Twelve Indian statesmen

Front matter

TWELVE INDIAN STATESMEN

WORKS OF DR. GEORGE SMITH, C.I.E.

The Life of William Carey, D.D., Shoemaker and Missionary, Professor of Sanskrit, Bengali, and Marathi in the College of Fort William, Calcutta. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. Second Edition.

Preface

The Twelve Statesmen sketched in this volume were chief among the Empire - builders of the nineteenth century. Eight of them were identified with the conflicting policies of the two Afghan and two Sikh wars of the last half-century, which have resulted in the Eusso- Afghan peace and the present subjugation of the independent tribes of the Frontier. Except the first, I had the good fortune to know them all, and to count some of them as intimate friends. It is an accident, but all the more significant on that account, that the twelve unconsciously revealed that strain of Puritanism which has been said to mark the greatest and most zealous patriotism.

Charles Grant was the first to work out the ethical principles on which alone Great Britain could found its Indian Empire ; he also had the chief influence in educating public opinion, and persuading Parliament to give these principles active authority. They were applied to the Princes and to the Army of India by Henry Lawrence ; to its Peoples by John Lawrence. The brothers having become leaders of the two great schools of Anglo-Indian administration, Henry Lawrence had as his disciples James Outram, Herbert Edwardes, Henry Marion Durand, and Colin

Vlll

PREFACE

Mackenzie; John Lawrence was followed by Henry Eamsay and Charles Aitchison. The Historian who recorded and the Journalist who continuously influenced much of the Imperial policy on Puritan lines was John Marshman. The Jurist who justified and applied these principles to the India of the Queen-Empress, embodying them in legislative forms so that they became fruitful for ever, was Henry Maine.

The only Governor - General among the twelve was John Lawrence. Hereafter, I hope to review, historically, the acts of the whole series, from the Marquess of Dalhousie to the Earl of Elgin II. Then also it may be possible to do justice to other workers with whom I have been associated, such as Sir Henry Yule and Sir Henry Daly, Sir George Campbell and Sir Bartle Erere, Dr. John Muir and Sir William Mackinnon. The missionary statesmen I have already sketched on a more elaborate scale. Sir Eichard Temple has told his own story. Lord Eoberts has written the narrative of his brilliant career in a book which must live as long as our Empire and Army of India. The other great Eield- Marshal, Sir Donald Stewart, Mr. Meredith Townsend, Dr. William Miller, Sir William Muir, Sir Henry Norman, Sir Eichard and Sir John Strachey, and others, are still happily spared to their country.

I thank William Canton, Esq., for his great courtesy.

G. S.

Serampore House, Merchiston,

Edinburgh, 24 th August 1897.

Contents

PAGE

1746-1823. Charles Grant (with Portrait) .... 1

First and Greatest of Indian Philanthropists

II Sir Henry Lawrence, K.c.b., 1806-1857

Provisional Governor-General of India

In the year 1855 Sir Henry Lawrence paid the last of his rare visits to Calcutta. Emphatically a man of action, whether as a soldier, a “ political ” in the Anglo- Indian sense, or an administrator, he had spent the thirty years of his brilliant career in the swamps of Arakan, the villages of the North-Western Provinces, the passes and forts of Afghanistan, the solitude of the valleys of Nepaul, the court and camps of the Punjab, and the arid wastes of Rajpootana, relieved only by a few weeks’ rest in the cool heights of Mount Aboo. He was known personally to few of those in the great cities who, whether Englishmen or Natives, form the public opinion of India. But his name had for some time been in every mouth. Keen interest was felt in the man who, having helped Lord Hardinge to win the first Punjab War, and having prevented the second from being attended by disaster at Chilianwala, had converted the turbulent brotherhood of Sikh praetorians into sturdy peasants or contented landlords, and yet had given way to his younger brother J ohn, as ruler of our new frontier province. The Marquess of Dalhousie was at the height of his well-deserved fame as Governor-General. But all the circumstances which a year before had led him to transfer Sir Henry Lawrence from Lahore to the inferior appointment of Agent for the States of Bajpootana, were not known, and especially throughout the Indian Army keen sympathy was felt with the officer who had been thus superseded. Hot only they who thus sympathised, but all officials who had long admired Sir Henry for his own sake, united to do him honour in a banquet, public enough to be thoroughly representative, but not so public as to chill the flow of private friendship, or check the expression of frank admiration.

