Sir Colin Campbell now turned his attention to Fatehgarh, the last rebel-held city in the Doab and the scene of an infamous massacre of Christians in July 1857. The man held responsible for the atrocity was the rebel Nawab of Farrukhabad. But real power at Fatehgarh lay in the hands of the mutinous officers, and there is evidence to suggest that they forced the nawab both to join the rebellion in June and to execute the prisoners a month later. Since then the area around Fatehgarh had been ruled in the nawab’s name, with ex-subedars from Sitapur regiments occupying senior government posts.
By capturing Fatehgarh, Campbell hoped to restore order throughout the Doab and open land communications between the Punjab and Bengal. He was prevented from leaving Cawnpore until 23 December, however, because he had to wait for the return of his transport from Allahabad. On New Year’s Day, 1858, he halted his troops at Gursahaiganj where the road forked to Fatehgarh. His original plan had been to link up with two other columns: Brigadier Walpole’s, which he had sent to clear the country along the left bank of the Jumna as far as Mainpuri; and Brigadier Seaton’s, which was advancing from Delhi. But with no sign of either column, and intelligence that the Nawab of Farrukhabad and 5,000 troops* were approaching the bridge over the Kali Naddi, five miles ahead, Campbell decided to act alone. The following morning, having crossed the river under heavy fire, his men drove the rebels from the nearby village of Khudaganj and captured seven guns. The mopping up was left to the cavalry.
On the line thundered [recalled Fred Roberts, who charged with the 5th Punjab Cavalry], overtaking groups of the enemy, who every now and then turned and fired into us before they could be cut down, or knelt to receive us on their bayonets before discharging their muskets. The chase continued for nearly five miles, until daylight began to fail and we… overtook a batch of mutineers, who faced about and fired into the squadron at close quarters. I saw Younghusband fall, but I could not go to his assistance, as at that moment one of his sowars was in dire peril from a sepoy who was attacking him with his fixed bayonet, and had I not helped the man and disposed of his opponent, he must have been killed.
Moments later Roberts noticed two sepoys making off with a standard. Determined to capture it, he rode after them and ‘while wrenching the staff out of the hands of one of them, whom I cut down, the other put his musket close to my body and fired; fortunately for me it missed fire, and I carried off the standard’. For these two acts of gallantry, Roberts was awarded the Victoria Cross.*
That night the nawab’s beaten forces evacuated the city and station of Fatehgarh in such a hurry that they left the bridge over the Ganges and the valuable gun-carriage factory intact. Campbell’s army entered in triumph the following morning and found ‘what must have been a pretty station… now a heap of ruins’. In the evening Campbell and his staff were invited to dinner by a leading citizen, Najir Khan, a relative of the rebel nawab. However, within twenty-four hours Khan had been arrested on the authority of Mr Power, the new magistrate, for complicity in the nawab’s crimes.
No wild beast could have attracted more attention [wrote Major Anson of the 9th Lancers]. He was for ever being surrounded with soldiers, who were stuffing him with pork and covering him with insults. He was well flogged and his person exposed, which he fought against manfully, and then hung, but as usual the rope was too weak and down he fell and broke his nose; before he recovered his senses he was strung up again and made an end of. He died game, menacing a soldier who rubbed up his nose with, ‘If I had a tulwar in my hand you wouldn’t dare do so.’ He it was who wouldn’t spare our women, and treated them with every possible indignity.
More retribution was to follow. ‘There were fourteen men hung, or rather tortured to death (some of them), in the town here yesterday afternoon,’ wrote Anson. ‘Only fancy, fourteen hanging at the same time close to one another, some dead, and some living, and it being very difficult to distinguish between the two.’
It had been Campbell’s intention to follow up victory at Fatehgarh by crossing over into rebel-held Rohilkhand. He wanted to postpone the reconquest of Oudh until the autumn when it was cooler. But Lord Canning would not agree, pointing out that the ‘political effect of leaving Lucknow in the hands of the rebels would be so mischievous that the city should be taken ere Rohilkhand was invaded’. He wrote to Campbell: ‘Every eye in India is upon Oude, as it was upon Delhi: Oude is not only the rallying place of the sepoys, the place to which they all look, and by the doings in which their own hopes and prospects rise or fall; but it represents a dynasty; there is a king of Oudh “seeking his own”… Oude, and our dealings with it, have been in every native’s mind for the last two years.’ Campbell acquiesced, as he was bound to, but to keep the rebels guessing he remained at Fatehgarh for a month while more troops and guns were brought up to Cawnpore.
