The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  The soldiers went to the King’s own garden, Mahtab Bagh, and there they tied up their horses. Soon after another group of soldiers, this time sixty in number, came asking for supplies. They were also given the same offer, then again another fifty arrived. Soon about three hundred of them had collected in the Mahtab Bagh.56

  From the point of view of the courtiers, the arrival of the sepoys was an invasion: the last time that large numbers of soldiers had poured unbidden into the Red Fort was when Ghulam Qadir seized the Palace in 1783, blinding the then Emperor, when Zafar was only eight. Since then it had been unheard of for anyone to pass the Red Curtain on horseback, or to approach the Diwan i-Khas without removing their shoes. When the British Resident, Francis Hawkins, had done so in 1830, during Akbar Shah’s annual holiday in Mehrauli, the Emperor had complained to Calcutta about the ‘offensive and disrespectful act’ and demanded that steps be taken ‘to wipe off the dust of grief and affliction from the polished mirror of our enlightened and resplendent mind’; Hawkins was promptly dismissed.57 Now several hundred unwashed and dirty ex-Company sepoys had come and billeted themselves without consultation in the inner apartments of the Palace, and had stabled their horses among the fruit trees of the Emperor’s favourite garden.

  Towards early afternoon, around three o’clock, the situation grew yet more tense, as the sepoys gathering in the Palace began to get restive, and came to collect again around Zafar’s private apartments. They had clearly expected the Emperor to shower them in gold for coming and offering service. Instead, they had received a mixed reception in the city and an openly hostile one in the Palace. Moreover, despite their having come all the way to Delhi to seek the shelter of the Emperor, Zafar had not been seen since the first party of troopers shouted up to him in the early morning. So at around 4 p.m. their leaders sent word to the King that they had come ‘to fight for our religion and to pay our respects to His Majesty’.58 When this again failed to produce the Emperor, the soldiers massed in the courtyard in front of the Diwan i-Khas and ‘commenced firing their muskets, pistols and carbines in the air, making a great clamour’, according to Ghulam Abbas, Zafar’s vakil (attorney).

  The King hearing the noise, came out, and, standing at the door of the Hall of Special Audience, told his attendants to direct the troops to discontinue the noise they were making. He told them to call the native officers forward, that they might explain the object of such proceedings. On this the noise was quelled, and the officers of the cavalry came forward, mounted as they were. They explained that they had been required to bite cartridges, the use of which deprive both Hindus and Mahomedans of their religion, as the cartridges were greased with pork and beef fat, that they accordingly had killed the Europeans at Meerut, and had come to claim his protection.

  The King replied, ‘I did not call for you; you have acted very wickedly.’ On this about one or two hundred of the mutinous infantry, ascended the steps and came into the hall, saying that ‘unless you, the King, join us, we are all dead men, and we must in that case just do what we can for ourselves.’

  Zafar argued with the troopers for a while – something unheard of in a normal durbar – admonishing them for the murders they had perpetrated, so that ‘the court of the palace became a scene of the wildest confusion, quarrelling and disputes’.59 As the nobleman Abdul Latif put it,

  The king was like the king on the chessboard after the checkmate. For a long time he acted with the utmost restraint and then said: ‘Why is an old soul like me being subjected to such humiliating behaviour? And what is the reason of this noise? The sun of our life has already reached its evening. These are our last days. All I wish for is retreat and seclusion.’60

  The courtiers were furious at the behaviour of the rebels and argued with the sepoys. But they were silenced by the mob and they had to return to their places. Ahsanullah Khan told the sepoys: ‘“You have long been accustomed under the English rule to regular pay. The King has no treasury. How can he pay you?” The officers replied, “We will bring the revenue of the whole Empire to your treasury.”’61 For a while Zafar continued to argue with the sepoys, telling them:’ “I have neither troops, magazine or treasury. I am not in a condition to join anyone.” They said, “Only give us your blessing. We will provide everything else.”’62