But Sir Henry Lawrence was something more and higher than a great soldier and administrator. He was remarkable in both capacities, because the root of his nature lay deep in Christ. While his brother officers and civilians crowded to recognise in him their professional ideal, there were some who knew his inner life and the true secret of that influence which radiated from him ; there were many who saw in him chiefly the beneficent philanthropist, the friend of the poor, the helper of the needy, the pattern of self-denial. The day of the banquet given in his honour by the “ Services ” he spent with me in visiting the various charities and schools of Calcutta, happily abundant in both, to which he had been long a subscriber. He knew well that there is a wise as well as a foolish way of spending money in seeking to do good, and in all the

HIS ANGLO-INDIAN NOVEL cases on which he spent the bulk of his income he sought by personal knowledge, or by means of those friends whom he employed as his almoners, to secure the wise way. On this occasion he was chiefly interested in the children of poor European parents, and in that class of Eurasians, the descendants of English fathers and native mothers, who are often neglected. The same spirit which led him to establish for soldiers’ children the noble Asylums that bear his name, prompted him all through his career to care for the class of adventurers, the runaway sons who used to enlist in the East India Company’s armies before the Colonies offered a healthier outlet to adventurous spirits. Of this class, and of individuals whom he had secretly assisted ever since he had been a Eevenue Surveyor, we talked much, and he expressed to me his intention to follow up his earliest production, Adventures of an Officer in the Service of Bunjeet Singh,1 by a work on European “ blackguards ” in India. He used the term humorously and kindly, including in it the soldiers of fortune, Erench as well as English, who had fought in the service of native chiefs, as well as those poor “ loafers,” vagabond sailors, soldiers, and Australian grooms, whose increasing num-

1 Published by Colburn, in two volumes, in 1845, and dedicated to his mother. Under the character of Bellasis and his “imaginary autobiography,” Henry Lawrence gives his own experience, and sketches the most realistic picture of the Maharaja Runjeet Singh and his government that we have. The book is one of the earliest, and it is as yet the wisest of Anglo-Indian romances. His wife thus described that and their other literary labours in the comparative rest of the Nepaul Residency, in a letter to a friend : —

“ Henry for ten years led a life of such urgent external labour that he had little leisure for study or thought. He is now reading systematically, bers soon after caused so much political difficulty and moral scandal as to necessitate the interference of the Legislature.

I had corresponded with Sir Henry Lawrence for some time, and had formed my own idea of the 'personnel of the man whose impetuous but shrewd benevolence, whose literary enthusiasm tempered by the grace of his noble wife, and whose eagerness as an Indian political reformer, I had good reason to know. But I was not prepared for the tall form, the gaunt features, the almost wasted face, and grizzly hair, which gave him the ascetic stamp of the old Puritan till the soul within spiritualised his expression. What the fever of Arakan began in the young Lieutenant, marring his features and to some extent his form, was intensified by hard work and occasional disappointment in a tropical climate. A few months before this his wife had been taken from him.

and writing a good deal. How I like to think of your reading our Bellasis, for it will give you many a sketch of our actual experience. I suppose the book has had no public success, or we should have heard of it. Colburn published it on his own responsibility, and we have never heard from him since its appearance. The friends to whom we sent copies speak of the work as interesting for the author’s sake, but if any review or even newspaper has thought it worth criticising, we have never heard. It is not, therefore, for fame that Henry now keeps his pen busy. Last year a work was started in Calcutta, called the Calcutta Review. We liked its principles and style, and knew more or less of almost every contributor. Henry therefore has made an effort to help on the work, and, little interest as our local Indian literature excites at home, I think you may possibly have heard of this periodical, as it is in some degree the foster-child of the Indian Free Church. Dr. Duff’s name you may probably know, and he and his colleagues write for the Review. Should you meet with the work, and have courage for our sakes to venture on an Indian publication, you will find much that I think will interest you. Our contributions treat of ‘The Sikhs and their Country,’ ‘Kashmir,’ etc., ‘Military Defence,’ ‘Romance and Reality,’ ‘Oude,’ ‘ Mahrattahs,’ ‘Carriage for the Sick and Wounded,’ ‘English Children in India,’ and ‘ English Women in Hindustan.’ Writing and reading are truly a resource here, where we have no society.”

