sind Amirs at Damdamah; half the Muhammadan population; and all the blackguards of all sorts of a town of six hundred thousand people. Against these we have one and a half weak regiments, most of whom dare not leave the Fort.’ Grant’s solution was to accept the Christian community’s offer to form a Volunteer Defence Corps, and on 12 June Canning grudgingly gave his assent. ‘About 180 horsemen and 600 foot have been enrolled,’ he informed Vernon Smith. ‘After a little training they will make a very useful patrol guard when needed, but I was not long in finding out that any duty which should take them away from their homes for any length of time, such for instance as garrisoning the Fort in place of European troops, would be strongly objected to by more than three-fourths of them.’
The following day Canning forfeited any goodwill this measure had engendered by introducing a bill to control the press. Popularly known as the ‘Gagging Act’, it was mainly aimed at the ‘incendiary tone’ of the Indian press but in practice restricted the content of Indian and English-language publications alike by making them apply for licences that could be withdrawn at any moment. ‘The English Press has been very bad,’ noted Lady Canning in her journal. ‘Civil enough to C. himself, but running down others – but that is not the mischief – it points out all sorts of imaginary reasons and grievances as causes for Mutiny, it spreads alarms, and shews up weakness, and gives information, which, translated, may do untold mischief among the natives.’ Many in Calcutta had lost faith in the government and believed that it had gagged the press to prevent reports of its errors reaching London. As such, the measure was universally condemned. In England, on the other hand, the reaction was positive. ‘Your, or rather Lady Canning’s, fears of unpopularity for bullying the press have proved utterly groundless,’ Lord Granville informed Canning. ‘Everybody is enchanted, and even the newspapers themselves seem to approve, although si va di loro decoro to give a subdued grunt.’
The general mood in Calcutta at this time was one of suppressed panic. When Elizabeth Sneyd finally reached the city on 11 June, with her daughter Louisa and newly born grandson, she was told by the proprietor of Mountain’s Hotel that ‘a terrible conspiracy had only on that day been discovered, to blow up the shipping on the river, & murder all the Europeans in Calcutta, and that many of the ladies and children had gone on board the ships’. So many fugitives had arrived from up-country, he explained, that ‘every hotel, private house, & even public offices, were crammed with them!’, including his own. Mrs Sneyd and her family were eventually taken in by friends of Cecil Beadon, the secretary to the Home Department, who had a house in nearby Alipore. There Louisa was overjoyed to receive a letter from her husband, Dr Hutchinson, who had escaped the outbreak at Fatehpur, though Mrs Sneyd ‘got none from my precious ones at Shahjehanpore which caused me the greatest grief & alarm’. Of particular irritation to Mrs Sneyd during this time of uncertainty was the insolence of the Indian servants. ‘My Ayah would often stand before the looking-glass,’ she recalled, ‘throwing herself into a variety of attitudes while admiring herself & dancing with a shawl fantastically thrown over her shoulders, like the nautch girls, instead of dressing me when I wanted her, & this she did in my presence with the taunt… “Ah! Your rule will soon come to an end, & we shall have our own King!”’
The fears of the jumpy Calcutta residents were not entirely without foundation. In the early hours of Sunday, 14 June, Canning received a letter from General Hearsey ‘saying that he had received evidence he could not resist that the regiments at Barrackpore were going to rise’ the following day and asking for permission to disarm them. ‘General Hearsey had shown such firmness and nerve hitherto,’ recorded Canning, ‘that I could not resist his appeal.’ Anticipating the Governor-General’s support, Hearsey had already instructed the 78th Highlanders at Chinsurah to march on Barrack-pore. They arrived on the morning of 14 June and helped to disarm the three and a half regiments of native infantry* at four in the afternoon. The troops at Calcutta were disarmed simultaneously. But Canning soon regretted his decision. ‘I am not now satisfied that there was any sufficient ground for a general disarming,’ he wrote to Vernon Smith on 19 June, ‘& although all in Calcutta is delighted at it, I look forward with some apprehension to the effect which the measure will have at the several stations in lower Bengal… The 43rd, the best behaved regiment in Bengal against which there has never been a breath of reproach, is completely panic-stricken, the men desert one day & come back the next not knowing what to do with themselves, but confident that some further disgrace is intended to them.’
In the same letter to Vernon Smith, Canning mentioned a ‘return of the panic more severe than ever’ among the European inhabitants of Calcutta. He was referring to ‘Panic Sunday’. For on 14 June, the day the disarmaments took place, rumours spread through the European quarter that the regiments at Barrackpore had mutinied and were marching towards the city, that the inhabitants of the suburbs had risen, and that the King of Oudh and his followers were plundering Garden Reach. The resultant hysteria was, Canning’s private secretary told the Governor of Ceylon, ‘beyond all belief’. He added:
My table was heaped with notes from all quarters, stating what was coming – imploring, threatening, urging, all sorts of schemes. Merchants, officials, men of all ranks came pouring in to know the state of the case and what we meant to do. I never did and hope I never shall go through such a scene again! People deserted their houses and went on board the ships in the River. Some drove into the Fort and finding no room, obstinately remained in their carriages. The clergy preached to empty benches, in short every man expected some awful calamity, and all prepared for it in their various ways.
According to Kaye, those ‘highest in office were the first to give the alarm’, with ‘Secretaries to Government running over to Members of Council, loading their pistols, barricading their doors’, while the latter ‘abandoned their houses with their families’ and took refuge on board ships. Virtually every Christian house in the city had been abandoned and a ‘score of London thieves would have made their fortunes by plundering’ houses in the fashionable neighbourhood of Chowringee.
