Empire Made Read online

  Nigel’s friendship with a scion of the Sadozais undoubtedly helped persuade some of his relatives that ill-gotten gains from such a transaction had somehow financed his splendid exile. They also knew of his connection to the Lawrence brothers, who featured in newspaper accounts of the diamond’s surrender as a spoil of the Anglo-Sikh wars. He never came home, they later guessed, because he couldn’t.

  They surely guessed wrong. Jang Bahadur would have handed Nigel over in a heartbeat if the British really wanted him. His travels abroad had shown him the wisdom of Nepal’s isolation—the less its people realized what they lacked, the likelier they would be satisfied with what they had. But the splendor of London and Paris had also sharpened his appetite for spending such wealth as his kingdom possessed. Upon his return, he decided on a policy of depriving his subjects of any foreign influence while rewarding his family with every foreign luxury. The trick was persuading the British to go along with it. For, as any fool could see, if the British wished, Nepal was theirs.

  What most gives the lie to the legend of Nigel’s forced exile, though, is that he spent several months in British India in 1854 without encountering any difficulties with the authorities. At the end of the Hot Weather, he set out from Nepal on what he called a “merry lark,” traveling westward on the Grand Trunk Road with Sa’adat, whose obligations in the Punjab seem to have been the reason for the journey. With those taken care of, they proceeded to Bannu, the district south of Peshawar that Herbert Edwardes had cleared of its four hundred native forts in 1847. Since Bannu was en route to nowhere else, and since there was nothing of particular interest there, it is safe to say that the sole object of their visit was to pay another call on John Nicholson, then serving as deputy district commissioner.

  Two and a half years had passed since he took over from another protégé of Henry Lawrence, Reynell Taylor, who had unwisely attempted to govern the unruly Bannuchis with fatherly indulgence. Nicholson established at the outset that he favored the wielded stick over the dangled carrot and, according to one of his successors, was hated at first as a “hard-hearted, self-willed tyrant.”

  The result of his exertions was neither riot nor rebellion nor religious upset. Bannu under Nicholson instead enjoyed a tranquility it had never known, one to be remembered fifty years later as having never recurred since. This comity came at a cost to Nicholson of at least one assassination attempt, the subject of his famous one-line dispatch to John Lawrence that he had shot a man who came to kill him. But the greater threat to achieving it was a falling-out between Lawrence and his brother Henry not long after Nicholson took up his post. Both men sat on the three-member Board of Administration for the Punjab, a body that Henry had long maintained should be replaced by a single commissioner. As the architect of British rule there, he considered himself the only man for the job. When a fierce dispute erupted over imposing a new system of land rights that John favored and Henry opposed, Dalhousie resolved the matter by doing away with the board and appointing John as commissioner. For the second time in his career, Henry was exiled from his beloved Punjab, this time to a ceremonial position in Rajputana.

  Herbert Edwardes wept when he learned the news; Nicholson despaired of carrying on at Bannu. “I don’t know how I shall ever get on when you are gone,” he wrote to Henry. “If there is any work in Rajputana I am fit for, I wish you would take me with you. I certainly won’t stay on the border in your absence. If you can’t take me away, I shall apply for some quiet internal district like Shahpur.”

  Henry advised Nicholson to remain at his post. The best way to support him, he wrote, was to continue his work. Nicholson rose to the occasion by remaking Bannu in Shahpur’s placid image. But by the time he received Nigel and Sa’adat there, it was apparent to all that the era of Henry Lawrence’s Young Men was drawing to a close. Telegraph wires connected Calcutta to Lahore. In both their missions and their methods, the Company’s officers on the frontier were subject as never before to stricture and supervision. “I know that Nicholson is a first rate guerrilla leader, but we don’t want a guerrilla policy,” fumed the governor general in a complaint to John Lawrence.

