The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (76 page)

With Britain remaining in such a bellicose mood the news of mutiny in India in 1857 broke like a thunderclap. A series of revolts and massacres by Indian troops threatened British rule as well as the lives of British men and women besieged in Cawnpore and Lucknow. Worse still, at that precise moment the British army in India was denuded of British troops, most of them having been diverted to the Crimea, China and Iran. For the seizure of Herat in Afghanistan by Russia’s allies, the Iranians, was believed to threaten the north-west frontier to India. The British army in India therefore consisted mainly of sepoys. The mutiny broke out at Meerut and spread all over northern and central India, but it was the East India Company’s Bengal army that was most strongly affected. The immediate cause was a change in weaponry, to the new Enfield rifle, an effect of the Crimean War. The Enfield rifled musket had been observed to be superior to the old smooth bore. A mischievous rumour swept the ranks that the tallow used to grease the cartridges was made with a mixture of cow and pig fat. This disgusted and offended at one stroke both the Hindus and the Muslims who now made up most of the army of India: Hindus believe that the cow is a sacred animal, whereas Muslims believe that to touch a pig will defile them. Both therefore refused to handle the cartridges, because, in order to use them, the soldier had to bite off one end.

But its underlying cause was the drastic westernization process India had been undergoing for the previous twelve years. The last governor-general but one, the Marquis of Dalhousie, was a keen modernizer in the tradition of his predecessor Lord William Bentinck, who believed it was his duty to open India up to progress. Bentinck had destroyed the Indian custom of suttee in the 1830s–the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres–and eradicated the Thugees, a caste of hereditary murderers whose religion in the service of the goddess Kali directed them to wander around the country strangling their victims. Dalhousie stepped up missionary activity as another means of spreading western civilization among the Indians. He brought the telegraph to the country, built proper roads, tackled education, created irrigation systems, constructed industrial ports and above all introduced the railway to India. Though Dalhousie had many admirable objectives and a vision of what could be achieved in India, his programme failed in one major respect. He did not take Indian sensibilities into account.

For Hindu Indians, the majority of the population, the railway did not represent progress as it did in Europe. In India the railway was seen as an attack on the caste system, as different castes would have to travel in the same compartments. In 1856 Dalhousie’s successor Lord Canning further outraged Indian notions, especially among the Brahmins in the Indian army, when he made altered conditions of service apply. Henceforth Indian troops had to go abroad as part of their service contract. It was another opportunity for the caste miscegenation forbidden by the Hindu religion.

Above all Dalhousie had angered Indians with the amount of territory he had added to British India by what he called his doctrine of lapse. As well as Burma–by the Second Burmese War in 1852, Lower Burma and the important trading station of Rangoon were annexed–British India obtained Sattara in 1848, Nagpore in 1853 and Jhansi in 1854. These were three hereditary lands of the Maratha warriors that Dalhousie took over on the grounds that each of the rulers lacked a direct descendant. Hindu policy in these circumstances was to adopt a male heir, but the governor-general would not have that. He maintained that the sovereignty of a nation ‘lapsed’ to the paramount power–the British government–in default of the natural heirs of a ruling family. Power could not pass to the adopted sons without the consent of the governor-general, and that Dalhousie would never grant.

By the 1850s no Indian ruling family of a dependent state, however princely, felt secure with Dalhousie, who had enormously extended the boundaries of British India. The final straw was the annexation of the powerful kingdom of Oude in 1856, again because there was no male heir of the body. To British eyes the administration of Oude was despicably corrupt and cruel, since the bulk of the massive taxes fell on the miserable poor, but its annexation enraged the kinsmen of the late ruler. Dalhousie himself had noted with concern that there was a great deal of unrest among the Brahmins of the Bengal army, a high proportion of whom had been recruited from Oude. A strange prophecy was circulating that a hundred years from Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757 the British would be driven out of India. When stories of the abysmal performance of the British army in the Crimea started to reach India, it encouraged the Indian troops to revolt.

