The charge was capable of complete disproof, but unluckily, as with the greasing of the cartridges, the Sepoys were unconvinced. A fortnight later Punch realized that the time for levity was passed:—
An Indian debate followed, but it is no subject for light treatment, for while members were droning about cotton, and Mangles [the Chairman of the East India Company] was puffing the Company as having done miracles for India, news was hurrying over the sea that native regiments were in mutiny, had seized Delhi, and murdered all the Europeans there, without distinction of age or sex. It is a good time to be erecting a Shropshire memorial to Clive, if only to remind England that she once had a man who knew not only how to gain, but how to keep Oriental conquests.
THE BRITISH LION'S VENGEANCE ON THE BENGAL TIGER
Heroes of the Mutiny
The issue of July 25 is full of the bustle of preparation, the hurried dispatch of Sir Colin Campbell to take command, and the embodying of the militia. It should be noted that one of the very first of the Mutiny cartoons revealed a disposition on the part of Punch to recognize that the mischief was deep-seated and had its origin largely in the arbitrary methods of the East India Company. On August 15 there appeared the picture of "The Execution of 'John Company,'" with Punch blowing up the offices in Leadenhall Street, and fragments labelled "avarice," "blundering," "nepotism," "supineness," "misgovernment," etc., flying from the mouth of a gun. But there was no hesitation in Punch's support of the most drastic measures for stamping out the mutiny. The word of the moment was "Cry Havelock! and let slip the dogs of war." On August 22 appeared the cartoon "The British Lion's Vengeance"—on the Bengal Tiger seen crouching over the bodies of an English woman and child. On September 12 Britannia is shown smiting down the mutineers; in the same number, however, in the lines "A word to the Avenger," reprisals are deprecated: "Spare the Indian mother and her child." On October 10, under the title "O God of Battles, steel my soldiers' hearts," the Queen is shown kneeling with widows and orphans in mourning garb, while a week later Sir Colin Campbell is drawn in fetters of red tape—his greatest difficulty in India.
At home, while Punch welcomed the recruiting from drapers' shops, and the filling of their places by women, he noted the snobbery of certain tradesmen who thought they would lose caste by enlisting. He also recognized that the appeal for recruits was seriously prejudiced by the callous treatment of ex-service men in the past.
Throughout the Mutiny Punch was hostile to Canning, and his "Clemency," representing him as unduly tender to the mutineers and invariably interfering on their behalf. This criticism reaches its height of injustice to the statesman who uttered and acted on the noble maxim "I will not govern in anger," in the mock proclamation which appears in the issue of October 24. There was probably better ground for the imaginary conversation between the Duke of Cambridge, as Commander-in-Chief, and Lords Lucan and Cardigan, in which the two latter noblemen sneer at the services of Havelock. This disparagement, be it noted, was not confined to the Crimean cavalry commanders; Mr. Gladstone declined to vote for the grant of a pension, and was in consequence associated by Punch with the Manchester School, whose pacificist organ, the Star, had been savagely burlesqued in the issue of October 31. Meanwhile the tide had turned in the war by the capture of Delhi and the first relief of Lucknow. The toll of heroic lives among our leaders had been heavy—Henry Lawrence, Nicholson and Havelock at the end of the year—but Punch was true to his old democratic instincts in recording the exploits of all ranks. He was eloquent in his appeal for the assistance of Miss Salkeld, sister of Lieutenant Salkeld, who lost his life in the blowing in of the Kashmir gate at Delhi. But he does not forget Salkeld's humbler associates, who with him "rushed upon death to make way for the bayonets of England when the great stronghold of treason was stormed":—