John Russel Colvin, the last lieutenant-governor of the North-West under the Company

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. Introductory 7-13

II. Summary of Mr. Colvin's Career . . . 14-26

CHAPTER I Introductoky

Many may remember that glad Tuesday, the 27th of October, 1857, when the news of the fall of Delhi was announced in the columns of the morning papers. ' Delhi was assaulted,' ran the Times telegram of the previous day from Trieste, ' on the 14th of September, and was in possession of our troops on the 20th.' Another line told how General Outram and Havelock report from Cawnpur, on the i9th at 6 p.m., that the troops crossed the Ganges without opposition, skirmishing only with advanced posts. A little lower down was added : ' Mr. Colvin, the Lieutenant-Governor, died at Agra, on September 9.' In the outpour of feelings overburdened during long months of suspense, and in the jubilant excitement which a few days later greeted the announcement that Outram and Havelock had entered Lucknow, there was little leisure to take stock of the fallen. Events were moving fast. While Lucknow was still beleaguered, too much remained to be achieved for more than a passing notice of those who had succumbed. With the return of order came questions of reconstruction. The past, with many who had moved prominently through it^ was for a time obscured. For a few weeks, paragraphs announcing in regretful terms the death of the Lieutenant-Governor of Agra reappeared in the news from India. In December, at the last visitation of the Directors of the East India Company to their College of Haileybury, which, like themselves, was about to be abolished, Mr. Mangles, the Chairman, referred to him in words of conspicuous eulogy. A few days later the friendly hand of the late Sir Charles Trevelyan recalled to his countrymen in the columns of the Times the services and the career of Mr. Colvin. His name after that fell by degrees into temporary oblivion ; to reappear, before much time had passed, in narratives of the events of 1857. Many, more fortunate if less prominent, who had taken part in those events, survived, to tell in their own words, and from their own point of view, their share in them. To others who, like Mr. Colvin, had died in the discharge of duty, justice was done by friends. ' I trust implicitlj^ to you, in case I fall,' wrote Sir Henry Lawrence to a brother, ' to see that, in the event of the loss of all my papers, which is not improbable, my memory gets fair play. I want no more.'

Sir Henry Lawrence in Oudh, and Mr. Colvin in the North- West Provinces, were the officers in charge

CAREER UNRECORDED of the two Provinces on which^ in 1857, broke the violence of the Mutinies. The one has found his biographer; on the other, public judgment has gone by default. His papers were dispersed. The day had not yet come when the full tale of the events with which he had been at one or other period of his life identified could be told. Other questions than those of India, other phases of Indian questions, pressed upon attention. There grew, with the years, round his name a legend of some want of vigour in meeting the great crisis of 1857. In past years, and in connexion with more distant events, he had been charged with too great vigour. The historian of the first Kabul war had asserted, and others had accepted the assertion, that when he was but thirty his strength of character, his force of will, and his powerful mind had established over Lord Auckland, whom he served as Private Secretary, too great an ascendency. The same chronicler, writing later of the Indian mutinies, found him wanting at fifty in the qualities of which at thirty an excess had been imputed to him. The shadow of these conflicting estimates rests upon his grave. Happily, the last word has not yet been said on the two great epochs with which his name is connected. Time, which has corrected much of the judgments, and cleared away more of the pretensions, with which in 1842 and again in 1857 the air was loaded, will yet allow that fair play to Mr. Colvin's memory which, like Sir Henry Lawrence, is all that he would have asked for. No memoir of him can be complete in the foreground of which is not placed a narrative of the events which, in 1837 and 1H38, brought about the first Kabul war, and a review of some phases of the Indian Mutiny. With those incidents in Indian history these pages, therefore, must be largely occupied.

