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Chapter 2

With these colleagues in the Council Chamber, and with a staff of able, well-trained secretaries, of whom I shall speak hereafter, in the several Departments, the new Governor-General found the burden of his work, though it pressed heavily upon him, in no way galling or dispiriting. There are always small vexations and embarrassments; incidental details, that will not run smoothly in the administrative groove, but grind and grate and have a stubborn obstructiveness about them. But the great sum-total of the business before him wore an aspect cheerful and encouraging. There was tranquillity in India. Outwardly, it seemed that Lord Dalhousie had left only a heritage of Peace.

The Administration of Oudh

Even in Oudh, just emerging from a revolution, there were external signs of general quietude; of contentment, or at least of submission; and of the satisfactory progress of the administration. But a new administrator was wanted. Outram had done his work. He had been selected to fill the office of Resident, and no man could have more becomingly represented British interests at a corrupt and profligate Court. In that capacity it had fallen to his lot to accomplish ministerially the revolution which had been decreed by the British Government. But it was work that sickened him; for although he believed that it was the duty of the Paramount State to rescue Oudh from the anarchy by which it had so long been rent, he was one whose political predilections were in favour of the maintenance of the Native States, and he knew that much wrong had been done to the Princes and Chiefs of India under the plea of promoting the interests of the people. When the Proclamation converted Oudh into a British province, the Resident became Chief Commissioner, and the superintendence of the administration was the work that then devolved upon him. But it was work that Outram was not now destined to perform. His health had broken down; the hot season was

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coming on apace; and a voyage to England had been urgently pressed upon him by his medical advisers. So he sought permission to lay down the Portfolio for a while, and asked the Governor-General to appoint an officer to act for him in his absence.

Question of succession

It would have been comparatively easy to find a successor suited to the work, if the appointment to be disposed of had been a permanent one. But Lord Canning had to find a man able to conduct the administration at its most difficult stage, and yet willing to forsake other important work for the brief tenure of another’s office. Outram said that there was one man in whom both the ability and the will were to be found. That man was Henry Ricketts, a Bengal civilian of high repute, whose appointment was pressed upon Lord Canning as the best that could be made. But Ricketts was wanted for other work. The authorities at home were clamouring for a reduction of expenditure; and as retrenchment, public or private, commonly begins in the wrong place, a revision of official salaries was to be one of the first efforts of our economy. So Mr. Ricketts had been specially appointed to furnish a Report on the best means of extracting from the officers of Government the same amount of good public service for a less amount of public money. Lord Canning shook his head doubtfully at the experiment; but Cannon-row was urgent, and nothing was to be suffered to interrupt the labours of the man who was to suggest the means of increasing the financial prosperity of the Company by sapping out the energies of those upon whom that prosperity mainly depended.

Whilst Outram and the Governor-General were corresponding about this arrangement, another plan for the temporary administration of Oudh was suggesting itself; but it never became more than a suggestion. Ever since the dissolution of the Lahore Board, Sir Henry Lawrence had held office as chief of the Political Agency at Rajputana. It was a post of honour and responsibility; but there was not in the work to be done enough to satisfy so ardent and so active a mind, and he had longed, during that great struggle before Sebastopol, which he had watched with eager interest from the beginning, to show, when all the departments were breaking down, what a rough-and-ready Indian Political might do to help an army floundering miserably in a strange land. But this field of adventure was closed against him. Peace was proclaimed: and Henry

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Lawrence, who had studied well the history and the institutions of Oudh, and who had advocated the assumption of the government, but not the annexation of the province or the absorption of its revenues, thought that he might do some good by superintending the administration during the first year of our tenure. There were many interests to be dealt with in that conjuncture, which required a strong but a gentle hand to accommodate them to the great revolution that had been accomplished, and he felt some apprehension lest civilian-government, harsh and precise, should forthwith begin to systematise, in utter disregard of the institutions and usages of the country, and should strike at once for a flourishing balance-sheet. It was too little the fashion to sympathise with the fallen fortunes of men ruined by the dominant influence of the White Race. In the chivalrous benevolence of the outgoing Commissioner, Henry Lawrence had full confidence. The great-hearted compassion which Outram had shown for the Amirs of Sindh, proclaimed the mercy and justice of the man. But a civilian of the new school from the Regulation Provinces might bring with him a colder heart and a sharper practice, and might overbear all ancient rights and privileges in pursuit of the favourite theory of the Dead Level. Anxious to avert this, which he believed would be a calamity alike to the people of Oudh and to his own government, Henry Lawrence offered to serve, during the transition-period, in Outram’s place; and the first misfortune that befell the ministry of Lord Canning was that the letter, conveying the proposal, arrived a little too late. A Commissioner had already been appointed.

The New Commissioner

The choice had fallen on Mr. Coverley Jackson, a civilian from the North-West Provinces, an expert revenue officer, held in high esteem as a man of ability, but more than suspected of some infirmity of temper. Aware of this notorious failing, but not deeming it sufficient to disqualify one otherwise so well fitted for the post, Lord Canning accompanied his offer of the appointment with a few words of caution, frank but kindly, and Jackson in the same spirit received the admonition, assuring the Governor-General that it would be his earnest endeavour to conciliate the good feelings of all who might be officially connected with him, so far as might be consistent with the claims of the public service and the maintenance of the authority entrusted to him. But he did not accomplish this; and there is slight evidence

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that he resolutely attempted it. It was an untoward occurrence that the man next in authority, and the one with whom the circumstances of the province brought him most frequently into official communication, was as little able to control his temper as Jackson himself. Mr. Martin Gubbins, of the Bengal Civil Service, was the Financial Commissioner. Upon him devolved the immediate superintendence of the revenue administration of our new territory, whilst Mr. Ommaney, of the same service, superintended the department of Justice. A man of rare intelligence and sagacity, eager and energetic, Martin Gubbins would have been a first-rate public servant, if his utility had not been marred by a contentious spirit. His angularities of temper were continually bringing him in collision with others, and his pertinacious self-assertion would not suffer him, when once entangled in a controversy, ever to detach himself from it. Of all men in the service he was the one least likely to work harmoniously with the Chief Commissioner.

Jackson and Gubbins

So it happened that, in a very short time, they were in a state of violent antagonism. Whether, in the first instance, Jackson overstrained his authority, and unwisely and unkindly expressed his displeasure in language calculated to excite irritation and resentment, or whether Gubbins was the first to display an insubordinate spirit, and to provoke the censure of his chief by the attempted usurpation of his powers, it is of little importance now to inquire. The sharp contention that grew up between them was soon made known to the Governor-General, who deplored and endeavoured to arrest it. How wisely and calmly he conveyed to the Commissioner an expression, less of his displeasure than of his regret, his correspondence pleasantly illustrated167. But no kindly counsel from Government

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House could smooth down the asperities of Jackson’s temper. As time advanced, the feud between him and Gubbins grew more bitter and more irreconcilable. In India, a paper war once commenced lasts out many a military campaign. There is something so exciting, so absorbing in it, that even the best public servants sometimes forget the public interests whilst they are wasting their time and expending their energies in personal conflicts and criminations. Had Coverley Jackson taken half as much pains to see that the pledges of the British Government were fulfilled, and the annexation of Oudh rendered as little ruinous as possible to all the chief people of the province, as he did to convict his subordinates of official misdemeanours, it would have been better both for his own character and for the character of the nation. But whilst Jackson and Gubbins were in keen contention with each other, covering reams of paper with their charges and counter-charges and their vehement self-assertions, the generous nature of the Governor-General was grieved by complaints and remonstrances from the King, who declared, or suffered it to be declared for him, that the English officers in Lakhnao were inflicting grievous wrongs and indignities upon him and upon his family, seizing or destroying his property, and humiliating the members and dependents of his House.

Movements of the ex-King

It has been shown that Wajid Ali, when he saw that all hope of saving his dominions from the great white hand that had been laid upon them had utterly gone from him, had talked about travelling to England and laying his sorrows at the foot of the Throne. But, in truth, travelling to England, or to any other place, was a thing rather to be whined about than to be done, by one so destitute of all activities, physical and mental, and it was almost certain that he would hitch somewhere; not improbably at the first stage. And so he did. Halting not far from Lakhnao, the King awaited the on-coming of his minister, Ali Naki Khan, a man not wanting in activities of any kind, who had been detained at the capital to aid in the “transfer of the Government,” out of which he had been ousted. But after a

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while King and Minister, and other regal appendages, male and female, moved on towards Calcutta – the first , stages by land; then afterwards taking the river steamer, at a time of year when there is ever a scant supply of water for such travelling, they were constrained to go “round by the Sundarbans,” and make a long and by no means a pleasant voyage to the English capital; of which necessity Lord Canning shrewdly observed that it would give his Majesty such a foretaste of life on board as would inevitably drive out of him any lingering thought of the passage across the black water to England.

And so it was. The King arrived at Calcutta when the month of May had burnt itself half out, and was soon domiciled in a house on the river-side, which had erst been the suburban villa of an English Chief Justice. It was enough for him to see the steamers smoking past him seawards, and to keep steadily before him the conviction that for a man of his tastes and habits, to take no account of his girth, Garden Reach was a more recommendable place than the Bay of Bengal, the Red Sea, or the Mediterranean. But still the pilgrimage to the foot of the Throne was to be undertaken, not by but for the last of the Oudh Kings. Without any sacrifice of his personal ease, or any abandonment of the delights of the Zenana, he might enter a vicarious appearance at St. James’s by sending the chief members of his family – the nearest of his kindred, in each stage and relation, before, beside, and after him – his mother, his brother, and his son, with agents and ministers, black and white, to plead against the seizure of his dominions.

The Oudh Mission

There was one of the royal party with some substance of masculine vigour still left as God had given it; and that one was not the Heir-Apparent, or the so-called General, or a born manhood of any kind, but the Queen-Mother, who set the example of going across the dreary waste of black water and level sand straight to the feet of the Queen of England. And they went, not scantily attended either, those three, like thieves in the night, embarking secretly in the darkness, and taking Government House by surprise with the report of the accomplished fact of their departure. Not that Government House would have opposed any obstacle to their going in broad daylight, with drums beating and flags flying; but that the steam-company, with an eye to business, thought it better to make a secret of it, such fellow-travellers, according to European notions, not increasing the comforts of

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the voyage. As to the Governor-General, all he could say was, “Let them go,” pitying the East India Company, thus compelled to take such troublesome visitors, but claiming for them kindly and courteous treatment at the hands of the magnates of Leadenhall. And so those representatives of the exploded kingship of Oudh went westward, with vague but extensive ideas of a recovery past looking for on this side of eternity, buoyed up and encouraged by men who well knew the hopelessness of the endeavour. The “case” was miserably mismanaged. There was much internal strife, and scarcely an attempt to strike out against the common foe. The so-called “Mission” went to pieces and rotted piecemeal. Not merely waste of treasure was there, but waste of life. The Queen-Mother and the Prince-General died, and were buried in the great cemetery of Père la Chaise. The Heir-Apparent, money-bound and helpless, threw himself upon the mercy of the enemy, borrowed from them half a lakh of rupees, and was carried homewards, somewhat dazed and bewildered as to the upshot or no upshot of the whole affair, but with a prevailing sense of escape and relief that it was all over. And the rest of the luckless embassy went at last, leaving behind them some scum of official trouble and mishap, and some legal perplexities not readily soluble by any “perfection of human reason” known in our English courts.

