BRIGADIER-GENERAL SIR HENRY LAWRENCE, K.C.B.
From
a photograph taken at Lucknow.
Lawrence as Statesman and Ruler In no part of India was there greater need for the services of a strong, enlightened, and sympathetic Ruler and Statesman. Difficult as were the positions in which many men in authority were placed in 1857, none was more difficult than that in which Henry Lawrence found himself when he took over the Chief Commissionership of Oudh in the spring of that year. His colleagues in the administration were at feud with each other, and by their ignorance of the proper methods of dealing with the people they had succeeded in alienating all classes.
While Lawrence was engaged in pouring oil on these troubled waters, and in earning the gratitude of the people by modifying the previous year's undue assessment, signs appeared of the disaffection, which had begun amongst the troops at Barrackpore, having spread to the cantonments in Oudh. Sir Henry met this new trouble in the same intelligent and conciliatory spirit as that in which he had dealt with his civil difficulties. He summoned to a durbar some Native officers who had displayed a very proper feeling of loyalty by arresting several fanatics who had tried to tamper with the soldiery, and he liberally rewarded them, pointing out at the same time in forcible language the disgrace to a soldier of being faithless to his salt. But while doing everything in his power to keep the Natives loyal, and with a certain amount of success, he did not neglect to take every possible precaution.
When first he heard of the outbreak at Meerut, he telegraphed to the Governor-General advising him to send for British troops to China and Ceylon, and to call on the Nepalese to assist; at the same time he applied to Lord Canning for, and obtained, the rank of Brigadier-General, which gave him military as well as civil control—a very necessary measure, for none of the senior military officers in Oudh were men to be relied upon; indeed, as in so many other places, they had to be effaced when the troubles began.
Very early in the day Henry Lawrence commenced his preparations for the defence of the Residency; he cleared the ground of all cover in its immediate vicinity, as far as it was possible to do so; he fortified it, mounted guns, stored ammunition, powder, and firewood; arranged for a proper supply of water; collected food, which proved sufficient, not only for the original number of refugees, but for the 3,000 additional mouths belonging to Outram and Havelock's force; in fact, he did everything which forethought and ingenuity could suggest to enable the garrison to hold out in what he foresaw would be a long and deadly struggle against fearful odds. There was no fort, as there was at Agra, capable of sheltering every European in Oudh, and strong enough to defy any number of mutineers, nor was there, as at Cawnpore, a well-stocked and strongly-fortified magazine to depend upon. But Henry Lawrence was not cast down by the difficulties which surrounded him; he was fully alive to the danger, but he recognized that his best, indeed, his only, chance of delaying the inevitable rebellion until (as he hoped) assistance might arrive, was to show a bold front.
On the 27th May Lawrence wrote to Lord Canning as follows: 'Hitherto the country has been kept quiet, and we have played the Irregulars against the line regiments; but being constituted of exactly the same material, the taint is fast pervading them, and in a few weeks, if not days—unless Delhi be in the interim captured—there will be but one feeling throughout the army, a feeling that our prestige is gone, and that feeling will be more dangerous than any other. Religion, fear, hatred, one and all have their influence; but there is still a reverence for the Company's [ikbâl][4]—when it is gone we shall have few friends indeed. The tone and talk of many have greatly altered during the last few days, and we are now asked, almost in terms of insolence, whether Delhi is captured, or when it will be. It was only just after the Kabul massacre, and when we hesitated to advance through the Khyber, that, in my memory, such a tone ever before [prevailed].[5]
Feeling all this so strongly, it is the more remarkable that Henry Lawrence never lost heart, but struggled bravely on 'to preserve the soldiery to their duty and the people to their allegiance,' while at the same time he was, as I have shown, making every conceivable preparation to meet the outbreak whenever it should come.
Lawrence's Friendliness for Natives There is no doubt that Henry [Lawrence] was a very remarkable man; his friendly feeling for Natives, and his extraordinary insight into their character, together with his military training and his varied political experience, peculiarly fitted him to be at the head of a Government at such a [crisis].[6]