  In the fragment from Nigel’s correspondence that touches on his visit with Sa’adat, he alludes only in passing to the taming of Bannu, saying that the settled state of the district permitted Nicholson to ease his isolation by visiting Herbert Edwardes in Peshawar on his leave days. It was Henry’s banishment from Lahore that dominated their conversation. Nicholson, unable to shake his abiding gloom over the situation, joined Sa’adat in forecasting trouble:

  “S[a’adat], having known [Henry Lawrence] as one whose word could be relied upon in matters of import to himself and his relations, believes that esteem for the Government can only suffer from his absence, and the loyalty of Native Chiefs might thus waver, reverting the Tribal Areas to their prior state of mistrust and confusion. As does Maj. Nicholson, he fears unhappy consequences.”

  In the event, their fears proved unfounded, owing to what turned out to be the final hurrah of Henry Lawrence’s onetime lieutenants on the North-West Frontier. Convinced that the security of the Punjab depended on harmonious relations with the Afghans, Edwardes spent the next few years negotiating treaties that bound them to be friends of Britain’s friends and enemies of Britain’s enemies. In return, the East India Company would promise to expand no further westward than its existing boundaries. John Lawrence, however, opposed any such agreements, forcing Edwardes to go over his head—not once, but twice—to secure support from Dalhousie in Calcutta. The telegraph, after all, worked both ways.

  John Lawrence remained so hostile to the idea of coming to terms with the Afghans that it required a direct order from the governor general to compel his attendance at the signing of the final treaty. Yet it was John Lawrence who ultimately received credit when the Afghans lived up to their obligations and fought for the British during the Indian Mutiny. In gratitude for securing their alliance, he was created a baronet. Herbert Edwardes received no official recognition at all.

  The true unhappy consequence of the change in Lahore was a disregard for happiness itself. Henry Lawrence, who believed that the well-being of natives ought to be the principal objective of British rule, had always commanded his lieutenants to “make the people happy.” He repeated the refrain in a letter to his brother from Rajputana:

  “If you preserve the peace of the country and make the people happy, high and low, I shall have no regrets that I have vacated the field for you.”

  John Lawrence replied with a promise that was also the empire’s, and, in all its cool majesty, so was his rebuke:

  “I will give every man a fair hearing, and will endeavour to give every man his due. More than this no one should expect.”

  29

  * * *

  A Mutiny

  SIX YEARS AFTER he first gazed upon the Terai jungle with Sa’adat​—​and five after he returned East from England to settle in Kathmandu as a guest of Jang Bahadur—Nigel again surveyed the steaming wilderness of the Terai, scribbling notes about flora and fauna. Natives armed with rifles stood guard around him. Somewhere behind them was the main hunting party, led by Jang Bahadur. Their quarry was a Bengal tiger—a man-eater blamed for a hundred deaths. The day before, in a village near the jungle’s edge, they were shown a bitten-off lower arm, all that remained of its latest victim, a teenaged boy taken while gathering firewood. The ruler of Nepal regarded the killing of man-eaters as an obligation as well as entertainment, and, never one to leave matters to chance, favored a robust approach to discharging his duty. On one occasion, Jang Bahadur had taken to the bush with thirty-two thousand soldiers, fifty-two guns, two hundred fifty horse artillery, three hundred horsemen, a hundred elephants, two thousand camp followers, and seven hundred ration officers.

  Nigel’s letter, preserved because it mentioned John Nicholson, was written in November 1856. Sa’adat had recently returned from another trip to the Punjab, this time by himself, bearing sketch plan
s of a formal garden in Peshawar that he had commended to Jang Bahadur. This was surely Wazir Bagh, established in 1810 under the patronage of Sa’adat’s grandfather Mahmud Shah, then reigning for the second time as king of Afghanistan. Its spacious lawns and flower beds, shaded by apricot, peach, and pomegranate trees, remained in Afghan hands for only three years, until the city’s conquest by the Sikhs under Ranjit Singh. Responsibility for their upkeep now rested with the British. In charge as district commissioner was Herbert Edwardes, who—as Sa’adat learned in Peshawar—was about to be joined by Nicholson as his deputy.

  When Nicholson arrived, he declined to move into the house assigned to him. He took up residence instead with Edwardes, in the commissioner’s bungalow. It was there that an officer found them on the afternoon of May 11, 1857, when he burst in with a signal just telegraphed from Delhi. Sepoys of the large Company army based at Meerut, northwest of the city, had risen the day before and massacred the Christian population. Now, after riding all night, they were swarming through the gates of the old Mughal capital.