Grievances of the ex-King

Meanwhile, in the name of the King himself, ministerial activities had not been wanting in India to make substantial grievance, not so much of the thing done (for that was left to the “Mission “) as of the manner of doing it, which had not been all right. In the Humanities, wherein is included the great art of letting down easily, good to be learnt alike by Men and by Governments, we had not taken first-class honours. Not without some reddenings of shame is it to be recorded that the wrongs inflicted upon the Princes of India in the shape of territorial dispossessions and titular extinctions had been sometimes supplemented by lesser wrongs, more grievous to bear upon the one side and less to be justified on the other. For there is some dignity in great wrong, doing or suffering; and a persuasion, in one case, not without sincerity at the bottom, that wrong is right. But look at the matter in what light we may, it can be nothing but miserable wrong to make these dispossessions and extinctions, which may be for the national good, the forerunners of personal

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distresses and humiliations to individuals thus dispossessed and extinguished. Yet men and, redder shame still, feeble Zenana-bred women had brought this charge against the strong Government of the British, before the kingdom of Oudh was marked for extinction; and now again the same complaint of supplemental cruelties and indignities, more galling than the one great wrong itself, went up from Wajid Ali, or was uttered in his name. It was charged against us that our officers had turned the stately palaces of Lakhnao into stalls and kennels, that delicate women, the daughters or the companions of kings, had been sent adrift, homeless and helpless, that treasure-houses had been violently broken open and despoiled, that the private property of the royal family had been sent to the hammer, and that other vile things had been done very humiliating to the King’s people, but far more disgraceful to our own.

Not only so disgraceful, but so injurious to us, so great a blunder, indeed, would such conduct have been, that all who had any hope of the restoration of the Oudh monarchy must have devoutly wished the story to be true. There were those who had such hope. How could it be hopeless, when it was remembered that the Sipahi Army of the Company was full of men whose homes were in Oudh; when it was believed that the great flood of English rule was sweeping away all existing interests, and destroying all the influential classes alike in the great towns and in the rural districts? The ministers and courtiers of the King of Oudh were at large in Calcutta and the neighbourhood, and might journey whithersoever they pleased. Vast fields of intrigue were open before them. The times were propitious. It was plain that there was a feeling of inquietude in the native mind, and that fear had engendered discontent. It was certain that the British Government were weak, for the country was stripped of European troops. The good day might yet come. Meanwhile, it might be something to spread abroad, truly or falsely, a story to the effect that the English, adding insult to injury, had cruelly humiliated all the members of the Oudh family left behind in Lakhnao.

In these stories of official cruelty Canning had small faith. But the honour of his Government demanded that they should be inquired into and contradicted, and he urged the Chief Commissioner at once to investigate and report upon the charges put forth by the creatures of the King. But Jackson,

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full of his own wrongs, failed to see the importance of the task assigned to him, and his answers were unsatisfactory and apparently evasive. Privately as well as publicly he was urged by the Governor-General to address himself seriously to the work of effacing from the nation the dishonour with which the dependents of the old Court of Lakhnao had endeavoured to besmear the British name. But the result was not what Lord Canning had sought, not what he had expected.

October 19, 1856

So at last, bitterly grieved and disappointed by the, manner in which his representative had dealt with a subject, at once of so delicate and so important a nature, the Governor-General thus becomingly poured forth his indignation: “I will not conceal from you,” he wrote to Mr. Jackson, “my disappointment at the manner in which from first to last you have treated this matter. Instead of enabling the Government to answer distinctly and categorically every complaint which the King has preferred, you have passed over unnoticed some upon which you must have known that the Government were without materials for reply. Upon placing your answers, now that all have been received, side by side with the King’s letters, I find myself quite unable to say whether any buildings such as he describes have been pulled down, and if so, why? – although one building, the Jelwa Khana, had been especially mentioned to the King, as in course of demolition – whether clogs or horses have been quartered in the Chatar Manzil, and especially whether a stoppage of the allowances to the King’s descendants has been threatened, a statement to this effect being pointedly made in the King’s letter of the 14th of September. You tell me that you have delayed your answers in order that they may be more complete. I can hardly think, therefore, that these matters have escaped you, and yet I do not know how otherwise to account for their being passed by. Be this as it may, the result of your course of proceeding is that the Governor-General is placed in an unbecoming, not to say humiliating position towards the King of Oudh. The King brings complaints, which, whether true or false, are plain enough against the officers of Government, and the Governor-General, after assuring the King that as soon as reference shall have been made to the Chief Commissioner, satisfactory explanation shall be given, and relying, as he has a right to do, that that officer will obey his instructions and do his duty, finds himself altogether mistaken, and defeated upon

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points which, however unworthy of notice they may appear to the Chief Commissioner at Lakhnao, cannot be slurred over by the Government in Calcutta. It matters nothing that these charges are instigated by disreputable hangers-on of the King, or that they are wholly or partly untrue, or even impossible. There they are in black and white, and they must be answered. It is surprising to me that you should have failed to appreciate the necessity.”

And it was surprising; but Coverley Jackson, at that time, could scarcely appreciate any necessity save that of riding roughshod over Gubbins and Ommaney, and keeping them down to the right subordinate level. How far these charges. of cruel indifference to the feelings of the Oudh family were true, to what extent the dependents of the late King were wronged and humiliated and the nobles of the land despoiled and depressed; how, indeed, the revolution affected all existing interests, are subjects reserved for future inquiry. It would have been well if the Chief Commissioner had done as much to mollify these poor people as to exasperate his own colleagues. But the temper of the man was to the last degree arbitrary and exacting, and Lord Canning, though with admirable patience and moderation he strove to control the excesses of his agent, could not hold them in check. Pointing to the great exemplar of John Lawrence, the Oudh administration having been constructed on the Panjabi model, he showed that the reins of government might be held with a firm and vigorous hand by one not grasping at all departmental authority. But these kindly teachings were in vain. The old strife continued. Striking with one hand at Gubbins, and with the other at Ommaney, the Chief Commissioner was continually in an attitude of offence; and the administration was likely to be wrecked altogether upon the lee-shore of these internal contentions. So, at last, the Governor-General was forced upon the conviction that he had selected the wrong man to preside in Oudh, and that the sooner he could be removed from it the better for the province.

The readiest means of effecting this, without any public scandal or any recorded reproach injurious to Jackson’s career, was by the restoration of James Outram to the post which the civilian had been holding for him. Very unfit, doubtless, was the “officiating Chief Commissioner” for that post; but he had done good service to the State, he had some commendable points

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of character, and even at the bottom of his proved incapacity for this particular office there might be nothing worse than a distempered zeal. So Lord Canning, in the exercise of what is called a “sound discretion,” as well as in obedience to the dictates of a kind heart, sought to accomplish the end in view by a return to the status ante in the natural order of things, rather than by any violent supersession of his unfortunate nominee. It was doubly a source, therefore, of satisfaction to him to learn that Outram, whose shattered health at the time of his departure in the spring had excited sad forebodings in the mind of the Governor-General, now in the autumn declared himself convalescent and about to return to his work. But the work, the very thought of which had breathed into the veins of the soldier-statesman new health, and revived all his prostrate activities, was not administrative business in Oudh. It was altogether work of another kind and in another place, far enough away from the scene of all his former endeavours; work the account of which must be prefaced by some historical explanations.

The rupture with Persia

Scarcely had Lord Canning taken his place in Government House, when the question of a war with Persia began to assume portentous dimensions. Truly, it was not his concern. Ever since the days when, nearly half a century before, there had been a strange mad scramble for diplomatic supremacy in Persia between the delegates of the Governor-General and of the Court of St. James’s, the position of the Government of India towards our Persian Mission and our Persian policy had been very indistinctly defined. The financial responsibility of the Company had been at all times assumed, and the executive assistance of the Indian Government had been called for; when our relations with that perfidious Court had been beset with difficulties beyond the reach of diplomatic address. But the political control had been vested in the Imperial Government, as represented by the Foreign Office168; and the officers of the Mission had been nominated by the Crown. Affairs were still in this state when Lord Canning assumed the Government of India, and found that Great Britain

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was rapidly drifting into a war with Persia, which it would be his duty to direct, and the resources for which must be supplied from the country under his charge.

Herat

The difficulties, which now seemed to render war inevitable, were chronic difficulties, which were fast precipitating an acute attack of disease. They were an after-growth of the great convulsion of 1838, which had culminated in the war in Afghanistan. We had tried to forget that hated country; but there was a Nemesis that forbade oblivion. It was an article of our political faith that Herat must be an independent principality, and we clung to it as if the very salvation of our Indian Empire depended on the maintenance of this doctrine. But there was nothing in the whole range of Eastern politics so certain to engender continual tribulation, and at last to compel us to apostatise in despair. The independence of Herat was a shadowy idea; it never could be a substantial reality. With an Army of Occupation in Afghanistan, and with British officers freely disbursing British gold at the “gate of India,” we had for awhile maintained the outward independence of the principality under Shah Kamran of the Saduzai House of Kabul; but even then the minister, Yar Muhammad, was-continually declaring that his heart was with Iran, and threatening to throw himself into the arms of the Persian King. When the British Army had evacuated Afghanistan, the bold, unscrupulous minister, having soon relieved himself of the nominal sovereignty of the Saduzai, began to rule the country on his own account. And he ruled it well: that is, he ruled it with vigour; and for some ten years, by astute diplomacy, the soul of which was a system of small concessions to Persia, which soothed her pride and averted great demands, he governed the principality in peace, and maintained its nominal integrity. But his son, Sai’ud Muhammad, who succeeded him, had none of the essentials of a great ruler. Plentifully endowed with his father’s wickedness, he lacked all his father’s vigour. Treacherous and unscrupulous, but feeble in the extreme, he was ready, on the first appearance of danger, to become a creature of the Persian Court. Persia eagerly seized the opportunity; and again England appeared upon the scene.