That same day a sepoy guarding one of the gates of Fort William was asked by a Muslim man ‘when the Europeans were most off their guards – and other questions’. As the sepoy seemed eager to help, the man told him he was an emissary of the King of Oudh. The sepoy’s quick response was that he had no time to talk, but would be on guard again at a certain hour when they could speak more freely. Meanwhile he informed his superiors and when the agent returned he was promptly arrested. ‘On examination he gave such evidence as justified the Governor-General in arresting the King of Oude,’ wrote Canning’s private secretary, ‘which… was quietly done at 4 o’clock on Monday morning. The emissary was to have been hung forthwith, but he was most culpably allowed to escape. Fortunately what he did say was recorded, and His Majesty is now comfortably in Fort William with his Minister and four other State Prisoners. I believe this to be very wise. The rebellion is now pretty well understood to be a Mahomedan one – and the Cartridge question to have been only a pretext to unite the Hindoos with them, and the King was a puppet ready at hand for any intrigues – even if he did nothing himself (which is very probable). The King of Delhi is another and I hope the last of these??!’
The senior adviser arrested with the King of Oudh was Ali Naki Khan, his former chief minister. Colonel Sleeman, who knew him well during his time as Resident, described Ali Naki as ‘one of the cleverest, most intriguing, and most unscrupulous villains in India; who had obtained influence over his master by entire subservience to his vices and follies, and by praising all he did, however degrading to him as a man and a sovereign’. If any member of the King’s entourage was behind this and other attempts to tamper with the sepoys at Calcutta and Barrackpore, Ali Naki was. But the evidence was never more than circumstantial. ‘Although no complicity has been fixed upon the King or his courtiers,’ Canning told Vernon Smith, ‘I deem it necessary for the safety of the state that it should be put out of the power of any one to seduce the state’s soldiers by speaking in the name of the King of Oude & that his name should not be made a rallying point for disaffected soldiers.’
Another major problem facing the Indian government was a lack of money: increased military expenses and a massive loss of revenue from the rebellious districts had put a severe strain on public finances. All public works had ceased and only the ‘real necessities of the Military and Civil Establishments’ were being provided for. One saving made as a result of the mutiny was the 35 lakhs of rupees owed in pensions to suspected rebels: 12 ‘for the Delhi family’, 22 (‘10 due for last year and 12 for this’) for the King of Oude and 1 ‘for the Jhansi family’. But that still left Canning’s administration short of at least three crores (roughly £3 million). Its solution was to borrow public money in India by offering a government loan at 6 per cent. The British Cabinet agreed.
On Monday, 29 June, three days after the first official reports of the outbreaks had reached England, an emergency debate was held in the House of Commons. The main speaker was Benjamin Disraeli, the Leader of the Opposition, who demanded to know how ‘insurrectionary and rebellious troops’ had been able to take possession of the ‘ancient capital of Hindostan’. He also asked what measures Lord Palmerston’s government was taking to combat the rebellion and whether the Governor-General was about to resign. Replying for the government, Vernon Smith said that 10,000 European troops – mainly reliefs and recruits – were already due to sail for India in the middle of July. A further 4,000 troops requested by the East India Company’s Court of Directors would accompany them. Yet Vernon Smith was keen to underplay the danger. ‘Our Indian empire is not “emperilled”,’ he declared, ‘and I hope that in a short time the disaster, dismal as it undoubtedly is, will be effectually suppressed by the force already in the country.’ As for Canning’s resignation, it was unthinkable. ‘He has behaved in this emergency with the vigour and judgment which I should always have anticipated,’ said Vernon Smith. ‘His letters [show] no want of calmness, no lack of confidence. He says that he is certain that he shall be able to put this revolt down, and he adds, that when he has done so he shall turn his mind to ascertaining the causes which have led to it, and the best means of remedying them…’
This was not mere rhetoric. On 26 June, the day he received the news from India, Lord Palmerston told the Queen that he had ‘no fear’ of the mutiny’s ‘results’. He added: ‘The bulk of the European force is stationed on the North-West Frontier, and is, therefore, within comparatively easy reach of Delhi, and about six thousand European troops will have returned to Bombay from Persia. It will, however, seem to be advisable to send off at once the force amounting to nearly eight thousand men, now under orders for embarkation for India.’ Queen Victoria agreed, informing Lord Panmure, the Secretary of State for War, that ‘she had long been of opinion that reinforcements waiting to go to India ought not to be delayed’.
In the event, not a single infantry regiment reached the Bengal Presidency from England until October 1857.* Part of the reason for this tardy arrival of reinforcements was the government’s insistence on sending the majority, including the first batch, in sailing ships rather than steamers. When criticized in Parliament, Lord Panmure gave the excuse that steamers had to visit several ports to restock their coal supply, whereas sailing ships ‘were able to shorten the course by keeping further from shore’. As a result, they would arrive at their destination ‘as soon, if not sooner, than steam vessels’. This was nonsense and Vernon Smith admitted as much to Canning when he wrote: ‘I think it most advisable you should send steamers to tow the sailing vessels from Point de Galle on Madras if you stand in greater need of their accelerated arrival.’
By early August, with no news of Delhi’s recapture, the Queen was convinced the government had not done enough. She wrote to Palmerston:
The last accounts from India show so formidable a state of things that the military measures hitherto taken by the Home Government, on whom the salvation of India must depend, appear to the Queen as by no means adequate to the emergency. We have nearly gone to the full extent of our available means, just as we did in the Crimean War, and may be able to obtain successes; but we have not laid in store of troops, nor formed Reserves which could carry us over a long struggle, or meet unforeseen new calls. Herein we are always most shortsighted, and have finally to suffer either in power or reputation, or to pay enormous sums for small advantages in the end – generally both.
