Then in Newport, South Wales, in November 1839, a Chartist march led to disaster. Troops opened fire on the crowd of 10,000 demonstrators. Twenty-two men were killed and now the country was riven with rumours of more coordinated revolts being imminent. Newport was outside Napier’s own district and the deaths had not been his responsibility. He was aware of the nature of the calamity but he refused to be alarmed. He still discounted the military potential of the Chartists, their vastly superior numbers notwithstanding. The most they could do, he remarked, was murder him, which would be good news for the ‘one hundred and sixty-four other major-generals, all anxious to be employed’. Even if they were all accounted for, one after another, ‘it would only be a godsend for the colonels’.
It was noticeable that, although very often highly strung, voluble and excitable in print and private correspondence, Napier was a much calmer individual now that he had a real job of work again. For the first time since his important labours on Cephalonia, he had something substantial to do. The corollary of this, however, was that he was dismissive of the reactions of what he saw as the ‘panicking rich’. Every concern or fear raised by the mercantile classes with Napier was either downplayed or, worse still, rejected flatly as being provocatively counter-productive. For Napier, the ‘vigorous measures’ demanded against Chartists were ‘idiot measures’ sought by ‘Member John Donkey’. Indeed, throughout his command of the Northern District, Napier was pointedly clear that in his view the Chartists needed protection from the threat of violence as least as much as the ‘entitled rich’ did.
Against such a context, cynics might well snort that if there was nothing ever really to fear, what real difference did Napier’s hard work make in the end? The answer is that there was nothing to fear precisely because of his active advocacy in the shadows. He was up at 5 a.m., and seldom in bed before 1 or 2 a.m. He spoke to as many Chartists as men of property and willingly walked among them. Napier always felt that the danger to avoid was that of another Peterloo, which is to say a gross overreaction by the authorities, so he fought untiringly to ensure that another Peterloo did not occur. He stoutly maintained, moreover, that his role was not to intervene in private industrial disputes, for almost certainly to do so would be to take the side of the haves against the have-nots.
On relinquishing his command in 1840, Napier dreaded what would happen next. He was convinced that the state would provoke violence after he was gone. Yet in his absence, his nightmares failed to come true. There was no bloody uprising nor heavy-handed repression, and he had demonstrated that it was perfectly possible to rule the United Kingdom without recourse to violence. Napier’s next call to service came from the Indian border with Afghanistan, a corner of the Empire where order and security were proving to be an intractable problem.
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Appointed in 1842 to a command in the Bombay Presidency, Napier found that the British in India had become embroiled in a disastrous invasion of Afghanistan, a ‘stupid’ war, as Wellington called it in the House of Lords, reminding his fellow peers that Afghanistan was a fearsome place of ‘rocks, sands, deserts, ice and snow’ and a land over which the British could not possibly hope to sustain any form of control. Wellington, indeed, foretold the entire course of the First Anglo-Afghan War with uncanny accuracy. The British might succeed in invading Afghanistan and capturing its cities but their supply and communication lines would from that moment be under sustained attack and any invading army would either starve to death or be lucky to escape with its collective life.
Hence, it came to pass. In the spring of 1839, the British invasion began and by the onset of winter much of the country was in British hands but as time passed it became clear that a vast standing army would be needed simply to maintain control. The country rose against the occupiers and in the depths of a bitter Afghan winter the order came to evacuate Kabul. Some 16,000 people, soldiers, with their families, servants and camp followers, left Kabul in mid-January 1842 and just one recorded survivor reached British-controlled Jalalabad, at the foot of the Khyber Pass. The dreadful aftermath of this calamity, one of the worst reverses in British military history, was later captured by Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler in her famous painting The Remnants of an Army. It depicts William Brydon, a surgeon who also survived the Siege of Lucknow.
The Earl of Ellenborough, Edward Law, was the new (and aggressive) Governor-General of India and he gave the newly arrived Napier the unenviable task of concluding the withdrawal of British forces from Afghanistan. This should ideally take place under cover of some kind of showy, punitive ‘victory’ but regardless of whether he achieved that or not, the most important thing was to ensure that the withdrawal happened, and fast. Yet all these designs became redundant when Army officers George Pollock and William Nott secured victories at the Khyber Pass and Kabul sufficient to enable the British to leave the region with some tattered semblance of dignity intact.
The result was that Charles Napier was instead given the task of resolving a situation that had developed in what is now the region of Sindh in Pakistan, which was of considerable interest to the British. Much of this stemmed directly from its location. It was on the way to the wealthy and strategically vital region of the Punjab and if Sindh could be more securely managed, so too would be the Punjab. Thus was the logic. In British India, wider still and wider the boundaries ever ran. Sindh was at this time theoretically autonomous and was, with depressing predictability, ruled extremely badly by a confederation of forty amirs or local rulers, a confederation much propagandised against in the British press.
