Empress

by Miles Taylor

  In the other main portion of the queen’s Indian service, loyalty carried a higher premium. The army constituted the largest element of Her Majesty’s servants in India after 1858. Victoria and Albert, together with her cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, had long coveted a more direct control of the army in India. The experience of divided command in the suppression of the rebellion of 1857–8 had only strengthened their resolve. Clauses 56 and 57 of the Government of India Act of 1858 transferred the armed forces of the East India Company to the Crown, and the Crown lost no time in taking up the command.39 Within weeks of the Act being passed the Duke of Cambridge was instructing Jonathan Peel, the secretary of state for war, with his future intentions. Albert was soon ready with his own plans. He envisaged an army of India, still split across the three presidencies as far as native regiments were concerned, but led by one all-India corps of officers, which would rotate around the different divisions. In his scheme, all the European regiments – both the soldiers of the Company and the royal troops – would be incorporated into the regular army of the line, that is, under the command of the Crown. That was essentially what the queen desired too, her domain to be secured by her own army. With the queen anxious for complete control, and the Duke of Cambridge, as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, keen to take precedence immediately over the India Office, Albert counselled patience. Amalgamate the two armies of India into the regular army, and the rest would follow.40

  However, that was not the view of Parliament, in the first instance at any rate. In March 1859, a commission, chaired by Peel, reported on the way forward. On merging the two armies, its views were split: the majority favoured retaining the local army, raised exclusively for service in India and under the command of the viceregal authorities and the secretary of state for India. A minority report gave the case for the Crown, calling for the maintenance of the separate armies of each presidency, and the combining of native and European regiments under a single command.41 Learning of the outcome of the Commission in February, ahead of publication, the queen was furious. She spelled out to Lord Derby her preferred course of action: the abolition of the local army, the transfer of command and recruiting to the head of the regular royal army, a reduction in the number of native regiments, and the introduction of Crown patronage over the appointment of senior European officers and military cadetships. Prince Albert joined in, writing directly to Peel, and, to complete the royal battery, the Duke of Cambridge (a member of the Commission) pitched in as well to lobby Lord Derby. Wincing at the ‘great pain’ the queen’s remonstrations caused him, but mindful of likely parliamentary opposition to any attempt to enhance the authority of the Crown over the army, Derby did his best to dodge the bombardment from the Palace and the Horse Guards (the Duke of Cambridge’s HQ) that continued unabated through March and April.42 Relief only came for the embattled prime minister when the Liberals under Palmerston returned to power. An old Whig now filled the new office of secretary of state for India: Sir Charles Wood. The prospects for amalgamating the army in India looked even dimmer. The Whigs believed in government by Parliament, and Parliament liked to think it controlled the army, wherever its operations. Fearing the worst, the queen made an early move on her new minister, pressing Wood to implement the changes required by the Palace. Wood deflected her ultimatum, saying that he needed to get his feet under the table of his new ministry, and also await the return of Parliament. Frustrated and fuming, the queen threatened Wood that she would not approve any new commissions in the existing Indian army until he made a decision about its reform.43 Royal brinkmanship once more.

