18
WHEN HENRY LAWRENCE went on leave at the beginning of 1847, he left his duties as resident in the hands of his brother John. He instructed his subordinates to hew strictly to his proven policy of “indirect rule” and insisted upon finesse rather than force as the solution to any problems that might arise.
One locus of potential trouble was Multan, a city-state on the western edge of the Punjab, two hundred miles south of Lahore. The Sikh emperor Ranjit Singh had captured Multan from the Afghan Durrani Empire in 1818. To rule it, he appointed a Hindu governor, Sawan Mal. In return for a hefty tribute, paid annually to Lahore, first Sawan and then his son Mulraj were given a free hand. The problem, from the standpoint of the Lahore Durbar in 1848, was that Mulraj had seized the occasion of Ranjit Singh’s death, nine years before, as a pretext for withholding tribute.
Before Henry’s departure, he had dispatched an emissary, charged with pressing Mulraj to pay the arrears. All John needed to do in his absence was to think of himself as a carpet dealer in the bazaar, with Mulraj his prospective customer. There would be haggling and bluff calling and indignant professions of wounded pride, but ultimately Lahore would get some of what it wanted without forcing Multan into a public loss of face. That would be the most dangerous outcome in that part of the world and one to be avoided even at the cost of getting rather (but not incontestably) the worst of the bargain.
The Durbar, after all, was not without fault in the matter. The Sikhs had ignored their accounts receivable for almost a decade. The role, then, of the British, having taken charge of Sikh foreign policy with the Treaty of Lahore, was to mediate, not dictate.
When John heard back from Multan in March, he received the expected parry to his brother’s opening thrust. Ignoring the demand for payment, Mulraj informed Lawrence that he wished to resign as governor; his son would take his place. It was clearly a gambit to confuse the issue, one that John doubted he was meant to take at face value. A healthy man in the prime of life ruling a city of several hundred thousand people as he saw fit was an unlikely candidate for retirement.
By that time, however, John Lawrence had himself been forcibly retired from acting on Henry’s behalf. Back in England, the incoming Whig prime minister had nominated Lord Dalhousie to replace Conservative appointee Henry Hardinge as governor general. The change of the party in power at home heralded a return to expansionist policies abroad, which Dalhousie strongly favored. He was also a staunch advocate of centralized authority who distrusted the freewheeling Lawrence brothers. After learning from Dalhousie that he was being replaced as acting resident by Frederick Currie, a bureaucrat from Calcutta, John Lawrence was obliged to ask Mulraj to postpone his decision, pending Currie’s arrival.
Currie, who knew nothing of the Punjab, swept into Lahore determined to enforce the imperial discipline of Government House. He abandoned the open-door policy for natives established by the Lawrences, who made a point of hearing out anyone who called on them with a grievance or a question.
“With you we contest and badger and dispute,” one Sikh noble told John Lawrence before he left to resume his duties at Jullundur. “You are one of our own. But what can we do with Currie sahib?”
Mulraj found himself asking the same question in Multan. Currie accepted his resignation without further ado and ignored his request that his son succeed him. Instead he appointed Khan Singh, a Sikh from the Durbar. Without consulting Mulraj, Currie also decided to disband some of the local troops in Multan and replace them with new regiments from Lahore. William Hodson, one of Lawrence’s “Young Men” who had expected to take up the post of political agent at Multan, lost out to the far less experienced Patrick Vans Agnew, probably because Currie suspected that Hodson was cut from the same unorthodox cloth as Henry Lawrence.
Currie also named Lieutenant William Anderson, a young infantry officer, as British military commander there. Rather than join Khan Singh on the march to Multan—and get to know the seven hundred troops of the Sikh army who escorted him—Vans Agnew and Anderson sailed down the Ravi River. Oblivious to Currie’s high-handedness in dealing with Mulraj, they had a comfortable, pleasant voyage; in a letter to a friend, Anderson exulted in what a “lucky fellow” he was.
Both men’s luck ran out on April 19, the day after their rendezvous with the military force. Following a tour of Multan’s fort, the Englishmen were attacked with spears and swords by Multani troops as they crossed the bridge over its moat. Khan Singh saved their lives by rallying the party’s mounted escort, which carried the wounded men to the sanctuary of a prayer pavilion outside the city walls. But it soon emerged that even the Sikh troops under Khan Singh could not be relied upon. All but a few disappeared that night, abandoning the Englishmen to their fate. On the morning of the 20th, a mob rushed in. Vans Agnew died first, beheaded by blows from a saber as he sat comforting Anderson, who was then hacked to pieces in the bed where he lay. The following day, Mulraj presented Khan Singh with a blood-drenched cotton sack and contemptuously bade him return to Lahore with “the head of the youth he had brought down to govern at Mooltan.”