The writer of this Memoir is very greatly indebted to the present Lord Auckland, who has kindly placed at his disposal t*he Earl of Auckland's letters and Minutes, written while he was Governor-General, and contained in forty-four large manuscript volumes. Such of these papers as have been published in Blue Books have been referred to, but their text has been little quoted in this Memoir. Of Lord Auckland's Indian correspondence, which contains his letters to Sir John Cam Hobhouse when President of the Board of Control; to successive Chairmen of the East India Company, and to other public men, nothing has hitherto been published. The writer has also to acknowledge the courtesy of the authorities at the India Office, who have permitted the publication of certain despatches of the Secret Committee of the East India Company, written in 1836 and 1838. The text of these, though they have been referred to by Lord Palmerston and Sir John Hobhouse in Parliament, has never been printed for the public eye. From these two sources extracts have been as freely made as space will allow. They throw new light on a page of Indian annals of which Kaye has been hitherto the undisputed exponent. Of

MATERIALS FOR PRESENT MEMOIR ii

Mr. Colvin's own papers, much perished with his library at Agra in 1857, but there remains a little of interest. During the years 1837--1839, when he was Private Secretary to Lord Auckland, he kept a diary of the work which passed through his hands. In the fourteen volumes of this diary, among notes of daily work and passages from his private reading, are preserved extracts from letters addressed to Lord Auckland or to his Private Secretary by the chief actors in the events of that time. Some of the flotsam and jetsam of his miscellaneous papers came also to the surface after the wreck of 1857. Letters of interest, written by Sir William Macnaghten when on his way to negotiate with Maharaja Ranjit Singh the terms of the invasion of Kabul, are in the present writer s hands. So are copies of letters written by Mr. Colvin, as Lieutenant-Governor, from November 1853 to May 1857 ; and copies of those which he addressed to the Governor-General (Lord Canning), the Commander-in- Chief, Lord Dalhousie, and to others during the months of May, June, July, August, till within a week of his death, on September 9, 1857. The writer, finally, is much indebted to Mr. F. Reade, for allowing him to use an unpublished narrative written by his father, the late Mr. E. A. Reade, an eminent member of the Indian Civil Service, describing the course of affairs at Agra in the Mutinies of 1857.

The career of Mr. Colvin as an Indian civilian was in some respects singular. Although he was on the Bengal establishment, barely half the period of his public life of thirty-two years was spent in Bengal. He had found himself in Haidarabad and the Deccan as an Assistant to the Resident at the Court of the Nizam ; in the Upper Provinces with the Governor- General ; at Nepal as Resident ; at Maulmain as head of the Administration ; in the Upper Provinces again as Lieutenant-Governor. His experience had been large and varied ; and except during three and a half years' furlough from 184:^ to the latter part of 1845 he had literally known no rest. Like other eminent Indian officers of his time, it is mainly as a public man that we must think of him. With whatever tenderness their thoughts may have turned homewards— and few could have given more tender care throughout life than Mr. Colvin to the welfare of his children — such men saw little of their families. Their children were brought up far away from them. Their wives, under stress of ill-health, or similar necessity, were frequently separated from them. They themselves remained absorbed in affairs, and in the varying public interests which, as they were drawn nearer to the heart of the administration, crowded in increasing importance round them. Nor was there much in their Indian life to lessen the pressure of their labour. Mr. Colvin found rest in the atmosphere of his home, the society of his friends, and in his books. He read unceasingly ; in the full hours of his labours as Private Secretary, in the intervals of his work on the Calcutta Bench, in the leisure of a long furlough, in the brief moments which present

MAN OF AFFAIRS AND STUDENT themselves to a Lieutenant-Governor. Usually he read, pen or pencil in hand. His note books testify to his appetite, as to the indulgence with which he gratified it. It is as a man of affairs in public, and as a student in private life, that in his papers and his diaries he presents himself to us. Glimpses of a more intimate kind may be gained when the veil is lifted by friends (for he was a man of many friends) who have recorded their reminiscences of him, or by the more jealous hands of those who were immediately connected with him.