In the course of 1852, a Persian Army marched upon Herat. Not, indeed, in open defiance; not with any avowed object of conquest; but nominally, as a powerful ally, to perform an office of friendship. On the death of Yar Muhammad the affairs

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of the principality had fallen into confusion, and the Persian Army went forth with the benevolent design of restoring them to order and prosperity. But the mask was soon thrown aside. The real object of the expedition proclaimed itself. Herat was declared to be an appendage of the Persian monarchy. This was not to be borne. To maintain the independence of Herat, England a few years before had been prepared to send her legions to the gates of the city. And now Persia was destroying it by a trick. So, fortified by instructions from Downing-street, the British minister resisted the outrage. On pain of an entire forfeiture of the friendship of Great Britain, the Persian Government were called upon to withdraw their army, and to enter into a solemn covenant binding them to recognise and respect the independence of Herat. There were then the usual displays of trickery and evasiveness; but overawed at last by the resolute bearing of the British minister, the required pledge was given, and Persia bound herself to acknowledge the independence which she was so eager to crush. But she was sorely disturbed and irritated by our interference with her schemes of ambition; and thenceforth the British Mission became an object of dislike and suspicion at Teheran; and a rupture between the two Courts was only a question of time.

The war in the Crimea delayed – it did not avert – the inevitable crisis. The genius of Persia had then free scope for exercise, and turned to the best account its opportunities of double-dealing. Waiting the sentence of the great Judge of Battles, she coquetted both with Russia and with the Allies, and was ready to sell her good offices to the stronger party, or in a time of uncertainty to the higher bidder. But when the war ceased, her importance was gone; she had not been able to turn her position to account during the day of strife, and when peace dawned again upon Europe, she tried in vain to be admitted to the great International Council, which made the work of reconciliation complete. Disappointed and offended, perhaps, not thinking much of our boasted victory, for Russia had been successful in Asiatic Turkey, and Persia knew less about Sebastopol than about Kars, she could see no profit in the English alliance. The minister who then directed her affairs had no feeling of affection for the British representative at her Court. A strong personal prejudice, therefore, came in to aggravate the national antipathy; and before the end of 1855, the Mission had been so grievously insulted that Mr. Murray

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hauled down the British flag, and set his face towards the Turkish frontier.

Into the details of this affair it is unnecessary to enter. Another event occurred about the same time. A rebellion broke out in Herat. Sai’ud Muhammad was killed. In his place was installed a member of the old Saduzai House, a nephew of Shah Kamran, Yusuf Khan by name, who had no peculiar qualifications for empire, but who could not be worse than the man whom he had supplanted. A revolution of this kind is so much in the common course of Afghan history, that we need not seek to account for it by any other than internal causes. But it was said that it had been fomented by Persian intrigue; and it is certain that the Government of the Shah were eager to profit by the crisis. The times were propitious. There was in Central Asia at that time one great man, whose movements were regarded at the Persian Court with alarm not altogether feigned, though sometimes exaggerated for a purpose. Ever since the British had set the seal on their confession of gigantic failure in Afghanistan by restoring Dost Muhammad to empire, the energies and activities of the old Amir had expended themselves on the consolidation of his former dominions; and now he was hot to extend them to the westward. It was not merely an impulse of ambition. In part, at least, it was an instinct of self-preservation. The pretensions of Persia were not limited, and her encroachments were not likely to be confined to the principality of Herat. Already she had established a dominant influence in Kandahar, and did not scruple to talk about her rights of dominion. It was impossible for Dost Muhammad to regard this with unconcern. That Persia had views of extended influence, if not of actual conquest, in Afghanistan was certain. She had proposed to the Amir himself to reduce the whole country to the condition of a protected State. The time had now come for him to put forth a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm for the maintenance of the independence of Afghanistan. Kohan-dil-Khan, his half-brother, the Chief of Kandahar, died in the autumn of 1856. Dost Muhammad had never trusted him; and his son was not to be trusted. So the Amir, who had no love for half-measures, annexed Kandahar to the kingdom of Kabul; and the Persian Government believed, or pretended to believe, that he included Herat itself in his scheme of conquest.

He had at that time no such design. But it was a favourite

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trick of Persia to justify her own acts of aggression by a reference to some alleged danger and the necessity of self-preservation. So, seeing in the internal state of Herat an encouraging opportunity, and in the movements of Dost Muhammad a plausible pretext for evading their obligations, the Government of the Shah tore the convention of 1853 into shreds, and again marched an army upon Herat. But it met with no welcome there. Alarmed by the movements of the Kabul Amir, and threatened with a counter-revolution at home, the nominal ruler of Herat had turned towards the Persians for assistance, but when he found that the chief people of the place were opposed to such an alliance, and that a strong national Suni-ism prevailed among them, he hoisted British colours and invited Dost Muhammad to come to his aid. The characteristic bad faith of the Saduzai Princes was conspicuous in this wretched man. His own people could not trust him. The Persians were investing the place, and it was feared that Yusuf Khan would betray the city into their hands. It was easy, therefore, to raise a party against him. So Isa Khan, the Deputy or Lieutenant-Governor of the place, caused him to be seized, and sent him a prisoner into the enemy’s camp, with a letter declaring that he was of no use in Herat, and that the Persians might do with him as they liked.

To this point events had progressed when Lord Canning was called upon to address himself seriously to the consideration of the troubled politics of Central Asia. To the new Governor-General these complications were a source of no common anxiety, for he could see clearly that England was drifting into war, and that, however little he might have to do with it in its origin and conception, its execution would be entrusted to him. There was a bitter flavour about the whole affair that was distasteful in the extreme to the Governor-General. “My hope of an accommodation,” he wrote to the President in August, “has almost died out, and I contemplate the prospect of the inglorious and costly operations which lie before us with more disgust than I can express169.” He had gone out, as others had gone before him, with an avowed and a sincere desire for peace; but warned by their cruel disappointments, he had laid fast hold in India of the resolution which he had formed in England, and he was not by any adverse or any alluring circumstances

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to be driven or enticed into unnecessary war. “Do not,” he said, “be afraid of my being unduly hasty to punish Persia. Unless the Shah should steam up the Hugli, with Murray swinging at his yard-arm, I hope that we shall be able to keep the peace until your instructions arrive170.” And he was anxious to avoid, not only aggressive measures from the side of India, but any diplomatic entanglements that might at some future time be a cause of perplexity to his Government. The politics of Central Asia he regarded with extreme aversion. Remembering the fearful lessons of the Past, he determined not, of his own free will, to send a single man into Afghanistan; and he resisted the promptings of Ministers at home, when it was suggested to him somewhat prematurely that seasonable donatives might convert Dost Muhammad into an effective ally, willing and ready to apply a blister from the side of Kandahar.

August 1856

And when, at a later period, instructions came from England to supply the Amir with arms and money, and authority was given to the Governor-General to send a British Mission to Herat, he shrunk from acting upon the latter suggestion. “I do not purpose,” he wrote, “to use the permission to send British officers to Herat. We know much too little of things there to justify this step, which would for certain be full of risk. The place is hard pressed by famine as well as by the enemy. Our officers could take with them no relief nor any promise of it, for we are not going to march to Herat ourselves, and we cannot afford to promise on the faith of the Amir’s performances.”

But unwilling as was Lord Canning to adopt the measures, to which reference was made in these letters, he could not maintain this policy of non-interference in Afghanistan after the Home Government had determined upon the declaration of war against Persia. The year had scarcely dawned, when such an upshot began to be discussed as something of no very remote reality, and before Parliament had broken up and her Majesty’s Ministers had dispersed for the autumn, the equipment of an expedition to the Persian Gulf had been decreed. The orders from Home were that all preparations should be made for the despatch of a military and naval expedition from Bombay to the Persian Gulf; but that pending the progress of some further diplomacies in Europe, which might end in concessions, no

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actual start should be made. It was not until the end of September that Her Majesty’s Government, through the legal channel of the Secret Committee of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, sent out final instructions for the sailing of the expedition and the commencement of the war171.

November 1st

On the evening of the last day of October, these instructions reached the Governor-General in Calcutta, and on the following morning – day of evil omen, for eighteen years before it had delivered itself of the sad Afghan manifesto a proclamation of war was issued. On the same day it was sent to Lord Elphinstone at Bombay, and the General in command was charged with instructions respecting the conduct of the expedition, and ordered straightway to begin.

The question of command

The question of the command of the expedition had been one which Lord Canning by no means found it easy to solve. Many names had been suggested to him, and among them that of General Windham – “Windham of the Redan” – who had performed feats of gallantry in the Crimea, and was ready for hard service in any part of the world. But Lord Canning, whilst thoroughly appreciating Windham’s gallant services in the field, and knowing well that his appointment would be “popular in England,” saw that there were strong reasons against it. “In a mixed force of Queen’s and Company’s troops,” he said, “it is of great importance that there should be a willing and earnest co-operation of all subordinate officers with the Commander, and it is more difficult to obtain this for a stranger than for one who is known. The Commander should have some acquaintance with the Indian Army, if he has to lead a large force of it into an unknown and difficult country. He should know something of its constitution, temper, and details – of what it can and what it

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cannot do. This would not be the case with Windham, fresh landed from England.” And it is not to be doubted that he was right. If the force had been on a larger scale, the Commander-in-Chief himself might perhaps have been placed at its head; but Lord Canning, with the highest possible opinion of Genera] Anson’s fine temper, of the assiduity with which he had addressed himself to the business of his high office, and the ability with which he had mastered its details, had still some misgivings with respect to his prejudices, and doubted whether he had not formed certain conclusions unjust to the Company’s Army.

On the whole, it was better, in any circumstances, that an Indian officer should command; and Lord Canning was resolute that such should be the arrangement. But he had been somewhat perplexed at first as to the choice to be made, and he had consulted Sir John Lawrence, as the man of all others who, not being by profession a soldier, had the finest soldierly instincts and the keenest appreciation of the essential qualities demanded for the command of such an expedition. What the great Panjabi administrator said in reply was an utterance of good sense and good feeling, the fulness of which, however, was not then as discernible as it now is, viewed by the light of intervening history. About the answer to be given there was no doubt; but clearly there was some difficulty.