In late January, in response to criticisms from England that he should be nearer the scene of action, Canning moved his seat of government to the fort at Allahabad. Campbell met him there a week later to discuss the forthcoming campaign. A vivid description of the Governor-General’s camp inside the fort has been left by William Howard Russell, the celebrated war correspondent, who visited Allahabad a few days later. He recorded:
After a short delay, I was told his Excellency would receive me, and I was introduced to one of those grand tents which would be a palace in the eyes of any field-marshal in Europe. A few servants, in the red and gold of the Viceroy’s livery, were sitting under one of the spacious canvas eaves… There were purdahs of fine matting, and doors, and flaps to pass, ere one could get inside. There soft Persian carpets received the feet in beds of flowers; the partitions of the tent, which was as large as a London saloon, were fitted with glass doors; but I was told afterwards, that Lord Canning had by no means carried tent-luxury to its fullest extent, and that, in fact, as governor-general, he had rather curtailed the usual establishment… I passed in through a partition into a tent where Lord Canning was sitting, surrounded by maps, and boxes, and papers, at a table covered with documents – just as I had first seen him.
During his conference with Campbell, Canning emphasized the importance of according Jung Bahadur’s Gurkhas a prominent role in the capture of Lucknow. Jung Bahadur, the Prime Minister and effective ruler of Nepal, had first offered troops in June 1857. That offer was not taken up by the government until late July, when Nepalese soldiers crossed into the Gorakhpur district and did much to pacify the area around Jaunpur and Azimgarh. Jung Bahadur’s subsequent offer of 8,000 troops and twenty guns to take part in the subjugation of Oudh had been accepted, Canning told Campbell, because there was ‘no immediate hope’ of more soldiers from England and ‘things are not clearing in your part of the world’.
On his return to Cawnpore on 10 February, Campbell named his senior commanders for the forthcoming campaign. The cavalry division went to Hope Grant, the three infantry divisions to Outram, Major-General Sir Edward Lugard and Brigadier-General Robert Walpole, the artillery to Archdale Wilson (recently returned from leave) and the engineers to Colonel Robert Napier* – all men with considerable experience of India. These appointments caused much disquiet among senior officers recently arrived from England. But, as Campbell explained to the Duke of Cambridge, it was impossible for an officer not used to India to ‘weigh the value of intelligence… he cannot judge what are the resources of the country, and he is totally unable to make an estimate for himself of the resistance the enemy opposed to him is likely to offer’.
On 12 February Campbell informed Canning that he had 10,000 men under his immediate command and would be ready to begin operations in Oudh in six days. But he doubted whether Jung Bahadur’s 8,000 men and a separate column of 4,000 British troops, operating under Major-General Franks in the districts south of Oudh, would be able ‘to take part in the fray’ until the 27th. His preference was to delay his own advance on the ground that a combined force would incur fewer casualties; it would also give him time to make Cawnpore more secure. Canning agreed. ‘I am sure that, as matters stand,’ he wrote, ‘we do better to accept the necessity and wait for Jung Bahadoor. It would drive him wild to find himself jockeyed out of all share in the great work of the campaign.’
Campbell began his preliminary operations at Lucknow on 2 March. The rebels, now numbering more than 100,000 armed men,† had greatly strengthened their defences by throwing up a triple line of earthworks from the canal to the Kaisarbagh, anticipating a third assault from the south-east of the city. But Campbell got wind of this and, on the advice of Colonel Napier, decided on a two-pronged attack: the main force would advance across the canal near La Martinière and head straight for the Kaisarbagh, while Outram’s division crossed the Gumti and outflanked the rebel positions to the east. The Alambagh and Nepalese forces were expected to hem in the western side of the city and, with luck, would link up with Outram’s troops to prevent any rebels escaping to the north.
The Dilkusha was occupied on the 3rd. Two days later Major-General Franks arrived with his combined Euro-Nepalese force and, that night, Outram’s column* crossed two pontoon bridges over the Gumti near Bibiapur. After marching north for about two miles, Outram’s men engaged a force of rebel cavalry and drove them back with artillery fire. A regiment of British horse – the Bays† – was sent in pursuit, but the broken nature of the ground impeded its progress. It eventually became a target for a battery of heavy rebel guns and was forced to beat a hasty retreat without its commander, Major Percy Smith, who was killed. That afternoon, Outram set up his camp on the Faizabad road, about half a mile from the village of Chinhut. The next two days were spent reconnoitring the rebel position across the river. On 8 March Campbell and Mansfield arrived to discuss a combined assault the following day.
