Lord Lawrence, by Sir Richard Temple.

Chapter I Introduction

John Laird Mair Lawrence was born in 1811 and died in 1879, being sixty-eight years of age. Within that time he entered the Civil Service of the East India Company, governed the Punjab then the most difficult province in India, took a very prominent part in the War of the Mutinies, was by many called the saviour of the Indian empire, and became Viceroy of India. By reason of his conduct in these capacities he is regarded as a man of heroic simplicity, and as one of the best British type, to be reckoned among our national worthies.

I shall write the following account of him as a man of action, partly from authentic records, but chiefly from personal knowledge. I was his Secretary during some of the most busy and important years when he was governing the Punjab, and one of his Councillors when he was Viceroy. My acquaintance •with him began in 1851, and continued on intimate terms till 1870, from which time until his death I was separated from him by distance. Thus I have been in great part an eyewitness of what is to be related of him. My knowledge, too, of his views is derived, not from correspondence

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nor from private letters, but from verbal communication. For several years it was my chief duty so to imbue my mind with his policy and opinions that I might be able to express them in writing at a moment’s notice.

He was a man of action as distinguished from a man of letters. He did not write a book nor contribute to periodical literature. Among his predecessors and successors in high office amidst the imperial affairs of India, some have been men either of letters or of literary culture ; as for instance, "Warren Hastings, Wellesley, Teignmouth, Mountstuart Elphinstone, Lytton. Though neither unlettered nor uncultured, he had no literary training nor did he possess that which would nowadays be called culture. Again, some of his predecessors and successors had acquired a considerable position either in political and parliamentary life at home or in imperial affairs abroad, as for example Amherst, Ellenborough, Hardinge, Dalhousie, Canning, Elgin, Mayo, Northbrook. But he derived his position solely from experience of India, knowledge of her people, and sendees rendered within her limits. The son of a poor and hardy veteran officer, he was essentially a self-made and a self-taught man. It is therefore interesting to learn how he came to make and teach himself thus grandly, and what was the process of the making and the teaching. For he had no wondrous gifts of intellect or imagination and few external graces. He never enjoyed the advantages of high education, of family connection, of contact with political life, of guidance from the lights of the age. He had to raise himself by his own up-heaving force, and to propel himself by his own motive power. Before him many great men

I

HIS ENERGY AND RESOLUTION have been singled out for greatness by every observer from their youth onwards. But he as a young man was never deemed remarkable, and almost up to his middle life he was not expected by his best friends to acquire greatness. Then the hour of difficulty came, and was followed by other hours harder and harder still ; and he was found more and more to be the man for them all. From a good magistrate of a comparatively old district he became the administrator of a newly-annexed territory. Thence he rose to be Resident at a Native Court in time of trouble, and virtual governor of an arduous province. While thus occupied he was overtaken by the desperate tempest of the Mutinies, and he rode on the crest of every wave. Thence he was promoted in natural order to the supreme command in India. Thus he rose not by assumed antecedents nor by collateral advantages, but by proved merit in action. Doing lesser things very well he was tried in greater things, and he did them with equal efficiency. Tested in the furnace of fiery danger he showed the purest metal. Lastly, when elevated to the highest office he was still successful.

All this while, his qualities were for the most part those which are commonly possessed by British people. He evinced only two qualities in an uncommon degree, namely energy and resolution. But if he was not a man of genius in the ordinary acceptation of the term, there must have been a certain genius in him, and that was virtue. Such genius is indeed heaven -born, and this was the moral force which combined all his faculties into a harmonious whole and made him a potent instrument for good, a man of peace or of war, according to

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the requirements of right and justice. His virtue was private as well as political, domestic as well as public. He was a dutiful son, a faithful husband, a kind father, an affectionate brother, a steadfast friend. There have been men eminent in national affairs over whose life a veil must partially be thrown ; but his conduct was unassailable even by those who assailed his policy and proceedings. However fiercely the light might beat on him, he was seen to be unspotted from the world. Again there have been statesmen who, vigilant as regards the public interests, have yet neglected their own concerns ; but he was a good steward in small things as well as in great. He always found the means of meeting charitable demands ; he was ever ready with trusty counsel for his friends ; he managed a fund formed by himself and his brothers as a provision for their widowed mother. But, while upright and undaunted before men, he was inwardly downcast and humble before the all-seeing Judge. He relied on divine mercy alone, according to the Christian dispensation. Apart from the effect of his constant example in Christian action, he made no display of religion beyond that which occasion might require. In this cardinal respect as in all lesser respects he was unostentatious, excelling more in practice than in precept. Amidst the excitement of success in emergent affairs, he would reflect on the coming time of quiet and retirement. In the heyday of strength and influence he would anticipate the hour when the silver cord must be loosed and the golden bowl broken ; when surrounded with pomp and circumstance, he would reckon up the moments when the splendid harness must be cast aside. In a word,

I

HIS ENDURANCE massive vigour, simplicity and single-mindedness were the keynotes of his character.