Chapter II

Summary of Mr. Colvin's Career

On his father's side, Mr. Colvin was of Scotch descent. His grandfather, Alexander Colvin, had married at Linlithgow, in 1749, the daughter of a clergyman in the north of Ireland, Elizabeth, known among her people as ' bonny Lizzie ' Kennedy. They lived at Denovan, on the banks of the Carron, in the parish of Dunipace, in Stirlingshire, where Mr. Alexander Colvin owned large bleaching works. According to a writer in Chambers' Encyclopedia, the first bleach-field in Scotland was established by the Fletchers at Saltoun in East Lothian about 1730. Mr. Colvin's works were probably among the earliest to be set up in Scotland. The art came, like Lizzie Kennedy, from Ireland. Print-works, now in turn removed, afterwards occupied the site of the buildings which belonged to Mr. Colvin ; and of him and his business there remains no longer any trace on the Carron, except graves in the little kirkyard, since stripped of its kirk, within the ' policies ' of Dunipace House. It was not in Scotland, but in India, that the branch of the family with which we

DESCENT AND ANCESTRY 15 are concerned was to spread itself. For the enterprising spirit inherited of their father the young men of that branch found scope on the banks of a river far remote from the Carron of their youth.

Among those who made their way to the Hugli, where the path of fortune had been prepared for them by Clive, was a son of the Denovan bleacher. Alexander Colvin, in or about 1778, was the first of the family to risk his fortunes in India, tempted by what connexion, or led by what hopes, cannot now be known. There, he established a house of business, known later as the house of Colvin, Ainslie, and Cowie ; and there, when in 1818 at the age of 62 he died, his brother merchants erected to his memory a marble monument, from the hands of Westmacott, in St. John's, the parish church of Calcutta. They raised also over his remains, in the South Park Street Cemetery, a tomb on which they recorded his worth. He had landed in India in the reign of Warren Hastings ; for Indian annals are divided, not by George or William, but by Clive, Wellesley, Dalhousie, their predecessors or their successors. While Hastings was enlarging the limits of the Company's rule, Alexander Colvin attended to his ventures. His name not infrequently recurs in old Calcutta gazettes and records. He may have served on a jury before Sir Elijah Impey. He must have discussed over his tea and his bananas the squabbles of the Governor and his councillors ; and have presented his homage to the adored ' Marian.' The scandal of Madame Grand i6 will have been to him a subject, first of discreet inquiry, and later of pious reprobation. He preferred, we may be sure, as became a sober Scotch body, the joys of his home in Hastings Street to the masquerades at Mr. Creighton s Harmonic House. In the South Park Street Cemetery, under hideous pyramids and beneath the debris of fast crumbling tombs, is gathered in its last reunion much of the vexed society which surrounded him. There is Hyde, Sir Elijah Imp'ey's colleague;, ^an honest man,' Sir Elijah thinks, 'but a great coxcomb.' There is choleric Clavering, Member of Council and Commander-in-Chief, but not the less prepared to call out his colleague, ' Curricle ' Barwell, who later begged the honour of his daughter's hand ^. There is his fellow Councillor, Colonel Monson; whose wife. Lady Anne Monson, *a very superior whist-player,'' rests with him.

Clavering and Monson had been sent with Francis from England to form Hastings' Council. No sooner had they landed on Indian soil than all three fell into a fashioned frenzy at what they termed the indignity of their reception. Soon, for two of them, a few feet of that earth would suffice. Now, not even a beggarly Hie jacet indicates their resting-places

^ *A man has followed Miss Clavering on foot from the East Indies ; is quite mad ; and scenes are daily expected, even in the drawing room,' wrote the Countess of Upper Ossory to George Selwyn in 1779. Mr. Councillor Barwell presently married Miss Sanderson, who lies also in the South Park Street Cemetery. Miss Clavering married Lord Napier of Merchistoun.

OLD CALCUTTA in the South Park Street Cemetery. They lie in nameless obscurity, where they held their heads so high. Generals, councillors, judges, the woman of fashion, the beauty of the hour^ the man of business, the man of pleasure, rest together in that distressful acre. As we turn over the delightful pages of Echoes from Old Calcutta, responsive to Doctor Busteed's gentle summons the dead rise for an hour from their slumber. They renew the interrupted flirtation, exchange compliments and shots, sip at their 'loll Shrub/ pace their minuets, pull at their extinct hukkahs. Mr. Hickey is sharpening his pen and his periods in the Bengal Gazette office. The young bloods, with their black Cape ' Coffres ' in attendance, are taking their pleasure in their pinnaces on the river, whence the strains of the French horn reach the celebrated Miss Sanderson, and the other languid ladies, as they pace in their chariots round the Lai Diggi Tank. Palankeens hurry past to Council House and Court. Mr. Councillor Francis in his budgerow hastens on the tide to Hiigli, where she, quae spiravit amores, as he inscribes it in his Diary, is awaiting him. In the morning mist a shot is heard in the direction of Belvedere ; at the next meeting of the Council the Governor will explain to his colleagues how he has found it necessary to wing the most active of their number. The deer are dozing in Impey's Park, of which Park Street recalls the existence, and Middleton Row the main avenue. Clive's new fort thunders out its salute to the dank dawn ;

i8 and, with the first shock to the heavy atmosphere of the Maiclan, the phantoms slip back into their graves.