Henry Lawrence

For the man whom of all men in India he held to be best fitted for the work in hand was his own brother, Sir Henry Lawrence; and if he could go, accompanied by Colonel Sydney Cotton, all would be well. “Cotton,” wrote John Lawrence to the Governor-General, “is one of the best officers I have seen in India. He is a thorough soldier, loves his profession, and has considerable administrative talent. Of all the officers I have noted, with one exception, Sydney Cotton is the best.” But his experiences, great as they were, had not lain in the line of diplomatic action, and, if it were necessary, as Lawrence believed, to unite the political and the military authority in the same person, Cotton, good soldier as he was, might clearly lack some of the essential qualifications for the double office. So John Lawrence proceeded to say: “The man whom I would name for the command of such an expedition is my brother Henry. I can assure your lordship that I am not in the slightest degree biased in his favour. He has seen a good deal of service, having been in the first Burmese

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war, in the second Afghan war, and in both the Satlaj campaigns. He is not an officer of much practical knowledge, except in his own branch (the Artillery), and he is not fond of details. But, on the other hand, he has great natural ability, immense force of character, is very popular in his service, has large political acumen, and much administrative ability. I do not think that there is a military man in India who is his equal in these points. He is also in possession of his full vigour, both of mind and body, and there is not a good soldier of the Bengal Army in the Panjab, or perhaps in Upper India, but would volunteer to serve under him. With him as the Commander, and Sydney Cotton as the Second-in-Command, the arrangement would be complete. Cotton is master of all technical details of every arm of the service, and devotes his entire energies and thoughts to the welfare of his soldiers.”

All this might have been misunderstood; and a little man, in such a case, would perhaps have hesitated to recommend his brother; but John Lawrence knew that the advice was good, and that he was incapable of offering it if it had not been. “If I know myself,” he wrote, “I would revolt against such conduct.” But though strong in the conviction that of all men living Henry Lawrence was the best suited to the work in hand, he was loud in his praise of other good officers, and had various plans to recommend, any one of which might have a successful issue. If Sydney Cotton were sent in command, it would be well to associate with him such an officer as Herbert Edwardes, in the character of political adviser. “But, in such matters,” said John Lawrence, “unity in council and action is of the highest importance, and a commander who unites the military and political functions is most desirable. If your lordship does not take my brother, and Outran] is available, I would be inclined to recommend him. I never met this officer; but he has a high reputation.” And John Jacob, as having much military ability and considerable political experience, was a man not to be overlooked in the account of available capacity for such an enterprise.

But not only in Calcutta and in the Panjab was this question of the command of the expedition being considered. It was well pondered at Bombay and in England, taking a shape eventually to overrule all other decisions. The expedition was to sail from Bombay, and all the arrangements for its organisation and equipment were proceeding there. Lord

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Elphinstone was Governor of that Presidency. Twenty years before he had been Governor of Madras.

Lord Elphinstone

At that time he was young, and not so serious and sedate as some people thought the head of a Government ought to be. “We want a Governor,” it was said, somewhat bitterly, “and they send us a Guardsman; we want a statesman, and they send us a dancer.” But he had ripened into what these people wanted, and now with a higher sense of the responsibilities of office, with a keener pleasure in his work, and a statesmanlike assiduity, for which the companions of his youth had not given him credit, he was, a second time, administering the affairs of an Indian Presidency, and busying himself with our external relations. The troops to be despatched, in the first instance, to the Persian Gulf were mainly Bombay troops, and it seemed fitting that the choice of a Commander should be made from the Bombay Army. If under stress of circumstance the war should assume more important dimensions, and the military force be proportionably extended, another selection might be made. But meanwhile, Elphinstone was requested to name some officer attached to his own Presidency, in whom the troops of all arms would have common confidence. So he named General Stalker, not without a pang of regret that he could not select Colonel Hancock – Hancock, the Adjutant-General of the Bombay Army – whom ill-health was driving to England. Stalker was the senior of the available officers, so there were no heart-burnings from supersession; he had seen much service, he was experienced in command, and it was believed that the appointment would be both a popular and a safe one. “I hear favourable accounts of his good sense and temper,” said Lord Canning; “and that is what is wanted for the service before him, which will require more of patient and enduring than of brilliant qualities.”

James Outram

So General Stalker was appointed to the command of the expedition to the Persian Gulf. But whilst these and other arrangements were being made in India, in the belief that ere long they would be merged into others of a more comprehensive character, the question of the chief command was being solved in England in a manner hardly anticipated by the Governor-General. In the month of May he had taken leave of Sir James Outram, with painful misgivings raised in his mind by the sight of the General’s shattered frame and feeble bearing. He had suspected that

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the mischief was far greater than Outram himself acknowledged or believed, and thought that years must elapse before he would be fit again for active service. And so thought all his friends in England. He appeared among them as the wreck only of the strong man who had left them a short time before; and they grieved to see the too visible signs of weakness and suffering which every look and gesture afforded. The summer faded into autumn; but there was little change for the better apparent in his outer aspect, when suddenly they were startled by the announcement that he was about forthwith to proceed to the Persian Gulf and take command of the expedition.

Nobody knew, nobody knows, how it happened that suddenly, in this conjuncture, James Outram shook off the incumbrances of disease, rose up from the prostration of the sick-room, and stood erect, active, robust before the world with the harness of war on his back. It was the autumnal season, when men scatter and disperse themselves in strange places, and elude in a vagrant life the rumours of the distant world; so there were many friends who, having left him at the summer’s close a feeble invalid, were struck with a strange surprise when, returned or returning homewards, they were met by the news that Outram had gone or was going to Persia to take command of the invading force. The wonder soon gave place to delight; for they knew that though he was moved by strong ambitions, there was ever within him a sense of duty still stronger, and that on no account would he jeopardise the interests of the State by taking upon himself responsibilities which he had not full assurance in his inmost self of his ample competence to discharge. And so it was. The sound of the distant strife had rekindled all his smouldering energies. There was work to be done, and he felt that he could do it.

Colonel Sykes

On the pleasant Brighton esplanade, sauntering along meditative, or perhaps in the stimulating companionship of a stalwart friend and high functionary, the Chairman of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, Master of Masters, new hopes were wafted upon him with the sea-breezes, and his step grew firmer, his carriage more erect, as with strong assurance of support from Leadenhall-street, he resolved to tender his services to her Majesty’s Government for employment in Persia with a joint military and diplomatic command.

This was at the beginning of the last week of October. On the 26th he wrote to Lord Canning that he purposed returning

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to India by the mail of the 20th of December, “having perfectly recovered from the illness which drove him home.” And he added, “In the supposition that I may be more usefully employed with the army about to proceed to Persia than necessary to your lordship in Oudh, where everything is progressing so satisfactorily, I have offered my services to the President (of the Board of Control), should it be deemed advisable to entrust to me diplomatic powers in conjunction with the military command, and I believe that, should your lordship be disposed so to employ me, the home authorities would not object. In that case your lordship’s commands would meet me at Aden, whence I would at once proceed to Bombay172.”

This letter reached Calcutta on the 2nd December. By the outgoing mail of the 8th, Lord Canning wrote to Outram at Aden, rejoicing in his complete recovery, “on every account, public and private,” but questioning the policy of the Persian appointment. The expedition, he said, was not likely to increase in magnitude; it was not probable that there would be any operations beyond the seaboard during the winter, or that any diplomatic action would be .taken to call for the employment of a high political functionary; if, indeed, overtures were to be made, they would most probably be addressed through some friendly power to London; there would be little scope, therefore, for his services with the Persian expedition, and it would be better, therefore, that he should return to his old appointment. “Oudh is completely tranquil,” wrote Lord Canning, “and generally prospering. Nevertheless, I shall be very glad to see you resume your command there.” The fact was that the Administration was by this time plunged into such a hopeless condition of internecine strife, that the Governor-General could in no way see any outlet of escape from the perplexities besetting him except by the removal of Chief-Commissioner Jackson; and now here was the opportunity, for which he had been waiting, to accomplish this end in an easy natural manlier, without any official scandal, or the infliction of any personal pain.

But it was not to be so accomplished. Before the end of November the question of Outram’s command of the Persian

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expedition had been fully discussed in the English Cabinet. Downing-street had laid fast hold of the idea, and pronounced its full satisfaction with it. Her Majesty the Queen had stamped the commission with the seal of her approbation, and the public voice, with one accord, had proclaimed that a good thing had been done, and that the right man would soon be in the right place. That it was thus virtually settled, past recall, went out under the President’s hand by the mail of the 26th of November, and greeted Lord Canning with the new year. In official language, however, of Court of Directors, or Secret Committee thereof, it took the shape not of an announcement of a thing done, but of a recommendation that it should be done; for it was substantially an interference with the prerogative of the Governor-General, and was to be softened down so as in no wise to give offence. But Lord Canning was not a man, in such a case, to raise a question of privilege, or, assured that it was, actually or presumedly, for the official good, to shoot out any porcupine-quills from his wounded official dignity. He took the interference in good part; thanked the Chairman for the delicacy with which it had been communicated, and promised to give Outram his best support. He had doubted, he said, whether Outram’s health and strength would be sufficient to bear the burdens that would be imposed upon him. “But the Queen’s Government,” he continued, “and the Secret Committee have seen him in recovered health, and if they are satisfied that he is in a condition to undertake the labour and trial of such a command, without risk to the interest confided to him, I have no objection to make, nor any wish to shake myself clear of responsibility.” And then, with a reference to a memorandum on the future conduct of the campaign which Outram had drawn up in England, the Governor-General added, “It is a pleasure to me to declare that I have been greatly struck by all that has proceeded from General Outram in regard to future operations in Persia. I think his plans excellent, prudent for the present, and capable of easy expansion hereafter, and the means which he proposes for carrying them out for the most part well suited. For everything that I have yet heard of his proposals he shall have my cordial support.”

1857. Central-Asian Policy

Whilst the first division of the expeditionary force under Stalker was commencing operations with good success in the Persian Gulf, the new year found Outram at Bombay superintending the despatch of the second.

