Empress

by Miles Taylor

  This encounter with the Awadhi court at the outset of the Indian rebellion of 1857 tells us a great deal about the wider role of Queen Victoria in the Indian revolt, and, conversely, about the changing place of India in Victoria’s own statecraft. As the unsuccessful Awadhi mission demonstrates, the queen was perceived as a court of final appeal – the last resort for Indian rulers at odds with the East India Company. The Awadhis were only the latest in a succession of rulers of states annexed by Dalhousie who brought their grievances to London with the hope of redress from the monarch. The episode also emphasises how Victoria was a Christian queen within a European culture infused with a heightened sense of religious difference and superiority. By the mid-1850s she had come to stand for much of the evangelical Protestant ideology of British India. Her support for the expanding Anglican church in India and her adoption of princely converts to Christianity, such as Duleep Singh and Gouramma of Coorg, had cemented the idea that she was not neutral when it came to the Christian religion. In the 1840s, this had aroused little comment at home or in India. By 1857, the situation was very different. Britain’s intervention with France in the Crimea in defence of Christian minorities, together with the war against the Shi’a Shah of Persia in 1856, demonstrated Britain’s willingness to fight in the name of religion. Inevitably, as the revolt in India came to turn on a clash of religious cultures, so Queen Victoria became invoked not for her tolerance but for her Protestant zeal. In this way, Victoria, far removed from the scene of battle, symbolised many of the tensions over which the rebels were battling.

  The rebellion also proved a turning point for Victoria herself. Throughout 1857 and 1858 India consumed the energies of the queen. With Albert and her cousin George, the Duke of Cambridge and recently appointed commander-in-chief of the Forces, she pressed the Cabinet of Lord Palmerston for a faster and more resolute military response from Britain. She sought her own channels of information about the unfolding events. Once the rebellion was suppressed, Victoria and Albert turned their attention to the post-war settlement – the transfer of the Government of India from the East India Company to the Crown. The royal couple intervened to ensure that royal prerogative was upheld. Then, when Lord Derby and his ministers drafted the proclamation announcing the transfer of power to the peoples of India, it was the queen and her consort who changed fundamentally the tone of the document in ways that ensured it would become known as the ‘Magna Carta’ of Indian liberties.

  The Infidel Victoria

  The Indian rebellion of 1857–8 had many causes and a variety of effects. Social change, modernised communications, religion, new taxes and old grievances, all combined to turn a fairly regular occurrence in British India – a mutiny amongst the Indian regiments of the army – into widespread, organised revolt.5 The mutiny spread like wildfire. One by one across the army garrison towns of northern India during May and June 1857, ordinary Indian soldiers – ‘sepoys’ – took up arms against their commanding officers. The outbreak was triggered by the mutinies of the 3rd Light Cavalry at Meerut and various infantry regiments at Delhi on the 10 and 11 May. In both cases the troops had been incensed by the practice of greasing rifle cartridges using animal fat. Across the Bengal presidency, sixty-four regiments mutinied (over half the total army). The old Mughal capital of Delhi became the epicentre of the revolt. The former King of Delhi, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was returned to the city and proclaimed emperor at the end of May. Rebel governments were also established at Jhansi, Kanpur, Lucknow, Malwa and Moradabad, all of which swore allegiance to the restored court of Delhi.