Outram’s task was to capture the Chakar Kothi, the racecourse bandstand, just across the river from the palace area of the city, so that his heavy guns could be sited on high ground to the north. This was accomplished on 9 March by the 1st Bengal Fusiliers and a regiment of Sikhs, but at a cost of one officer and twenty men. Most of the casualties were inflicted by a small group of desperate sepoys who were holding out in one of the downstairs rooms. Lieutenant Majendie, a British gunner, recalled:
At last, General Outram, seeing that it was death to any one to attempt to enter, and thinking that enough lives had been sacrificed in the attempt, ordered some guns to be brought to bear on to the house; five accordingly came into action, and fired about twenty shells, in quick succession, at the windows and doorways of the building, and as the smoke of the last round cleared away, the Sikhs, who had been held in readiness for the purpose, received the signal, and dashing forward entered the house en masse. It was most exciting to see them racing up to the place, where, when they reached it, there was for a moment a confused scrambling at the doorways, then a sharp report or two, then a sort of shout and scuffling, then bang! bang! bang! sharp and distinct, and finally there burst from the building, with loud yells, a crowd of Sikhs bearing among them the sole survivor of this garrison.
The Sikhs were angry at losing a popular officer, Lieutenant Anderson, but nothing can excuse the barbarity of their revenge on this lone sepoy. ‘Seizing him by the two legs,’ wrote Majendie, ‘they attempted to tear him in two! Failing in this, they dragged him along by the legs, stabbing him in the face with their bayonets as they went. I could see the poor wretch writhing as the blows fell upon him, and could hear his moans as his captors dug the sharp bayonets into his lacerated and trampled body, while his blood, trickling down, dyed the white sand over which he was being dragged.’ He added:
But the worst was yet to come: while still alive, though faint and feeble from his many wounds, he was deliberately placed upon a small fire of dry sticks, which had been improvised for the purpose, and there held down, in spite of his dying struggles, which, becoming weaker and more feeble every moment, were, from their very faintness and futile desperation, cruel to behold. Once during this frightful operation, the wretched victim, maddened by pain, managed to break away from his tormentors, and, already horribly burnt, fled a short distance, but he was immediately brought back and placed upon the fire, and there held till his life was extinct.
Writing later, Majendie was appalled that ‘in this nineteenth century, with its boasted civilization and humanity, a human being should lie roasting and consuming to death, while Englishmen and Sikhs, gathered in little knots around, looked calmly on’. Yet so infuriated were the Sikhs by Anderson’s death that neither he nor any other officer dared to intervene.
Lieutenant Montagu Hall was also present and his account barely mentions the incident. ‘For some reason,’ he wrote, ‘the Sikhs were particularly enraged against [the sepoys] and catching one of them they roasted him alive.’ He added:
While this was going on on our side of the river the Commander-in-Chief had advanced on his side and taken the Martinière and opened a heavy artillery fire on the enemy’s entrenchments. The position we had taken completely enfiladed these works and we could see right into them and [Lieutenant] Butler, observing that the enemy had vacated their position and that the Chief was pounding away at empty entrenchments, swam across the river and by himself entered the entrenchments and mounting the parapet waved a handkerchief to intimate that the works were in our possession. It was a good day’s work and practically decided the fate of Lucknow, for our advance had turned the flanks of the enemy position and rendered utterly useless all the defensive works which they had during the last three months erected to withstand our advance.
Two days later, as Outram’s troops attacked positions covering the iron and stone bridges and his batteries pounded the rebels’ second line of defence, Hope Grant and Roberts rode across the river to see how Lugard’s assault on the Begum Kothi* was progressing. Their arrival at Campbell’s headquarters coincided with a ‘visit of ceremony’ by Jung Bahadur. In honour of the occasion, Campbell had changed from his ‘usual workman-like costume’ to full dress-uniform. But he was outdone by the Gurkha prince, who was ‘most gorgeously attired, with magnificent jewels in his turban, round his neck, and on his coat’. Not long after Jung’s arrival, word came that the assault on the Begum Kothi had been successful.
No fewer than six hundred rebels were killed in the brutal hand-to-hand fighting at the Begum Kothi. British casualties were ‘nothing in proportion to those of the enemy’, but they did include William Hodson, who had been visiting Campbell’s headquarters when the signal-gun announced the attack. He immediately mounted his horse and rode off with his orderly, a powerful Sikh by the name of Nihal Singh, in the direction of Banks’s House. They arrived as the storming party was about to set off, and so fell in with it. Once the breach had been gained, the troops fanned out to search for sepoys. Hodson did likewise, kicking open a door with the words, ‘I wonder if there is anyone in this house.’ As he entered the dark room he was shot by a musket-ball that passed through his liver and out of his back. He staggered backwards for a few paces, and then fell, at which point some Highlanders rushed into the room and bayoneted the lone sepoy. Hodson was carried by his orderly to a doolie and then taken back to Banks’s House, where his wound was dressed. Dr Anderson, his regimental surgeon, finally reached him at ten that night, four and a half hours after he had been hit. Anderson recorded:
I lay beside him on the ground all night, holding his hand, on account of the great pain he suffered. He was very weak when I came, but by means of brandy and other stimulants he rallied wonderfully and slept for an hour or two during the night. At daybreak he was much better, his hands were warm and his pulse was good… He drank two cups of tea and said he felt very well… About 9 o’clock I had the doolie lifted into a room which I had got cleared out, where he was much quieter. About 10 o’clock however the bleeding came on profusely again, and he rapidly became worse. I then told him that recovery was hopeless. He sent for Col. [Robert] Napier to whom he gave directions about his property and business matters and a message to Mrs Hodson. He rapidly sank and died at 1.25 p.m. on the 12th March.