HIS ‘ LIFE * BY SIR HERBERT EDWARDES

The time had even now come for that sick leave to England which the doctors had often pressed upon him, and which his appointment as Chief Commissioner of Oudh, the year after, prevented him from taking. The photograph taken of him when he first went to Oudh, and engraved in Eees’s Narrative of the Siege of Lucknow, unfortunately remains the only published portrait of one who has justly been termed the greatest man England has ever sent to India. His Life, by his friend and disciple, Sir Herbert Edwardes, completed by Mr. Herman Merivale, does not contain a portrait. If a biography is valuable in proportion as it represents what its subject was, as well as what he did, then it is deeply to be regretted that Sir Herbert Edwardes did not live to complete his labour of love. Earely has so valuable an addition been made to religious or to Anglo- Indian biography as the first volume of this work. It is unfortunate that the tale of Sir Henry Lawrence’s administration of the Punjab and removal to Eajpootana, and the story of the Mutiny in Oudh crowned by that death-bed in the Baillie Guard of the Lucknow Eesidency, have not been told by the man who was, next to the brothers Lawrence, facile princeps among the statesmen of the Punjab, who kept the gate of India at Peshawar against all odds in 1857, and who belonged to the same school of catholic Evangelicals as his great master.

Henry Lawrence was an Irishman, but of the Scots- Protestant type. Those who are curious in such matters will observe that the three countries divide very fairly among them the distinguished men who have won and built up our Indian Empire. Clive and Warren Hastings were purely English, while Lord William Bentinck — like the later Governor- General, Lord Northbrook — was of Anglo-Dutch descent. Lord Minto, who has never received justice ; the Marquess of Hastings, whose long administration was so brilliant; and the Marquess of Dalhousie, who excelled even that nobleman in his services to the Empire and to humanity, are claimed by Scotland. But it is to Ireland that we must give the honour of having sent to India the Marquess Wellesley, who, though overshadowed in the eyes of Europe by his younger brother, the Duke of Wellington, was the “glorious little man” of Indian contemporaries like Metcalfe and Malcolm. To Ireland also we owe the Lawrences — George, Henry, and John.

The first, less known than his younger brothers, won a solid reputation alike as a soldier, a “ political ” and a captive in the Afghan War, and as Henry’s successor in the control of the eighteen principalities of Bajpootana. The story of Henry and of John seems even more romantic than that of the Westminster schoolboys, Warren Hastings, Chief- Justice Impey, Lord Chancellor Thurlow, and the poet Cowper ; or that of the three Christ Church students, Lord Dalhousie, Lord Canning, and Lord Elgin, who succeeded each other as Governor-General of India. Henry Lawrence, the artillery officer, fevered by the swamps of Arakan, came home to find his younger brother, John, eager to go out to India as a soldier. Dissuaded from this by

HIS FAMILY his brother, John landed in Calcutta in the Civil Service, and, other things being equal, by that one fact gained the start and distanced his elder brother in the honours of life. So important was it, so valuable is it still, to be a “ covenanted ” civilian rather than a soldier in the East. Henry found himself ousted from the Punjab by the brother whom he had as his colleague in the Board of Administration, and honourably enough so far as that brother was concerned. When the supreme crisis of the Mutiny came, J ohn was Chief Commissioner of the Punjab, and Henry had been appointed by Lord Canning Chief Commissioner of Oudh. Henry was the one man in India to whom England looked as the successor of Lord Canning, and Lord Palmerston nominated him Provisional Governor-General. But death carried off the elder brother before he could fill the highest position, for good or evil, that a subject of the British Crown can hold ; and on Lord Elgin’s death the same Premier appointed John, who after a few years’ term as Viceroy was raised to the peerage.