  The rebels singled out Queen Victoria as the enemy. On 6 June 1857 Nana Sahib was proclaimed peshwa at Kanpur. In announcing his assumption of power, he accused Queen Victoria of being behind a plan to Christianise forcibly the sepoys in the Indian army. A similar rumour, claiming that the queen had personally approved of a decision by the governor-general in Council to convert all sepoys was expressed at Lucknow. Then, in early July 1857, a pamphlet invoking a holy war against Britain – entitled Fateh-i-Islam – argued that servitude under a Muslim king would be better for Indian rajas than ‘under the infidel Victoria and the English’.6 Unprecedented levels of violence on both sides now followed, although losses were disproportionate. British fatalities numbered around 11,000, three-quarters of these from disease, whilst rebel deaths exceeded 100,000. Sepoy killings of European officers and civilian residents were countered by British forces slowly but steadily annihilating the rebel armies and the communities from which they were drawn, as well as undertaking bloody reprisals for months after the revolt had subsided, including ritual executions by cannon and public hangings. Initially caught unawares, Britain poured European and colonial troops into India from west and east – from the recent war in Persia, together with several regiments from the Cape and from Ceylon, and diverted troops en route to China7 – all to contain the revolt, and drew on every ounce of loyalty to be found in India itself. A force of British and European volunteers was offered from Calcutta but rejected by Viscount Canning, the governor-general, but otherwise military support from the states ringed around the North-West Provinces proved crucial. Gurkha troops were provided from Nepal by Jung Bahadur, whilst to the south-west the armies of the Maharaja of Gwalior and Tukoj Rao Holkar of Indore rallied and cordoned off routes to the Rajput states and to the coast. To the north-west of the rebel areas, the Punjab held back from taking up arms against the British, despite serious early outbreaks of mutiny in regiments at Ambala, Lahore, Peshawar and elsewhere.8 Undoubtedly a risky strategy at the time, the steps taken by Sir John Lawrence to pacify and then mobilise Sikh forces from the Punjab allowed the British to protect the vulnerable north-west frontier from the threat of Afghan and Russian incursion, and to retake Delhi by September 1857. Bahadur Shah was captured, his two sons and a grandson were executed in his presence and he went on trial the following January. Still the revolt continued as the Rani of Jhansi, the most potent female icon of the rebellion, held out and joined other leaders such as Nana Sahib converging on Gwalior, where they were eventually defeated in June 1858. By the end of 1858 Awadh returned to British control, and lingering pockets of resistance in Bengal and Bihar had been suppressed as well.

  Although confined to northern India, the revolt was so much more than a series of isolated military uprisings. Mutiny in the Indian army revealed Britain’s garrison state at breaking point. As the boundaries of British India expanded in a north-westerly direction, the army had become ever more reliant on Indian troops serving on declining rates of pay far from their home villages. European regiments had been siphoned off to serve in the wars in the Crimea and in Persia, and then towards the end of 1856 several units were despatched to China.9 With the advent of the telegraph, news of disaffection in the army travelled more speedily than in previous decades, and where accurate information could not be conveyed rumour did its own work.10 Since the Registration of the Press Act of 1835, newspapers in India had been relatively lightly regulated, and by 1857 there were many vernacular weeklies and newsletters. Curbs on printing presses were introduced through emergency legislation in June 1857, and censorship rolled out to include the English language press, but with limited effects.11 Economic modernisation was also at work in rural northern India, as local markets opened up to the free trade competition of British goods, and, unprotected by the law, landowners sold off struggling estates and farms.12 Western-style liberalisation of the economy thus created an unstable mix of winners and losers, some ripe for revolt, others primed to show loyalty in return for concession and benefit.

  Above all, at the heart of the revolt lay religion and political power. The spark which ignited the flames of mutiny – the greasing with animal fat of soldiers’ cartridges – signified colonial arrogance towards Islam and Hinduism, stoking the fear that sepoys would be subjected to Christian conversion. The restoration of the Mughal emperor at Delhi gave legitimacy to traditional forms of dynastic rule in India, which decades of Company administration had
done much to undermine. Although modern scholarship has proved kinder, much of the blame at the time for the religious and political disaffection that lay behind the revolt was laid at the door of the Marquess of Dalhousie, the governor-general of India.13 In the Dalhousie era evangelical Protestantism had certainly been spurred on. Restrictions on the remarriage of Hindu widows had been lifted, greater protection provided for the property rights of native Christian converts, and encouragement given to missionary work in schools and in villages in Bengal and the North-West Provinces. In April 1857, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel revised its plans for the expansion of the Anglican church in India, calling for three new sees: two in the north – Agra and Lahore – and one in the south, at Palamcotta (Palayankottai) in Madras. There was also evidence of growing evangelicalism in the army in 1857, through the work of so-called ‘missionary colonels’, such as Lieutenant-Colonel William Mitchell and Colonel Stephen Wheeler of the 34th Cumberland foot regiment, stationed at Kanpur.14 British opinion at the time was adamant that the rebel movement was ‘primarily of Mahomedan origin’ to such an extent than Bahadur Shah Zafar was tried in January 1858 for leading an international Muslim conspiracy.15 More recently, historians have identified the jihadi and Wahabi elements in the rebel movement, but also emphasised how the revolt united Hindus and Muslims against a common Christian enemy.16 Religious differences focused enmities like nothing else. The first mutiny at Meerut, it was rumoured, was planned around an attack on Christian civilians and soldiers worshipping on a Sunday.17