Hodson’s death was much regretted by his fellow soldiers. Sir Colin Campbell wrote to Mrs Hodson: ‘I followed your noble husband to the grave myself, to mark in the most public manner my respect and esteem for the most brilliant soldier under my command, and one whom I was proud to call my friend.’ ‘A more daring, fearless, brave man never existed,’ commented Montagu Hall. ‘Danger was to him a source of perfect delight.’ Arthur Lang lamented the death of ‘the finest Cavalry and “Intelligence” officer in the army’, but added: ‘He had no right to be at the Begum Kothi.’ Archdale Wilson made the same comment in a letter to his wife: ‘He should have been 5 miles off with his Horse.’ From such comments arose the rumour, avidly circulated by his enemies, that Hodson had been killed in the act of looting. Roberts, who was not a particular friend of Hodson, rejected this charge. ‘Hodson could not have been looting,’ he wrote, ‘as he was wounded almost as soon as he reached the palace.’ But even if Hodson had been looking for loot, and there is no evidence that he was, it was hardly the ‘crime’ that some implied. Looting, by both officers and men, was commonplace during the the capture of Lucknow, not least because of the government’s failure to honour Wilson’s promise to distribute prize money for the booty taken at Delhi.
On 13 March Lugard’s division was relieved by Franks’s, while Jung Bahadur’s Gurkhas were put into the line between Banks’s House and the Charbagh Bridge. The following morning one of Franks’s brigades captured the Imambara, a large mosque between the Begum Kothi and the Kaisarbagh. It was not Campbell’s intention to advance beyond the Imambara that day, but so close was the pursuit of the fleeing rebels that the storming party soon found themselves in a building overlooking the Kaisarbagh. Franks wisely decided to follow up his success by ordering the troops occupying the Sikandarbagh and Shah Najaf to advance and, by nightfall, the Kaisarbagh, the mess house and numerous other buildings in between were in his possession. ‘In camp they would not for some time believe that we had the Kaisar Bagh,’ wrote Arthur Lang, who, with Brayser and twenty of his Sikhs, reached the furthest point of the advance.
Our carrying it all so fast was a glorious piece of pluck and luck. It was a splendid palace: magnificent and gorgeous, yet much more tasteful than most native buildings. Such jolly gardens, with marble honeycombed arbours, marble canals and high bridges, and such loot – jewellery and shawls, gold and silks! I was knee deep in valuables… A man held up a bag of jewels – a bag as big as his head – and said: ‘Take a share, sir. Take this.’ Like a fool I came up magnanimous and rejected everything! I took some handsome tulwars which I stuck in my belt. One officer in the tent next to mine has upwards of 500,000 rupees worth of diamonds, pearls and rubies! I never saw such precious stones as I have here.
William Russell, the first civilian into the Kaisarbagh, was appalled by the indiscipline of the British soldiers:
At every door [he noted in his diary] there is an eager crowd, smashing the panels with the stocks of their firelocks, or breaking the fastenings by discharges of their weapons… Here and there the invaders have forced their way into the long corridors, and you hear the musketry rattling inside; the crash of glass, the shouts and yells of the combatants, and little jets of smoke curl out of the closed lattices. Lying amid the orange-groves are dead and dying sepoys; and the white statues are reddened with blood. Leaning against a smiling venus is a British soldier shot through the neck, gasping, and at every gasp bleeding to death! Here and there officers are running to and fro after their men, persuading or threatening in vain. From the broken portals issue soldiers laden with loot or plunder. Shawls, rich tapestry, gold and silver brocade, caskets of jewels, arms, splendid dresses. The men are wild with fury and lust for gold – literally drunk with plunder. Some come out with china vases or mirrors, dash them to pieces on the ground, and return to seek more valuable booty.
Despite all the successes that day, a great opportunity was missed. Outram, who had been kept informed of Franks’s progress by field telegraph, offered to assist him by advancing across the Gumti with his three brigades. Mansfield’s extraordinary response was that he might cross the iron bridge, but he was not to do so if he thought he would lose ‘a single man’. Outram took this injunction literally and stayed where he was – with disastrous consequences. Fred Roberts wrote:
The bridge, no doubt, was strongly held, but with the numerous guns which Outram could have brought to bear upon its defenders its passage could have been forced without serious loss; the enemy’s retreat would have been cut off, and Franks’s victory would have been rendered complete, which it certainly was not, owing to Outram’s hands having been so effectually tied.