Alexander, the father of the Lawrences, was the youngest son of a mill-owner in Coleraine. He was worthy of such sons. When just seventeen he went off to India as a military volunteer. There he so served for a quarter of a century that he would have won his commission and a Victoria Cross, had there been such a reward, many times over but for the lack of interest. Forced at last to purchase, the veteran was soured, and when the time came for his sons to enter the Army he warned them against the Eoyal Service. Nor were the

D boys less fortunate in their mother, a Knox, and a collateral descendant of the Scottish Reformer, through Andrew Knox, Bishop of the Isles. In their long roamings over India and Ceylon, and during occasional visits to England, this couple were blessed with twelvechildren, of whom three of the five boys and their eldest sister, Letitia, concern us most. Henry Montgomery Lawrence was his mother’s jewel, being described by her as her Matura diamond, in allusion to his birthplace, which is known for its precious stones. He was born on 28th June 1806. What with their father’s grievance and his sometimes thoughtless generosity to his old comrades and their families, their mother had need of all that administrative ability for which her son Henry so fondly gives her credit. The family income was very narrow, and, on their return to England, Guernsey, and afterwards Clifton, was selected as their home.

But the boys were educated by their uncle, the Rev. James Knox, who was headmaster of the Foyle College, at Derry, a town ever since associated with the Lawrences, and justly proud of their reputation. There Henry was remarkable for his love of truth-telling even to his own hurt, and for the thoughtfulness of his character. Mrs. Lawrence was fortunate not only as a manager, but in her relation as cousin to Mr. Huddleston, who was both an East India Director and a Member of Parliament. This good man, who had been the intimate friend of the missionary Schwartz, in Tanjore, liberally provided cadetships and a writership for the Lawrence boys, the last falling to John. Henry chivalrously

EARLY DAYS refused any appointment which did not involve an examination, and hence he passed for the Artillery, lest it should be said that no Lawrence could face an examination. He left behind him at Addiscombe the reputation of being “ backward and slow.” Both he and John were wont to confess that they were dull at scholarly studies, and that their education had been neglected. But Henry came out the first of his year. His so-called slowness seems to have been due to that habit which was the secret of his success. He was what the Germans call “ griindlich,” refusing to advance till he had thoroughly mastered every step, always seeking the causes of things. It is true, however, that competitive examinations, as now conducted, would have deprived India of Henry and John Lawrence, and of many of their great predecessors. There was at least one man who foresaw Henry’s future. When Letitia, the beloved elder sister and companion, was so bewailing her brother’s approaching departure that he proposed to take her with him, and set up a school or a shop in the Himalayas, Mr. Huddleston said, “You foolish thing, Henry will distinguish himself. All your brothers will do well, I think; but Henry has such steadiness and resolution that you’ll see him come back a general. He will be Sir Henry Lawrence before he dies.” So away from Clifton one September morning, leaving the young ones in bed, and parting with his sister on Brandon Hill !

His mother’s counsel is characteristic of both, and tells of a life of struggling, not unmixed with happiness, “ I know you don’t like advice, so I will not give you much.

But, pray, recollect two things. Don’t marry a woman who had not a good mother ; and don’t be too ready to speak your mind. It was the rock on which your father shipwrecked his prospects.” In all this we have as yet hardly a glimpse of the higher life. But Sir Herbert Edwardes tells us that the mother had inherited no small share of John Knox’s “strong, God-fearing character,” and we know that Letitia, the sister, prayed much for her favourite brother, that he might be led into all truth. We learn afterwards, too, that the scarred old Colonel, the victim of many wrongs, and oft grumbling over his grievances, found before his death their true remedy in the love of Him who bears every burden, a fact which Henry joyfully records.

