Foyle College as an educational institution has doubtless been much developed since his time. But the building and its precincts may now be seen almost exactly as they were when he was there. From the upper windows is the same prospect which he had of the Foyle estuary, and from the field where he played football is beheld a view of the historic city. As he used to stay there with his uncle during the holidays, he must have often walked round the terrace on the top of the well-kept walls, that still enclose the old citadel-town wherein the faith and freedom of the Protestants were sheltered during the storm of war in 1688-9. Here he found the historic memories preserved with wonderful tenacity. So he must have gazed at the Ship-Quay, the Water-gate as it once was, whither the relieving ships from England, after fighting their way up the Foyle, brought victuals for the long-suffering and famished garrison. He must have passed beneath the venerable bastions where the defenders repeatedly beat back the French soldiers of King James. He attended on Sundays divine service in the Cathedral which stood close to the fighting-ground during the defence, and where the bones of eminent defenders were interred. This, then, was just the place to be for him a nutrix leonum, and the meet nurse for a heroic child; as indeed it is the Saragossa of the British Isles. In after life his talk would oft revert to the Foyle as to him the queen of rivers. Forty years later, when at the summit of his greatness, he spoke publicly to his admirers in the Punjab about the memories of Londonderry, as nerving Britons in other lands to stubborn resistance.
At fifteen years of age he returned to England and went to a school kept at Wraxall Hall, near Bath, an Elizabethan structure with picturesque courtyards and orchards. It was comparatively near to his paternal home at Clifton, and in it were renewed those rural associations of English life which he had gathered in childhood. Shortly afterwards he was offered a civil appointment in the East India Company’s service by a good friend, Mr. Hudlestone, who had already given appointments in the Company’s military service to three of the elder brothers, one of whom was Henry. But he was minded to decline the civil appointment, then considered of all appointments the most desirable, and to ask for a military appointment instead. He would not regard the advice of his father, nor of his brother Henry, who had just returned from India on sick leave after hard service in the wars. The influence of his sister Letitia alone persuaded him to accept the civil appointment. Consequently at the age of seventeen he went to the East India Company’s College at Haileybury near Hertford, and remained there for the appointed term of two years. There he heard lectures in political economy from Malthus, and in law from Empson, afterwards editor of the Edinburgh Review. The discipline was not specially strict, nor was the intellectual training severe; but as the Company maintained a highly qualified and distinguished staff of professors, he had educational opportunities of which he availed himself in a moderate or average degree only. He was a fairly good student, but was not regarded by his compeers as remarkable for learning or for prowess in games. His frame was tall and well knit but gaunt. His manner was reserved in public, sometimes tending to taciturnity, but vivacious and pleasant in private. As he had been thought to be English when in Ireland, so now when in England he was deemed to be somewhat Irish in his ways. In his case, as in many eminent cases, the temper and disposition were being fixed and settled, while the mental faculties were being slowly developed. The basis of his great character was being founded in silence. But his fondness for the rural side of English life must have been gratified to the full at College. He had not cultivated any architectural taste, and if he had, it would have been offended by the plainness even ugliness of the collegiate architecture; but his nature rejoiced in the surroundings of the College, the extensive woods reaching to the very gates, the outburst of vernal foliage, the singing birds in their leafy haunts, the open heath, the Rye House meadows, the waters of the Lea. He would roam with long strides in the meads and woodlands. Though not gifted with any æsthetic insight into the beauties of Nature, yet he would inwardly commune with her, and he had an observant eye for her salient features. Such things helped to establish a mind like his, and to temper it like pure steel for the battle of life.
He used to spend a part of his vacation in each year at the house of a friend at Chelsea, before returning to his home at Clifton. Having passed through College he spent four months in England, in order to have the companionship of Henry on the voyage out to India. He sailed in September 1829, being nineteen years old, in a vessel bound for Calcutta by the route round the Cape of Good Hope.