One of the aspects of Sindh especially to excite the British press, both at home and in India, was the existence of lush, green hunting preserves, the property of the amirs, ranged along the banks of the Indus. These vast landscapes stood in sharp contrast to the barren, uncultivated countryside beyond them. They were highly covetable. Indeed, the entire British sense of very public affront against the amirs of Sindh may be seen through a covetous lens. Nearly everything the amirs did was seen as thoroughly provocative. In particular their habit of parlaying with one another by way of ceremonies conducted by sailing their hundred-foot pleasure barges along the Indus from hunting preserve to hunting preserve was seen as dreadful because of the land it took from the indigenous poor. It was more in the style of King John than Queen Victoria.
The British, as part of this campaign to delegitimise the political status quo in the region, also grumbled continually that the amirs had only been in control of Sindh for a paltry sixty years – the subtext being that they did not, therefore, really deserve to control the region at all. There were no strong moral or legal grounds for the British to object to the presence of anyone else on the lengthening frontiers of their possessions in the subcontinent and there was little need for grumbling in any case. By 1839 amir control of Sindh was highly circumscribed. The region was falling inexorably into the British sphere of influence, it had become subject to the usual treaties, whereby it was placed formally under British protection, with tribute to be paid, the Indus made navigable for British trade and no negotiations to be entered into by the Sindhi authorities with foreign powers without first obtaining the approval of the East India Company. Yet, suddenly, this was not quite enough. Sindh would have to be absorbed into British India and quickly, for a situation was developing in the region in the aftermath of the Afghan disaster. The amirs, sensing momentary British weakness, were restive and a rebellion against the British not to be ruled out.
Napier’s task was to calm Sindh, although he clearly thought about the region as he had about Cephalonia. That is, in terms of the civil engineering opportunities it presented, once a peace had been restored and what he could in general do for the region’s wretched inhabitants. He saw a golden opportunity, another one, to effect some good in the world. Ellenborough, who was an extremely able politician, if never a successful one, had been President of the Board of Control, effectively the minister at Westminster responsible for the East India Compa
ny. This meant that he knew, even if Napier did not, that securing Sindh would accomplish another objective, one that had nothing at all to do with civil engineering. It would ensure that the opium trade, the movements of which had tended to flow around British borders, would have no choice but to fall under the control of the British authorities. This was no small objective, for more than half of British revenue in India in this period was accounted for by duties levied on the trade in opium. In the end, British interest in Sindh had everything to do with realpolitik.
For Napier, there were rather larger fish to fry. The moral case behind his presence in India had to be made and thankfully it was simple. It had nothing to do with opium. It was this. Intervention was a moral choice, because wanton amirs did not deserve their grossly exploited realm, where the ‘wretched people [are] frequently seen to pick the grain from the dung of the officers’ horses to eat!’ In consequence, ‘Mene! mene! tekel, upharsin! How is all this to end? We have no right to seize Scinde [Sindh], yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality it will be.’ Rascally or not, a case can be made that Napier was trying to achieve in India what he had achieved in the North of England, albeit by different means. In his dealings with the amirs, he was outrageously high-handed, deploying language tinted by arrogance of the first order, but arguably this was a deliberate policy. This was a move to avoid bloodshed and by his reckoning this could best be done by overawing the amirs, who would be more likely to settle if confronted by imperious behaviour and words. This was, in theory, a sound psychological approach, though Ellenborough, with memories of the appalling recent happenings in Afghanistan still fresh, doubted, as it turned out, correctly, that the ruling caste in Sindh would submit without resistance.
The official who dealt directly with the amirs was the highly experienced political agent Sir James Outram, who, because he felt it would be highly provocative, had withheld Ellenborough’s ultimatum from the amirs: that they must stop interfering with British policy and conspiring with foreign powers or face being deposed. Ellenborough had given Outram permission to withhold this threat if he concluded the amirs were not in fact plotting against the British and Outram duly held his tongue, even though he knew for sure that the amirs were plotting. At the edge of the Empire, the man on the spot was often taking decisions like this but in Sindh in 1842 much was at stake. A country and a war turned on the outcome of this case.
In such a serpentine business, the grounds for division were endless but what emerged in the strategic discussion between Napier on one side and Outram on the other was essentially this. How was the Empire to be managed? Napier set himself against the governing philosophy of Outram, with what might be termed his ‘Old India’ logic. He thought that local habits and customs must be acknowledged where possible, even if one privately thought them barbarous. Local rulers must be respected, even if one knew them to be rogues and knaves. To Outram, conversely, this Napier, a general new to India and full of current and untested theories, was both ‘profoundly ignorant’ and more seriously, ‘a theorist who invented systems, and acted on them as if they were realities’.
This criticism of Napier hinges on the claim that he did not do in India as he had done in the North of England. That, although in both cases he sincerely loathed war and wanted to avoid it, he did not engage with the Sindhi as he had with the Chartists and that he had no firm grasp as to what the Sindhi rulers really wanted. One possible reply to this is that Napier knew, as a certainty, that war with the amirs was inescapable and also that this war might yet prove to be providential. After all, it would allow him to bring history forward by a few years. For was not Sindh starving? Were not her rulers corrupt and irresponsible? Did not her people deserve better, and should they not get this ‘better’ as rapidly as possible?