The spark for mutiny was the Enfield rifles and their supposedly sacrilegious cartridges handed out to the Indian troops at Bengal. But though the tallow was withdrawn it was not soon enough to stop wild rumours sweeping the country that it marked the start of an attempt to destroy the caste system and the Hindu and Muslim faiths, and to convert India to Christianity. Panic spread throughout the country and the revolt began. The Indian Mutiny was the worst crisis the British Empire had encountered since the Napoleonic Wars. Much of India joined the rebels, leaving isolated garrisons like Cawnpore and Lucknow in British hands. But eventually, after a long siege, the British garrison at Cawnpore under Sir Hugh Wheeler was forced to surrender.

Unfortunately the siege of Cawnpore was led by a vengeful victim of Dalhousie’s lapse policy called Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the last Peishwah of Poona. Nana Sahib tricked the British garrison into letting their wives and children go by granting them a safe-conduct pass. Then, before the eyes of their husbands and fathers, as the party of women and children began sailing away downriver Nana Sahib’s soldiers opened fire on them.

Those who escaped death were dragged bleeding and terrified to a local palace and locked up. There, five of Nana Sahib’s men hacked them to death and threw their limbs, large and small, down the well of Cawnpore. When news of Cawnpore reached England from the three men who managed to escape it poisoned the attitude of the new British garrisons towards the Indians for a generation. The rage of the English soldiers when they discovered the remains of their comrades’ wives and children down the well of Cawnpore led to equally barbarous scenes of retaliation upon the Indian population–some were tied to cannons and blown up–which could likewise not be forgotten by their Indian victims.

At Lucknow, the garrison managed to hold out until help arrived with General Havelock, who had come from the Punjab. Britain had annexed the Punjab and its subject province Kashmir in north-west India only eight years before after two strenuous wars against the Sikhs, a very martial people. However, British treatment of the Punjab was very different from that of Oude and the other disaffected areas thanks to its administration by the Lawrence brothers Henry and John. The Lawrences, who had spent most of their adult lives bound up with Indian affairs, respected and admired Indian culture and deplored Dalhousie’s doctrine of lapse. The regime they created in the Punjab, which the Sikhs found acceptable, ensured that it stayed loyal to Britain. In fact the military traditions of the Sikhs and the fearless soldiers they produced became a crucial element in the maintenance of the empire–never more so than at the time of the Mutiny.

Confident that the Punjab would not rise, a force was collected of partly British and partly Sikh soldiers which marched south from the Punjab to recapture Delhi, while others sailed along the Ganges to relieve the weakened defenders of Lucknow. Fortunately for the British, most of Bombay, Madras and Lower Bengal did not join the rebellion, and most independent local leaders such as the princes of Holkar and Sindhia remained allies of the British. Fortunately, too, a detachment of soldiers on its way to the Second China War could be diverted to India instead.

The Indian Mutiny dramatically demonstrated that it was absurd for most of the enormous subcontinent of India to be governed by what was essentially a commercial company, even if there was a Cabinet representative to oversee its affairs. A Conservative government, the second Derby–Disraeli administration, was now in power, Palmerston having been briefly thrown out of office in February 1858. The India Bill which dissolved the East India Company after it had ruled India for 101 years had the assent of both parties. It transferred the government of British India to the crown, which was represented by a secretary of state for India, and an expert council replaced the old Board of Control which had been composed of directors of the company. In India itself, a viceroy replaced the governor-general, and all the former presidencies such as Bombay and Madras were henceforth subordinate to his rule. The company’s army became conjoined with the British army. The son of Prime Minister George Canning, Lord ‘Clemency’ Canning, who had acted with aplomb during the Mutiny and insisted that most of the rebels be treated leniently, became the first viceroy.

But the minority Derby and Disraeli government was driven from power in 1859, and Palmerston came back for his second period as prime minister. Although it was called a Whig–Peelite coalition it was in effect the first administration of what by 1865 was becoming known as the Liberal party. A few days before Palmerston took office, at a meeting at Willis’s Rooms in London on 6 June 1859 some 300 Whigs, Peelites and Radicals had pledged themselves to work as one against Derby and Disraeli. For many years they had supported one another on the issues where they had ideas in common, such as representative government and free trade. Now there was fusion, though the tension between the disparate elements continued under Palmerston, since their leader shared none of the commitment to a wider franchise and social progress that would be an increasingly dominant theme for the new party.