The Queen was right. The government was not displaying the urgency the situation in India demanded because it had underestimated its seriousness. This was partly wishful thinking: in the wake of the Crimean War the government was anxious to avoid the expense of another full-blown conflict. But it was also partly the fault of Canning’s overly optimistic dispatches. On 5 June, for example, in the same letter informing Vernon Smith of Anson’s death, Canning gave it as his opinion that once Delhi had been cleared of mutineers ‘the neck of the insurrection will be broken’. Events would prove him wrong. That said, even in early June Canning was anxious to stress the need for reinforcements to guarantee India’s long-term security. ‘Be the issue what it may,’ he wrote, ‘whither with the speedy fall of Delhi, the rebellion at once collapses or whither before this happens, ravages extend & the Europeans are driven from the Central Provinces, Oude or elsewhere, & these parts have to be recovered, I reckon we shall require an additional European force of 12 regiments of infantry & one of dragoons. We must not conceal from ourselves that our Government must henceforth rest much more openly upon military strength.’ It was not a question of if but when the rebellion was suppressed.
This is exactly what Palmerston’s government wanted to hear and, in return, it gave the Governor-General its full support. ‘The Cabinet… have full confidence in you,’ wrote Lord Granville to Canning on 10 July, ‘and I believe will thoroughly support you both as regards your administrative acts and in Parliament.’ What the government was not prepared to do, however, was endorse Canning’s choice of Sir Patrick Grant as the new Commander-in-Chief. In his letter to Vernon Smith of 5 June, Canning had given his reasons for choosing Grant: ‘If you wish to give the Government of India the most effective aid & support in the difficulties which will rise up after calm has been restored [i.e. during the reform of the Bengal Army]… you cannot do more effectually than by the appointment of Sir Patrick Grant as C.-in-C.… There is no Queen’s officer in India who will be the slightest service in this work. I know of none at home… Experience, temper, no rashness & the confidence of the Army officers & men, ought to unite in the person chosen. They are all combined in Sir Patrick Grant.’
But the government – with advice from the Horse Guards* – had other ideas. ‘You have done excellently I think in naming P. Grant,’ wrote Vernon Smith on 10 August. ‘We could not do otherwise than send Colin Campbell.’ Lieutenant-General Sir Colin Campbell was one of the most experienced officers in the British Army. Born in Glasgow in 1792, the son of a carpenter named Macliver, he had mistakenly been given the name of his uncle, Colonel John Campbell, by the Duke of York† when he was commissioned. But lacking money and social standing, his promotion had been slow: he took thirty years to rise from captain to colonel and forty to clear his debts. In that time, however, he had seen action in numerous campaigns, including the ill-fated Walcheren expedition, the Peninsular War, the War of 1812 with the United States, the Opium War of 1842, the Second Sikh War (for which he was knighted) and, most recently, the Crimean War. In the last conflict he had commanded the Highland Brigade at the Battle of the Alma and won everlasting fame for his repulse of the Russian cavalry attack on Balaklava, the so-called ‘Thin Red Line’. Yet he was a cautious, methodical commander, rather than a dashing one – more Montgomery than Rommel – and was known from a previous stint in India as ‘Old Khabardar (Old Careful)’. One officer opined: ‘His whole thoughts were centred on a peerage and he’d risk nothing for fear of losing it, nay more he’d sacrifice all and anybody for its attainment… A brave man undoubtedly, but too cautious for India, and too selfish for any place.’
In fact, like Montgomery, he was popular with his men because they knew he would not sacrifice their lives needlessly. He was interested in the welfare of ordinary soldiers, promoting healthy living, opposing drunkenness, providing shelters in the Crimea and sun helmets in India. He looked like a concerned grandfather, with his shock of grey curly hair, furrowed brow and small goatee beard. But there were many in India who did not approve of his appointment. He had left the subcontinent in 1853 under something of a cloud, after a difficult time as commander of the Peshawar Brigade, and those in the know were not happy to see him return. Canning said as much in a private letter to the President of the Board of Control. The reply was dismissive. ‘I trust he may prove different when at the head,’ wrote Vernon Smith, ‘than what he was when previously known in India.’
Campbell left England by mail packet on 12 July and – travelling via Marseilles and the Suez isthmus – reached Calcutta just over a month later. ‘Our voyage… was a very trying one,’ wrote a fellow passenger. ‘The heat in the Red Sea was overpowering, and all hands were in a state of feverish anxiety which was not allayed in any wise by the rumours we picked up at Aden of fresh mutinies and further atrocities.’ The bad news was confirmed when they reached India. Mutinies and rebellions in Bundelkhand, Nowgong and Gwalior in June, Mhow, Sagar and Indore in July, and Bhopal in early August had left much of central India in flames.* Other recent mutinies had taken place in the Punjab, in the Benares Division and in Bihar province.
The most serious took place at Dinapore in Bihar. Despite intelligence that a disgruntled raja, Kunwar Singh of Jagdispur, was ‘carrying on an intimate correspondence with the sepoys at Dinapoor’, the station commander, Major-General George Lloyd, did not order the garrison’s disarmament until 25 July. Even then it was hopelessly mismanaged and more than 2,000 sepoys managed to escape to the nearby town of Arrah where they linked up with Kunwar Singh’s retainers. When Lloyd heard that the civil station at Arrah was under siege,† he sent a force of four hundred men to relieve it. But the force was ambushed on the outskirts of Arrah and only half its number returned to Dinapore.* Arrah was finally relieved on 3 August by an even smaller expedition led by Major Vincent Eyre, an aged artillery officer. A week later, reinforced by three hundred men from Dinapore, Eyre again defeated the rebels near Jagdispur before capturing Kunwar Singh’s stronghold. The district, however, was far from pacified.
The initial reverse at Arrah had been preceded by an even more serious British defeat near Agra. On 4 July the Kotah Contingent had risen and joined up with mutineers from Nimach in central India. The following day, as this combined force of around 4,000 rebels approached to within four miles of the fort, Brigadier Polwhele marched out to meet it with seven companies of the 3rd Europeans, a battery of European artillery and a few volunteer cavalry. Polwhele was loath to risk his infantry and tried to win the battle with his guns alone. But they were eventually disabled by counter-fire and he was forced to order a humiliating retreat.† In the wake of this defeat, Agra’s entire Christian community‡ was confined to the fort in a virtual state of siege. It was kept there not by the Nimach and Kotah mutineers, who had made for Delhi the day after their victory, but by civilian rebels who had risen in the city and surrounding districts.