It was in 1823, towards the close of the cold season in Eebruary, that Henry Lawrence joined the headquarters of the Bengal Artillery at Dum Dum, now almost a suburb of Calcutta. Two or three months later there landed with his regiment at the same place a young officer of the Royal Service, who on the soldier side of his character so resembled Lawrence — Henry Havelock. Both saw their first campaign in the first Burmese War, which was already brewing. Both came under spiritual influences at once, Havelock in the saintly circle of Baptists at Serampore, Lawrence among the Church of England evangelicals at Dum Dum and Calcutta. Both took part in the Afghan conflicts. And both, by very different paths, found a soldier’s grave in ’57, Lawrence in the hallowed ground of the

THE GREAT CHANGE beleaguered Residency of Lucknow, Havelock in the then fortified garden of Dilkooshah, from which he had advanced to the relief of that Residency. When Henry Lawrence had time to look from professional details to the society around him, he found that some of his most intimate companions at Addiscombe, who had landed a few weeks before him, had undergone a change. One especially, named Lewin, was a new man altogether. We find Henry writing again and again of this change to his sister. In a letter dated eight months after his arrival he recurs to it as something at once marvellous and worthy of his own imitation, but yet hardly attainable by himself. “ Lewin has turned an excellent religious young fellow,” writes the Lieutenant of seventeen. And again : “ There is a play here to-night, but as I did not feel inclined to go, I took tea with Lewin, and am just returned home. It is really wonderful to me the conversion of Lewin, having known him as a worldlyminded lad. His whole thoughts seem now to be of what good he can do. I only wish I was like him.”

The occasion of the change was this. The Rev. George Craufurd, who afterwards held the family baronetcy as Sir George William Craufurd, had gone out in the same ship with Lewin and the other cadets, as assistant chaplain to the Rev. Thomas Thomason. With the cadets was Lawrence’s friend, James Thomason, soon to become the Lieutenant-Governor of the North- Western Provinces, whose admiring disciple in all things, Sir William Muir, afterwards ruled in his spirit over the thirty millions of Hindustan proper. Sir George

Craufurd’s name is one henceforth to be remembered with those of the Simeonites, Brown, Buchanan, Corrie, Henry Martyn, Bishop Wilson, and Bishop Deal try, who, with the Serampore and the Scots missionaries, have made India spiritually what it is, and what it promises to be. Hot only as the father in Christ of Henry Lawrence and others, but as the man who first asserted religious liberty for the Sepoys, ought the name of Sir George Craufurd to be recorded. The story has a sad interest since the Mutiny.

When chaplain in Allahabad, in 1830, Craufurd was visited in his own house by some Sepoys curious about the Christian religion. Assisted by a Mirza, his catechist, Sir George finally accepted their written invitation to teach the Church catechism in the lines. The Major commanding, excited by the dread of insubordination, interfered. The General, much better disposed, laughingly permitted the chaplain to teach only such Sepoys as chose to visit him privately. The result was the application of several for baptism. Lord William Bentinck, the Governor- General, overborne by his advisers, it was thought, had ordered Archdeacon Corrie to forbid the visiting of the native soldiers in their lines. But when the question of baptism arose the matter seemed more serious. It is deeply to be lamented that two such men as Lord William Bentinck and Archdeacon Corrie went so far as to prevent the baptism of Sepoys ; and the former issued that order prohibiting all chaplains from speaking to native soldiers on the subject of religion,

THE FIRST WAR WITH BURMA which did so much to foster the ignorance that ended in the Mutiny. Even after the abolition of the East India Company, Lord Canning rebuked a civilian for attending the baptism of a Sepoy. The disgraceful and inexpedient order of Lord William Bentinck’s government still remains in force, so far as I know.

The prayers of Lewin, his companion, and the labours of Craufurd were blessed in time to the conversion of Henry Lawrence. Very slowly does he seem to have opened his reserved and questioning heart to the influences of that circle. At last we find him reaching this point in his intercourse with the chaplain : “ What I want to be assured of is that this Book is God’s. Because when I know that, I have nothing left but to obey it.” On the Christmas Day of 1823 we find this joyous entry in Le win’s journal : “ Lawrence took the Sacrament ; God bless him now and for evermore.” On the subsequent 17th of April the words occur, “ I have been greatly pleased to-day to see dear Lawrence reading his Bible considerably.” The good seed was then sown.

