Meanwhile there suddenly burst upon British India an unsuspected and appalling danger. Owing to injudicious interference by officers of the King's service who held high command in the Madras Army, regulations were introduced which ignored the caste marks of the Sepoys. Silently but effectually correspondence was established between the Company's battalions all over the Presidency; and a general insurrection was concerted for the autumn of 1806. Favourable circumstances caused the garrison at Vellore to rise prematurely; when eighteen hundred Sepoys made a general attack upon all the Europeans in the fort, murdered several, and were within an ace of complete success. The situation was saved by Colonel Gillespie of the Nineteenth Light Dragoons, who galloped to the spot with his regiment and two guns, forced an entrance into the fort, rallied the Europeans and destroyed the mutineers almost to a man. They had already succeeded in killing and wounding over two hundred British soldiers, so no mercy was shown to them. The service rendered by Gillespie upon this occasion was beyond estimation great; and it was a matter of extreme good fortune that such a man—ready, energetic and of almost incredible courage—should have been within reach at such a crisis. But for his bravery and promptitude the entire native army of Madras might have mutinied, and the evil might have spread until it threatened the actual existence of the British in India. With her resources strained to the utmost by the struggle with Napoleon England would have found reconquest a difficult matter; and in short, but for Gillespie, the mutiny of Vellore might have altered the whole course of European as well as Indian history.
Hardly was this peril passed away, when a trouble, almost incredibly strange and formidable, followed upon it. As the Directors had complained of extravagance and expensive wars, Sir George Barlow thought fit, in a true English spirit, to cut down above all things military expenditure; and this he did mainly by reducing certain allowances to the officers of the Company's army. Now the discipline of the British officers of that army was in a very bad state. For the King's army the King himself was the fountain of honour, and rewards for good service took the form of the Royal approbation publicly signified, of titles of honour, or of the thanks of both Houses of Parliament. The Company's army (except in rare instances) received only the thanks of the Directors—a parcel of merchants in Leadenhall Street—which were naturally little valued; except so far as they were supplemented by grants of money, of which the officers, condemned to long exile in an unhealthy climate, were very justly tenacious. Hence they had instituted the practice of passing votes of appreciation and approbation of each other, which was most pernicious to discipline. This might rightly have been put down with a strong hand; but the reduction of pecuniary allowances was a real grievance; and the officers met it with a number of absurd and insubordinate resolutions. Barlow was a strong and determined man, but he hated soldiers; and, instead of appealing to the better feelings of the officers and using tact as well as firmness, he sent spies among them, suspended them arbitrarily right and left without trial, and employed emissaries to wean the devotion of the Sepoys from their regimental officers—this last an inconceivably dangerous measure. To be brief, in 1809 he succeeded in driving the officers into open mutiny, which was not suppressed without bloodshed; and in fact the trouble was only ended by the advent of his successor, Lord Minto; the officers yielding readily to him but declining altogether to submit to Sir George Barlow. The ill-feeling bred by this mutiny lasted for thirty years, and was not without its effect upon the greater Mutiny of 1857.
To return to more general matters, the policy of the Directors in holding aloof from affairs outside their own territory produced the worst consequences.
Lord Minto, equally with Barlow, shrank from any imitation of Lord Wellesley's masterful keeping of the peace. The result was that Central India became the resort of large bands of free-booters, who ultimately rallied themselves, thirty thousand strong, under the name of Pindaris, with a single leader Amir Khan, and bade fair to destroy the Rajputs, who were our friends, altogether. The danger was the greater, inasmuch as the beaten Maratha leaders were chafing under their defeat, and were likely to use the Pindaris as allies. Central India in fact was in a most deplorable condition, when Minto was succeeded in 1814 by Lord Moira, better known as Marquess Hastings, a very able soldier and a resolute man, who realised at once that anarchy must be stopped in Hindostan, otherwise something worse than anarchy might result from it. His first trouble was with the Nepalis or Gurkhas, who were encroaching upon British lands in Bengal and in 1814 actually seized two districts. Hastings at once resolved upon war, and sent an army to penetrate the passes into the mountains. The expedition is noteworthy, for it was the first of our many invasions into the great hill ranges which surround the north of India. The operations were not easy; and it was necessary to invade the frontier in four different columns, varying in strength from four to eight thousand men. One of these was thrice repulsed in attacks upon a hill-fort; and Gillespie, its commander, was killed. There were slight reverses in other parts also, for some of the British officers showed anything but ability; but all was redeemed by the brilliant conduct of General David Ochterlony, commanding the most westerly of the four divisions, who broke through the whole of the Gurkha defences before him, and forced them in the summer of 1815 to sue for peace. Hostilities were renewed, however, the next year, when Ochterlony, now in supreme command, by further operations drove the Gurkhas to submission. They ceded to us a long tract of the Lower Himalayas, and thus our frontier was brought up to that of the Chinese Empire. Since then there has been unbroken friendship between England and Nepal; and there are no more loyal, efficient and gallant troops in the Imperial service than the Gurkhas.