  There was then a long pause while Zafar considered his options. For all his many good qualities, indecision was always Zafar’s greatest vice. Emily Eden relates a telling anecdote from her visit to Delhi in 1838 when Zafar, then the heir apparent, ‘was coaxed or threatened into waiting on’ her brother, the Governor General, Lord Auckland. Unable to make up his mind whether to attend or not, Zafar had taken to his bed and sent a succession of no fewer than ‘thirteen doctors to say he was too ill to come’. He dithered backwards and forwards all afternoon before ‘he changed his mind yet again and came, and in the meanwhile, half our troops who were out for the durbar were fainting away from the heat’.63 Likewise, when Zafar had had his spat with Mirza Fakhru in 1852, he oscillated week to week, one day banning his eldest son from the durbar and forbidding any of the courtiers from having contact with him, then the next he would declare his love for the Mirza and tell the members of the court that they need have no fear of befriending him or attending his monsoon parties.64

  Yet now, at the moment of the most crucial decision Zafar would ever take, with most of the Delhi elite already instinctively lined up against the looting, mutinous sepoys, Zafar made an uncharacteristically decisive choice: he gave them his blessing. The reason is not hard to guess. With the armed, threatening and excitable sepoys surrounding him on all sides, he had little choice. Moreover, thanks to Simon Fraser and Lord Canning, he had even less to lose. For all his undoubted fear, anger and irritation with the sepoys, Zafar made the critical choice that would change both the fate of his dynasty and that of the city of Delhi, linking them both with the Uprising:

  The King then seated himself in a chair, and the soldiery, officers and all, came forward one by one, bowed their heads before him, asking him to place his hand on them. The King did so, and each withdrew … Picketing their horses in the courtyard, the troops took up their quarters [in the Palace and across the bridge in the old Mughal Bastille of Salimgarh] and spread their bedding in the Hall of Audience, and placed guards all about the palace.65

  It was at this crucial moment, when the King had just publicly – if hesitantly and reluctantly – given his blessing to the mutineers, and they were settling down into quarters inside the Palace, that the entire city was shaken by a colossal explosion, a report that could be heard 20 miles away. Buildings shook; in the Palace several plaster ceilings collapsed.

  Half a mile to the north of the Red Fort, Theo’s friend Lieutenant Willoughby, besieged by sepoys, had just blown up the magazine, the largest arsenal of guns and ammunition in northern India; and with it the large mob of jihadis, insurgents and sepoys who were attacking it, as well as almost all of its British defenders.

  Far to the north, beyond Metcalfe House, Captain Robert Tytler spent most of 11 May unaware of the fate of his fellow countrymen, or the dramatic political revolution then taking place in the Palace.

  Sent with a company of 200 sepoys to guard the new powder magazine and the Yamuna ford at a large army building known as the White House, a little to the north-east of the cantonments, Tytler knew that all was not well, but remained quite ignorant of the extent of the reverses fast destroying British rule in and around Delhi.

  He knew that his men had shown their sympathies for the sepoys in Meerut when the sentences had been read out on parade; he knew that the men had been ‘excitable’ when the news had come that the Meerut sepoys had reached Delhi ‘shouting vehemently every now and then’ as he prepared them to march; and he had seen that when he handed out ammunition to his men some had grabbed far more than their entitlement and he had mentally marked down the guilty men for punishment at a later date. But isolated as he was in his remote position, no precise news had reached h
im of what was going on, although looking downstream, he could plainly see the smoke rising from within the city, and hear the faint report of musketry and cannon.

  By early afternoon, he and his colleague Captain Gardner had noticed that the sepoys were refusing to come within the shelter of the White House, and were instead forming into small groups in the heat of the sun. ‘I ordered them to come in and not expose themselves thus,’ he wrote later.

  They said, ‘we like being in the sun.’ I ordered them in again. [No one moved.] I then remarked for the first time a native – from his appearance, a soldier – haranguing the men and saying that every power or Government existed its allotted time, and that it was nothing extraordinary that that of the English had come to an end, according to what had been predicted in their books. Before I could make a prisoner of him, the magazine in the city exploded, and the men of the two companies with a tremendous shout took up their arms and ran off to the city, exclaiming, ‘Prithviraj ki jai!’ or ‘Victory to the Sovereign of the World!’ Captain Gardner and myself rushed after them, and ordered those within hearing to return to their post; when orders failed, entreaties were resorted to, but proved of no avail.66

  Tytler found himself with only eighty sepoys left, ‘chiefly old soldiers that had served with me in Afghanistan’, and felt ‘quite at a loss how to act and what to do’. Minutes later, however, urgent orders arrived by messenger that Tytler should join his brigadier at the Flagstaff Tower in the centre of the Ridge overlooking the walled city.