In the following pages, then, the development of this character will be traced through many striking circumstances in distant fields of action, through several grave contingencies and some tremendous events. The portrait will, indeed, be drawn by the hand of affection. Nevertheless every endeavour will be made to preserve accurately the majestic features, to pourtray the weatherbeaten aspect, to depict the honourable scars, the wrinkles of thought, the furrows of anxiety. In a word he is to be delineated as he actually was in gentleness or ruggedness, in repose or activity, in sickness or health.

His course, from the beginning to the end of life, should have a spirit-stirring effect on the middle class from which he sprung. For to his career may be applied the Napoleonic theory of a marshal’s baton being carried by conscripts in their knapsacks during a campaign. With virtue, energy and resolution like his, British youths of scanty means, winning their places by competition, may carry with them to the Eastern empire the possibilities of national usefulness and the resources for conquering fortune in her noblest sphere.

Moreover, a special lesson may be learnt from him, namely that of endurance ; for he was, in the midst of energetic life, often troubled and sometimes even afflicted by sickness. In early life he seemed to have been born with powerful robustness ; but as a young man he suffered several times from critical illness, and in middle age ailments, affecting chiefly the head, grew upon him like gathering clouds. As an elderly man he was prematurely borne down to the dust of death, while accord-

CHAP. 1 ing to ordinary hope he might yet have been spared for some years to his family his friends and his country. If anything could add to the estimation in which he is held, it is the remembrance that when he magnificently swayed the Punjab his health was fitfully uncertain, that it was still worse when he stemmed the tide of the Mutiny and Rebellion, that it had never been really restored even when he became Viceroy, and that during the performance of deeds, always arduous and often heroic, he had to struggle with physical pain and depression as well as wrestle with public emergencies.

But though he might have added something to the long list of his achievements had his life been prolonged, still the main objects of his existence had been fulfilled, and he died neither too early nor too late for his fame. Even if it cannot be said of him that he lived long enough to be gathered to his fathers like a full shock of corn, still there is a fulness and a completeness in his career. To his memory may be applied the lines of Schiller on' a dead hero : “ He is the happy one. He has finished. For him is no more future here below. For him destiny weaves no webs of envy now. His life seems spotless, and spreads out with brightness. In it no dark blemish remains behind. No sorrow-laden hour knocks to rouse him. He is far-off beyond hope and fear. He depends no longer on the delusive wavering planets. For him ’tis well for ever. But for us, who knows what the dark-veiled hour may next bring forth !”

Chapter II Early Life 1811-1829

He who would understand this story aright must stretch the wings of his imagination for a flight across the ocean to the sunny shores beyond. In these northern latitudes sunshine is regarded as genial and benignant, but in those regions the sun is spoken of by the natives as cruel and relentless. It is with fierce rays that he strikes the stately architecture, the crowded marts, the dusty highways, the arid plains, the many-coloured costumes, the gorgeous pageantry, — in the midst of which our action is laid, and which in their combination form the theatre where the mighty actors of our drama are to play their parts. But not in such a climate nor amidst such scenes were these actors born and bred. In the time of youth, — when the physical frame is developed, and the foundation of the character is laid, — their stamina were hardened, their faculties nursed, their courage fostered, under the grey skies and misty atmosphere, in the dales and hills, amidst the green fields and the smoky cities of Great Britain and Ireland.

The village of Richmond is situated in the North

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Riding of Yorkshire at the western base of the hills which flank the Westmoreland plateau, and near the head-waters of the Swale, an affluent of the Ouse. In the year 1811 it formed the headquarters of the Nineteenth Regiment of Foot, of which Alexander Lawrence was the Major.

Here John Lawrence was born on March 4th, 1811 : being the eighth in a family of twelve children. His sister Letitia, his elder brothers George and Henry, his younger brother Richard, will be mentioned in the following narrative. His brother Henry, indeed, was closely associated with some of the events to be related hereafter.