Even Havelock’s first advance into Oudh had been a failure. He had begun his march on 29 July from Mangalwar, six miles beyond the Ganges, with just 1,500 men and twelve field guns. But the rebels put up a stiff resistance in two battles that day at the villages of Unao and Bashiratganj, and, despite prevailing, Havelock did not feel strong enough to continue. He had already lost a sixth of his force to battle casualties and disease. He was also low on ammunition and had barely enough transport to carry the sick and wounded. The final straw was a message from Neill on 31 July announcing that Bihar had risen in the wake of the mutiny at Dinapore and the two regiments he was daily expecting to reinforce him – the 5th Fusiliers and 90th Light Infantry§ – would not be available for at least two months. That day Havelock retired to Mangalwar, informing Sir Patrick Grant by telegram that he ‘could not… move against Lucknow with any prospect of success’. On 6 August, having fought a second successful action at Bashiratganj a day earlier, he told Grant that he had ‘with great grief and reluctance’ abandoned his ‘hope of relieving Lucknow’. He explained:
The only three staff officers in my force whom I ever consult confidentially… are unanimously of the opinion that an advance to the walls of Lucknow involves the loss of this force. In this I concur. The only military question that remains, therefore, is whether that, or the unaided destruction of the British garrison at Lucknow, would be the greatest calamity to the State in this crisis. The loss of this force in a fruitless attempt to relieve Colonel Inglis would, of course, involve his fall. I will remain, however, till the latest moment in this position strengthening it, and hourly improving my bridge-communication with Cawnpore, in the hope that some error of the enemy may enable me to strike a blow at them, and give the garrison an opportunity of blowing up their works and cutting their way out.
Despite a third victory at Bashiratganj on the 11th, against a rebel force estimated at 4,000, Havelock and his rapidly dwindling column were back in Cawnpore by 13 August. Many of the general’s subordinates were unimpressed by his toing and froing. ‘He is a brave old man,’ wrote Lieutenant John Grant after the first two battles, ‘but awfully wanting in Generalship.’ After returning to Cawnpore, Grant told his brother that had Havelock continued to advance after his second victory at Bashiratganj, on the 5th, he could have relieved Lucknow. He added: ‘Our unsuccessful attempt will certainly counterbalance all the good effects of beating the enemy four times. Our Force was certainly very very small, but it is wonderful what a few determined Englishmen can do.’ Grant ended the letter by mentioning that there had been ‘a great deal of cholera here but it is going off now’. Within days he himself had succumbed to the deadly water-borne disease.
Havelock returned from Oudh to the unwelcome news that some of Nana Sahib’s forces, reinforced by mutineers from Sagar, had regrouped at Bithur.* Having given his exhausted troops two days’ rest, he set off for Bithur on 16 August and found the rebels well entrenched to the front of the Nana’s ruined palace. Fortunately for Havelock, the rebels had only two guns and he was able to pound them with his superior artillery for more than twenty minutes. Yet still they held their ground and, as at Cawnpore, it required a succession of bayonet charges to dislodge them. Victory came at a price: sixty killed and wounded, including twelve deaths from sunstroke. Moreover, a body of two hundred rebel sowars had attacked the British rear, killed thirty camp followers and made off with the volunteer cavalry’s baggage.
The worst news to greet the newly arrived Commander-in-Chief was the continued stalemate at Delhi. Soon after General Barnard’s decision in mid June to delay an assault, the mutineers had taken the initiative with almost daily attacks on the Ridge. They all failed, but the position of the British rapidly became weaker not stronger. By early June Barnard’s force had been swelled by more than 3,000 reinforcements* from the Punjab – including the newly promoted Brigadier-General Neville Chamberlain, who had been appointed adjutant-general – to around 6,600. During the same period, however, the rebel army at Delhi was joined by elements of no less than fourteen infantry regiments, five cavalry regiments and two artillery batteries from stations in Rajputana, the Punjab and Rohilkhand. A further 2,000 troops had been raised near Delhi in the King’s name. This brought the total strength of the rebel army to at least 15,000, most of them regulars.
A fascinating insight into the early days of rebel rule in Delhi was provided by Devi Deen, a trooper in the 3rd Light Cavalry, in conversation with a British officer after the mutiny. Devi’s recollections confirm that for a time the mutinous regiments retained their discipline and organization:
When we first came all was quiet, and the regiments did exactly as if they were in cantonments. We heard the British had all been killed. The regiment mounted guards in the Palace and at the Kashmir Gate… Our Resaldar-Major was very strict, and made us turn out as we did in Meerut… After about ten days the King was proclaimed as the Great Mogul. And the day after I arrived I saw him come on an elephant and open the main bazaar… We had our regimental bunnias, and the country people brought in supplies after the King had opened the bazaars.
Before long, the rebels’ preoccupation with money began to undermine their discipline. On 28 May the cavalry and infantry had a ‘violent, abusive altercation over pay’. The cavalry wanted 30 rupees a month, whereas the sepoys were prepared to accept their old pay of 7 rupees. The sowars eventually settled for 20. According to Mainodin Hassan Khan, the mutineers ‘thought more of plunder than of fighting’. He added: ‘The rebels were becoming clamorous for pay. They were really laden with money, but they wished to extort as much more as they could. They threatened to leave the King’s service unless paid, and they proposed that the wealthy men of the city should be ordered to subscribe for their mainenance… Gangs of armed men were collected to stop Sepoys from plundering.’
