The man upon whose shoulders the survival of British India would depend during the dark days of 1857 was Dalhousie’s successor, Lord Canning. Born in 1812, the third son of George Canning whose sudden death as Prime Minister in 1827 prompted King George IV to raise his widow to the rank of viscountess, Charles (‘Carlo’) Canning was still at Eton when his last surviving brother was drowned and he became heir to his mother’s title and sizeable fortune in 1828. He continued his education at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was part of a brilliant set that included William Gladstone, Sidney Herbert, Robert Vernon Smith and the future Lords Dalhousie, Elgin, Cardwell and Granville, and from which he graduated in 1833 with a first in Classics and a second in Mathematics. Two years later he married Charlotte Stuart, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Lord Stuart de Rothesay, but the union would remain childless.
In 1836 Canning followed in his father’s footsteps by entering the House of Commons as a Tory MP. Within a year his mother’s death had elevated him to the upper chamber and relieved him of the expensive and time-consuming business of re-election. He served as a diligent junior minister in the governments of Sir Robert Peel, Lord Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston. But his consistent failure to achieve senior Cabinet status was probably the main reason why he accepted Palmerston’s offer to succeed Lord Dalhousie as Governor-General of India in 1855. There was also the financial incentive: the Governor-General received a salary of £25,000 a year (£1.25 million today), out of which he had to pay for his personal servants; the Company provided for the upkeep of his two official residences at Calcutta and Barrackpore, paid the salaries of most of his household staff and defrayed the cost of the annual ball to celebrate the Queen’s birthday. Lord Ellenborough believed a prudent Governor-General could save £1,000 a month. Dalhousie considered such a figure to be optimistic, but during his eight-year tenure he still managed to accumulate enough money to pay off a ‘large debt’, buy a cotton mill and leave himself with ‘about £7000 of savings in hand’.
Canning was under no illusions as to the potential for trouble in India. ‘I wish for a peaceful term of office,’ he told the Court of Directors at a farewell banquet, ‘but… we must not forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise, at first no bigger than a man’s hand, but which, growing larger and larger, may at last threaten to burst and overwhelm us with ruin.’
Canning’s closest friend was Lord Granville, the Lord President of the Council,* whom he had known since childhood. The two agreed to correspond and Granville was given permission by both the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, and the Queen to include Cabinet secrets in his letters to India. He later wrote this revealing sketch of Canning:
He was handsome, with singularly fine eyes… He had extraordinary powers of continuous work for months and years, when the occasion arose, together with a facility for being perfectly idle for long periods, hardly looking at a newspaper… He was of temperate habits, but on one solitary occasion, he rather exceeded at a dinner at The Angel, and I found him in his rooms kneeling before his candle, praying it to light itself… He inherited from his father a strong sense of the ridiculous; but his fun, bubbling over at the moment, was never ill-natured… His departure [for India] and that of the beautiful and clever Lady Canning created a great void in a very intimate society.
Canning, his wife and her two maids left London for Paris on 26 November 1855. After an audience with Napoleon III, they travelled by train through France and endured a stormy passage across the Mediterranean in the steamship Caradoc. At Alexandria they were lavishly entertained by the corrupt Egyptian government of Said Pasha; leisurely expeditions were arranged to Luxor, the Valley of the Kings and the great rock temple of Medinet Hebu. Early in the New Year the Cannings re-embarked at Suez on the Indian ship Feroze and finally reached Calcutta – via Bombay, Ceylon and Madras – in late February 1856.
The city of Calcutta was situated on a mud ridge beside the Hooghly River, the westernmost channel of the Ganges Delta. It had been chosen as the site of a British trading post in 1690 because, at 80 miles from the sea, it was the furthest point that ocean-going ships could reach. A young British lieutenant described his river-borne approach to the city in 1857:
More cocoa and palm trees on the banks; more tangled jungle; more mud villages; more sly creeks; more white spectral forms; more naked children; till the ever-twisting river discloses to our view scenery of a somewhat more civilized description: a house!… then a bit more jungle, then another house! – two! – three! opening upon us in quick succession as we enter ‘Garden Reach,’ till the banks present one long vista of pretty villas, with their green verandahs, looking bright and pleasant in the warm sun… English faces peep from the windows, ayahs (native nurses) carrying English children stroll about the beautiful gardens which stretch down to the water’s edge, and so rapid has been the transition from barbarous wilds to civilized scenes, that one can hardly credit that the eye… was but five minutes since gazing on rude mud villages, surrounded by nought save the dense and savage jungle.