  Then something happened to prevent a stand-off between Crown, Cabinet and Parliament – another ‘mutiny’ in India, but this time of British troops. Throughout the debates around Indian army reform in the immediate aftermath of the rebellion of 1857–8, no one had thought to consult the European soldiers themselves. In May 1859, almost two years to the day after the start of the sepoy mutiny, a regiment of European troops at Meerut began a protest – or a ‘strike’, as they called it – objecting to serving the Crown.44 Graffiti suggested it was personal. ‘John Company is dead, we will not soldier for the Queen’ was scrawled on the washhouse walls at Meerut. The protests spread: to Allahabad, Baharampur in Bengal, and to the hill cantonment of Dagshai. At issue was the question of whether the soldiers were obliged to switch service, or whether they might be discharged and re-enlist, or be paid a bounty to move from one regiment to a new one, as was the convention. Company troops were limited to service in India; soldiering for the queen might take them anywhere in the world. Many believed they had been offered the right to a discharge from comments made by Lord Palmerston during the debates on the Government of India bill in 1858. Fearful of having to turn European soldiers on fellow Europeans, the Government of India moved swiftly to quell the outbreak. Three ringleaders at Meerut were identified. Special hearings were conducted at several of the principal army towns to find out how widespread was the mood of resistance. In their statements, many soldiers claimed they were loyal subjects of the queen, but not her servants. Having sworn an oath of attestation when they joined the Company army, and with the Company now disbanded, they felt no obligation to the Crown, unless incentivised by the bounty payment. Of the 837 soldiers interviewed at Lahore, 73 per cent stated they were dissatisfied with the way their transfer had been handled. Extra troop ships were quickly laid on for those who wished to be discharged, and by the summer of 1860 some 10,000 troops had been shipped out.45 As a statement of disloyalty amongst the rank and file, the 1859 mutiny was a powerful one. The authorities in India and in Britain subsequently recognised that European soldiers’ ‘rights had been overlooked’ in the transfer of government from Company to Crown. One commentator went so far as to suggest that, instead of the change of employer being made by the ‘stroke of a pen’, a general order should have been issued, in which the queen offered all Company troops a bounty to re-enlist in the regular army, referring in ‘stirring language’ to their recent brilliant exploits.46 Preoccupied with securing Indian loyalty after the rebellion, the British government had taken for granted the patriotism of its own forces.

  The ‘white mutiny’ of troops in 1859 quickly undid the work of Peel’s Commission. From India it was reported that Lord Clyde (commander-in-chief of the Indian army) and General William Mansfield (commander of the Bombay army) were not only sympathetic to the discontented troops, but also felt that the incident proved the days of the local army were numbered. Clyde also had the ear of the queen and the Duke of Cambridge. Wood, the new secretary of state, who on taking office had been minded to deliver the Commission’s recommendations, changed tack completely.47 The following summer he brought forward legislation which did away with the local army altogether. European company troops were absorbed into the regular army, and three native armies were maintained in the Presidencies, together with the Hyderabad contingent and the Punjab frontier force. The East India Company’s military college at Addiscombe was closed. A new officer corps was brought in, over the course of time picked from the regular army and directly from the army staff college at Sandhurst. The sepoy regiments were disbanded, and ‘irregular’ Indian infantry and artillery established, with their own native officers.

  The court had got its way. India now felt the force of only one army, and it was the queen’s. As Wood’s Indian army bill left the House of Commons en route for its final reading, Lord Clyde stayed over at Osborne House, his table talk ‘very strong about amalgamation of the Army’.48 This was a royal army in India in every sense. Its overall command lay with the queen’s cousin, the Duke of Cambridge. The queen herself ensured that going forward her views on senior military appointments in India were made known. Army institutions over which she enjoyed patronage – Sandhurst, the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers – now staffed the officer corps in the Indian army. The new Indian irregulars fought in the name of the queen, the buttons on their tunics embossed with the crown of England.49 By th
e mid-1860s the reorganisation was complete. The new Indian army comprised 62,000 British officers and rank-and-file, and 125,000 Indians. The native regiments were unlike the old sepoy units. They were drawn deliberately from the ‘martial’ peoples of India: Punjabi Sikhs and Muslims, Gurkhas, Jats, Santhals, Balochis and Pathuns. They were recruited into clannish regiments, serving alongside their neighbours, kith and kin.50 They were expected to fight anywhere, not just in their immediate vicinity as in the old days. The last campaign fought by the dual army was in Sikkim in 1860, the first of the new era was in Bhutan in 1864–5. Then, in 1867, 13,000 British and Indian troops sailed from Bombay to fight in Abyssinia, setting a pattern for overseas deployment during the rest of Queen Victoria’s reign51 – 40,000 troops went to Egypt in 1882, 8,500 to the Sudan in 1885, and 9,000 to Burma between 1885 and 1887. This reformed and streamlined, multipurpose and amphibious Indian army soon became the model for a projected inter-colonial army, first mooted in 1867. Less than a decade after worried military men thought African troops might be required to suppress the rebellion in India, Indian regiments were being proposed as a new cheap fighting force for Africa.52 For years the native regiments had been the Achilles heel of the Indian empire. Now pockets of loyalism that were to last through to 1947 emerged in the principal recruiting areas of the Indian army such as the Punjab. Waging war for the queen and later for the emperor, and by 1914–18 suffering great casualties in doing so, became the hallmark of Indian imperial patriotism, however much it was taken for granted by the British, who never allowed recruitment to extend beyond the homelands of the ‘martial’ races, and who dismissed out of hand Indian enthusiasm for establishing their own volunteer forces.