Lucknow was practically in our hands on the evening of the 14th March, but the rebels escaped with comparatively slight punishment… Sir Colin saw his mistake… too late. The next day orders were issued for the Cavalry to follow up the mutineers, who were understood to have fled in a northerly direction. One brigade under Campbell (the Colonel of the Bays) was directed to proceed to Sandila, and another, under Hope Grant, towards Sitapur. But the enemy was not seen by either.
Vibart could not understand why the stone bridge, which had been in Outram’s possession, was abandoned.
We had the intense mortification of seeing, from our position at their iron bridge, several thousands of mutineers quietly defiling over it… thus making good their escape to Fyzabad and the heart of Oudh with scarcely any molestation on our part. A few shells, it is true, were occasionally fired at them from a couple of field guns posted at the iron bridge, but these mostly burst over their heads without inflicting any damage. I think I am not wrong in saying that it was generally considered that the wholesale escape of the rebels on this occasion, when they might have been so easily circumvented and destroyed, had Sir Colin Campbell willed it, was the one blot on his otherwise masterly tactics by which the capture of the fortified city of Lucknow… was effected.
Not quite. As late as 19 March the Commander-in-Chief threw away another chance to intercept a large body of rebels by misusing his cavalry. ‘For instead of both brigades being collected on the Lucknow bank of the river,’ wrote Roberts, ‘which was now the sole line of retreat open to the enemy (the bridges being in our possession), only one (Campbell’s) was sent there.’ The other brigade, under Hope Grant, was ordered to take up its old position on the opposite side of the Gumti. Only Colonel William Campbell’s brigade, therefore, was in a position to intervene when Outram’s division drove 9,000 rebels – under Begum Hazrat Mahal, her lover Mammu Khan and the boy-King Birjis Qadr – from the Musabagh, a large palace four miles north of the city, on 19 March. Even then Colonel Campbell failed to act. The official explanation was that he lost his way. One of his officers explained why: ‘He moved his force in utter disregard of the statement of his guides, in opposition to the protestations and explanations of all to whose information and advice he was bound to listen.’ Yet his commander, Sir Colin Campbell, must take the major share of the blame: not only for dividing his cavalry but for giving such a critical task to a Queen’s officer who was new to India and could not understand his guides. What might have been achieved was demonstrated by two squadrons of 9th Lancers with Outram’s force: they chased the rebels for four miles, killing a hundred and capturing four guns.
The final action at Lucknow took place on 21 March when a large rebel force, under the Maulvi of Faizabad, was driven from a fortified house in the centre of the city by the 93rd Highlanders and 4th Punjab Rifles. This time Campbell’s brigade of cavalry was ready, and a great many rebels were killed during the six-mile chase that ensued. The Maulvi, however, was not among them.
Sir Colin Campbell’s general unwillingness to cut off the rebels’ line of retreat, or to pursue them with any vigour, was probably deliberate. General Mansfield said as much when he asked: ‘What is the use of intercepting a desperate soldiery whose only wish was to escape?’ Certainly Campbell, who had seen more than enough butchery in the Crimea, was determined to keep his casualties to a minimum. And in many ways he succeeded: in twenty days’ fighting at Lucknow he lost 127 men killed and 595 wounded; by contrast, British casualties at Delhi, where the attacking force was a third as large, were 1,674 killed and wounded over thirteen days (8–20 September 1857). Yet Campbell’s parsimony was to reap a bitter harvest: the escape of so many mutineers from Lucknow meant that the flames of rebellion in Oudh and neighbouring Rohilkhand were not finally extinguished for a further twelve months, and many thousands of British lives were lost as a result.*
Shortly before the final assault on Lucknow, a five-year-old English girl was smuggled into the British camp at the Alumbagh by an Indian horseman. Her name was Louisa Orr and her mother, Annie, was still being held with another English woman, Madeline Jackson, in a house on the outskirts of the city. Every effort was made to secure the release of these captives but without success, until a letter stating their location was handed to two British officers, Captain Carstairs McNeill and Lieutenant Bogle. Accompanied by a detachment of Gurkhas, the pair went straight to the house in question and, having driven off the rebel guard, carried them to safety.
Madeline Jackson later wrote an account of their tragic experiences. She and her fellow fugitives from Sitapur – her brother Mountstuart, Lieutenant Barnes, Quartermaster-Sergeant Morton and little Sophie Christian, the daughter of the commissioner – had remained with the Orrs in the jungle near Kutchiani until the autumn of 1857. During that time their protector Loni Singh, the Raja of Mithauli, twice defied the rebel government’s demand to send them into Lucknow. But on 20 October, when the demand was made for a third time, he agreed because Havelock’s failure to retake Lucknow had convinced him that the ‘English would not conquer’. The fugitives were handed over to a party of mutineers and taken into Lucknow in the back of two bullock-carts, the men in chains. A large, hostile crowd impeded their progress, and they were forced to walk the last few hundred yards to the Kaisarbagh through a gauntlet of insults and blows.