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But it was not only by these movements from the sea-board that an impression was now to be made on the fears of the Court of Teheran. Diplomacy was to do its work in the country which lay between India and Persia. Reluctant as he had been, in the earlier part of the year, to commit himself to any decided course of Central-Asian policy, Lord Canning now began to discern more clearly the benefits that might arise from a friendly alliance with the Amir of Kabul. There was no longer any chance of a pacific solution of our difficulties. War had been proclaimed. Herat had fallen. Dost Muhammad had put forth plentiful indications of a strong desire for an English alliance; and the English Government at home appeared to be not unwilling to meet his wishes. That some action must now be taken in that direction was certain. Already had arms and money been sent into Afghanistan; but with no specific undertaking on the one side or the other, and it appeared desirable to put the matter now upon a more secure and a more dignified footing than that of temporary shifts and expedients. But there were great diversities of opinion as to the shape which should be taken by British action in the Afghan countries. Lord Canning had always had at least one clear conception about the matter; that it was better to do little than to do much, and wise not to do that little a day sooner than was needed. The terrible lessons which had been burnt into us fifteen years before had lost none of their significance. The warning voice was still sounding in our ears; the saving hand was still beckoning us away from those gloomy passes. It could never again enter into our imaginations to conceive the idea of turning back the tide of Russo-Persian invasion by making war against the national will and the substantive Government of the Afghans. But the monitions of the Past did not stop there. They cautioned us against ever sending a single British regiment across the Afghan frontier. Neither the Princes nor the People of Afghanistan were to be trusted, if the memories of their wrongs were to be reawakened within them by the presence of that which had done them such grievous harm. So, although among the schemes which were discussed, and in some military quarters advocated, was the project of an auxiliary British force, acting in close alliance with the Afghans, it was never for a moment seriously entertained in the Council Chamber. But to assail Persia in some measure from that side, whilst we were operating upon the seaboard;

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to recover Herat, and, at the same time, to occupy some of the littoral provinces of the Persian Empire; was doubtless to put enormous pressure upon the Shah, to hold. him, as it were, in a vice, helpless and agonised, and to extort from him all that we might want. This, peradventure, might be done, by continuing to send British bayonets into Afghanistan, but without, as of old, British valour to wield them; so many thousands of stands of arms, not so many thousands of soldiers; and British money, lakhs upon lakhs, but no British hands to dispense it. In a word, if we could manage successfully to subsidise Dost Muhammad, and hold him, by the bonds of self-interest, to a friendly covenant, whereby whilst aiding us he would aid himself, we might bring the war much more rapidly to a conclusion than if no such alliance were formed.

Dost Muhammad

But there were strong doubts of the good faith of Dost Muhammad. The wily old Amir, it was said, was waiting upon the shore of circumstance, willing to sail in the same boat with us, if tide and stream should be in our favour and a fair wind setting in for success. For some time there had been going on between the Governor- General of India and the Ruler of Kabul certain passages of diplomatic coquetry, which had resulted rather in a promise of a close alliance, a kind of indefinite betrothal, than in the actual accomplishment of the fact.

March 30, 1855

We had condoned the offence committed by the Amir at the close of the last war in the Panjab, when he had sent some of his best troops, in the uniforms of our own slaughtered soldiers, to aid the Sikhs in their efforts to expel us; and whilst Dalhousie was still the ruler of India, an engagement of general amity had been negotiated by John Lawrence on the one side, and Haidar Khan on the other, between the English and the Afghans. It was probably intended, with a forecast of the coming rupture with Persia, that this should in time be expanded into a more definite treaty with Dost Muhammad; and more than two years before the occasion actually arose, the subsidising of the Amir loomed in the distance173. It was an old idea. Mr.

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Henry Ellis had entertained it; Sir John McNeill had entertained it174; and if Lord Auckland’s Secretaries had allowed him to entertain it, it is probable that the events of which I am about to write would never have afforded me a subject of History. In an hour of miserable infatuation, we had played the perilous game of King-making, and had forced an unpopular pageant upon a reluctant people. Now, after bitter experience, we were reverting to the first conception of our diplomatists; but mild as comparatively the interference was, it was held by some great authorities to be wiser to leave Afghanistan and the Afghans altogether alone. In spite of the present benefit to be derived from applying in that quarter a blister to the side of Persia, it might be better to suffer the old Amir to make the most of the crisis after his own fashion. He would not fight our battles for us without substantial help; but he might fight his own, and there could be no time, for the extension of his dominion to Herat, so opportune as that which saw Persia entangled in a war with England. But Dost Muhammad had too clear a knowledge of the English, and Afghan cupidity was too strong within him, to suffer this gratuitous co-operation. He knew that, if he waited, we should purchase his aid; so he magnified the difficulties of the march to Herat, talked of the deficiency of his resources, and otherwise pretended that he lacked strength for a successful enterprise without continuous pecuniary aid from the English. Whether, having received such assistance from us, he would render effectual service in return for it, seemed to some of our Indian statesmen extremely doubtful, for there was the lowest possible estimate in their minds of Afghan truth and Afghan honour. There was the fear that the old Amir would set an extravagant price on his services, and that by disappointing his expectations, if not scouting his pretensions, we might inopportunely excite his

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animosities against us. Some, indeed, thought that he looked eagerly to the conjuncture as one that might help him to realise his old day-dream, the recovery of Peshawar. There was, in truth, no lack of sagacity in these anticipations; but, perhaps, at the bottom of them there lay too deep a distrust of the personal character of the Amir. He had, in all candour it must be admitted, too much reason to doubt the good faith of the English. He could fathom the depths of our selfishness as well as we could fathom the depths of his guile. In truth, there were causes of mutual suspicion; and little good was likely to come from the distant fencing of diplomatic correspondence. So at last it was resolved to test the sincerity of the Amir by inviting him to a conference on the frontier.

Herbert Edwardes

At that time, Herbert Edwardes, he of whose glorious youthful impulses I have spoken in the first chapter of this work, was Commissioner of Peshawar. He had grown, by good-service brevet, rather than by the slow process of regimental promotion, from Lieutenant to Lieutenant-Colonel. His career had been a prosperous one, and its prosperity was well deserved. The great reputation which he had gained as an ambitious subaltern, brought down upon him at one time a shower of small jealousies and detractions. He had been feasted and flattered in England, and there were some who, doubtless with a certain self-consciousness of what would be likely to flow from such adulations, said that his head was turned, and that he had been overrated.

Honoria Lawrence

But one, the noble helpmate of a truly noble man, wrote to me at this time, as one, however, not doubting, for I had like faith, that Herbert Edwardes was one of Nature’s true nobility, and that surely I should live to know it. It was right. Under the Lawrences, Henry and John, both of whom he dearly loved, he grew to be one of the main pillars of the Panjabi Administration; and now he was in charge of that part of the old dominions of Ranjit Singh which lay beyond the Indus; the Proconsulate of Peshawar. Planted thus upon the frontier of Afghanistan, it was one of his special duties to watch the progress of events in that country, and duly to report upon them to the higher authorities. Of direct diplomatic action there had been little or none; but no one knew what a day might produce, and it was ever therefore among the responsibilities of the Peshawar Commissioner to be well versed in the politics of Kabul, and

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prepared, in any conjuncture, to counsel the course to be taken by the British Government.

For some time there had been much to observe and much to report, and now a conjuncture had arisen, which seemed to require from us that we should act. Persia was doing all that could be done to enlist the sympathies of Central Asia on her side, even in the far-off regions of Bokhara and Kokhand, by sending abroad, as a proof of the dangers of English friendship, copies of the pro-Christian Firman of the Sultan, which had been issued at the close of the Russian war. It was fortunate, therefore, that at this time the political animosities of the Afghans were strongly excited against the Persians, for, perhaps, under such pressure, the chronic sectarian jealousies which kept the two nations apart might for a while have been merged in a common religious hatred of the Faringhis. A very little done, or left undone on our part, to offend the old Amir, might have lost to us for ever the only serviceable Muhammadan alliance that could have availed us in such a crisis. To no man was the value of this alliance so apparent as to Herbert Edwardes; no man pressed its importance so earnestly upon the Governor-General. He believed that Dost Muhammad would respond with pleasure to an invitation to meet on the frontier of the two States a representative of the British Government, and to discuss the terms of a friendly alliance; and he recommended that this invitation should be sent to him. Reluctant as Lord Canning had been in the earlier part of the year to commit himself to any decided course of Afghan policy, he now before the close of it, in the altered circumstances that had arisen, yielded. to this suggestion, and afterwards, with that frankness which sat so becomingly upon him, gracefully acknowledged its wisdom, and thanked the suggester.

So Dust Muhammad was invited to a conference at Peshawar. He was, if willing to meet the representatives of the British Government, to discuss personally with them the terms of the alliance. Either Sir John Lawrence, accompanied by Colonel Edwardes, or Colonel Edwardes alone, as might be determined between them, was to meet the old Amir on the frontier, to feel his pulse, and to prescribe accordingly. It would have been a great opportunity for the younger man; but Edwardes, to whom the decision was left by Lawrence, for ever giving the lie to all that had been charged against him on the score of

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vanity and self-assertion, strongly urged that the Mission should be headed by his beloved Chief. Lawrence, much doubting, however, whether the Amir would come, and little expecting a successful issue if he should come, lauded the magnanimity of more sanguine friend, and prepared himself with all the earnestness of his nature to prove the groundlessness of his own anticipations of failure.

January 1, 1857

They were groundless. The Amir accepted the invitation, marched down with two of his sons, some of his chosen counsellors, and a body of picked troops, to the frontier;, and on the first day of the new year received in the. Khaibar Pass the first visit of the British Commissioners. It was with no common interest that Lawrence, Edwardes, Sydney Cotton, and the other English officers who accompanied them, looked into the face of the old Amir, whose white beard and venerable aspect had, fifteen years before, been so familiar to the eyes of the dwellers in Calcutta, and who in his fallen fortunes, half prisoner and half guest, had been a not unworthy object of our sympathies. When, nearly half a century before, the representatives of the British Government had been received almost on the same spot by Shah Sujah, they had found the Kabul ruler arrayed in gorgeous apparel, his whole person a blaze of jewellery, with the Koh-i-nur outshining it all; but the English gentlemen now saw before them only a hale old man, very simply attired in a garment of the coarse camel-hair of the country. They found him full of energy, full of sagacity; courteous and friendly in his outer manner; glad to welcome them to his camp. It was only a visit of ceremony; repaid, two days later, by the Amir, who was received in the grand English style near Peshawar. Our troops formed a street more than a mile long, and after the Durbar marched past the Amir and his host in review order. More than seven thousand British fighting-men were assembled there, and among them were three complete European regiments, whose steady discipline and solidity, and fine soldierly bearing, made a strong impression on the minds of the Afghan visitors, from the aged Amir himself to the youngest trooper of his escort.

The formal interviews thus accomplished, the serious business of the conference commenced on the 5th of January. The Amir had pitched his Camp at Jamrud, and there Lawrence and Edwardes visited him, accompanied by Major Lumsden of the

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Guides. Dost Muhammad, his sons standing behind him, and a few chosen Sirdars on his left, opened the discussions with a long exposition of the recent struggles in Herat, and of the policy which he had himself pursued. He had entertained no schemes of conquest embracing that principality. The movements which the Persians had thus pretended to interpret were directed only towards Kandahar. But he frankly avowed his eager longing to recover Herat; and, please God and the English, he would take it from the Persians. Swearing by Allah and the Prophet that, from that time, he would be our friend, let all the world be against him, he declared, as his enthusiasm kindled, that let the English but make a diversion in the Persian Gulf and supply him with money and with arms, he would mine the walls of Herat, blow up the towers, and take the place at the point of the sword; or raise such a flame in the surrounding country as fairly to burn the Persians out of it. The Turkomans and the Usbegs would rise at his bidding, and join against a common foe.