The parents were people of British race domiciled for some generations in Ulster. The mother was a descendant of John Knox the Scotch reformer, and the daughter of a clergyman in the Church of England, holding a cure in Donegal. The father had run a military career for full fifteen years in India and Ceylon, and had been among the leaders of the forlorn hope in the storming of Seringapatam. He was a fighting man, ardent for warlike adventure, maimed with wounds, fevered by exposure, yet withal unlucky in promotion. He was full of affection for his family, and of generosity towards his friends. Despite the res angusta dorni which often clings to unrewarded veterans, he was happy in his domestic life. His only sorrow was the indignant sense of the scant gratitude with which his country had regarded his sendees. Nevertheless he sent forth three of his sons for military careers in that same East where he himself had fought and bled, — of whom two rose to high rank and good emoluments.

II His Veteran Father

But he placed them all in the service of the East India Company, which he hoped would prove a good master, and that hope was realised.

As a child, John Lawrence went with his parents from Richmond to Guernsey, thence to Ostend where the father commanded a Veteran Battalion during the Waterloo campaign, and thence soon after 1815 to Clifton near Bristol. During his childhood he suffered severely from an affection of the eyes, the very ailment which, as we shall see hereafter, overshadowed his declining years. From Clifton he went to a day-school at College Green in Bristol, walking daily over the breezy uplands that then separated the two places, in company with his brother Henry, his elder by five years. It would seem that according to the fashion of the schools of this class in those times, he received a rudimentary education with a harsh discipline. His home, being furnished with scanty means, must have been destitute of external amenities. But he enjoyed the care of one who, though forced by circumstances to be rigid, was a thoroughly good mother, and the tender thoughtfulness of his sister Letitia which he never forgot. He listened eagerly to his father’s animated tales of war, as the veteran recounted

“ the story of his life

From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,

That he had passed . . .

Wherein he spoke of most disastrous chances,

Of moving accidents by flood and field,

Doubtless it was from his father’s conversation in these days of childhood that he acquired the soldierly predilec-

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tions which clung to him throughout his civil career. The receptive years of his boyhood up to twelve were thus spent in English surroundings, and amidst English scenery of an attractive character. Despite the whirl and worry of his after-life, he ever remembered the beautiful Clifton of his day — before the rocks were pierced for railwaytunnels or the valley spanned by a suspension -bridge. He loved the forest- clad heights, the limestone cliffs, the bed of the tidal Avon.

At twelve years of age he went to Foyle College close to Londonderry, to be under the care of the Reverend James Knox, his mother’s brother. In this College were his brothers George and Henry, also Robert Montgomery, who was in future years to become to him the best of colleagues. Here he stayed during two years of great importance in the forming of his mind and disposition, as he breathed the air, imbibed the ideas, and gathered the associations of Ulster. At first, however, his ways were so much those of England that his companions called him “ English John.” The education which he there received was characteristic of the British type, for it tended rather to form and strengthen the character than to enlighten the intellect. The religious training, to which he was subjected, appears to have been somewhat too severely strict. Yet in combination with home influences and with natural impulses, it planted religion ineradicably deep in his heart. The recollection of it, however, rendered him adverse to formalism of any kind.

Fojde College as an educational institution has doubtless been much developed since his time. But the building and its precincts may now be seen almost exactly as

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HIS TIME IN LONDONDERR V

1 1 they were when he was there. From the upper windows is the same prospect which he had of the Foyle estuary, and from the field where he played football is beheld a view of the historic city. As he used to stay there with his uncle during the holidays, he must have often walked round the terrace on the top of the well-kept walls, that still enclose the old citadel- town wherein the faith and freedom of the Protestants were sheltered during the storm of war in 1688-9. Here he found the historic memories preserved with wonderful tenacity. So he must have gazed at the Ship-Quay, the Water-gate as it once was, whither the relieving ships from England, after fighting their way up the Foyle, brought victuals for the longsuffering and famished garrison. He must have passed beneath the venerable bastions where the defenders repeatedly beat back the French soldiers of King James. He attended on Sundays divine service in the Cathedral which stood close to the fighting -ground during the defence, and where the bones of eminent defenders were interred. This, then, was just the place to be for him a nutrix leonum, and the meet nurse for a heroic child ; as indeed it is the Saragossa of the British Isles. In after life his talk would oft revert to the Foyle as to him the queen of rivers. Forty years later, when at the summit of his greatness, he spoke publicly to his admirers in the Punjab about the memories of Londonderry, as nerving Britons in other lands to stubborn resistance.