  Sannads

  The queen’s proclamation applied not only to British India, but to all the native or princely states as well. Numbering some 560 altogether, the princely states comprised just under 40 per cent of the Indian subcontinent, and around 20 per cent of its population.53 There were so many, because they were mostly very small, concentrated in a strip that swept westwards from Bengal and Orissa (Odisha) through Bhopal and Gwalior, fanning north up into Rajputana and the northern and eastern parts of the Punjab, to Kashmir, and up against the frontier with Afghanistan, and south-west into Gujarat. There were also many small independent states dotted about the Deccan plateau within the British presidency of Bombay. To the south lay the three largest princely states of all: Hyderabad, Mysore and Travancore. Victoria became queen of them all, assuming the paramount power that had previously been held by the King of Delhi. His crown and throne came to Windsor in the new year of 1861. They were not in good shape. Charles Wood told Prince Albert that the ‘head-dress’ could not really be called a crown; it was more of a skullcap. And the throne was in fact two ‘old and worn’ chairs, remarkable only because the king had used them.54 As symbols of sovereignty the personal effects of Bahadur Shah II were not at all impressive. Fortunately, the words of the queen set out in the 1858 proclamation were, and had as much influence over the princely states as they did over British India. Letters of congratulation from several prominent Indian maharajas – Benares, Bikaner, Jind, Mysore, Nabha, Patiala and Udaipur – joined the many similar civilian addresses received by the queen upon the transfer of power in 1858. In Hyderabad, the nizam held a special durbar to mark the occasion.55 Princely India was thus cemented into the fabric of British India, and so it remained for the next ninety years. The British Raj could not exist without the strategic security and revenue provided by the Indian states; the royal families of the princely states required the Raj to shore up dynastic rule. There was something for all in the queen’s proclamation.

  As far as the princely states of India were concerned, the key phrases of the proclamation were the queen’s assertion that Britain had no desire to extend ‘Our present territorial Possessions’ and that the ‘Rights, Dignity and Honour’ of native princes would be respected ‘as Our own’. No one needed to read too much between the lines to know that this meant an end to Dalhousie’s doctrine of lapse, whereby Indian states without a legitimate direct family heir were annexed to Britain. It also implied acceptance of the right of adoption, that is to say, the succession passing to someone chosen specially for the role even if not related to the incumbent ruler. During the remainder of the queen’s reign the promise of the proclamation to respect the integrity of these states was kept, more or less. Only one new territory was added to British India – Upper Burma in 1886 – and technically it was outside British Indian territory. Native rulers were replaced by temporary British administrations in a handful of cases: Karauli (1882), Rajpipla (1884–7), Cambay (1890–92) and Makrai (1890–93). Ruling dynasties were ousted and new chiefs chosen by the Government of India in several other instances: Tonk (1871), Suket (1878), Bharatpur (1900), Jhalawar (1896) and, most dramatically of all, following conspiracies against the British representatives, in Baroda (1875) and Manipur (1891).56 These, however, were exceptions. Somehow, the queen’s words worked wonders. As Lewin Bowring later put it, the minds of the Indian princes were ‘tranquilised’ by the proclamation.57 Calmed, certainly, but were they sedated as well?