From that distant-frontier post, on the very outskirts of our empire, the telegraphic wires ran right up to the vice-regal capital, and the Governor-General and the Chief Commissioner were corresponding by the “lightning post” between Calcutta and Peshawar. So it happened that whilst John Lawrence and Dost Muhammad were in conference, a horseman galloped up with a message from the former, despatched on the preceding day. In it Lord Canning told Lawrence that a reinforcement of five thousand men would be sent as quickly as possible to the Persian Gulf; and that amongst the conditions of Peace with Persia would be a stipulation that she should withdraw her troops from Herat, and renounce for ever her pretensions to interfere with Afghanistan. The significant words, “You may make use of this,” were included in the message. But the time had not then come for the best use to be made of it; so John Lawrence, reserving the rest for more opportune disclosure, announced only that the reinforcements were about to be despatched to the Gulf. It was his design, at that first meeting, to elicit the views and intentions of the Amir rather than to disclose those of his own Government175,

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So, making no promises of any kind, he indicated the difficulties that seemed to lie in the way of the Afghan ruler, and asked for a recital of the means and resources, by which they were to be overcome, already at his disposal, and the extent of the aid which he would require from the English. But this was too momentous a question to be answered, without much thought and calculation; so the Amir, seeking time for deliberation, said that he would unfold his views fully at the next meeting; and so the conference broke up for the day.

January 7, 1857

On the 7th, Dost Muhammad, attended by a few chosen counsellors, visited the British Camp, and the conferences were renewed in the Chief Commissioner’s tent. Pursuing the old process of drawing-out, John Lawrence, at the outset, reminded the Amir of his promise to state fully his views and intentions; but it required some resolution and perseverance to keep the old Afghan to this point, and it was not without difficulty that the promised revelation was extorted from him. At last he explained that, owing to the state of the season, he could not commence his march on Herat until after the expiration of a period of two months; grass and young grain would then be springing up, and with the aid of some not very elaborate commissariat arrangements, he would be able to find provisions for his troops; that he proposed to march one column from Balkh and another from Kandahar. The muster-roll of his troops showed some thirty-five thousand men and sixty guns. These, he said, should be raised to fifty thousand men with a hundred guns; four-fifths of the men and nearly the whole of the guns should, he said, be moved upon Herat. “But,” he added, “if you say take more troops, I will take more; if you say less will suffice, I will take less. I have given you my own opinion, but you Sahibs know Persia best.” But when pressed for a statement of the amount of aid he would require, he said that on the morrow morning his son, Azim Jah, would wait upon the English gentlemen with all the required information in a digested form, in order that they might judge for themselves.

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So the conference broke up; and on the following day the Amir’s sons, accompanied by a few of his ministers, waited upon John Lawrence, and laid before him a detailed statement of the Finances of Afghanistan, and of the military resources of the empire, together with an estimate of the aid that would be required from the English to enable the Afghans to drive the Persians out of Herat, and to hold their own against all corners. The aid that was thus sought amounted in money to sixty-four lakhs of rupees a year whilst the war lasted, and in munitions to more than fifty guns, eight thousand stands of small arms, and ammunition at discretion. It was more than the English Government were likely to be willing to give, but not more than appeared really to be wanted. The largeness of the demand, however, suggested the idea of a less extensive enterprise; and so Lawrence asked what would be required to enable the Afghans, abandoning all aggressive movements, to hold their own, without danger of encroachments from the westward. The question was not a welcome one. The Afghans were hot for an advance on Herat. If they were to sit down within their own dominions, the Persians would assuredly occupy Farah. It was for the English, of course, to decide upon the course to be pursued, but it was more in accordance with the genius and temper of the Afghans to take vigorous action in advance. Still, however, John Lawrence pressed for a statement of the requirements of the Afghans if a strictly defensive policy were maintained. The Sirdars could give no answer without consulting the Amir, so the conference broke up; and next day they returned with the statement that, in addition to what had already been supplied, four thousand muskets would be required, and money to pay eight thousand regular troops; one-half to be employed in the Kandahar country, and the other half in Balkh. But still they were eager for the larger enterprise; and one of them whispered to Edwardes that the enmity between the Afghans and the Persians was not merely an affair of this world, for that Shiahs and Sunis must always hate each other in the world to come. There was nothing more now to be said. The Afghans, on their part, had made known their wishes; and all the English gentlemen could say in reply was, that they would at once communicate with their Government.

So the telegraphic wires were again set in motion, and the substance of what had passed at the two last meetings was

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communicated to the Governor-General at Calcutta. Then there was doubt in the Council Chamber. Would it be better to await detailed reports from Peshawar by post, or at once to send telegraphic instructions to Sir John Lawrence? The former course was determined upon, and a message to that effect despatched to Peshawar. Lawrence had sent in detailed reports of the meetings, and had added to the last an expression of his own views as to what should be done. He recommended that assistance on the larger scale, for the siege of Herat, should not be given to Dost Muhammad, but that we should give him the four thousand muskets that he required, and an annual subsidy of twelve lakhs of rupees, so long as England and Persia might be at war with each other. But it did not seem to him to be wise to await the slow process of correspondence by letter. The Amir was eager to depart; and some time must be necessarily occupied in the negotiation of a formal agreement. So Lawrence telegraphed the substance of his recommendation to Calcutta, urged that nothing would be gained by awaiting his more detailed reports, and asked permission to communicate to the Amir the proposal which he thought it best to make. To this a message was promptly returned, saying: “You may tell the Amir that the terms are agreed to. Four thousand stand of arms and twelve lakhs a year, whilst England is at war with Persia. You will proceed to arrange the articles of agreement and report them by telegraph.”

This message was despatched on the 13th of January. On the following morning Lawrence and Edwardes proceeded to Dost Muhammad’s camp, and unfolded to him the views and intentions of the British Government. With less appearance of disappointment than had been expected, the Amir assented to the abandonment of the expedition to Herat, and accepted the modified proposal of the English. But the despatch of a party of British officers to Kabul, which was to form part of the agreement, appeared to be distasteful to him. When active offensive warfare against Persia had been contemplated, he cherished the thought of their presence with his troops; but now the state of affairs was altered. The point, however, was one not to be yielded. If the British were to give the subsidy, they were entitled to see it rightly appropriated. Then the Amir lowered his tone, and said that he was ready to do what was expedient; and finally he agreed to all that was proposed. But next day, when his son, Azim Khan, accompanied by other

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chiefs, visited, according to agreement, the English Commissioners, to settle the precise terms of agreement, the question of the Mission to Kabul was reopened. It was urged that the appearance of British officers at the Afghan capital might compromise the Amir either with his own people or with his English friends. There would be danger in their path at Kabul; but at Kandahar, threatened by the Persians, their presence would be better understood, and they might abide in perfect security. Nearly fifteen years had passed since our retributive Army had set its mark upon the Afghan capital; but still the hatred which our usurpation had engendered was fresh in the minds of the people, and Dost Muhammad knew that there were those in Kabul whom he could not trust within reach of an English throat. It was a sad thought; and Lawrence could not but ask how the alliance between the two nations could ever strike deep root when in one country such suspicions and animosities were never suffered to sleep. What the English wanted was not a temporary alliance dictated by an emergency of self-interest, but an enduring friendship based upon mutual confidence and respect. But Dost Muhammad knew the Afghans well, and little wisdom would there have been in disregarding a warning which every Englishman’s heart must have told him was an utterance of the voice of truth. So it was resolved that, although we should claim, and duly record, our right to send British officers to Kabul, as to other parts of Afghanistan, yet that practically the Mission should, in the first instance, proceed only to Kandahar. It was better than that our officers should be smuggled into the capital, surrounded by the Amir’s troops, virtually prisoners under the name of protected guests. There was, at all events, some definite meaning in their proceeding to the more western city, for it was a better point from which to observe the movements of the Persians. But what route were they to take? It was the Amir’s wish that the Mission should proceed by way of the Bolan Pass; but this, although the route by which Shah Sujah and the Army of the Indus had marched into Afghanistan, was said to be entering the country by a back door. It was, therefore, finally determined that the Mission should proceed by way of the Paiwar Pass176, an unexplored road to Kandahar;

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and that Major Henry Lumsden, of the Guide corps, an officer of great courage and capacity, versed in the politics of Afghanistan, who had been marked from the first for the conduct of this enterprise, should be placed at its head. His brother, Lieutenant Peter Lumsden, was to accompany him, and Mr. Henry Bellew was selected to take medical charge of the Mission; a post of more importance than it appears to be in an official gazette, for in such diplomacies as these the Medicine-chest and the Lancet are often more serviceable than the Portfolio and the Pen.

On the 26th of January, the Articles of Agreement, having by the aid of the telegraph been approved by the Government at Calcutta, were ready for seal and signature; and a meeting for the conclusion of the compact was held in Dost Muhammad’s tent. In attendance on the Amir were his son Azim Khan and several of his chief counsellors, whilst Lawrence, Edwardes, and Lumsden appeared on behalf of the English. Written in Persian and in English, the Articles of Agreement were read aloud in Durbar. By these the Amir engaged to maintain a force of eighteen thousand men; to allow British officers to be stationed at Kabul, Kandahar, or Balkh, or wherever Afghan troops might be posted; to receive a Wakil at Kabul, and to send one to Calcutta; and to communicate to the Government of India any overtures that he might receive from Persia and from the Allies of Persia during the war. On their part, the English undertook, during the continuance of hostilities, to pay to the Amir a monthly subsidy of a lakh of rupees, to send him four thousand stands of arms, and, as if the wrong done had been all against us, to forget and forgive the past. It was explained that the British officers would in the first instance proceed to Kandahar; and with this assurance the Amir was satisfied. So the Articles of Agreement were signed and sealed. Then came some discussion and some interchange of compliments. A message from the Governor-General had been received by telegraph, desiring Sir John Lawrence to express to Dost Muhammad “the satisfaction which he had derived from his

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frank dealing, and from the clear understanding on which affairs had been placed,” together with the best wishes for his health and long life, and a word of regret that he had not himself been able to meet the Amir. The message was now delivered and received with manifest gratification. It would have delighted him, he said, to meet Lord Canning, but he could not expect his Lordship to take so long a journey to see him. He had known two Governor-Generals, Lord Auckland and Lord Ellenborough, who had been kind to him in old times; he remembered also with gratitude the kindness of two other English gentlemen, Mr. Wilberforce Bird and Mr. Thoby Prinsep177, who had paid him much attention in Calcutta. “And now,” he said, in conclusion, “I have made an alliance with the British Government, and come what may, I will keep it till death.” And the promise thus given was never broken. He was true to the English alliance to the last.