In fact, regardless of party, there was a widespread consciousness among much of the House of Commons of the changing times. Dissenters or Nonconformists, whose numbers at mid-century in some cities rivalled those of the Anglicans, would make up much of the Liberal party’s supporters. It was no longer appropriate for Britain to continue to be confined within the Anglican settlement of two centuries ago. A less exclusive mood was emerging in the country. Under the Tories in 1858 a Jewish Disability Act allowing non-Christian jurors to become MPs allowed the Jewish Lionel de Rothschild to take the seat in the House of Commons he had won in 1847. In the same year the Property Qualification Act laid down that for the first time MPs did not have to be men of wealth.

William Ewart Gladstone, chancellor of the Exchequer from 1859 onwards, was one of the leaders of the progressive section of the Liberals. He clashed frequently with Palmerston, who was almost a quarter of a century older. While Gladstone’s whole life was a voyage of intellectual exploration, Palmerston’s ideas were immovable. He could not understand Gladstone’s palpably growing confidence in the perfectibility of man and democratic ideas. Gladstone was increasingly disquieted that lack of money prevented some people from voting. It offended his Christian conscience, which led him to regard all men as equal. He would soon be making speeches in favour of universal suffrage and Parliamentary reform, though Palmerston had given strict orders that all attempts at expanding the franchise were to be shot down. Palmerston even tried to stop Gladstone’s bill to reduce duty on newspapers to make them cheaper and more accessible to the working man, and sided with the House of Lords when it tried to throw it out. But Gladstone triumphed by wrapping the bill up in the budget. As a money bill, constitutionally it could not be touched by the Lords.

The natural scientist Charles Darwin’s
Origin of Species
, published in 1859, whose theories about evolution were popularized as ‘the survival of the fittest’, increased Britons’ belief in their civilization. So did writers like Lord Macaulay, the dramatic historian whose ‘Whiggish’ view of the unending progress of English history was the required reading of the day. Although the Indian Mutiny implied that the fruits of Victorian civilization might be less valued by other nations, the patriotic mission to impart material achievements to less fortunate peoples did not cease.

British penetration into central Africa in the 1850s reinforced the country’s sense of superiority. Africa’s impenetrable equatorial interior had defied Europeans since Roman times. At the end of the eighteenth century a young surgeon named Mungo Park had died in his attempt to follow the uncharted Niger river to its source during his intrepid solo journey into the Gambia, and no Briton had ventured there since. Tropical disease and the lack of maps made any expedition potentially suicidal. But in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s missionaries like David Livingstone and British explorers like Sir Richard Burton and J. H. Speke at last mapped out Africa’s geographical contours. The invention and widespread use of steamships facilitated travel to Africa, while breakthroughs in medicine made it possible to survive.

There had been considerable missionary activity in southern Africa, working from the Cape northwards, ever since the British had captured it during the Napoleonic Wars, and it was their activities which reawakened interest in equatorial Africa. David Livingstone, a former mill hand from Lanarkshire in Scotland, was the most celebrated missionary of Victorian England. He became a national hero and was given a state funeral at Westminster Abbey in 1874. His statue, with its peaked tropical cap, located outside the Royal Geographical Society headquarters opposite Hyde Park, reminds us that he was also one of the nineteenth century’s most important explorers.

Having enterprisingly taken a short course in medicine because he believed it would be of use to him, but with no special knowledge of Africa, Livingstone had been sent to Bechuanaland (now Botswana) by the London Missionary Society in 1840. From there he travelled north on foot into the unknown. Using beads to barter for food, armed with his Bible and a gun, he spent the next thirty years crossing and recrossing parts of east-central Africa where no European had been before to bring her Christianity and to denounce slavery. Whereas malaria and other tropical diseases had put paid to earlier European adventurers, Livingstone’s survival was ensured by his pioneering use of quinine.