James, younger brother to Alexander Colvin, and twelve years junior to his brother^ having been born in 1768 — youngest, indeed, of eight sons — had as a lad entered the navy. Leaving it while still a midshipman, he sailed to Calcutta to join Alexander; and from the date of his arrival there, early in the eighties, until the present hour, the family has been directly represented in India, in the male line of the younger brother. James, returning later in 1789 to England to recover health,'found himself present at the taking of the Bastille. In 1802 he married, in Calcutta, Maria daughter of William Jackson^ ' Attorney to the East India Company/ and ' Kegister,' as the functionary was then termed, to the Supreme Court at Calcutta. To them in Calcutta, in the business house in Hastings Street, part of which they occupied as their own, there was born on May 29, 1807, their fourth child ; a son subsequently named John Russell, who is the subject of the present Memoir.

Like other Anglo-Indian children John Colvin was taken home at an early age. In 18 12 he was received at St. Andrews, with his eldest brother Bazett, in the house of an uncle, Thomas Binny, formerly a merchant in Madras, who had married Mrs. James Colvin's eldest sister. There he remained till 1821, living for most of the time in a house now known as Prior's Gate, on the south side of South Street, immediately adjoining the Pends. The house next to it on the

EARLY YEARS AT ST, ANDREWS 19 west side is that ' old merchant's house/ of which it may at one time have formed part, in which Mr. Andrew Lang tells us that Mary Queen of Scots sometimes lived when she sought refuge from the politics and the pulpits of Edinburgh. Later, says Mr. Lang, it came into the possession of Colonel Nairne, who had been engaged in 1745 on the Hanoverian side. In the Colonel's garden stood once a solitary tree, known as Dr. Johnson's tree, from its having been mentioned in Boswell's narrative. About the year 181 7, being then a bare trunk without branches, this relic was uprooted, in the sight of John Colvin and his younger brother, Binny.

At St. Andrews the lad attended as a day scholar the schools of Mr. Waugh and of Mr. Moncur, each in those days a great local dominie ; and in 181 9 was entered at the University. Mr. Waugh's schoolhouse, which was pulled down in 1834, stood immediately to the east of the Blackfriars' Chapel, in the present grounds of the Madras College. The site of Mr. Moncur's school was on the ground known as Gregory's Green (now no Green, but a space paved with cobblestones), at the east end of North Street, by the Fisher's Gate. This site is now occupied by Coast Guard barracks. In February, 18 17, John Playfair being principal, John Colvin inscribed his name in the University books. At St. Andrews he remained, as at the other schools which he had attended^ a day student ; wearing the scarlet gown, but daily tracing and retracing his steps, as he had done when he carried his

B 2 class books down South Street to the Blackfriars, or across Gregory Green. He continued to be a student of the University till 1821. His mathematical teacher at the University, Robert Haldane, afterwards Principal of St. Mary's College, when the lad was about to leave St. Andrews, vouches under his own hand, on May 9, 1 821, with much profusion of capitals, that * during my Experience as a Professor I have but rarely witnessed so much strength as well as quickness of Talent, and so much Proficiency exhibited by a Person so young.'