Such infighting was rife by the time the Rohilkhand mutineers,* commanded by Subedar Bakht Khan, reached Delhi on 2 July. Bakht Khan himself had been prevented from reaching Delhi earlier by the sort of Commissariat difficulties that were inevitable in times of civil disorder: notably the unwillingness of Bareilly bankers to lend funds and the tendency of mahajuns to close their shops. At his first public audience with the King on 2 July, Bakht Khan ‘solicited orders for the employment of his force’. Bahadur Shah replied that his ‘orders were that the inhabitants of the city must not be plundered’, yet up till now they had not been obeyed by the rebel soldiers because he had ‘no one to enforce them’. Hearing this, Bakht ‘offered his services as Commander-in-Chief of the forces, with a view to enforce general discipline’. The King’s response was to grasp his hands ‘in token of friendship’.
Within hours of his arrival at Delhi, Bakht had replaced four ineffectual royal princes – Mirza Mogul, Mirza Kizr Sultan, Mirza Abu Bakr and Mirza Abdulla – at the head of the rebel army, though Mirza Mogul, the King’s eldest surviving son, stayed on as his adjutant-general. One of Bakht’s first acts was to inform the King that if any of the royal princes attempted to plunder the city he would cut off their noses and ears. ‘You have full authority,’ replied the King. ‘Do whatever seems good unto you.’ Bakht also told the King that he had come to Delhi with 400,000 rupees and his men had been given six months’ pay in advance. As such he did not require any financial assistance and would pay the balance of his money into the King’s treasury if the rebels were victorious. Delighted that the Rohilkhand troops would not be a financial burden, the King ordered 4,000 rupees to be distributed among them ‘for festivities’.
The British force in Delhi too was about to have a new commander. On 5 July, two days after yet another assault was postponed, General Barnard died of cholera. His successor was, unfortunately, the ineffectual General Reed, whom Wilson thought more ‘fit for an invalid couch’ than to command an army. By now the British troops on the Ridge were ‘more besieged than besiegers’. As if heat, disease, battle casualties and a lack of supplies were not enough, they also had to contend with the ‘enemy within’. On 2 July some sowars of the 2nd Punjab and 9th Irregular Cavalry were disarmed for inciting the Sikh regiments to mutiny. A company of the 4th Sikh Infantry was also deprived of its weapons. ‘This Company were not Seikhs,’ noted Wilson, ‘but enlisted in the Plains. Some 4 or 5 of them – two of them native officers – were hung. They ought all of them to have been shot, but it is very dreadful having such wretches in our Camp, to do all sorts of mischief while we are repelling attacks from Delhi. I believe our Seikhs and Goorkhas to be as true as steel, but not another Native soldier is to be trusted.’
The truth of this was demonstrated on 9 July when, during the heaviest rebel attack yet, the faithlessness of a picket of 9th Irregulars and the pusillanimity of a troop of Carabiniers enabled a body of the mutinous 8th Irregulars to penetrate to the heart of the European camp. Harriet Tytler, the only European woman still on the Ridge, recalled:
They tore in as if they were mad and passed my bell of arms. Immediately there was a cry from all our men, ‘Treachery, treason.’ The alarm was sounded and in a minute every man was standing, musket in hand, waiting for the word of command, some with their shirt-sleeves tucked up, others without their shoes or socks on, just as they had turned out of bed when off duty. Next moment the word of command came and they were off to meet the enemy, which they did in front of the cantonment cemetery. This was the only battle I ever saw fought with my own eyes. I shall never forget the sight, the glistening of the bayonets even through the smoke as both sides fired. Almost in the twinkling of an eye, all was over. Leaving some fifty of their own men dead, they dashed off.
For not abandoning his outpost when the Carabiniers fled, Lieutenant Hills of the Bengal Horse Artillery was awarded the Victoria Cross. His commander, Major Tombs, was similarly honoured for coming to Hills’s rescue. But everyone knew the real cause of the incursion was the duplicity of the 9th Irregulars. ‘The mistake of leaving an inlet into camp to be guarded by Hindustanis,’ wrote Hervey Greathed, ‘will not again be committed. Brigadier Wilson had in vain protested against it.’
The other rebel attacks on the Ridge that day were also repulsed, but at an overall cost to the British of 40 men killed, 168 wounded and 11 missing. Rebel losses were estimated at more than 500 killed. They could afford such a rate of attrition; the British could not. Second-Lieutenant Chichester summed up the reality of the situation in a letter home on 11 July. ‘Here we are still before the walls of Delhi, fighting hand to hand with the rebels every other day nearly, and they are joined by fresh regiments that have mutinied in different parts of the country every day. I suppose they muster now at Delhi about 30,000 fighting men* very near, but whenever they come out to attack us we kill a frightful number of them while our loss compared to theirs is comparatively small. Yet we cannot afford at the present moment to lose a single man, our strength being 6,000 men.’
On 14 July an even heavier rebel attack was made on the pickets under Hindu Rao’s House and at the Sabzi Mundi. The British remained on the defensive until the afternoon, when a column was formed under Brigadier Showers to dislodge the rebels. Brigadier-General Chamberlain accompanied the column, which had great difficulty in driving the enemy out of the many serais and walled gardens that covered the ground between the Ridge and the city walls. Yet position after position was carried, until the British column found itself in sight of the Lahore Gate. In its eagerness it had gone too far. Musket and artillery fire from the walls inflicted many casualties, and the column was forced to retire, pressed all the way by the emboldened rebels.
Chamberlain was wounded in the advance, hit in the shoulder as he tried to rally the wavering British troops by jumping his horse over a wall lined with sepoys. ‘There is not a braver heart or cooler head in camp,’ commented Hodson, who had also distinguished himself in the fight. ‘His fault is too great hardihood and exposure in the field, and a sometimes too injudicious indifference to his own life or that of his men.’ Archdale Wilson’s assessment was blunter: ‘He ought never to have been there at all.’