Gazing through a tangle of shipping – from ‘long, low river steamers’ to ‘gun-boats, fishing boats, beautiful clipper ships, huge merchantmen, still larger transports, noble Peninsular and Oriental steamers, and stately men-of-war’ – the lieutenant’s eye was ‘forcibly arrested by the vast parapets’ of Fort William, the citadel built to defend the original settlement, with its ‘noble outline, its scientifically traced ditches, and its long white row of barracks, but half visible above the green fortifications’. He also noted, stretching away from the fort along the banks of the river, ‘the “Chowringee,” or immense Maidan, which forms the Hyde Park, the Rotten-row of Calcutta’. He was struck by the bustle and grandeur of the city, and by the contrast between its European and Indian quarters. He wrote:
First, by its position, beauty, and size, stands the noble structure of Government House, while around it, as though paying it homage, gather those hundreds of smaller buildings – the clubs, the residences of the rich merchants, the public offices, the palatial hotels, the magnificent shops, the extensive warehouses, the churches and the temples, which have earned for Calcutta the hackneyed, but well merited title ‘The City of Palaces’. Far away does this prospect of architectural beauties extend – far away, till it dwindles imperceptibly into the dirty native town, where the tapering minarets and the curved domes of temples rise high above the confined and squalid streets… Along the crowded banks of the river are the various ghauts (or landing-places), the scenes of a busy trade; at some, passengers are landing; at others, merchant’s ships are disgorging their freights into the greedy jaws of huge warehouses, receiving in return a rich cargo of silks or indigo.
Lord and Lady Canning disembarked at Garden Reach on 29 February 1856. They were met by city officials and a guard of honour before being conducted, in separate carriages, to Government House, where Canning was received on the front steps by Frederick Halliday, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, and the members of the Supreme Council. ‘Dalhousie was on the top of the steps,’ noted Canning in his diary, ‘and after welcoming me very prettily, led me towards the Council Chamber and then went back to the private apartments to Lady C. The ceremony of hearing appointments read and swearing in took about 20 minutes; the room was full of official spectators, besides the Members of the Council, and as soon as I had sworn, Fort William fired its salute.’
Government House had been designed by a captain in the Bengal Engineers, a nephew of the celebrated architect James Wyatt, who had based his plans on Robert Adam’s drawings for Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire. It was a classical, white, three-storeyed structure with two enormous wings, one of which contained the Governor-General’s private apartments. Most of the rest of the building was turned over to government offices. Canning admired its fine proportions, but not the fact that it was ‘miserably furnished’ with ‘private apartments incapable of ever being made really comfortable’. He particularly regretted the absence of a single WC, ‘there being no fall for drainage’ in Calcutta.
Canning, however, had little time to dwell on such matters as he devoted all his considerable energy to mastering the detail of Indian business: by day he was surrounded by dispatch boxes; at night he met councillors and officials. In a letter to Lord Granville, he described a new Governor-General as ‘little better than a galley slave’. He added: ‘Quite apart from writing, composing, commenting, and minuting, excess of which is the vice of the Indian Government, there are such innumerable matters crowding up each day for his decision (be it ever so curtly given), and matters upon which, as long as there is a Governor-General, nobody but him ought to decide, that the shortest perusal of each case leaves little leisure for going deeply into any.’ Fortunately the five secretaries, or heads of the various government departments – Foreign, Home, Financial, Military and Public Works – were all ‘first-rate men’. If they had not been ‘as willing as they were good’, said Canning, the work would have been ‘impracticable’.
As if the weight of official business was not enough, Canning also had to contend with the oppressive climate. He recorded:
Any attempt to go out, even in a carriage, makes one gasp and dissolve immediately, and an open window or door lets in a flood as though one were passing through the mouth of a foundry. At 5 p.m. windows and Venetians and doors are thrown open, and in comes the strong wind, blowing one’s papers off the table (which is performed by the punkah at other times) and making the chandeliers swing, and their glass drops jingle, all night long. But even at night (if one gets out of the draught, which we never do…) one becomes what Shelburne would call natando in sudor in an instant.