  During his time in India Dalhousie had also pushed through the most extensive annexation of territory to Britain in the Indian subcontinent since the end of the Maratha wars.18 The subjugation of the Punjab in 1849 was accompanied by the imposition of direct rule across India: from Satara and Sindh in the west, to Rajputana and the North-West Provinces, to Tanjore and Arcot in Madras, Nagpur and Jhansi in central India, as far south as the Berars in the kingdom of Hyderabad, to the north-east in Sikkim, and all the way round to Pegu in Burma. Dalhousie did not invent the infamous doctrine of lapse, whereby Britain took control of states in which a ruler had died and where there was no natural replacement heir, but he certainly applied it with vigour. Moreover, Dalhousie aspired to expel Muslim rule in northern India. In 1851 he undertook an extensive tour of the conquered north-west frontier, conducting durbars at which a series of Sikh rajas swore personal fealty to him in the same way that they had previously honoured the Mughal emperor. At Peshawar Dalhousie noted how Britain had stopped ‘the tide of Mahometan conquest’ after over eight centuries and subjugated the ‘fanatical & furious barbarians, whose faith is a cloak for every crime’. At Pinjore Dalhousie sat on the golden throne of Ranjit Singh to receive the Maharajas of Patiala and other Sutlej chiefs. These tours continued into the North-West Provinces. At Rampur singers assembled by the Nawab sang ‘Rule Britannia’.19 Dalhousie’s critics accused him of assuming the powers of a ‘deity’, whilst he defended the expense and the long absences from Calcutta that his durbars entailed, pointing out that they were not ‘mere gaudy show’, but critical to the stability of British power.20 Under Dalhousie the Government of India also ensured that northern India was made aware of British prowess beyond the north-west frontier, for example translating into Urdu news of allied success at the battle of Alma in the Crimea.21 Finally, in 1856, Dalhousie moved ahead with the annexation of the Muslim kingdom of Awadh. He shrugged off his own colleagues’ concerns about the legitimacy of the move and delayed his departure from India until it was completed. With pathos he described for Queen Victoria the moment of submission when the King of Awadh handed over his turban to the British resident: ‘the deepest mark of humiliation and helplessness which a native of the East can exhibit . . . when the head thus bared in supplication was one that had worn a royal Crown’.22

  For Dalhousie annexation was much more than another chapter in the piecemeal expansion of British India. In absorbing territory Dalhousie was displacing ancient Muslim and Hindu kingdoms and princely states, and their religious and ceremonial infrastructure. Through his durbar tours he appropriated older forms of Mughal royal style in order to enforce allegiance to Christian Britain and its queen. His administration encouraged depictions of native rule as decadent, corrupt and immoral, for example William Knighton’s salacious account of the court at Awadh,23 and choked off official and unofficial communications amongst Indian royal houses and between their rulers and London. It took its toll. Exhausted and bereaved (his wife, the queen’s former lady-in-waiting, died in India in 1853), Dalhousie returned home in 1856. He was so ill on reaching England that his chair had to be hoisted on deck so he could wave to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as they sailed past on the royal yacht down the Solent. But he had left a tinderbox behind, with the queen perched on its lid.