  The Flagstaff Tower was a scene of great confusion when Tytler finally reached it. In the course of the day, this short, isolated round tower situated on the summit of the barren Ridge had become the place of refuge for all the remaining British families from the cantonment and the Civil Lines, as well as those few who had managed to escape from the walled city. These included Tytler’s wife Harriet, who was uncharacteristically flustered and weeping, feeling the weight of her advanced pregnancy: unflappable as she usually was, her steely composure had finally broken when her little four-year-old son Frank had asked her, ‘Mamma, will these naughty sepoys kill my papa, and will they kill me too?’ Also within the tower were the entire Wagentrieber clan, whose patriarch George had that morning had a narrow escape from the rebel sepoys at the Kashmiri Gate on his way to the now-ransacked premises of the Delhi Gazette.

  Outside the tower stood two light field guns overseen by Brigadier Graves and the Delhi judge Charles Le Bas, the only survivor from the group of men who had closed the Calcutta Gate earlier that morning. Under their orders were a company of scowling and clearly disaffected sepoys, and the Anglo-Indian orphans from the Christian Boys’ Band, whose annual wheelbarrow race had for several years been one of the highlights of the Delhi Derby, but who had now been pressed into active military service. They had been issued with muskets, and were now standing on guard behind the battlements on the top of the tower.

  Crushed inside were the massed womenfolk of the station, several of whom had just been told that their husbands, sons or brothers had been killed. Equally distraught was one of the few European soldiers present, Charlie Thomason, Padre Jennings’ prize tenor, who had been carried to the tower from his sickbed in the cantonments, only to be told that his fiancée, Annie Jennings, had been murdered in the Palace.

  The single interior room of the tower was only 18 feet in diameter, windowless and stuffy at the best of times; at the height of the hot season it was like an oven. Worse still, for their safety, many of the women had been sent up a suffocating interior staircase, as a result of which several had fainted.67 But more distressing even than the discomfort, the heat and the lack of water was the suspense. Over the course of the day, successive reports brought ever worse news of the British position, with reversal following reversal, death following death, and the prospects of relief from the British regiments in Meerut growing progressively more remote. According to the young Florence Wagentrieber,

  Ladies and children [as well as] servants, male and female, were all huddled together in utter confusion. Many ladies were in a miserable condition from the extreme heat and nervous excitement, little ones crying and clinging to their mothers. Here were wives made widows, sisters weeping at the report of a brother’s death, and some whose husbands were still on duty in the midst of the disaffected sepoys, of whose fate they were as yet ignorant … There was not a tree near the tower to shelter it from the hot sun … the heat was unbearable and the children were stripped of every garment.68

  Arriving into this heaving pandemonium, Tytler could see immediately that the isolated tower was quite indefensible, and that to mass the women and children in such a spot was to invite a further and much larger massacre than that which had already taken place within the walls of the city. Without hesitation, he marched straight up to Brigadier Graves and, according to the account of his wife Harriet, asked ‘in a very clear and audible voice’:

  ‘Excuse me sir, but what are you going to do?’

  He replied: ‘Stay here Tytler, and protect the women and children.’

  My husband said in a most emphatic manner, ‘It’s madness sir, have you any food?’

  ‘No, Tytler.’

  ‘Have you any water?’

  ‘No, Tytler.’

  ‘Then how do you propose protecting the women and children?’

  ‘What can we do? If we put out our heads they will shoot us down.’

  My husband said, ‘Look here gentlemen … We cannot hold our post, therefore it is our duty to form a retreat.’