  Some had seen it coming. As far back as 1850, General Charles Napier had warned that the British were in “great peril” from native unrest within the army. When Lord Dalhousie dismissed his concerns as unjustified, Napier resigned as commander in chief. The sepoys had a long list of grievances. No matter how long they served, few could hope for commissions as regimental officers. Their base pay was relatively low, and after the annexation of the Punjab and Oudh (the region in north India centered around Lucknow, in present-day Uttar Pradesh), they no longer received bonuses for duty on “foreign missions.” The influx of Gurkhas and Sikhs, who were favored by the British for their fighting qualities, made it harder for the sons of serving sepoys to break into the ranks. High-caste Hindus—the majority of sepoys in the Bengal Army—were distressed by the Company’s new emphasis on recruitment of the lower-born, a deliberate strategy to reduce the complications caused by ritual sensitivities. An article attributed to an invalided sepoy that was published in the Delhi Gazette in May 1855 warned the British to desist from enlisting “men we cannot know and whom 1000 of the 1120 people in the village despise.”

  Then there were the larger issues.

  The increasing gulf between the rulers and the ruled was one. Sahibs shut themselves off from India and retreated into their cantonments and clubs at the price of the camaraderie that once forged bonds of trust between British officers and their native men.

  Evangelism was another. Proselytizing, long proscribed by the Company, was now exalted by an increasing number of Englishmen as their highest calling in India. The Reverend Midgeley Jennings, appointed chaplain of Delhi in 1852, invoked the Koh-i-noor diamond in calling for the transmission of Christian doctrine to the farthest reaches of the subcontinent. Now that the British Crown possessed that splendid jewel, he wrote, it behooved the British themselves to show their gratitude and “give in return that ‘pearl of great price.’” More often than not, a commander like Colonel Steven Wheler, who took it upon himself to preach the Gospel to “natives of all classes . . . in the highways, cities, bazaars and villages,” was no less eager to brandish his Bible in the barrack-room, reading Scripture to his sepoys on a regular basis in hopes of rescuing them from eternal damnation.

  It was the belief that the Company was intent on caste breaking and Christianizing that finally led to revolt. In August 1856, the Indian Army began testing the new Enfield rifle, which used pre-greased paper ammunition cartridges that sepoys were obliged to bite open. After the rifles were issued, rumors spread in the ranks that the cartridges were defiling to Hindus and Muslims alike. They were greased, it was said, with a mixture of tallow and lard, animal fats derived from beef and pork.

  Though denied at the time, the rumors were true, at least at first. The Company made haste to change the ingredients, and officers told sepoys they were free to make their own grease from beeswax and vegetable oil.

  Almost to a man, they refused to have anything at all to do with the new weapons. Their hostility persisted even after the Company went further and modified the loading drill to permit tearing open the cartridges by hand. Most sepoys believed the defilement was no accident. They accused the British of violating their ritual purity in order to forcibly convert the entire army to Christianity. When word reached Meerut of the execution of a sepoy who had tried to incite rebellion at Barrackpore, they turned on their officers—the first of all but 7,796 of the 139,000 sepoys in the Bengal Army to mutiny.

  Nicholson’s first response to the bad news was to ask its bearer who else had heard it. Told that the signal was first brought to the officers’ mess by the telegraph operator, he hurried over and told those present to keep word of the rebellion to themselves. He then asked Fred Roberts, a twenty-four-year-old ensign in the Bengal Artillery, to take the minutes at a council of war the next morning.

  It was Roberts who witnessed the genesis of Nicholson’s plan for a fast-moving force of Pashtun and Sikh irregulars that could strike anywhere in the Punjab at the first sign of trouble; Roberts who accompanied that column to Delhi in August, when it constituted the last British hope of saving the Indian Empire; Roberts who found Nicholson’s mortally wounded body after he led the charge that carried the main breach of the city walls and heard him say, “I am dying; there is no chance for me.”