In 1 821 he left the University, and went south to reside with a tutor in Hampstead, who was to prepare him for Haileybury. Mrs. Binny had died in 18 13 ; in 1818 Mr. Binny had left St. Andrews, and his nephews had been transferred to the charge of a medical man^ an acquaintance of their uncle's. The Doctor's house, known as Ketchpeel House (Ketchpeel being, the initiated have it, a kind of tennis), still stands in North Street, little altered but for a new frontage and a change of tenants. The Doctor has long since moved to a better home. The residence at Hampstead was an experience similar to that which many Anglo-Indian children undergo, and from which not a few, Johii Colvin among them, turn in later life with repulsion. To exchange home for a pupil room, the love of relatives for the salaried affection of strangers, familiar surroundings and a congenial atmosphere for the unknown, often for the dingy, sometimes for the disreputable^ is the lot of too many Anglo-Indian children. To the St. Andrews of

EPITOME OF CAREER

Ws earlier years — to the kindly St. Andrews of his uncle's home — to the sea-blown links where he had mastered the mysteries of ' dormy/ of ' stimey,' of ' foursome,' of ^ the honour,' to the buoyant waters of the northern sea, where he had become an expert swimmer, he returned^ as will be seen, with delight, when on furlough twenty years later. But of the study at Hampstead he retained little but painful recollections. Fortunately, he had near relatives in London, whom he visited in the holidays, and who kept an occasional eye on the lad.

He entered Haileybury in 1^20^, Among his contemporaries were Sir Frederick Halliday, the late Sir Eobert Hamilton, Sir Charles Trevelyan, Sir Henry Ricketts, and Martin Gubbins. ' I was a man of many acquaintances,' he wrote in later years, 'and somewhat gadding and social habits ; all my work being done at night. You may do a good deal at Haileybury if you set yourself to it steadily,' he added ; writing doubtless from his own experience. He passed out of Haileybury in 1825 at the head of his term^ carrying off the honours of his year in classics and mathematics ; though in Persian, a language in which he became afterwards proficient, he seems to have met with no marked success. He sailed to India in the 'Clyde' in October, 1825, reaching it on March 9, 1826. His father had left Calcutta shortly before John Colvin sailed from England. Passing rapidly through the College of Fort William, where he distinguished himself in Persian, he was attached before the close of 1826 as an Assistant to Mr. (later Sir William) Macnaghten, the Registrar at that time of the Company's chief Court of Appeal in Calcutta, with whose name his own was to become closely associated. In the following year, on May 10, 1827, little more than twelve months after his arrival in India, when a few^ days under twenty, he married. To his father, and probably to his friends, it seemed too early ; but life-long happiness proved the soundness of his judgment. His wife was Emma Sophia, a daughter of the Reverend Wetenhall Sneyd, at that time Vicar of Newchurch, in the Isle of Wight. When Mr. Colvin met her, she was living with her brother, Major Henry Sneyd, Commandant of the Governor-General's Bodyguard. She survived her husband many years, dying in July 1882, at the age of seventy-five; full of years, and happy in all that should accompany old age.

After serving an apprenticeship in the Bengal Province of Cuttack and in the Muhammadan State of Haidarabad in the Deccan, Mr. Colvin found himself again in 1830 in Calcutta, where he filled subordinate posts in the secretariat offices, till in 1835 he was made Secretary to the Bengal Board of Revenue. He had meanwhile been deputed to inquire into an outbreak of Wahabi fanaticism at Barasat, in the neighbourhood of Calcutta ; and had distinguished himself, as a member of the Educational Committee, in the ranks of those who under the guidance of Macaulay were endeavouring to displace Oriental in favour of

INDIA, IN HIS LIFETIME

Western instruction. In March, 1836, he was selected by Lord Auckland, on his arrival in India, to be his Private Secretary. Eeturnlng with Lord Auckland in the spring of 1842 to England, he remained there till September, 1845, when he left it for the last time. He was sent, on his return to India, to Nepal, relieving Captain (afterwards Sir Henry) Lawrence as Resident at the Court of Khatmandu. In the end of 1846 he succeeded Captain (afterwards Sir Henry) Durand as Commissioner of the Tenasserim Provinces in Burma. From thence, in the close of 1848, he was recalled to Calcutta, and took his seat on the Bench of the Company's Chief Appellate Court, where twenty-two years earlier he had begun official life as Assistant to the Registrar. On the death of Mr. Thomason he was selected by Lord Dalhousie to be the Lieutenant-Governor of the North- West Provinces. There, in the midst of his labours, the Mutinies burst on him in 1857. On September 9 of that year he closed his life in the Fort of Agra.