Wilson would soon have even more reason to rue Chamberlain’s incapacity because, on 17 July, he became the fourth commander of the Delhi Field Force in three months. Reed had tacitly acknowledged that the task at Delhi was beyond him by agreeing to return to the Punjab to regain his health. Though Wilson was not the next senior officer on the Ridge, Reed nominated him because of his victory at Ghazi-ud-din-Nagar and because he was known to be an active officer who ‘knew his work’. Most of the force approved of the decision. Wilson himself, now a brigadier-general, was not so sure. He described the promotion to his wife as a ‘fearful responsibility’ and ‘knowing as I do my own weakness and incapacity I feel as if I should faint under the burden, but the Lord God… will surely give me strength’.
The pressure to retake Delhi was still immense. Unaware of Barnard’s death, Sir Patrick Grant addressed the following letter to him on 13 July:
The latest tidings from Delhi are dated the 16th June and we learn that it had then been determined to defer the assault until the reinforcements should reach you. I cannot doubt that you had good and sufficient reasons for this delay, but I must tell you that it has already produced incalculable mischief, increasing with every day the capture of Delhi and the destruction of its vile defenders is postponed.
We learn from a letter from Sir John Lawrence, received here today and dated 17th June, that a strong reinforcement of 3,250 men of all arms despatched from the Punjab was expected to be with you on or before the 6th Instant, and a letter of prior date mentions that you had already received abundant supply of ammunition of every description. I most earnestly trust therefore that you will have found yourself in sufficient strength to make your attack, and I can hardly doubt that Delhi has been for some days in your possession.
Six days later, having seen Barnard’s letter of 18 June explaining the reasons for postponing the assault, Grant struck a more conciliatory tone. He assured the long-dead Barnard that he had been wise not to go ahead with the attack. Yet reinforcements since then, wrote Grant, had surely made victory certain and ‘we are in hourly expectation of hearing that you are master of the Imperial City’. He was to be disappointed. The rapidly increasing strength of the rebels had resulted in yet another postponement and Wilson, the latest commander, was thinking more in terms of survival than conquest. Soon after taking command, he wrote to warn Sir John Lawrence that ‘unless speedily reinforced’ by at least two regiments the Delhi Field Force ‘will soon be so reduced by casualties and sickness that nothing will be left but a retreat to Karnal’. Lawrence wired back on the 21st that ‘we can send you off at once seventeen hundred men’* to be followed up by ‘two thousand more’. But the most cheering news was that John Nicholson was on his way.
With the disarmament of the Peshawar garrison and the dispersal of the mutinous 55th in May, Nicholson and Edwardes had felt the frontier to be reasonably secure. The most obvious threat was from Dost Mohammed, the Amir of Afghanistan, who had fought against the British during the Second Sikh War in an effort to recover the Vale of Peshawar. But Dost had recently signed an alliance with the British* that both Edwardes and Nicholson were confident would be honoured. Edwardes was shocked, therefore, to receive a letter from Sir John Lawrence on 11 June that advocated a withdrawal from Peshawar and the Trans-Indus frontier region. This was necessary, said Lawrence, to release British troops and loyal levies for the recapture of Delhi. His proposal was to ‘make a merit of necessity’ by inviting Dost Mohammed to hold the Vale and the Trans-Indus as an ally, with the promise of a permanent occupation once the crisis was over.
Horrified by this show of weakness, Edwardes was moved to remark that had the letter not been in Lawrence’s own handwriting, he ‘would not have credited it’. Having consulted Nicholson and Cotton, he drafted a no-nonsense protest signed by all three: ‘We are unanimously of the opinion that with God’s help we can and will hold Peshawar, let the worst come to the worst, and it would be a fatal policy to abandon it and retire across the Indus. It is the anchor of the Punjab, and if you take it up the whole ship will drift to the sea… As to a friendly transfer of Peshawar to the Afghans, Dost Mohammed would not be a mortal Afghan – he would be an angel – if he did not assume our day to be gone in India, and follow after us as an enemy. Europeans cannot retreat – Kabul would come again!’ Ignoring these objections, Lawrence asked the Governor-General for permission to withdraw from the frontier. Canning’s response in early July was emphatic: ‘Hold on to Peshawar to the last.’ To relinquish it would, he believed, cause the rebellion to spread to southern India: ‘If we were now to abandon territory, no matter how distant, it would be impossible that faith in the permanency of our Rule should not be shaken. The encouragement to join the league against us would be irresistible and immediate; its effect would be felt long before we should secure any material benefit from the force which would be set free by the abandonment.’ Accompanying this letter was a private note of condolence. ‘I cannot put into a letter on public matters,’ wrote Canning, ‘the expression of the deep grief which I feel at the death of your noble-hearted brother [Sir Henry Lawrence]*… There is not a man in India who could have been less well spared at the present moment.’
Nicholson, meanwhile, had replaced Neville Chamberlain as commander of the Movable Column. With this appointment went the temporary rank of brigadier-general, a considerable achievement for a 34-year-old who held only the permanent rank of captain. He left Peshawar on 14 June and caught up with the Movable Column at Jullundur six days later. With him was his personal bodyguard of Indian frontier horsemen. ‘They came out of a personal devotion to Nicholson,’ wrote Ensign Reginald Wilberforce† of the 52nd Light Infantry. ‘They took no pay from the Government, they recognised no head but Nicholson, and him they obeyed with a blind devotion and faithfulness that won the admiration of all who saw them. These men, some 250 in number, mounted on their wiry ponies, surrounded the Column like a web.’ Chief among them was ‘a huge Pathan, black-whiskered and moustachioed; this man never left his [Nicholson’s] side, he slept across the doorway of Nicholson’s tent, so that none could come in save over his body. When Nicholson dined at mess this Pathan stood behind his chair with a cocked revolver in one hand, and allowed none to pass a dish to his master save himself.’ His name was Muhammad Hayat Khan, the son of a man who had saved Nicholson’s life many years earlier. Nicholson had shown his gratitude by appointing the younger Khan as darogah of police in Peshawar and they had been close friends ever since.