The cold season of 1823-24 was passed amid preparations for war with Burma. The first half of the eighteenth century, or from the death of Aurangzeb, about the time of the union of Scotland and England, to Clive’s victory of Plassey, was the period of anarchy in India. All, Musalman and Hindu, Maratha and Rajpoot, English and French, sought to keep what they had got, and more or less consciously, on our part at least, to obtain supremacy. The Musalman was effete. The Hindu had no power of recuperation, and sought only, as in Rajpootana, to be protected from his enemies. The Marathas, themselves Hindus, were the most formidable— a veritable scourge of God. Of the European Powers then trading in India the Portuguese were as hopeless as the Musalman, while the Dutch had only sought gain in the paradise of the Eastern Archipelago, which their culture system still oppresses. The peninsula lay open to the English and Erench. But the latter, in spite of great names like La Bourdonnais and Dupleix, were not supported, save by Colbert for a time, at home ; and their designs were of the purely selfish military class. Whether deserving it or not, England was used to save society, and all who, like the princes of Rajpootana and the Nizam of Haidarabad, clung to the English were preserved, and have been fossilised to this hour. While India proper was thus seething, what the ancients called India beyond the Ganges was undergoing a similar revolution. The robber-chief Alompra founded in the valley of the Irawadi that house whose cruelties led eventually to its disappearance.

Eor years the dynasty of Alompra had, from Ava, their capital, insulted the Governor-General, who had sent envoys to the Golden Eoot, but had otherwise been too busy to think of Burma. In an evil moment the Burmese not only claimed, but invaded Assam and Cachar. The Empire had enjoyed five years’ peace, the treasury was full, and Lord Amherst, the weakest of Governors next to Lord Auckland, was in power. So a

IN ABAKAN WITH HIS GUNS two years’ war was waged and brought to a successful issue ; thanks to Sir Thomas Munro, the great Governor of Madras. Henry Lawrence and his guns formed part of the Chittagong column which, under General Morrison, crossed the jungles and hills of Arakan and took its capital. Havelock, with the main army, seeing that there was no chaplain at all with the force, converted a cloister of the great Shwe Dagon pagoda of Eangoon into a church, and there, by the light of a lamp placed in the lap of the images of Gautama that lined the walls, he ministered to the soldiers of HM.’s 13th. The hot weather of 1825 came, and even by May of that year the early rainy season of Burma was upon our troops. As Havelock, the historian of the war,1 records, “ In a month General Morrison had no longer an army.” Of all the artillery officers, only Henry Lawrence and his Colonel were fit for duty, and the former received his first promotion as Adjutant. But there he too was struck down, and after being nursed in Calcutta by Mr. Craufurd, he was ordered to England. In May 1827 we find this noble testimony from a mother in her journal: — “Returned from Arakan after the Burmese War, my dearest beloved, Henry Montgomery, not twenty-one years old, but reduced by sickness and suffering to more than double that age. Self-denial and affection to his whole family were ever the prominent features of his character.”

1 Memoir of the Three Campaigns of Major-General Sir Archibald Campbell's Army in Ava. By Henry Havelock, Lieutenant in the 13th Light Infantry, and D.A.G. Serampore, 1828.

Who shall describe the joys of the first visit home of the Indian exile ? Yet that is an easier task than the attempt to picture the other side of the poetry of Anglo-Indian life — the separation of husband and wife, of parents and children, of the friends of youth and of manhood, often for long years. That, and nothing else, is the price we pay for India, for death is less bitter. That Henry Lawrence was changed in other respects than in form was soon apparent. His first act was to consult his sister Letitia about family prayers. After some surprise on the part of the household, he brought out his Scott’s Bible, and from that day there was an altar in the house. This holiday of two years and a half was memorable for some things. Notably, with his sister’s companionship and the spiritual privileges, which he enjoyed alike at Clifton and when he visited the north of Ireland, he grew in grace. Hard by his father’s house, Bobert Hall’s preaching was sounding forth, and drawing good men of all sects to listen. His younger brother John was grumbling that Mr. Huddleston had presented him with an appointment to the Bengal Civil Service, instead of giving him the chance of becoming a soldier, like his seniors. He admired the young hero of the Burmese War, and could not understand why that somewhat stern person should side with his father in the advice — “ If you want to be independent, be a civilian.” So to Haileybury the future Viceroy went, but not before he had often helped Henry to carry the delicate Letitia up the hills from Clifton, to be in time for the preaching of Bobert Hall.