Mr. Colvin's career in India coincides with the later and final stages of the long course of operations which brought the Peninsula from Cape Comorin to the Indus under the flag of the East India Company. The making of British India was still, during much of his career, the chief business of the Government. The main questions of interest in public offices, in the journals, and in pamphlets and reviews, were till 1848 those of warlike enterprise, or of foreign policy. In the decade preceding his arrival the Nepal war had placed within the Company's grasp the Himalayan provinces of Garhwal and Kumaun, and a long stretch of valuable forest at the foot of the Himalayas. Lord Hastings had put an end to the confederacy of the great Maratha States, had dispersed the Pindaris, and had secured the peace of Central India. The Tenasserim Province, Arakan, and Assam had been acquired by the Company ; Ehartpur, hitherto believed invincible, had fallen. The Sikh kingdom in the Punjab, the Amirs of Sind, and the Court of Oudh were in 1826 the chief representatives of native rule in Northern and Western India. Before Mr. Colvin died, he saw Lahore, Haidarabad in Sind, and Lucknow annexed, and the geographical limits of India coterminous with the India of the Company. The needle of apprehension was henceforth no more subject to disturbance from storms in the Peninsula, but continued steadily to point, as in Mr. Colvin's day it had for a time pointed, to the North- West frontier and to the regions beyond it.

While Mr. Colvin saw the close of this epoch of Indian history, he was himself identified with the era which succeeded it. We can see now that with the acquisition of Oudh, in 1856', the East India Company had done its work. The Company, and the great instrument which had served it, became thenceforth impediments to progress. The Indian Empire, once formed, with boundaries approximate to those of the great empires of Russia and China, could only be represented by the Crown. The old Sepoy army, with its numbers, its prejudices, the position which it occu-

PROGRESS, DURING HIS CAREER 25 pied in native consideration, and the deference shown to it by its masters, could not have been longer tolerated. It was the emblem of Brahman supremacy ; as the Emperor, who was dozing his last hours away in Delhi, was the symbol of Muhammadan dominion. These pretensions were inconsistent with the paramount rule of a foreigner, established throughout India. If there was to be free elbow-room and an open field for the play of English forces, it was as imperative that these should disappear as that the Company should be dissolved. But in 1826 such ideas would have been scouted. When Mr. Colvin first entered the public service the old traditions of the Company were still those by which the country was administered. The press was not free. The interloper, at the will of the authorities, might be hustled out of the country. Government schools, outside the Presidencj^ towns, were unknown. Instruction in the English language was given only by missionaries or by the School Book Society. The native of India was excluded from public employ, other than that of the most subordinate kind. The procedure of the Company's Courts, and the law administered by them, were a terror to all but the evil-doer. Appeals from the Company's Courts, in suits to which European British subjects were parties, lay not to the Company's chief Court of Appeal, but to the Supreme Court, representing the Crown. Before Mr. Colvin died, the Press had been freed, railways had been opened, posts and telegraphs had been established.

the Englishman had been brought within the jurisdiction of the Company's Civil Appellate Courts. The foundations had been securely laid of an executive and a judicial native civil service. English education had been vigorously introduced. The system of nomination by v^hich he had entered India had been condemned, and the Indian Civil Service had been thrown open to competition.

With the movement which had brought all this to pass he had been from the first connected. He had been always, as Macaulay put it of his brother-inlaw, the Indian civilian Trevelyan, on the side of improvement. His sympathies were with progress and enlightenment ; his friends were those who looked, -like himself, beyond the epoch of internal wars, beyond the India of Wellesley, to a time which lay far ahead of them, to the verge of which Dalhousie conducted them, and which they were enabled by faith to foresee. Elphinstone, Malcolm, and Metcalfe among his seniors, Thomason and Trevelyan among contemporaries, were men after his own heart. They were all of them far in advance of their day ; their aims and methods were of the present hour. From Lord Amherst to Lord Canning, though a century seems to divide their several terms of office, is but twenty-eight j^ears. If ibi^S and 1856 are a cycle apart, and if the ideas of 1894, though they may diff'er in extent, are identical in direction with those of 1856, it is largely because of the labours of that group of the Company's servants of whom Mr. Colvin was not the least conspicuous.