Canning’s nephew Lord Dunkellin, who arrived in the summer of 1856 to take up his duties as Military Secretary, resented the lack of fresh air ‘as all day one lives shut up in a room with the blinds down close to the windows to prevent the glare and heat of the sun from coming in’. The summer rains brought further irritants: giant cockroaches on the floor, bats in the bedrooms, lizards on the walls and red ants everywhere; so numerous did the last become that saucers of water were placed beneath the legs of tables and chairs. To combat the swarms of flying insects, wine glasses were protected by silver covers and the Governor-General and his wife each had a pair of servants behind their chairs armed with horse-tail swats. Then there was the all-pervading damp: writing paper became unusable, books mouldy, shoes furry and Canning’s dispatch-box ‘assumed the appearance of a bottle of curious old port – white and fungus-y’.
All the inhabitants of Government House found the legions of servants strangely obtrusive. Lord Dunkellin wrote:
The free and easy way which the natives have of coming into one’s rooms at all times is rather a bore; the more so as they glide in so noiselessly that one never really knows whether there is really one hovering about or not, and I have more than once been startled on looking up from my book to find a meek black clad in white waiting with his hands before his breast in an attitude of submission for me to acknowledge his presence, and he may have been there any time. In fact as Uncle C. observes, one never knows how one may have committed oneself before being aware of the arrival.
This lack of privacy caused Lady Canning, in a letter home, to reminisce about ‘creaking footmen’. But she found obtrusive servants more bearable than her social obligations. ‘The plan here is for everyone to come very early, long before they are asked, and no one to go till the greatest lady gets up to take leave,’ she recorded. ‘These dinners are very wearisome. Neither C. nor I can get at all the people. Not a man has ever voluntarily spoken to me since I came to India… and the ladies look terribly afraid of me… The Indian families – I don’t mean half-caste or Indian blood, but people who are of the families always connected with India and who have only been sent home to be educated… – are more insipid and dull than words can express, and generally very underbred.’
To outward appearances, however, the first lady of India was coping well with her responsibilities. ‘Aunt C. is in rude health and wonderful looks to the detriment of the very few ladies with any pretension to beauty here,’ Lord Dunkellin told his mother. ‘She does the honors very well and as far as I can make out is immensely liked. I am inclined to believe it, as her manner to everybody is charming and she is always cheery and in good humour.’ Canning, on the other hand, was looking thin and ‘rather pasty’. He told his nephew that he had been ill. Dunkellin thought he worked too hard and advised him to set aside at least two hours for himself each day. He also tried to encourage his uncle to drink wine, ‘but he won’t and if pressed complains rather indignantly that he always takes a glass of sherry at lunch’. Mostly he drank soda water with his meals.
Canning’s careworn appearance was caused partly by the ongoing problem of Oudh. Its first chief commissioner, Sir James Outram, had returned to Britain on sick leave in April 1856. Canning replaced him with Coverly Jackson, whom Kaye described as ‘a civilian from the North-West Provinces, an expert revenue officer, held in high esteem as a man of ability, but more than suspected of some infirmity of temper’. The consequence was that Jackson quarrelled with his financial commissioner, Martin Gubbins, the possessor of an equally contentious nature, while Canning tried to keep the peace. But the real losers during this early stage of British administration were the inhabitants of Oudh.
Shortly after the annexation in February 1856 King Wajid Ali, his senior advisers and family had left Oudh for Calcutta. His intention was to travel on to Britain to petition the Queen for the return of his kingdom. But the journey wearied the obese King, and he decided to remain in the riverside villa the Indian government had provided for him at Garden Reach (the former house of the Chief Justice), while his mother, brother and eldest son led the deputation to London. It was not a success: the first two died en route and were buried in France; the son, having failed in his mission, was forced to borrow half a lakh of rupees from the Company to pay for his return. The Oudh people, meanwhile, were genuinely distressed by the plight of their King:
Noble and peasant all wept together
And all the world wept and wailed
Alas! The chief has bidden adieu to
His country and gone abroad.
Those most affected by British rule in Oudh were the taluqdars, the feudal lords who had never entirely submitted to royal authority. The more powerful rajas among them – men such as Man Singh and Beni Madho – possessed substantial mud forts. No sooner had the British taken control of Oudh than these forts were earmarked for destruction. But the greatest cause of discontent – even worse than the loss of their homes – was the revenue settlement.
As most Indian revenue was derived from the land, the British needed to assess who was responsible for its payment, and in what quantity. The principle they applied was that the settlement was to be made ‘with the actual occupants of the soil’, in other words with village zemindars, or joint owners. But by equating the taxpayer with the proprietor of the land, the British upset the status quo of Oudh’s quasi-feudal agrarian society. Many taluqdars were dispossessed: Man Singh, the biggest revenue payer in the Faizabad district, lost all but three of his villages; Lal Madho Singh of Amethi was left with three hundred of his eight hundred villages; Hanwant Singh and Beni Madho, who both became leading rebels, forfeited 55 and 44 per cent of their villages respectively.