Meanwhile the situation in Central India had grown worse and worse; and the Pindaris, secretly abetted by the Maratha chiefs, made inroads upon British territory within Bengal and Madras. The Rajputs implored the help of Hastings, who in 1817 set over one hundred thousand men in motion, more than forty thousand from the Dekhan, and more, than sixty thousand from Hindostan. The occasion was worthy of so large a force, for three of the Maratha chiefs, Peshwa, Holkar and Bonsla, had thrown in their lot with the Pindaris. The Marathas were speedily weakened by three defeats at Kirki, Sitabaldi and Mahidpur; and part of the armies were then turned upon the Pindaris in converging columns, so as to break them up completely. Defeat after defeat of these free-booters followed, for every man's hand was against them. For years, owing to the timidity of Minto, they had ridden roughshod over the unhappy villagers with murder, torture and rapine, but now their time was come. This campaign is the second instance of the employment of the British cavalry in marches of astonishing length and swiftness to exterminate bands of brigands. Arthur Wellesley had set the example in 1800, and it was worthily followed now. Very soon but one formidable band of Pindaris was left under a leader named Chitu, who was hunted for days and weeks until he was driven at last into the jungle and killed by a tiger. The remnant of the Peshwa's Marathas was again defeated at Korigaon; his strongholds fell one after another; and at length in March, 1819, the war was brought to an end. The boundaries of the Maratha states were carefully defined; their predatory system was utterly abolished; and their territories were made subject to Wellesley's principle with regard to troops, disputes with neighbours and relations with foreign powers. Then for the first time for nearly two centuries there was peace in Central India.
There were now but two points of disturbance on the British frontier: in the north-west, where the genius of Ranjit Singh had united the Sikhs into a single powerful and essentially military nation by conquest; and in the north-east, where the Burmese armies had carried aggression so far as to invade border-states under British protection. The ill-deeds of these last caused Lord Amherst, the Governor-General, to send in 1824 a formidable force of eleven thousand men against them. Few expeditions have been undertaken with more fatuous contempt of information and enquiry than this one. The army was sent by sea to Rangoon with orders to ascend the Irrawadi by water, capturing all the principal cities which lie upon its banks, and so penetrating to Ava. As the province of Pegu, in which Rangoon stands, was a comparatively recent conquest of the Burmese, it was assumed that the inhabitants would be friendly and native supplies plentiful. On the contrary the troops found Rangoon deserted, no boats, no native pilots, no supplies, and were obliged to remain in and about the city, eating such salted and preserved provisions as they had brought with them, until a fresh supply could be brought from India. This accordingly they did, only making occasional sorties to prevent the Burmese from hemming them in altogether. These were costly little operations, for the Burmese threw up stockades with astonishing skill and swiftness, and these required to be stormed. On several occasions attacks upon them were repulsed with loss. Having arrived at the beginning of the rainy season in order to have plenty of water to ascend the river, the British had to endure all the misery and unhealthiness of the rains, aggravated by bad food, with the result that sickness made havoc of the troops and reduced their effective numbers at one moment to three thousand men. The Burmese closed in upon them in force; but in December, 1824, were driven back by a general attack upon their whole line.
When the news of the situation reached Calcutta the Government sent out two additional expeditions to invade the province of Ava overland, one from Manipur, the other from Chittagong. The first route was found impracticable, owing to the density of the forest; the second force, eleven thousand strong, advanced upon Aracan and captured it, but failed, from neglect of sound geographical information, to find a way to the army on the Irrawadi, which it had been intended to join, and remained helpless and stationary. One fourth of the men died during the rainy season of 1825, and half of the survivors were in hospital. The main army meanwhile advanced up the Irrawadi into the interior, captured Prome, and after several smart actions arrived within sixty miles of Ava, when the Burmese at the beginning of 1826 met them and made submission. Assam, Aracan and Tennasserim were ceded to the British, and thus some compensation was gained for a very costly and destructive campaign. The casual fashion in which war had been begun in a region of continuous marsh and forest at the beginning of the rainy season, when the whole country was inundated, was thoroughly English and most condemnable. Thousands of lives were sacrificed which might have been saved, and it was fortunate that matters fell out no worse than they did. Meanwhile the eternal assault of stockades was very trying to the troops, and gave opportunities, which were abundantly taken, for brilliant displays of valour.
While this was going on, the throne of Bhurtpore became vacant through the death of the Rajah, and was usurped by a pretender. This was a direct menace to the peace of India; and Sir David Ochterlony, who was the Resident at Delhi, at once assembled a force to drive out the usurper. So little, however, did the Governor-General know his duty, that he countermanded the project and publicly censured Ochterlony in terms of extravagant harshness. The veteran General resigned, but was so much affected by Amherst's foolish policy and by the slight put upon himself that he died soon afterwards. Then of course Amherst was obliged to do at last what he should have done at first, and Sir Stapleton Cotton was sent with twenty thousand men to besiege the famous fortress which had foiled the eager impetuosity of Lake. Its strength may be imagined by the statistics that its circuit is five miles in extent, that the ditch of the citadel was fifty yards wide and fifty feet deep, and that the ramparts generally, besides being of great height and thickness, were built of clay which refused to crumble away under the battering of round shot. A bastion was therefore undermined and blown up, and the place was stormed out of hand.
Lord Amherst was succeeded in 1828 by Lord William Bentinck, a man who, having had Macaulay to write his epitaph, enjoys a reputation far above his deserts. He was mediocre alike as soldier and statesman, and had an extraordinary knack of doing foolish things. While Governor-General his only idea was to save money for the Directors—he even tried to sell the Taj Mahal, the gem of Mohammedan architecture in India;—but he neglected to keep the peace; he reduced the allowances of the European officers, in direct breach of agreement; and finally, to curry favour with the humanitarians, he, in the face of all advice from British and native soldiers, abolished the punishment of the lash in the native regiments. The mischief which he thus did was incalculable; for he lowered the officers in the eyes of the natives, and so ruined the discipline of the Sepoys that beyond doubt he was the greatest of all contributors to the Mutiny of 1857. The Duke of Wellington, and all who knew India, were furious with him; but being a sentimental Whig, which is synonymous with a man of good intentions and bad judgement, he found and still finds many admirers at home. Let me beg you not to be carried away by their admiration. Bentinck certainly did some good work, but an Indian administrator who ruins the discipline of the army—and Bentinck undoubtedly did so—is not only no statesman, but a foolish and mischievous person.