For almost a month they were kept in a small apartment in the Kaisarbagh, expecting every day to be their last. Finally, on 14 November, as Sir Colin Campbell’s relieving force fought its way into the Dilkusha, Mammu Khan received Raja Jai Lal Singh’s permission to execute the male prisoners. Mammu also wanted to kill the women, but the Maulvi of Faizabad stopped him, ‘saying no success attended them because women were killed, and that we were the only ones left and must be kept as hostages’. The task of killing the men was given to a squad of sepoys from the 71st Native Infantry. They entered the prisoners’ room and told the men to prepare to leave. ‘My dear brother kissed me and we all said goodbye,’ remembered Madeline. ‘The last I saw they were tying their hands, and Mountstuart was resisting. I rushed to him, but the Sepoys pushed me back and drew a curtain, and I don’t know what happened. I suppose I fainted, for I woke up and found myself on a sofa and Mrs Orr pouring water over me.’ She never saw her brother again. He, Orr, Barnes and Morton were taken into the courtyard outside and shot.
All this time little Sophie Christian was suffering from dysentery. A few days after the men were executed, her condition worsened. ‘I did not understand,’ wrote Madeline, ‘but Mrs Orr at once saw she was going and laid her on a rezai in the open air. The natives brought one of their priests to say prayers over her, and bless a cup of water which they gave her, and said she would be well; – but she only breathed hard a little and went to sleep, poor little darling. I had no idea she was so ill and was heart broken. Mrs Orr sent word by Wajid Ali, the headman who took care of us and all the native ladies in the Kaiser Bagh. He came and ordered people to bury her, and at night they took her away.’ Madeline was the hardest hit by Sophie’s death. Only by spending so much time caring for the child had she been able to blank out the horror of her predicament. Now, with ‘no-one to do anything for’, she became apathetic and depressed. But worse was to come when one of the guards laughingly told her that she looked like a girl who had been dragged by her hair into a large square at Lucknow before being butchered with a sword. Her worst fears were soon confirmed: the victim was her sister Georgina, executed with a number of other Christians at the time of Havelock’s first relief. With Mrs Orr’s support, however, Madeline gradually regained the will to live.
In the New Year, Wajid Ali moved the three remaining prisoners ‘to another house and gave us native clothes to wear, as it was safer’. He told Madeline that it was the house her sister had been held in before she was killed. She looked everywhere to see if Georgina had left a message on the walls, ‘but there was nothing’. She wrote:
Now we began to hear rumours that the English troops were close and would soon storm the place, – letters were sent and received, and Wajid Ali knew the rewards offered for us, but seemed very hopeless of saving us. Then he arranged to send little Loui Orr to the camp. She was dressed like a native, her face, feet and hands stained, and was carried out of the house like a bundle of clothes on the ayah’s back. She was a very slight child, could speak the language perfectly, and knew she was to pretend she was the Ayah’s sick child. Then the Ayah made her over to a sowar who was to say she had smallpox, and he rode off with her to the English camp. He was stopped by natives several times, but at the word ‘smallpox’ they left him, and she was got safely in – and Mrs Orr got a letter from her brother-in-law; but those two or three days were dreadful for the poor mother.
As the British assault progressed, and shells began to fall uncomfortably close to where they were being held, Madeline and Mrs Orr were moved to ‘a big house on the outskirts where the Court Ladies and Wajid Ali’s wives had been taken’. There they remained until Wajid managed to get a letter through to the British. The first Madeline knew about a rescue attempt was the sound of gunshots outside, followed by footsteps on the stairs.
I flew out to see what was happening, and there was a tall Englishman! ‘We are saved,’ I called out to Mrs Orr. He came in and another Englishman ran up, – Captain McNeill and Mr Bogle. They said, ‘Are you Miss Jackson and Mrs Orr?’ – ‘Come at once’… Mr Bogle was left to take care of Wajid Ali and the Court ladies and the rest. Capt. McNeill came with us and a lot of little ghoorkas, and carried us off, up and down ravines like cats, and we were in the English Camp – saved! It seemed such an impossible thing! English soldiers rushed up to greet us. Sir Colin Campbell and the Ghoorka Chief and a lot of officers came and shook hands with us. Telegrams were sent to England at once and to Calcutta. They asked me who I wanted sent to in India, and I burst into tears, and said all mine were killed.
In fact she had one relation left. Her cousin, Elphinstone Jackson, was a High Court judge in Calcutta. They later married.