Having thrown down the gauntlet, Mulraj appealed to disaffected Sikh officers throughout the Punjab, imploring them to widen his revolt into a full-scale rebellion that would force the British back across the Sutlej. At first they demurred, and an irregular army of three thousand “bold villains,” raised by Herbert Edwardes from the tribes of Bannu, captured a strategic fort held by troops loyal to Mulraj. They went on to besiege Multan itself, where Edwardes waited for assistance from Lahore.
Ignoring warnings from John Lawrence and Henry’s political officers that time was of the essence, Currie temporized. A month after the murders of Anderson and Vans Agnew, he finally informed Edwardes that the rebellion would be crushed, but not “until the close of the Summer and Rainy seasons.”
The news that no army would advance from Lahore for five or six months was all it took to set the Punjab ablaze. On June 8, a regiment of Sikh cavalry mutinied and joined the Multan rebels. When Sikhs garrisoned at Bannu followed suit, Fort Duleepghar was lost. Rebel troops then rose in Peshawar. By the time General Hugh Gough took to the field that fall, the mutineers from Multan were on the march toward a rendezvous in the central Punjab with a large rebel army, raised in the northern Hazara district after its Sikh governor declared war on the East India Company.
Delaying that convergence became the principal objective of Gough and his sixteen thousand men for the duration of the Second Anglo-Sikh War, one of the bloodiest ever fought anywhere. In battle after battle, the British suffered grievous losses under leadership so disgraceful that there was talk of a drumhead court-martial for Gough—even his execution. (Commander in more general actions than any British officer of the nineteenth century except the Duke of Wellington, he had a penchant for softening up enemy defenses with waves of charges by infantry.)
But delay it they did, until the decisive Battle of Gujrat, on February 21, 1849. Gough, who had just received orders recalling him to London, knew it would be his final engagement, and he rose to the opportunity to save his reputation by embracing the tactical use of artillery for the first time in his career. After a bombardment so intense that the opposing Sikh gunners abandoned their weapons and fled, the British suffered the loss of only ninety-six men, compared with more than two thousand Sikh fatalities. Eleven days later, the rebel commander agreed to terms for surrender. His army—reduced by mass desertions to ten thousand men and ten guns—handed over its arms and disbanded.
Almost alone in pronouncing himself immune to “the hot fit of annexation” that broke out afterwards was Henry Lawrence, who had returned to India as Sir Henry following his investment in England as a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath and resumed his duties at the residency in Lahore on February 1. He blamed the war on Frederick Currie and the military. Had Multan been captured in early September, he argued, there would have been no larger insurrection. He continued to believe that “indirect rule” was the best option for the British in the Punjab, and better served the long-term interests of the country’s inhabitants. But his opinions were dismissed by Lord Dalhousie, who also rejected Lawrence’s advice that the Company army be transformed by admitting natives to the officer corps.
“Lawrence has been greatly praised and rewarded and petted,” Dalhousie wrote to Sir George Couper, “and no doubt naturally supposes himself a king of the Punjab.” But his sovereign reign, as far as the governor was concerned, had reached its end:
[Lawrence] took charge three days ago from Sir F. Currie, and commenced his career by proposing a Proclamation which I have forbidden and shaken him for it. It began by saying that he was anxious it should be generally known that he had returned to Lahore, desirous of bringing peace to the Punjab, and then promising all sorts of things. I told him this sort of thing would not do at all; that I had great confidence in him, but that I could not permit him to substitute himself for the Government, whose servant he was, or permit a word to be said or an act done which should raise the notion that the policy of the Government depended in any degree on the agent who represented it; or that my measures and intentions would be the least affected by the fact of his being the Resident.
The message was clear: there would be no more Kangras. The era of romantic individualism in conducting the Company’s affairs of state had passed. Calcutta was in charge.
Lawrence was so shocked by the terms of the annexation proclamation that he refused at first to sign it. He preferred to resign, he told Dalhousie’s chief secretary, Henry Elliot; clearly he had “no sort of influence” with the governor. Dalhousie, for his part, wished to avoid an open rupture with a well-known public figure whom Queen Victoria had lately received as an overnight guest at Windsor Castle. According to Herbert Edwardes, who was acting as Lawrence’s personal assistant, Dalhousie charged Elliot with persuading Lawrence to change his mind. Elliot, wisely, appealed to Henry’s idealism:
“He succeeded, mainly by the very just argument that the Resident’s own favourite objects—the treatment of the vanquished with fair and even indulgent consideration, the smoothing down the inevitable pang of subjugation to those proud and brave enemies, with whose chieftains no man was so familiar as he, or could so fully appreciate what there was of noble in their character—were in imminent danger of being thwarted, if his moderating presence were removed between conqueror and conquered.”
On March 29, the British flag was raised over the citadel of Lahore, and the following day Maharaja Duleep Singh sat for the last time on the golden throne of his father. On behalf of himself, his heirs, and his successors, the twelve-year-old monarch renounced all claims to the sovereignty of the Punjab. The Kingdom of the Sikhs was no more.