On top of all this, ex-King Wajid Ali charged British officers with quartering dogs and horses in his Lucknow palaces, breaking into his treasure houses, selling his private property and threatening to stop the allowances paid to his descendants. Jackson was asked by Canning to investigate these charges so that they could be refuted, but he was too preoccupied with fighting his subordinates and failed to do so. Furious, Canning replaced him with the highly experienced Sir Henry Lawrence. It was an inspired choice.
Born in Ceylon in 1806, the fourth son of a British officer from Ulster who had served with Wellesley at Seringapatam, Lawrence was educated at Foyle College in Londonderry, ‘a tough, no-nonsense, God-fearing institution that produced boys ideally matched to the East India’s needs’. Like two of his elder brothers before him, he was nominated for a cadetship at the East India Company’s military academy at Addiscombe by John Huddleston, a director of the Company, who had married his mother’s first cousin. There he acquired a reputation for hard work and integrity that would remain with him for the rest of his life. ‘When anything mean or shabby roused his ire,’ noted a fellow cadet, ‘the curl of his lip and the look of scorn he could put was most bitter and intense.’ He was a deeply religious young man and cared little for frivolous pleasures. ‘What a wretched unprofitable evening!’ he once remarked after returning from a ball. ‘Not a Christian to speak to. All the women decked out with flowers on their heads, and their bodies half naked.’ In 1823 he arrived in India as a second-lieutenant in the Bengal Artillery and quickly came under the influence of the chaplain at the artillery depot at Dum-Dum. He had been there less than a year when war was declared on Burma and he sailed with his battery to Chittagong. He excelled during the successful attack on the fortified heights of Arracan, but the rigours of a long march through a malarious country eventually told on his constitution and he was forced to return to Ulster for two and a half years to recuperate.
He was back in India in 1830 and within two years had passed his examination in Persian, Urdu and Hindi. So impressed were his examiners that they took the unusual step of recommending him to the Commander-in-Chief. His potential was duly noted, and a year later he was appointed an assistant in the Revenue Survey Department. All his subsequent service was away from his regiment – the preferred career option for an ambitious army officer – with either the Revenue Survey or the Political Department. Yet he never forgot his military training and, in the 1840s and early 1850s, wrote a series of anonymous and prescient articles for the Calcutta Review that warned of the threat an unreformed Bengal Army posed to British India.
Lawrence’s chief achievements, however, were in the Punjab. He was appointed Resident at Lahore in 1846 and knighted on a visit to England two years later. In 1849, following the annexation of the Punjab, he became the senior member of its three-man Board of Administration. Thereafter he did much to restore order and prosperity in the province by drawing up a simple legal code, imposing ‘a summary and equitable settlement of the land revenue’ and instituting an ambitious public works programme. In direct contrast to the policy practised in Oudh, he avoided alienating the feudal chiefs by upholding their proprietary rights. This stand caused Lawrence to quarrel with his younger brother John, a co-member of the Board of Administration, and ultimately cost him his job. Henry was demoted to the post of Governor-General’s Agent in Rajputana, while John became Chief Commissioner of the Punjab. But the chiefs repaid Henry’s support when they sided with the British in 1857, thereby enabling John Lawrence to release troops for the reconquest of Delhi.
Much of Lawrence’s early reserve had been softened by his marriage in 1837 to his striking, intelligent and down-to-earth cousin Honoria, the daughter of the Revd George Marshall. They had two boys and two girls, the last born in 1850. Four years later Honoria died of rheumatic fever, depriving the children of a mother and Lawrence of a much needed emotional crutch. A contemporary described him: ‘Above the middle height, of a spare, gaunt frame, and a worn face bearing upon it the traces of mental toil and bodily suffering, he impressed you, at first sight, rather with a sense of masculine energy and resolution than of any milder and more endearing qualities. But when you came to know him, you saw at once that beneath that rugged exterior there was a heart as gentle as a woman’s, and you recognised in his words and in his manner the kindliness of nature, which won the affection of all who came within its reach.’ Unfortunately for the British, this remarkable man did not take up his appointment in Oudh until March 1857 when it was too late to make a difference.