‘The capture of Lucknow,’ wrote Fred Roberts, ‘though not of such supreme importance in its consequences as the taking of Delhi, must have convinced the rebels that their cause was now hopeless. It is true that Jhansi had not yet fallen, and that the rest of Oudh, Rohilkhand, and the greater part of Central India remained to be conquered, but there was no very important city in the hands of the enemy, and the subjugation of the country was felt to be merely a matter of time.’ He knew, of course, that the balance of trained troops had tipped decisively in the British favour. By April 1858 reinforcements had increased the number of European soldiers in India to 96,000, supported by a similar number of ‘loyal’ Indian troops, including many new levies from the Punjab. The total number of mutineers (as opposed to armed civilians), even at the outset of the rebellion, was never more than about 60,000.
But the task of completing the pacification of India would take much longer than many people expected, particularly in Oudh. Sir Colin Campbell must bear some responsibility for his failure to prevent the bulk of the rebels at Lucknow from escaping into the countryside. An even more important factor, however, was Lord Canning’s ‘Oudh Proclamation’, which was made public by Sir James Outram, chief commissioner, on 14 March 1857. The proclamation’s main provision was the confiscation of all ‘proprietory right in the soil of the Province’ to the British government ‘which will dispose of that right in such manner as it may seem fitting’. Only six minor landholders* – those who had been ‘steadfast in their allegiance’ – would be re-established in the possessions they held prior to annexation. All the rest – including the most powerful taluqdars like Man Singh, Lal Madho Singh and Beni Madho – would be dispossessed. Their lives and those of their followers were to be spared if they made ‘immediate submission’ to the chief commissioner, but only if their hands were ‘not stained with English blood’. Any ‘further indulgence’ would be at the discretion of the British government.
Sir James Outram’s initial reaction, on receiving the draft text in early March, was that the proclamation was far too severe. It was his ‘firm conviction’, he told Canning, ‘that as soon as the chiefs and talookdars become acquainted with the determination of Government to confiscate their rights, they will betake themselves at once to their domains, and prepare for a desperate and prolonged resistance’. He urged instead that ‘not only should complete pardon be offered to all (except those concerned in murders) but that it should be declared that upon their coming in they should be secure in all their old possessions, i.e. not only those which they held when the mutinies broke out, but those which they held under the old Oude Government, and some of which they were compelled to disgorge when we took the country’. Canning, however, ‘flatly refused’ Outram’s proposal on the grounds that it would make the taluqdars‘so much the better for having rebelled, and this without waiting for any sign of submission on their part’. His only concession was to add a further sentence to the original text, stating that he would ‘be ready to view liberally the claims’ of those who were quick to submit to British authority.
Outram’s was not the only influential voice urging leniency in Oudh. Sir John Lawrence had gone even further, Canning told Lord Granville, by ‘advocating an amnesty to the mutineers in Oude (not the rebels only), literally before a dozen of them had been brought to justice’. Once again Canning had stood his ground. ‘I do not want more of general hanging and shooting,’ he wrote, ‘but I do intend that large numbers of those men shall be transported… and that those who remain shall understand that mutiny is not a game in which, if they get safely through the first hot scurry, they may reckon upon escaping scot-free.’
By refusing to moderate his proclamation, Canning was at odds with most opinion on the ground. ‘I have not heard one voice raised in its defence,’ wrote Russell from Campbell’s headquarters on 22 March, ‘and even those who are habitually silent, now open their mouths to condemn a policy which must perpetuate the rebellion in Oudh. In fact, unless there be some modification of the general terms of the Proclamation, it will be but irritamenta malorum to issue it.’ Outram was in complete agreement. ‘The Proclamation,’ he wrote to Canning on 20 March, ‘has not been attended hitherto with the slightest effect, although the city itself is beginning to be populated, not however I fear from the inducements held out by your Lordship, but in consequence of the Proclamation issued by the Commander-in-Chief, that the town would be bombarded if the inhabitants did not open their shops.’ Under the circumstances, Outram was anxious to take up his new appointment as military member of the Governor-General’s Council as soon as possible. Canning gave his consent, and Outram was replaced by Robert Montgomery, the man who had saved Lahore, on 3 April. Within three weeks Montgomery was able to report that twenty-six principal taluqdars had come in or sent their agents on their behalf. A month later he wrote: ‘Every hour appearances improve, & a very large proportion of the land-holders have tendered their allegiance by letter; and many personally.’