  The officers called out, ‘For God’s sake, don’t listen to Tytler.’ My husband then said, ‘Very well gentlemen, do as you like, stay here and be butchered, but I will go with my family and stand my court martial. I will not stand to see my wife and children butchered.”69

  As Tytler was speaking, a single bullock cart appeared at the foot of the slope and slowly creaked up the incline of the Ridge from the Kashmiri Gate. Inside, under a thin covering of women’s dresses stained with blood, lay the mangled and mutilated bodies of all the British officers murdered as they entered the city earlier in the morning; the sister of one of the victims, Miss Burrowes, stood perspiring inside the tower. The cart had in fact been sent up by Edward Vibart to the cantonment, and by mistake found its way to the Flagstaff Tower; but it was taken by the edgy and nervous refugees as an act of intimidation by the sepoys. Although that had not been the original intention of the sender, it certainly had that effect.

  On seeing the bodies, Tytler’s remaining sepoys urged their captain to flee if they were to avoid the same fate, telling him that the Meerut sawars were currently resting their horses in the nearby Ochterlony Gardens: ‘They expect you to stay here all night, and will come and kill you at their leisure,’ the sepoys told Tytler.*

  At this the nerve of the frightened crowd finally broke. As soon as the Brigadier and his officers heard of the fate awaiting them,’ wrote Harriet Tytler, ‘they realised how near their end had come, and then there was indeed a stampede. Everyone rushed to their carriage to see who could get off first.’70

  As the day progressed, Edward Vibart’s position at the main guard just inside the Kashmiri Gate of the walled city became increasingly untenable.

  At one o’clock, the 200 missing sepoys of Vibart’s regiment suddenly turned up again. They justified running away and leaving their officers to their fate earlier that morning by saying that they had been unarmed and taken by surprise by the mutineers, immediately as they entered Kashmiri Gate. Vibart was unsure whether this was true, and noticed ‘that although the demeanour of the men was outwardly respectful, they stood about in groups talking to each other in undertones. One sepoy of my company refused to go on sentry duty when ordered to do so; he roughly disengaged himself and slunk back into the crowd. All this was very disquietening, and boded no good’.

  At first, Vibart had kept up communication with both Lieutenant Willoughby at the magazine and Arthur Galloway, the Assistant Magistrate, who had
refused to leave his post a short distance away in the Kutcherry building, just the other side of St James’s Church. By mid-afternoon, however, Galloway had been killed by his own disaffected Kutcherry Guard, while Willoughby had blown up the magazine to prevent its contents falling into the hands of the mutineers, the ‘terrific explosion shaking the foundations of the Main Guard to its centre’. By now Vibart and his companions felt insufficiently confident even to intervene to halt the looting of the church 200 yards in front of their position, ‘the cushions and stools even being borne off by the rascally populace without let or hindrance’.71

  The spirits of the defenders were momentarily lifted when Willoughby and his assistant, Lieutenant Forrest, father to the three Misses Forrest, appeared at the gate, ‘begrimed with dust and powder, and the latter badly wounded in the hand from a musket ball’; some other badly singed and disabled sergeants from the magazine limped in shortly afterwards. But the signs of disaffection among the sepoys guarding the gate were now becoming unmistakable, and they began to refuse all orders. Two cannons that had been sent up to the Ridge with a guard of sepoys and two English officers returned after half an hour with the two officers mysteriously missing. When asked why they had returned, and what had happened to their officers, the men gave evasive replies. Meanwhile ‘sepoys kept entering the enclosure in groups of threes and four, and we could observe our men getting very restless and uneasy’, wrote Vibart.

  At this critical juncture some sepoys rushed at the gate and closed it; their next act was to discharge a volley right amongst a group of officers, and their example was rapidly followed by all the other sepoys inside the enclosure … I saw Captain Gordon fall from his horse … The horrible truth now flashed on me – we were being massacred right and left, without any means of escape. Scarcely knowing what I was doing, I made for the ramp which leads from the courtyard to the bastion above. Everyone seemed to be doing the same. Twice I was knocked over as we all rushed up the slope, the bullets whistling past us like hail, and flattening themselves against the parapet with a frightful hiss. Poor Smith and Reveley, were killed close beside me. The latter was carrying a loaded gun, and, raising himself with a dying effort, he discharged both barrels into a knot of sepoys, and the next moment expired.72