At fifteen years of age he returned to England and went to a school kept at Wraxall Hall, near Bath, an Elizabethan structure with picturesque courtyards and orchards. It was comparatively near to his paternal home at Clifton, and in it were renewed those rural

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associations of English life which he had gathered in childhood. Shortly afterwards he was offered a civil appointment in the East India Company’s service by a good friend, Mr. Hudlestone, who had already given appointments in the Company’s military service to three of the elder brothers, one of whom was Henry. But he was minded to decline the civil appointment, then considered of all appointments the most desirable, and to ask for a military appointment instead. He would not regard the advice of his father, nor of his brother Henry, who had just returned from India on sick leave after hard service in the wars. The influence of his sister Letitia alone persuaded him to accept the civil appointment. Consequently at the age of seventeen he went to the East India Company’s College at Haileybury near Hertford, and remained there for the appointed term of two years. There he heard lectures in political economy from Malthus, and in law from Empson, afterwards editor of the Edinburgh Review. The discipline was not specially strict, nor was the intellectual training severe ; but as the Company maintained a highly qualified and distinguished staff of professors, he had educational opportunities of which he availed himself in a moderate or average degree only. He was a fairly good student, but was not regarded by his compeers as remarkable for learning or for prowess in games. His frame was tall and well knit but gaunt. His manner was reserved in public, sometimes tending to taciturnity, but vivacious and pleasant in private. As he had been thought to be English when in Ireland, so now when in England he was deemed to be somewhat Irish in his ways. In his case, as in many eminent cases, the temper and disposi-

II

HIS STAY AT HAILEYBURY tion were being fixed and settled, while the mental faculties were being slowly developed. The basis of his great character was being founded in silence. But his fondness for the rural side of English life must have been gratified to the full at College. He had not cultivated any architectural taste, and if he had, it would have been offended by the plainness even ugliness of the collegiate architecture ; but his nature rejoiced in the surroundings of the College, the extensive woods reaching to the very gates, the outburst of vernal foliage, the singing birds in their leafy haunts, the open heath, the Bye House meadows, the waters of the Lea. He would roam with long strides in the meads and woodlands. Though not gifted with any aesthetic insight into the beauties of Nature, yet he would inwardly commune with her, and he had an observant eye for her salient features. Such things helped to establish a mind like his, and to temper it like pure steel for the battle of life.

He used to spend a part of his vacation in each year at the house of a friend at Chelsea, before returning to his home at Clifton. Having passed through College he spent four months in England, in order to have the companionship of Henry on the voyage out to India. He sailed in September 1829, being nineteen years old, in a vessel bound for Calcutta by the route round the Cape of Good Hope.

At a later stage in his life, some analysis will be given to show how far he partook of the several elements in our composite national character, English, Scotch and Irish. It may suffice here to state that for all these years his nurture, bringing up, and education generally,

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CHAP. II had been English, with the important exception of the two years which he spent at Londonderry. Whatever Scotch or Irish proclivities he may have possessed, and they will be considered hereafter, no son of England, of his age, ever left her shores more imbued than he with her ideas, more loyal to her principles, more cognisant of her strength or weakness, of her safety or danger, of her virtues or failings.

Chapter III The Delhi Territory 1829-1846

John Lawrence, in company with his elder brother Henry, entered in 1829 upon his new life, beginning with a five months’ voyage through the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. On this voyage he suffered severely from sea-sickness, and the suffering was protracted over several weeks. This must have aggravated any constitutional tendency to nervous irritability in his head. He landed at Calcutta in February, 1830, just when the cool season was over and the weather was growing warmer and warmer till it attained the heat of early summer. Then he passed through the rainy period of midsummer, which in those latitudes always had a depressing effect on him as on many others. He was an ordinarily good student in the College of Fort William — the official name whereby the stronghold of Calcutta is called. He mixed but little in the society of the capital, and pined for his English home, fancying that poverty there would be better than affluence in the East ; he even allowed himself to be dominated by this sort of home -sickness, for the first and last time in his life. However, after sojourning for a few i6

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months in Calcutta, and passing the examination in the vernacular of Upper India, he asked for and obtained an appointment at Delhi, partly because his brother Henry was serving in the Artillery at Kurnal in that neighbourhood, partly also because the far-off frontier had a fascination for him as for many others. In those days a journey from Calcutta to Delhi (now accomplished by railway within three days) often occupied nearly three months by boat on the Ganges ; but by travelling in a palanquin he traversed the distance, about eleven hundred miles, within three weeks.