Nicholson’s ruthlessness was soon in evidence. On 26 June, near Phillour, he disarmed the two Bengal regiments with the column – the 33rd and 35th Native Infantry – on the grounds that they could not be trusted. The reaction of the two colonels on hearing the fate of their regiments was very different. Sandeman of the 33rd burst into tears, exclaiming that he would answer for the loyalty of his regiment with his life. The 35th’s Younghusband said simply: ‘Thank God!’ Just over a fortnight later the 59th Native Infantry was also disarmed by Nicholson at Amritsar as a precaution. Colonel Boyd, the commanding officer, wrote: ‘Subsequent to being disarmed, two men were found guilty of secreting ammunition, and were executed. The regiment, as a body, have remained passive and obedient throughout.’ That same day, 9 July, Nicholson’s precipitate action seemed justified when the 46th Native Infantry and a wing of the 9th Light Cavalry rose at nearby Sialkot and murdered a number of officers and civilians, including Brigadier Frederick Brind, the station commander, and Dr James Graham, the superintending surgeon.* Having plundered the station as the surviving Europeans huddled in the fort, the mutineers headed for Delhi.
Nicholson heard about the mutiny the following day. His first act was to arrange for the disarming of the other wing of the 9th Light Cavalry that formed part of his column. This took place at nine in the evening, shortly before he set off for Gardaspur to intercept the mutineers with a portion of the 52nd Light Infantry, a battery of horse artillery and his Pathan horsemen. To give his column extra mobility, Nicholson had arranged for the 52nd to be transported in ekkas, small pony-carts capable of carrying four men and a driver. These enabled him to reach Gardaspur, 40 miles north of Amritsar, in eighteen hours. Early next morning, having learnt that the mutineers were in the act of crossing the Ravi River at a ford known as Trimmu Ghat, about nine miles distant, he moved off to confront them. The two forces met about a mile from the river. Warned about Nicholson’s approach by cavalry scouts, the sepoys were drawn up in a line, their right resting on a disused mud fort and their left on a small village, with groups of sowars on either flank.
Nicholson advanced his nine field guns to within 600 yards, but as they prepared for battle the sepoy line fired a volley and then raced forward with fixed bayonets. At the same time the mutinous sowars charged the right of the British line. These twin threats caused the Pathan levies who had advanced with the guns to bolt to the rear, and for a brief moment it seemed as if the British force was about to be overwhelmed. But the men of the 52nd quickly formed squares to receive the enemy horse and the guns managed to open up with grape before the sepoys could reach them. ‘For about ten minutes [the rebels] stood up very well indeed,’ reported Nicholson, ‘many of them advancing boldly up to the very guns. Meanwhile the cavalry had made several rushes in detached parties on our flanks and rear, but had always been repulsed by the file-firing of our infantry.’ The mutineers’ muskets and single cannon could not match the firepower of the British battery and Enfield rifles. Within twenty minutes the rebels were falling back towards the river.
They retreated on to a large island, but could go no further because the water on the other side was too deep. Realizing the mutineers were trapped, Nicholson left a guard at the ford and took the rest of his men back to Gardaspur to await the arrival of enough boats to enable him to assault the island. By the 15th all was ready. The following morning Nicholson and the British infantry crossed over to a point a mile from the rebel position. Screened by thick brushwood, they were upon the mutineers before they could be detected. ‘The real business was over in a few minutes without any check,’ recalled Nicholson, ‘and with a loss to us of only six wounded. A few resolute men among the mutineers died manfully at the gun; the rest fled, and were either slain on the bank or driven into the river.’
Sir John Lawrence was impressed, telling his aides that had other commanders acted with the same vigour as Nicholson, Delhi would long since have fallen. Nicholson was clearly the man for the job, and on 21 July, at a meeting in Lahore, Lawrence ordered him to march the Movable Column to Delhi as quickly as possible. Nicholson left Amritsar on 25 July, and nine days later, somewhere north of Ambala, he received an urgent message from Wilson to hasten his advance because the rebels had rebuilt the bridge over the Najafgarh Canal and were threatening to cut communications to the north. So he left the column at Ambala on 6 August and, travelling by mail-cart, arrived at the Ridge a day later. Having consulted Wilson, he rejoined his column,* which finally reached Delhi on 14 August.
Nicholson’s reinforcements increased the British strength on the Ridge to almost 9,500 men, but 1,500 of them were hors de combat from sickness and wounds. The rebels had more than twice that number. According to one official estimate, compiled from the reports of Indian spies, the number of mutineers inside Delhi at this time was no more than 4,000 horse and 12,000 foot. A further one hundred cavalry and 3,000 infantry were ‘undisciplined levies’ and, in the opinion of the Commissioner of Ambala, ‘of no account whatever’. Contrary to expectations, however, Nicholson’s appearance was not the prelude to a grand assault. For Lawrence had promised yet more troops and a heavy siege train from Ferozepore, and the cautious Wilson was not going to act until they had arrived. He explained his safety-first policy in a letter to his wife of 14 August:
Nicholson joined me with his Force this morning. I have a little more than 5000 Infantry, but I can do nothing towards battering the Town and making a breach until my siege train comes up, which will not be until the beginning of next month. The Mutineers are too much on the alert, for any hope of being able to surprise them and blow open their gates, and even if I could do I do not think it would be good policy as yet, as they would escape out of the city with their light guns, and overrun and harass the whole country. We could spare only a small Brigade to go after them, and they would bolt in every direction. If we can hold them in check until Grant or Havelock come up, they will be unable to escape except as an unarmed rabble.
Sir Colin Campbell’s arrival at Calcutta in mid August coincided with the high-water mark of the rebellion. The outbreaks were still not over, but already more than 60,000 trained troops, two thirds of them regulars of the Bengal Army, had mutinied. While some had lain down their arms and returned to their villages, many more had returned from furlough or disbanded regiments to join the revolt. The rebel ranks had been further swelled by tens of thousands of armed civilians.
