Earl Canning to Queen Victoria.
PACIFICATION OF INDIA
Calcutta, 4th July 1859.
Lord Canning presents his humble duty to your Majesty, and begs permission to offer to your Majesty his respectful thanks for your Majesty's most gracious letter of the 18th of May.
Lord Canning ventures to believe that he is well able to figure to himself the feelings with which your Majesty will have welcomed the termination of the Mutiny and Rebellion in India, and of the chief miseries which these have brought in their train. He hopes that your Majesty will not have thought that there has been remissness in not marking this happy event by an earlier public acknowledgment and thanksgiving in India, as has already been done in England.55 The truth is, that although this termination has long been steadily and surely approaching, it is but just now that it can be said to be complete in the eyes of those who are near to the scene of action. It is only within the last three weeks that the exertions of our Troops on the Oudh and Nepaulese frontier, and in some other parts, have been remitted, and almost every Gazette has recounted engagements with the rebels, which, although they have invariably had the same issue, would scarcely have consisted with a declaration that peace and tranquillity were restored. Now, however, military operations have fairly ceased, and the rains and the climate, which would make a continuance of those operations much to be regretted, will do their work amongst the rebels who are still in arms in the Nepaul jungles more terribly than any human avengers.
Lord Canning has used every exertion and device to bring these wretched men to submission; but many—it is difficult to say how many, but certainly some few thousands—still hold out. With some of them the reason no doubt is that they belong to the most guilty Regiments, and to those which murdered their officers; but this cannot apply to all; and it is to be feared that the prevailing cause is the bad influence of their leaders—the Nana, Bala Rao, and the Begum;56 or rather the Begum's infamous advisers. It is certain that all of these, believing their own position to be desperate, have spared no pains to persuade their followers that the Government is seeking to entrap them, and that, if they submit, their lives will be taken....
Footnote 55: There had been a Public Thanksgiving in England on the 1st of May.
Footnote 56: Bala Rao was a brother of Nana Sahib, chief instigator of the Sepoy Mutiny. See ante, [p. 238], note 24.
Queen Victoria to Viscount Palmerston.
A MILITARY ENQUIRY