Arrived at Delhi, in 1830, he felt that happy revulsion of thought and sentiment which is well known to many who have passed through similar circumstances. He had not only landed on a strange and distant shore, but had advanced many hundred miles into the interior of the country. He had thus, so to speak, cut his cables and cast away home-sickness, treasuring the memory of the former existence in the sunniest corner of his heart, but bracing and buckling himself to the work of the new existence. This work of his, too, was varied and intensely human in its interests. Its nature was such as made him anxious to learn, and yet the learning was extraordinarily hard at first. His dormant energies were thus awakened, as he dived deep into the affairs of the Indian people, listened to their petitions, guarded theu rights, collected the taxes, watched the criminal classes, traced out crime, regulated the police. The work was in part sedentary, but it also afforded him healthy exercise on foot and on horseback, as he helped in supervising the streets, the drains, the roads, and the

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HIS SERVICE AT DELHI

1 7 municipal institutions of all sorts in a great city and its neighbourhood.

He was, moreover, impressed deeply by imperial Delhi itself as one of the most noteworthy cities in the world, and as

“ The lone mother of dead empires.”

The matchless palace of the Great Mogul overhanging the river Jumna, the hall of audience, the white marble mosque, a veritable pearl of architecture, the great city mosque, probably the finest place of worship ever raised by Moslem hands, the ruins outside the walls of several capitals belonging to extinct dynasties, doubtless affected his imagination in some degree. But he was too much pre-occupied by work to regard these things as they would be regarded by artists or antiquarians. Nevertheless his native keenness of observation served him well even here, for he would describe the structural merits of these noble piles, the clean cutting of the redsandstone and the welding together of the massive masonry. He was more likely to observe fully the geographical situation which gave commercial and political importance to the city in many ages, and preserved it as a capital throughout several revolutions. In the intervals of practical business he must have noticed the condition of the Great Mogul, whom the British Government then maintained as a phantom sovereign in the palace. But he could not have anticipated the position of fell activity into which this very roi faineant was fated to be thrust some twenty-seven years later. It will be seen hereafter that the local knowledge which he thus gained of Delhi, served him

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in good stead during the most critical period of his after-life.

In 1834 he was placed in temporary charge of the district of Paniput, in a vast plain that stretches along the western bank of the Jumna. His being after only four years’ service entrusted, as acting Magistrate and Collector, with the command of a district containing some thousands of square miles and some hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, was a proof of the early reputation he had won as a capable officer and well-informed administrator. At Paniput he controlled, as a superior, much the same work as that which he had performed as a subordinate at Delhi. That which he had learnt by laborious self-instruction on a smaller scale, he was now to practise on a larger. The area being extensive, and rapidity of movement being essential to the maintenance of a personal control over affairs, he used to ride on horseback over his district from end to end. Every arduous or dangerous case, fiscal or criminal, he would keep in his own hands ; though even in these early days he trusted his subordinates when trustworthy, and made them do their duty as he did his. He did not, indeed, adorn all that he touched, but he stamped on it the mark of individuality. The natives soon learnt to regard him as the embodiment of British justice. The various sections of the population, the evil-disposed or the industrious, the oppressor or the oppressed, the suppliant for redress or the hardened wrong-doer, — all in their respective ways felt his personality. The good officers in India live, move and have their being among the people, and such was his daily routine. He could not fail, moreover, to be moved by

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HIS OFFICIAL LIFE

>9 the historic traditions of Paniput — the scene of the Mahabharat, that antique epic of the Hindoos ; the victory of the young Akber, the first of the Great Moguls ; the Persian invasion under Nadir Shah ; the rout of the Mahrattas under Ahmed Shah the Afghan : especially must the tragic and touching incidents of the Mahratta disaster have appealed to susceptibilities such as his.

In these days he practised himself much in horsemanship, becoming a strong rider and a good judge of horses ; it was truly to be said of him gaudet equis canibusque. He was a keen observer of steers and heifers, of bullocks for draught and plough. Being fond of animals generally, he studied their breeding, nurture and training, their temper, habits and capabilities. Though a stranger to botany as a science, he knew the local names of every tree and plant. He had a discriminating eye for the varieties of soil, the qualities of growing crops, the faults and merits of husbandry. Though not versed in the theory of economic science, he had an insight into the causes affecting the rise and fall of prices, the interchange of commodities, the origin and progress of wealth, the incidence of taxation. He had hardly, indeed, mastered the technicalities of finance, yet he had a natural bent for figures, and was a financier almost by instinct.

This was the spring-tide of his public life when he was bursting forth into vigour of body, soaring in spirit, and rejoicing like a young lion in healthy strength. Then, too, he was able to withstand the climate all the year round. For although in summer the sky was as brass, the earth as iron, the wind as a blast from a furnace, still in winter the marching in tents was

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salubrious, the breeze invigorating, the temperature delicious by day, and the air at night frosty.