British commanders had had their successes: notably Wilson at Ghazi-ud-din-Nagar, Barnard at Badli-ki-Serai, Havelock en route to Cawnpore, and Eyre at Gujraganj and Jagdispur. But these were tactical victories. In a wider, strategic sense, the rebels still held the whip hand. British troops at Delhi, Agra and Lucknow were in a virtual state of siege. Havelock was stalled at Cawnpore, and the revolt in Bihar meant that communications between Calcutta and the crucial North-Western Provinces were intermittent at best. Set-piece battles, moreover, had not always gone the way of the British. At Chinhut, Sasia and Arrah the rebels had humiliated European troops – albeit with a numerical advantage. However, with more British reinforcements on the way, and loyal Indian units of the Bombay and Madras Armies advancing into the disaffected areas of central India, time was running out for the mutineers. The only way they could end British rule for good was by spreading the rebellion across the subcontinent. No ruling Indian princes had yet joined the rebels, though some were wavering. They feared the power of the British and were waiting on events. But if the revolt had spread deep into western and southern India, great princes like the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Maharajas of Indore and Gwalior would have been tempted to join it.
Many of the Company-recruited and European-officered forces that served these princes had already mutinied.* So too had some of the princes’ personal, Indian-officered troops: notably the Raja of Ulwar’s army in May and two of the Maharaja of Indore’s infantry regiments in June. Even the Hyderabad Contingent, nominally part of the Bombay Army, had experienced unrest in June when the Muslim sowars of the 1st Cavalry, based at Aurungabad in the Deccan, refused to ‘fight against their King [of Delhi]’. Major-General Woodburn was sent with a column from Poona to put an end to the disaffection; but his hesitation at a punishment parade enabled one hundred and sixty mutineers to escape, of whom sixty-four were recaptured. Of the three ringleaders sentenced to death, two were shot and the other one blown away from a gun. A British eyewitness described the death of the last: ‘Fire! and in an instant he was blown to atoms. His head flew up into the air some thirty or forty feet – an arm yonder, another yonder, while the gory, reeking trunk fell in a heap beneath the gun. Scarcely had the head and arms fallen to the ground before the carrion birds were glutting themselves upon the warm and mangled flesh, and the whole air was tainted with a most sickening effluvium.’
The danger of a general rising in the Deccan, the heartland of the Marathas, was very real. At Poona there were nightly patrols, and both the post office and treasury were guarded by cavalry. ‘We always go to bed with fear of having our throats cut,’ wrote the wife of a Bombay officer who was with Woodburn’s column. ‘If the Nizam’s Army rise we shall all be obliged to go to Bombay. The mutineers have threatened to burn down Poona and the whole of the Deccan and to murder every European man, woman and child.’ At around the same time as the mutiny at Aurungabad, a plot by sowars of the Nagpur irregular cavalry to rise and murder all the Europeans at Sitabuldi was foiled by loyal Madras troops. The regiment, six hundred strong, was disarmed on 23 June, and three Indian officers were hanged a week later. The only other serious mutiny below the Nerbudda was that of the 27th Bombay Native Infantry at Kolhapur, south of Poona, on 31 July. Raised in 1846, following the conquest of Sind, the regiment had an unusually high proportion of purbias and ‘no record of past warfare to keep it steady’. The mutiny, which was eventually quelled by Lieutenant Kerr’s detachment of Southern Maratha Horse, was thought to be part of an attempt to restore the ancient House of Satara. Of the one hundred and sixty-five mutineers captured by Kerr’s men, more than two thirds were purbias.
By the end of August there had been mutinies at Jhansi, Nowgong, Banda, Gwalior, Indore, Mhow, Sagar and Sehore in central India. Large areas of Bundelkhand, Bhopal and the Sagar and Nerbudda Territories were in rebel hands. On 25 August Prince Firoz Shah, the nephew of the King of Delhi, had been placed on the musnud at Mandsaur in Rajputana; a day later the Green Flag of Muslim revolt was raised and men flocked to join Firoz Shah’s cause. September would see further mutinies at Nagode and Jabalpur, the latter outbreak sparked by the execution of Raja Shankar Shah, a descendant of the Gond Kings of Garha-Mandla, for plotting rebellion with the sepoys of the 52nd Native Infantry.
What prevented the outbreak of rebellion in western and southern India, and enabled the British to regain the upper hand in the central belt, was the departure of trained rebel troops. In far too many cases the mutineers abandoned their stations and headed for the rebel centres of Delhi and Cawnpore, leaving civilian insurgents to oppose a British return. When the sepoys did remain, or entered the region after suffering reverses further north, they showed what redoubtable opponents they could be.
But even regular troops were deficient in three key areas: they lacked a unified command, their officers had no experience of handling large bodies of troops in battle, and their weapons were generally inferior to those used by the British. Under the circumstances, it is surprising that they won any set-piece battles at all. Yet if they had avoided direct confrontation and waged a guerrilla war from the start, severing lines of communication and appearing when least expected, they might well have prevailed. In particular they should have spread the flame of rebellion by marching south. Instead, as if preoccupied by the concept of safety in numbers, they concentrated on a few urban centres – Delhi, Cawnpore and Lucknow – and gave the British time to regroup.
Looking back, few observers realize how close the British came to losing India. They assume that British reinforcements were bound to reconquer the country sooner or later. Yet it is almost impossible to rule any foreign country without the tacit acceptance of a sizeable proportion of its population. Once the majority want you out, as occurred in America during the War of Independence, no amount of military force can save you. This critical mass was almost reached during the Indian mutiny. If the rebellion had spread into western and southern India, some of the ruling princes and significant elements of the Bombay and Madras Armies would have turned against the British, and the game might well have been up. This was still a possibility in August 1857. Yet the aims of most rebels were too localized and disparate; they lacked a George Washington, a leader with the vision to see the wider strategic picture and the military genius to take advantage of it.