January 27, 1857

On the following day a Durbar was held in the Camp of the British Commissioner, and the chief officers of the Amir’s suite attended to take their leave of the English gentlemen. Dost Muhammad had excused himself on the plea of age and infirmity. The visit to Peshawar, with its attendant anxieties and excitements, had visibly affected the Amir’s health. The hale old man, who, three or four weeks before, had spent hours in the saddle, and seemed to be full of health and energy, had lost much of his bodily vigour and his elasticity of spirit. A sharp attack of gout had prostrated him; and he seemed to be growing impatient under his protracted detention in Camp. So the conclusion of the Terms of Agreement was a manifest relief to him; and it was with no common satisfaction that, on the day following the Farewell Durbar, he set his face towards Jalalabad, carrying with him, in bills on Kabul, a lakh of rupees and some costly presents from the British Government178.

Nor was the gratification experienced at this time confined to the Amir’s camp. Lawrence and Edwardes were well pleased

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to think that all had gone off so smoothly; that the friendship of the Afghans had been secured at no very extravagant cost; and that, on the whole, although Dost Muhammad had not obtained all that he had asked, he had taken his departure tolerably well satisfied with the favourable issue of the meeting. Lord Canning, too, was more than well satisfied with the manner in which the negotiations had been conducted, and with the apparent result. He was not one stinting in free outspoken expressions of praise and gratitude to those who did good service to his Government; and, both in public and private letters, he cordially thanked the Commissioners, even before their work was done, for the admirable judgment and good tact which they had displayed at the conferences; giving an especial word of thanks to Edwardes as the original suggester of the meeting179, and, it might have been added, the originator of the new policy which had more recently been observed towards the Afghans. To Major Lumsden he wrote, at the same time, a letter of kindly encouragement and good advice, cordially approving the selection, “not only from his trust in Sir John Lawrence’s judgment on such matters, but from everything that the Governor-General had been able to hear of Lumsden from those who knew him.” He knew the power of such words; as a statesman he felt assured that they would bear good fruit; but as a man he uttered them from the kindness of his heart.

So Dost Muhammad set his face towards Kabul, and Sir John Lawrence, after a month of administrative journeying about the province, returned to Lahor. It need be no subject of surprise if the latter, as he went about his work, thinking of all that had been done at Peshawar, sometimes asked himself, What good? and wished that the monthly lakh of rupees to be

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expended on the Afghan Army were available for the improvement of the province under his charge; for he had never liked the project from the beginning. He had no faith in Dust Muhammad. He had detected him in at least one palpable falsehood, and the detection had excited in the Amir no sense of shame, but rather a feeling of admiration at the clever incredulity of the Faringhis. The expulsion of the Persians from Herat, or even the raising of the Turkoman tribes, was, in Lawrence’s opinion, so far beyond the power of the Amir, that he believed, on the other hand, that the Persians would have little difficulty in seizing Kandahar. This belief in the weakness of Dost Muhammad was based upon a somewhat exaggerated estimate of the disunion among the chief people of the country. But even if the Amir had the power, Lawrence could not believe that he had the will to serve the British; and he doubted, therefore, whether the subsidy would produce any tangible results. As to the question of the future of Herat, it had never even approached a solution. Dost Muhammad had been assured that the evacuation of the place by the Persians would be an essential condition of peace; but he had not been able to offer, without manifest doubt and hesitation, any suggestion as to the best means of providing for its future government. In truth, there was a lack of available capacity in the direction in which it was most natural that we should look for a new ruler. When the Amir was asked if there was any member of Yar Muhammad’s family to whom the government could be entrusted, he replied that there was a brother of Sai’ud Muhammad, but that, if possible, he was a greater reprobate and a greater fool than that unlucky chief. Sai’ud Muhammad, however, had left a son, a boy of some ten years, in whose name a competent Wazir might administer the affairs of the principality; but a competent Wazir was not to be found more readily than a competent Prince. The future of Herat was, therefore, left to the development of the Chapter of Accidents. In the meanwhile, Lord Canning, though he had slowly come to this point, believed that the subsidising of the Amir was not a bad stroke of policy. It bound the Afghan ruler by strong ties of self-interest to remain faithful to the British Government. Even neutrality was great gain at a time when Persia was doing her best to raise a fervour of religious hatred against the English throughout all the countries of Central Asia. The very knowledge, indeed, of the fact that Dost Muhammad had gone down to Peshawar

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to negotiate a closer alliance with the British, must have had a moral effect at Teheran by no means conducive to an increased confidence in the Shah’s powers of resistance. Altogether, it was not an inefficacious, whilst comparatively it was an inexpensive, mode of pressing upon Persia from the side of Afghanistan. But whilst he went thus far, Lord Canning was resolute to go no farther. Re had made up his mind that the independence of Herat could be written only on sand; that the waves of circumstance from one direction or another must utterly efface it after a while; and that it would be wiser to abandon an effort that was so fraught with tribulation, and so sure to result in failure. Certain he was that nothing would ever induce him to send a single regiment into Afghanistan to maintain the integrity of a petty state, which Nature seemed to have intended to be a part of Persia or a part of Afghanistan, and which, as in a national and religious sense it assuredly belonged to the latter, was certain, if left to itself, eventually to fall into the right hands180.

The question of the Oudh Commissionership

Whilst thus, in this first month of the new year, Lord Canning was eagerly watching the progress of his foreign policy, he was grappling with the great difficulty . which beset his internal administration. The question of the Persian command had been settled; but it unsettled, by its solution, that other question of the Oudh Commissionership. It was clearer than ever that Jackson must be removed; but it was no longer possible that his tenure of office should come to a natural end and peacefully die out. It was necessary to lay violent hands upon it, and bring it to an ignominious close. The necessity was painful to Lord Canning; but the interests of the State demanded it, and the Governor-General, in such a case, properly overrode the man. Therefore, as Outram

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could not quietly resume his old seat, another officer was to be found to take the place of Commissioner Jackson. Ample admissions were there of zeal and ability, of assiduous devotion to public business, of much good work well done in the province; but the tone and temper of the man, his contentious spirit, his insolent treatment of his colleagues, were past bearing; and communication to that effect, with notice of appointment of a successor, was made to him in due course.

The choice was an admirable one. It has been said that in the spring of 1856 Sir Henry Lawrence had offered his services to the Governor-General, to officiate as Chief Commissioner of Oudh, in Outram’s absence, and that the first disaster that befell Lord Canning was that the offer was received too late181. When Henry Lawrence found that it was so, he saw at once the weak point of the arrangement, and an idea struck him that if, whilst the civil administration of the province was placed in Jackson’s hands, he himself were vested with political and military authority in Oudh, all objects might be advantageously secured. It was but a passing thought, a fleeting suggestion; but it found expression in a letter addressed to the Governor-General, who said, “Two Consuls and Two Tribunes have worked well enough in old times, as we all know; but Two Commissioners at Lakhnao would have been at a dead lock within a month. I could not have delayed for a day the sending of a third.” A truth not to be disputed. So Henry Lawrence had fallen back upon his duties among those intractable Rajputs; grieving over their degeneracy, striving mightily, but with no great success, to evolve something of good out of their transition state, and at last admitting that the peace and security we had given them had not. yet much improved the race. All through the year he had gone on, in his old earnest, unstinting way, doing what he could, through divers channels of beneficence, alike for the Ancient Houses and the National Chivalries, whereof History and Tradition had given such grand accounts. But often had he turned aside from the thought of the Princes and the people by whom he was surrounded to consider the general condition of our empire in the East, and most of all our Military System, wherein he discerned some rottenness, which needed to be arrested lest the entire edifice should some day become nothing but a prostrate ruin.

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But as the new year approached, certain promptings of failing health inwardly admonished him that it would be well to turn his face towards England for a while; and he had just communicated his wishes upon this score to the Governor-General, when there sprung up a great need for his services on a new and more hopeful field of action. So the answer that went back contained the expression of a hope that he would reconsider his determination to go home and accept the Chief Commissionership of Oudh.

January 19

“There is no person in whose hands I would so gladly and confidently place the charge,” wrote Lord Canning, “and my only scruple in offering it to you is, that I am proposing that which will interfere with the immediate recruiting of your health. But I will not for this refrain from executing my intention to do so, which was formed many days before I received your letter.” And truly a most wise intention; formed without any doubts and misgivings upon his part, for he knew the real character of the man; but not without some counsel against it, given in perfect honesty and good faith by one honest and faithful to the core, but under a false impression, an error afterwards frankly admitted. Had the counsellors been many, and all of the same singleness and sincerity, and the same ripe experience, they could not have turned Lord Canning from his good purpose, or shaken his conviction that he was right.

The invitation reached Henry Lawrence at Nimach. It came to him, weak and dispirited as he was, with all the renovating influence of a breath of his native air. It was to him what the distant sound of the Persian war had been to James Outram. It made the blood course less languidly through his veins. With such work as lay before him in Oudh, he could not be an invalid. The head-shakings of the medical profession were nothing, if the practitioners learned in physical symptoms took no account of the action of the mind. It was the spirit, not the flesh, that required rousing. Two great clouds, coming from opposite directions, had overshadowed his life, blighting both his honourable ambitions and his domestic affections; a heavy disappointment followed by a cruel loss. The black-edged paper on which he wrote still spoke of the latter; a certain sadness of tone in all his allusions to his public life told how fresh were the wounds of the former. “Annoyances try me much more than work,” he now wrote to Lord Canning. “Work does not oppress me.” He could work at

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his desk, he said, for twelve or fifteen hours at a time. He had just made a tour of Gujrat, riding thirty or forty miles a day, sometimes being in the saddle from morning to night, or from night to morning. “But,” he added, “ever since I was so cavalierly elbowed out of the Panjab, I have fretted even to the injury of my health. Your lordship’s handsome letter has quite relieved my mind on that point; so I repeat that if, on this explanation, you think fit to send me to Oudh, I am quite ready, and can be there within twenty days of receiving your telegraphic reply.”