Convinced that they were sincerely willing to accede to British terms, Outram requested a gathering of the amirs at Hyderabad in February 1843. Napier disagreed with this meeting. He thought that the amirs were temporising in order to build up their combined armies prior to attacking the British. Outram urged Napier to come along, alone on a steamer along the Indus, to remove the doubts the amirs entertained (it must be said, with good reason) about him. Napier was proved correct. ‘Unquestionably,’ he observed later, with admirable dryness, ‘it would have removed all doubts and my head from my shoulders.’ In February, a Sindhi force maybe 8,000-strong attacked Outram’s hundred-strong garrison in the Hyderabad residency, with the agent only just escaping down the Indus by the very steamer on which he had wanted Napier to arrive.
Miani, the battle which followed the attack on the residency, was Napier’s first and greatest victory as a fighting general. Heroic on the close-fought battlefield, he may have been assisted in his daring frontal attack by the fact that the fire of the enemy artillery was being laid down by a coerced, captive British officer, who diligently set it off target. It was a famous victory. The British were outnumbered perhaps ten to one by the 30,000-strong force of Sindhi troops. Napier lost most of his junior officers in the ferocious hand-to-hand fighting. There is a tendency now to suppose that when West met East in those days, to wage war was to win it, but nobody in India at that moment supposed anything of the sort, not with the retreat from Kabul still fresh in their minds. Thus we must not diminish Napier’s victory or his strategic skill. The victory at Miani was an extraordinary feat of arms and with good cause Napier became ‘the first commander in British history to name the common soldiers in his dispatches and not merely the officers. And he named Indian soldiers as well as British troops.’
In the aftermath of the British victory, Hyderabad opened its gates and Napier gallantly returned to the amirs the jewelled swords they had ceremonially surrendered to him in token of defeat, no small consideration in an age when bounties still existed. He further ensured that the Sindhi women were guarded and went unmolested. And indeed, when the editor of the Bombay Times claimed that they were systematically violated by the army, all 104 of Napier’s officers who had survived the battle immediately signed a letter refuting this. For Napier believed in the moral force of intervention and of intervention with honour.
Dubba was the next battle, on 24 March, just as the hot weather was settling on India in advance of the monsoon. This engagement was fought against the ‘Lion’ Shere Mohammed, whose men had not come to Hyderabad and who outnumbered the British force merely by a factor of 5:1. Again, and still bearing an open wound from an accidentally exploded rocket earlier in the year, Napier was valiant in battle. The general was on his horse for four full hours of running cavalry battles, barely able to sit, sixty years old, in 110-degree heat with almost no junior officers left. Sindh was now British territory. It was annexed by Napier in the aftermath of the battle but it is well to remember that, in so doing, he had in fact exceeded his orders. He had been ordered to put down any rebellion but not formally to annexe the region.
At home, Punch had a field day with this ‘mission creep’. A famous pun of Catherine Winkworth’s described a victorious Napier astride the battlefield, despatching a message to his irked superiors in London. Peccavi, it read, a pun on the Latin ‘I have sinned’. Napier had been correct not to trust the amirs. Their attack on the Hyderabad residency proved this beyond doubt and to allow them to have concentrated their forces would have been to run the risk of the Afghan horrors being dismally repeated in Sindh. Yet as much as Napier thought he was simply anticipating the inevitable so, by exactly the same logic, could the same be said of the amirs themselves.
The criticism at home did not come only from Punch. Outram’s predecessor, the illustrious Sir Henry Pottinger, thought Napier simply rash and guilty of ignorance. The Edinburgh Review was scathing:
[Needless to say] we attach no value to the random statements of men like Sir Charles Napier, who, having made up their minds to have the country [are] seized with a strong feeling of sympathy for the subjects of those termed by them oppressors, whose place they are anxious to t
ake.
In Parliament, Lord Ashley MP (the future Lord Shaftesbury) led the charge against both Ellenborough’s forward policy and against Napier, its celebrated instrument. A vote of censure was called and now Radical MP John Roebuck, a friend of Napier, experienced in Indian politics and ally of the Chartists, rallied the defence, defeating Ashley’s motion 202 votes to 68 in the Commons.
There were other critics too. Although Sir Robert Peel publicly defended the action in Sindh, he was privately scathing of British treatment of the amirs. ‘We have taken their territories and despoiled them of their private property,’ the Prime Minister noted, ‘surely we need not inflict further punishment and privations … It makes one ashamed of Indian policy.’ Retired Old India hand and Scottish statesman Mountstuart Elphinstone added, ‘Sindh was a sad case of insolence and oppression. Coming after Afghanistan, it put one in mind of a bully who had been kicked in the streets, and went home to beat his wife in revenge.’
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