  Queen Victoria’s first crop of viceroys did not take the deference of the Indian princes for granted. Canning, Lord Elgin and Mayo all undertook extensive durbar tours in order to bind the princely states into union with the British. The long journeys in the saddle endured by both Canning and Elgin destroyed their health, whilst Mayo was assassinated as one of his expeditions neared it conclusion. Lord Lawrence travelled less and lived longer, but his durbars were by far the largest. It is tempting to see these durbar tours as early versions of the famous Delhi durbars of 1877, 1903 and 1911, when the Indian princes swore fealty in acts of collective submission to their British rulers who had superseded the Mughals. That would be misleading. These earlier durbars were more like diplomatic summits, in which the terms of Indian princely allegiance to the British Raj were negotiated and settled. As formal occasions, they were inevitably accompanied by ritual pomp and ceremony, but the business they transacted suggested that the viceroys of the 1860s, as they laid down the foundations of the new Raj, did not rely on the habits of deference and obeisance routinely attributed to eastern potentates. Canning set the tone early on. At the time of the transfer of power in 1858 he told Lord Stanley that ‘ostentatious’ ceremonies of homage to mark the occasion were inappropriate. Better that he set out to meet the native chiefs on their own territory. During his second durbar tour in 1860, Canning declared to Charles Wood that Indian princes did not need cajoling into showing ‘loyalty and reverence for the Queen’s name’.58 Just over two years later, Canning’s successor Elgin made the same point, albeit in a slightly different way. He told Charles Wood that:

  I know that it is customary with certain people whose opinions are entitled to respect to act on the assumption that all Orientals are children, amused and gratified by external trappings and ceremonies and titles, and ready to put up with the loss of real dignity and power if they are only permitted to enjoy the semblance of it.

  On the contrary, Elgin argued, ‘the Eastern imagination is singularly prone to invest outward things with a symbolic character, and that relations on points of form are valued by them because they are held necessarily to imply connections of substantial matters’.59 In other words, subjection to the Raj involved both heart and head. The authority of the queen, articulated by the proclamation, underpinned the terms of the union between the native states and the Raj. The proclamation was a covenant between the queen and the princes, mediated by the viceroys.

  Someone who understood these maxims well was Scotsman Charles Umpherston Aitchison, an Indian civil servant across whose desk most of the significant diplomatic dealings with the Indian princes passed. First as under-secretary from 1859 and then as secretary from 1868 he worked in the foreign department of the Government of India for almost twenty years (except for three years when he was posted to Lahore). Aitchison compiled what prov
ed to be the definitive listing of all the treaties and agreements that bound the states of India, surrounding territories and dependencies in the Persian Gulf. What started life in 1862 as a snapshot of princely northern India became by the time of its fifth edition in 1929 a fourteen-volume guide to the architecture of British rule in India.60 For his insights into the principles of Crown paramountcy after 1858 Aitchison is an invaluable guide, both as draughtsman and as commentator, yet rarely have historians consulted him.

  Aitchison had little time for the argument that British authority over the princely states was derived from the power originally enjoyed by the Mughals. Rather, he argued that de facto supremacy had been built up over many years, and was underwritten by successive treaties and charters. In this respect the importance of the queen’s proclamation was that it promised to uphold all the original agreements made by the East India Company, and not to transgress any single treaty with a native state. Aitchison described a mutual relationship between the British government and the Indian states. The latter did not enjoy the principle of nationality, but they did have sovereignty. They could expect Britain not to advance its own interests at their expense, but equally they needed to show ‘active co-operation’ in furthering imperial interests. Their nationality was vested in the British government, with whom they had a unity of interest, which the queen personally expected them to fulfil.61 In support of his argument, Aitchison turned to Henry Maine for confirmation of the type of sovereignty applicable to the princely states. Maine had argued in a series of minutes while legal member of the Viceroy’s Council that the princely states enjoyed what he described as ‘demi-sovereignty’, similar to the situation that had prevailed in the eighteenth-century Prussian empire, or more recently in the Confederation of the Rhine, or German Bund. The Indian states were under the protection of the British sovereign in their internal affairs, but obliged to conform to external obligations laid down by the paramount power. Maine, who like Aitchison disregarded any precedents set by the Mughals, stated that this kind of ‘demi-sovereignty’ was in fact a standard model in modern international law. It was not so much a throwback to the era of Akbar as an eastern variation of the European state system recalibrated by the great powers after 1815. Aitchison’s doctrine thus bore a striking resemblance to the late Prince Albert’s vision of princely independence within an imperial framework. Aitchison later singled out Lord Lawrence for applying this modern version of the ‘feudatory principle’ during his term as viceroy, but its genesis can be found in the durbar tours of Canning a few years earlier.62