The substance of this letter was telegraphed to Calcutta, and it brought back a telegraphic answer. The convictions on both sides were so strong in favour of the arrangement that it was not likely to break down under any conditions or reservations on either part; and so it was settled that Henry Lawrence should be Chief Commissioner of Oudh. “I am in great hopes,” wrote Lord Canning, “that the task being so thoroughly congenial to you, it will sit more lightly upon you than, measured by its labour alone, might be expected; and as to my support, you shall have it heartily. The field before you is a noble one, full of interest and of opportunities for good; and I look forward with the greatest confidence to the results of your exertions in it.” So Henry Lawrence prepared himself to proceed to Lakhnao, and was soon on his way thither by easy stages; for it was not desired that he should assume office before the middle of the following month. Halting at Bharatpur, where he took counsel with the Political agent and the Engineer officer, and did much to give a right direction to their energies, he proceeded thence to Agra, which was then the seat of the Lieutenant-Governorship of the North-Western Provinces.

Mr E. A. Reade

It was vividly remembered afterwards by one old friend with whom he held sweet communion at that time, that though his thoughts were pregnant with many grave matters begotten of the great Condition-of-India Question, and though he conversed of many things and many men, there was nothing that seemed to press more heavily on his mind than an anxious, uncertain feeling with respect to the state of the Sipahi Army. There were few civilians in the service who knew the Native soldier so well as this friend; and as they talked over certain manifest signs and symptoms, and narrated what they had seen and heard, each saw plainly that there was a painful sense of coming danger in the other’s mind. For twelve years Henry

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Lawrence had been publicly discoursing of the defects of our Indian military system, and emphatically indicating the dangers which might some day overtake the State in the most terrible of all shapes, an outburst of the Native Soldiery182; and he now playfully told his friend, but with more of sadness than of pleasantry in his speech, that the time was not far distant when the Sipahis would hold him and the Lieutenant-Governor and other “big Brahmans,” as hostages in the Fort of Agra, until all their demands were granted.

Still thinking much of this, and mindful that in the province to which he was proceeding he would stand on vantage-ground for the clear discernment of the real causes of the malady, Henry Lawrence passed on to Lakhnao. And before day had broken on the 20th of March, he had been received, at the Residency, by the man whom he had come to supplant. There must have been pain and embarrassment on both sides in such a meeting. But before he had broken his fast, the new Commissioner sat down and wrote a letter to Lord Canning, saying that he had had two hours’ friendly conversation with Mr. Jackson, who had received him altogether “like a gentleman.” He had found a long and encouraging letter from the Governor-General awaiting him on his arrival; and now he emphatically replied, “With your lordship’s cordial support I have no fear of success.” His spirit rose as he thought of the work before him. What that work was, what he found done and what he found undone in the province, when he assumed charge of his new office, will be told in a subsequent page of this story.

*** No better opportunity than this may be afforded for a note on the opinions of Sir Henry Lawrence with respect to the maintenance of the Native States of India. Having said elsewhere that he was on principle opposed to the “Annexation Policy,” I recently elicited the following reply from a distinguished writer in the Edinburgh Review: “A writer so well informed as Mr. Kaye need not have thus held on to the skirts of a popular delusion. The course which Sir Henry Lawrence favoured in respect to Oudh, by whatever name it may be called, is plain enough. It is a course

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which, if submitted to the ‘Law Officers of the Crown,’ as a question of international law, would, probably, receive from these authorities some name harsher than annexation.’” To this I think it right to reply, that as any opinion which I may have formed of the sentiments, on this or any other subject, of Sir Henry Lawrence, has been derived either from oral communication with him or from his letters to myself, I ought not to be charged with “hanging on to the skirts of a popular delusion.” That those sentiments were what I have represented them to be, I have numerous proofs in his own handwriting. A single extract, however, from his correspondence will suffice for all purposes. Writing to me from Mount Abu on the 16th of July, 1856, with reference to the office under the Home Government of India which had recently been conferred on me, he said: “The appointment must be one of the pleasantest, unless, indeed, you feel as I do, that Government is going too fast, and that we are losing our good name among the Native States. I confess that I do not like the present system, and that I would gladly give up salary to change to a purely civil or military berth. When I read the tirades of the Friend of India, I half think myself (with many better men, including Elphinstone, Munro, and Clerk) a fool. The doctrine now is that it is wicked not to knock down and plunder every Native prince. My views are exactly what they were when I wrote the articles for you on the Marathas and on Oudh. My paper on Oudh would serve as a guide to present doings in all points save the disposal of the surplus revenue, which assuredly ought to be spent in Oudh. Nor, indeed, do I think that we should materially lose, or fail to gain thereby. Is it nothing that we should make a garden of the nursery of our Sipahis, and open out the resources of a province bordering for a thousand miles on our old ones? ... But I repeat, that my taste for politics is gone. There is no confidence left in the country; and one does not feel that the people about Government House care one straw about one’s exertions on behalf of the Native States.” Surely, the trumpet here gives no “uncertain sound.”

Footnotes

167. Take, for example, the following: “Judging by my own experience, I should say that in dealing with public servants who have incurred blame, everything is to be gained by telling them their faults in unmistakable language, plainly and nakedly; but that one’s purpose (their amendment) is rather defeated than otherwise by the use of terms that sting them, or amplify their offences to them unnecessarily – even though all be done within the strict limits of truth and fact. I believe that if a man has at bottom a sense of his duty, and is possessed of the feelings and temper of a gentleman, the more simply his error is put before him, and the more plain and quiet the reproof, the better chance there is of his correcting himself readily and willingly, and that if we wish to get work done hereafter out of someone whom it is necessary to rebuke, we ought to give him as little excuse as possible (he will too often find it where it is not given) for feeling irritated against ourselves.” – Lord Canning to Mr. Coverley Jackson, July 7, 1856. – MS. Correspondence.

168. Except during a brief interval; that is, between the years 1826 and 1835, when the King’s Government delegated partially the management of affairs to the Governor-General, only to resume it wholly again.

169. Lord Canning to Mr. Vernon Smith, August 8, 1856. – MS.

170. Lord Canning to Mr. Vernon Smith, April 22, 1856. – MS.

171. The orders were, under date July 22, 1856, that measures were to be “immediately taken at Bombay for the preparation of an expedition sufficiently powerful to occupy the island of Karak in the Persian Gulf, and the district of Bushir on the mainland; but the expedition is not to sail until further orders shall have been received from this country.” On the 26th of September the Secret Committee forwarded to Lord Canning copies of Lord Clarendon’s instructions to the British Consuls in Persia to withdraw from that country, and of a letter addressed by his Lordship to the Commissioners for the Affairs of India, “requiring that the expedition, which will have been prepared, under instructions of the 22nd of July, shall, as soon as it can be completed, proceed to its destination in the Persian Gulf.”

172. So full was Outram at this time of the thought of his departure in December, and so eager for the advent of the happy day of release, that he dated this letter “December” instead of October.

173. It was talked of, indeed, before the compact of 1855, but did not form a part of it. In 1854 (June 19), Sir Henry Lawrence wrote to the author: “I fancy that we shall have some sort of Treaty with Dost Muhammad, unless Lord Dalhousie overreach himself by too great anxiety and by agreeing to pay him a subsidy. If Persia attack Afghanistan the help we should give the latter should be by attacking Persia from the Gulf. We should not send a rupee or a man into Afghanistan. We should express readiness to forgive and forget, to cry quits in Afghan matters, and pledge ourselves to live as good neighbours in future; but there ought to be no interference beyond the passes, and no backing of one party or another.”

174. One passage in Sir John McNeill’s early correspondence I cannot help quoting. There is rare prescience in it: “Dost Muhammad Khan, with a little aid from us, could be put in possession of both Kandahar and Herat. I anxiously hope that aid will not be withheld. A loan of money would probably enable him to do this, and would give us a great hold upon him. ... Until Dost Muhammad or some other Afghan shall have got both Kandahar and Herat into his hands, our position here must continue to be a false one.”

175. This course, though doubtless the one that would have suggested itself to John Lawrence’s unaided judgment, was expressly dictated by Lord Canning, who had written on the 2nd of December to the Chief Commissioner saying, “It is not certain that our object will continue the same as the Amir’s; neither is it certain to what extent the Amir can contribute towards it, even whilst it continues the same. For these reasons it is necessary first that we should know what he can do; and next, that we should come to a clear understanding as to the conditions upon which he shall receive aid in doing it. The meeting ought to clear up the first point at once.” – MS. Correspondence.

176. “It was deemed advisable that the Mission should journey to Kandahar by the route of the Paiwar Pass, a road that had never before been traversed by Europeans, and was consequently unknown ground, and full of interest to the British in a military point of view, as being one of the approaches by which an invading force from the West might enter and attack their Indian Empire.” – Bellew’s Journal of a Political Mission to Afghanistan in 1857.

177. Then members of the Supreme Council of India.

178. The only present made by the Afghan ruler to his allies consisted of a batch of wretched horses, all of which, John Lawrence wrote, were spavined or worn out. The whole were sold for not more than 100l. Perhaps Dost Muhammad, remembering the “pins and needles” brought by Burnes, which had caused so much disappointment some twenty years before at Kabul, did not expect, on this occasion, to be the recipient of anything more valuable.

179. “I must ask you,” wrote Lord Canning to Colonel Edwardes on the 19th January, “to accept my best thanks for the part you have taken in the recent negotiations, and for their satisfactory issue. I feel the more bound to do this, because the first suggestion of a meeting came from you; and so far as I can judge from the reports as yet received, and from the tone of the discussion shown in them, I believe that the suggestion has proved a very wise and useful one. It would be a good thing if all diplomatic conferences were conducted so satisfactorily, and set forth as lucidly as these have been.” All this was well deserved; for the policy was emphatically Edwardes’s policy; he had been the first to recommend, in Lord Dalhousie’s time, that we should try the effect of trusting the Afghans, and his recommendations had resulted in the general compact of 1855.

180. Dost Muhammad and his counsellors, during the conferences at Peshawar, frequently asserted that Persia had, on this as on a former occasion, been instigated and aided by Russia to occupy Herat. I can discern no evidence of this. Prince Gortschakoff assured Lord Granville at Moscow that the Russian Minister at Teheran had urged the Persian Government to evacuate Herat, and so to place themselves in a better position to demand from others a like observance of treaty obligations. It may be noted here, that the Amir told Lawrence at Peshawar that he would show him the letter which the unfortunate Russian diplomatist, Viktevitch, had carried with him to Kabul from the Government of the Czar. But he did not produce it after all.

181. Ante, page 292.

182. See Lawrence’s Essays, reprinted from the Calcutta Review: “How unmindful we have been that what occurred in the city of Kabul may some day occur at Dehli, Mirath, or Bareli” (page 51). Again: “What the European officers have repeatedly done (i.e. mutinied) may surely be expected from Natives. We shall be unwise to wait for such occasion. Come it will, unless anticipated. A Clive may not be then at hand.” The emphatic italics are Lawrence’s. Other passages to the same effect might be cited.

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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