But much of this initial momentum was halted by a military setback in Rohilkhand. With Lucknow in his hands, Campbell wanted to concentrate on bringing the rest of Oudh to heel. He also preferred to wait until the hot season was over before embarking on any fresh campaigns. But he was overruled by Canning on the political grounds that Rohilkhand contained a significant number of pro-British Hindus who were anxious to be released from Muslim rule, particularly that of Khan Bahadur Khan at Bareilly. So on 7 April Campbell sent a sizeable British column, including three Highland regiments, into Rohilkhand from the west of Oudh. It was commanded by Major-General Walpole, whose orders were to link up with two separate columns entering the province from Bulandshahr and Rurki respectively. Unfortunately Walpole was not a popular choice as commander. ‘We are surprised that Sir Colin trusts his Highlanders to Walpole,’ wrote Russell the day before the column departed. Dr Hadow was more explicit in his criticism, describing Walpole as a ‘great dolt’ and noting that the whole army was ‘horribly disgusted’ by his appointment. And with good reason. On the ninth day of his leisurely march into Rohilkhand, Walpole came upon the rebel-held fort of Ruiya. He had been told by a trooper of Hodson’s Horse who had escaped from the fort that the local chief, Nirput Singh, had only about five hundred men and would certainly retire after making a show of resistance. But Walpole refused to believe him and decided, instead, to take the fort by a frontal assault without making any preliminary reconnaissance. He failed to discover, therefore, that the western and southern walls of the fort were weak and incapable of sustained defence. Ensign Glascock of the 79th Highlanders wrote later:
We were kept under the walls of the fort under heavy fire, on the strongest side of the place, nearly the whole day. At last, being tired himself, I presume, with doing nothing, the General ordered two companies of the 42nd Highlanders to storm the place alone, while we looked on. Also two companies of a Sikh regiment were sent up but these poor fellows were unable to scale the steep sides of the mud fort, though many tried to fall back into the muddy ditch pursued by many a bullet. At length, seeing that the efforts of these fellows were useless, Walpole sent Brigadier Adrian Hope to recall them. Endeavouring to do so, he received his death wound… Towards evening the whole force was withdrawn – to give, I suppose, the rebels a chance of escape which of course they availed themselves of, as the fort was evacuated by them during the night, and was found quite empty and deserted the next morning. We halted there three days, to bury the dead. The whole force followed Hope’s body to the grave.
Six officers and one hundred and twelve men were killed and wounded in the action. The reaction of one sapper officer to the news was typical. Walpole ‘is a poor incompetent wretch,’ he noted in his diary, ‘and I hope Sir Colin’s strong arm will give him the chastisement he so rightly deserves’.
In the event, Walpole retained his command and made a better fist of subsequent engagements; as did the Commander-in-Chief when he took control of all British troops in Rohilkhand in late April, liberating Shahjahanpur and then defeating Khan Bahadur Khan outside Bareilly on 5 May 1858. But, as Montgomery told Canning in late May, Walpole’s defeat at Ruiya, in conjunction with Hope Grant’s ‘retrograde movement’ in the Doab and the arrival in Oudh of armed fugitives from Rohilkhand, meant that the pacification of Oudh was not going as well as he had hoped. There were almost seven hundred taluqdars of varying importance in Oudh and it was undoubtedly the severity of Canning’s proclamation, as well as the military situation, that prevented many of them from submitting sooner. On the other hand, only eight had had their estates confiscated by the time Montgomery left Oudh in 1861: the rental value of these estates ranged from 10,000 to 180,000 rupees a year. One other case was pending, and smaller estates to a total value of 30,000 rupees had also been seized. In most other cases, the taluqdars were given back the property they had held prior to annexation. Montgomery had followed the spirit, rather than the letter, of the proclamation.
The criticism of Canning’s proclamation was, if anything, even harsher in England. This was partly because Palmerston was no longer in power. He had been forced to resign in February when an anti-terrorist measure – inspired by the attempted assassination of Napoleon III – was defeated by eighty-four members of his own party. He was succeeded by the Earl of Derby’s minority Tory government, with Benjamin Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the Commons and Lord Ellenborough, the former Governor-General, replacing Robert Vernon Smith as President of the Board of Control. Both Disraeli and Ellenborough criticized Canning in Parliament, but it was the latter’s coruscating attack on Dalhousie and Canning’s recent policy with regard to Oudh, in the form of a secret dispatch of 19 April, that brought matters to a head. Ellenborough had failed to discuss the dispatch with his Cabinet colleagues and, once that fact became public, he was left with no option but to resign. The day he did so, 10 May 1858, The Times left its readers in no doubt as to where its sympathy lay:
No statesman is entitled to more generous consideration from the Government, the Parliament, and the people of England than LORD CANNING. He met the catastrophe of the Sepoy revolt with unshrinking firmness. Feebly supported by his Council, bitterly thwarted and calumniated by the English community of Calcutta, he neither allowed himself to be goaded into acts of severity by the frantic urgency of the European community, nor terrified by massacres and reverses into overtures of undignified concession.