  News from India

  Queen Victoria was oblivious to how the leaders of the Indian revolt denounced her personally, but she quickly discerned the root cause of the mutinies. Writing to Charlotte Canning, the governor-general’s wife, the day after she had received the Awadhi delegation, she asserted that ‘a fear of their religion being tampered with is at the bottom of it’.24 Her immediate concern, however, lay with the inadequacy of Britain’s military reactions to the uprising. Throughout the summer months of 1857 she kept in close contact with the news reported from India, communicated directly from the War Office and Horse Guards to Buckingham Palace whilst she was in London, and then by telegraph straight into Osborne House during the summer months. Queen Victoria blamed the spread of the mutiny on reductions in the European army in India, and on the dual fighting force (crown and Company troops) that created a divided command.25 En route to Osborne House on 16 July she met with Palmerston and his Cabinet colleagues and ‘spoke to them most strongly about the necessity of recruiting the whole army, of taking energetic measures at once, & not miserable half measures’. But the ‘dilatoriness and senselessness’ of Palmerston’s government in the face of the revolt continued to alarm Victoria. On arrival at Osborne she and Albert wrote a long memorandum on the army in India, calling for the integration of the European and native soldiers. The following weekend they took the steamer over to Portsmouth to watch the departure of Albert’s brigade, the 3rd Rifles, as part of the troop reinforcements going east.26 Over the next two months Queen Victoria repeatedly called on Palmerston to increase the supply of extra troops, not just from other parts of Asia but from Canada and the Mediterranean as well. Gradually, helped by the intercession of Lord Clarendon, the foreign secretary, Palmerston’s Cabinet heeded her advice and the urgency of the situation, agreeing to call up the militia and send out extra battalions from home as well as from Malta and Canada.27 As in the 1840s, Queen Victoria’s instinctive reactions to events in India were those of a warrior queen. True, she sanctioned Lord Palmerston’s proposal to hold a day of state prayer.28 Mostly, however, it was her voice of military command that prevailed. She saw Sir Colin Campbell, appointed by Palmerston to lead the British forces in India, before he left for India in July 1857, and once back in London and Windsor during the first half of 1858 she met and spoke with many returning officers and army wives, getting first-hand information about the battle scenes and their experiences.29

  In this way the queen stood apart from much of the response to the Indian rebellion that so captured the British literary imagination. Contemporary magazines, newspapers and so-called eyewitness accounts rendered the violence and bloodshed of the mutiny as the ‘rape’ of British India, dwelling particularly on the ferocity with which the sepoy rebels attacked European women and children.30 Queen Victoria was certainly aware of the atrocities, sharing in the wave of emotional indignation that broke over Britain from late August. ‘If only they had been shot down,’ she wrote in her journal of the European women and children murdered and dumped in a well at Kanpur, ‘it would not be so ghastly but everything that can outrage feelings, – every torture that can be conceived, has been perpetrated’.
31 However, the sensational reportage did not hold her attention. Plenty of contemporary officer accounts of the British campaign against the rebels in India survive in the Royal Library at Windsor, but only Adelaide Case’s Day by Day at Lucknow (1858) is there to represent the more popular genre of female non-combatant memoirs.32 By November 1857 Queen Victoria was telling Canning that she thought the ‘unChristian spirit shown by the public’ would not last and she was asking for evidence of the ill treatment of women.

  For this Queen Victoria turned to Charlotte Canning. Of all the nineteenth-century vicereines, Charlotte was the closest to the queen, having served at court for thirteen years as a Lady of the Bedchamber. She kept a diary and was a prolific watercolourist and photographer.33 From Charlotte Canning Queen Victoria received the most detailed accounts of the rebellion and the British counter-offensive, from the early scares over the greased cartridges through the major incidents of the rebellion as it spread north-west, and on to her husband’s post-revolt tour of northern India in 1859–60, which she carefully documented with brush, pen and camera. Charlotte Canning’s letters supplied Queen Victoria with a corrective to the lurid narratives of the events, particularly at Kanpur and Lucknow. She pointed out to Queen Victoria that most of the stories of the sepoy horrors arose from the mutilations that were carried out upon the bodies of the dead, but there was no credible evidence that violent sexual assault had occurred whilst they were alive. Concerned that she seemed to ‘talk of “poor dear sepoys”’ and to have ‘softness or tenderness towards them’, Charlotte Canning assured the queen that she only wanted to test some of the stories. It seemed to work. Other visitors to Buckingham Palace confirmed that there had been ‘dreadful exaggeration of the cruelties’. In fact by May 1858 Charlotte Canning herself feared that there had been ‘too great a reaction’ the other way, and that in accepting the evidence against mutilation, all the ‘treachery and cruelty’ should not be forgotten.34