  And it was Roberts—the future Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar, one of the most successful British commanders of the nineteenth century—who would remember him in terms that echoed those of Nigel, captivated by the “honesty and bravery and fine convictions” of a then-unknown lieutenant at the residency in Lahore in 1846.

  “Nicholson impressed me more profoundly than any man I had ever met before, or have ever met since. I have never seen anyone like him. He was the beau ideal of a soldier and a gentleman. His appearance was distinguished and commanding, with a sense of power about him which to my mind was the result of his having passed so much of his life among the wild and lawless tribesmen, with whom his authority was supreme. Intercourse with this man amongst men made me more eager than ever to remain on the frontier, and I was seized with ambition to follow in his footsteps.”

  Nicholson survived his injuries long enough to learn that Delhi had been taken, and to dictate a farewell message to Herbert Edwardes. “Tell him that, if at this moment a good fairy were to grant me a wish,” he said, “my wish would be to have him here next to my mother.” He died on September 23, 1857, six weeks after a rebel artillery shell killed Henry Lawrence during the siege of the Lucknow residency. Among the last words of Lawrence, who had been appointed chief commissioner of Oudh upon its annexation the year before, were instructions for his epitaph:

  “Put on my tomb only this: HERE LIES HENRY LAWRENCE, WHO TRIED TO DO HIS DUTY.”

  Both would pass into history as paragons of Victorian chivalry. And so, at least officially, would Jang Bahadur, after taking personal command of an army of twenty-five thousand Nepalese troops in the Hot Weather of 1857 and rushing to the aid of British garrisons besieged in Gorakhpur and Lucknow. Queen Victoria rewarded him for his loyalty by creating him a Knight Grand Cross in the Order of the Bath, one of Britain’s highest chivalric orders. Her government further showed its gratitude by restoring to Nepal the territory it had ceded to India as the price of ending the Anglo-Nepalese War.

  Reprisals were the first order of business in the rebellion’s aftermath. Many were enacted to cries of “Remember Cawnpore!” There, after a Company garrison numbering nine hundred men surrendered under a guarantee of safe passage, all but four were killed by mutineers, who then hacked 120 European women and children to death and dismembered their bodies with meat cleavers before tossing them into a well. The British took their revenge with equal savagery, and far greater loss of life. Entire villages were burned to the ground, their inhabitants hanged. Delhi became a charnel house. Among those taking part in the slaughter there was Edward Vibart, a nineteen-year-old company commander whose broth
er, sister, and parents had been slain in the Cawnpore massacre. They “cry aloud for vengeance,” he wrote to his uncle afterwards, “and their son will avenge them.” But the scale of the carnage unnerved him:

  I have seen many bloody and awful sights lately. But such a one as I witnessed yesterday please God I pray I never see again. The regiment was ordered to clear the houses between the Delhi and Turkman Gates . . . and the orders were to shoot every soul. I think I must have seen about 30 or 40 defenceless people shot down before me. It was literally murder and I was perfectly horrified. The women were all spared, but their screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most terrible.

  The town as you may imagine presents an awful spectacle now . . . heaps of dead bodies scattered throughout the place and every house broken into and sacked—but it is the townspeople who are now falling victims to our infuriated soldiery . . . Wherever you go, you see some unfortunate man or other being dragged out of his hiding place, and barbarously put to death.

  Heaven knows I feel no pity—but when some old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your very eyes—hard must be that man’s heart I think who can look on with indifference.

  It was John Lawrence who acted to end what he likened to “a war of extermination.” After the administration of Delhi was transferred to the Punjab government in February 1858, he complained to the new governor general, Lord Canning, that the magistrate in charge of Delhi was guilty of “wholesale slaughters” and requested that he be sent back to England.

  “I stopped the different civil officers hanging at their own will and pleasure,” wrote Lawrence at the end of April, “and appointed a commission, since when matters have greatly improved and confidence among the natives greatly increased.” He persuaded Canning to oppose the wholesale demolition of Delhi proposed by Lord Palmerston, the prime minister, as punishment for the city’s central role in the rebellion. Lawrence also argued for a general amnesty for all who had not personally murdered British civilians in cold blood. He was no more willing to make natives pay for crimes they had not committed than he was to take responsibility for making them happy.