At a later stage in his life, some analysis will be given to show how far he partook of the several elements in our composite national character, English, Scotch and Irish. It may suffice here to state that for all these years his nurture, bringing up, and education generally, had been English, with the important exception of the two years which he spent at Londonderry. Whatever Scotch or Irish proclivities he may have possessed, and they will be considered hereafter, no son of England, of his age, ever left her shores more imbued than he with her ideas, more loyal to her principles, more cognisant of her strength or weakness, of her safety or danger, of her virtues or failings.
CHAPTER III
THE DELHI TERRITORY
1829-1846
John Lawrence, in company with his elder brother Henry, entered in 1829 upon his new life, beginning with a five months’ voyage through the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. On this voyage he suffered severely from sea-sickness, and the suffering was protracted over several weeks. This must have aggravated any constitutional tendency to nervous irritability in his head. He landed at Calcutta in February, 1830, just when the cool season was over and the weather was growing warmer and warmer till it attained the heat of early summer. Then he passed through the rainy period of midsummer, which in those latitudes always had a depressing effect on him as on many others. He was an ordinarily good student in the College of Fort William—the official name whereby the stronghold of Calcutta is called. He mixed but little in the society of the capital, and pined for his English home, fancying that poverty there would be better than affluence in the East; he even allowed himself to be dominated by this sort of home-sickness, for the first and last time in his life. However, after sojourning for a few months in Calcutta, and passing the examination in the vernacular of Upper India, he asked for and obtained an appointment at Delhi, partly because his brother Henry was serving in the Artillery at Kurnal in that neighbourhood, partly also because the far-off frontier had a fascination for him as for many others. In those days a journey from Calcutta to Delhi (now accomplished by railway within three days) often occupied nearly three months by boat on the Ganges; but by travelling in a palanquin he traversed the distance, about eleven hundred miles, within three weeks.
Arrived at Delhi, in 1830, he felt that happy revulsion of thought and sentiment which is well known to many who have passed through similar circumstances. He had not only landed on a strange and distant shore, but had advanced many hundred miles into the interior of the country. He had thus, so to speak, cut his cables and cast away home-sickness, treasuring the memory of the former existence in the sunniest corner of his heart, but bracing and buckling himself to the work of the new existence. This work of his, too, was varied and intensely human in its interests. Its nature was such as made him anxious to learn, and yet the learning was extraordinarily hard at first. His dormant energies were thus awakened, as he dived deep into the affairs of the Indian people, listened to their petitions, guarded their rights, collected the taxes, watched the criminal classes, traced out crime, regulated the police. The work was in part sedentary, but it also afforded him healthy exercise on foot and on horseback, as he helped in supervising the streets, the drains, the roads, and the municipal institutions of all sorts in a great city and its neighbourhood.
He was, moreover, impressed deeply by imperial Delhi itself as one of the most noteworthy cities in the world, and as
“The lone mother of dead empires.”
The matchless palace of the Great Mogul overhanging the river Jumna, the hall of audience, the white marble mosque, a veritable pearl of architecture, the great city mosque, probably the finest place of worship ever raised by Moslem hands, the ruins outside the walls of several capitals belonging to extinct dynasties, doubtless affected his imagination in some degree. But he was too much pre-occupied by work to regard these things as they would be regarded by artists or antiquarians. Nevertheless his native keenness of observation served him well even here, for he would describe the structural merits of these noble piles, the clean cutting of the red-sandstone and the welding together of the massive masonry. He was more likely to observe fully the geographical situation, which gave commercial and political importance to the city in many ages, and preserved it as a capital throughout several revolutions. In the intervals of practical business he must have noticed the condition of the Great Mogul, whom the British Government then maintained as a phantom sovereign in the palace. But he could not have anticipated the position of fell activity into which this very roi fainéant was fated to be thrust some twenty-seven years later. It will be seen hereafter that the local knowledge which he thus gained of Delhi, served him in good stead during the most critical period of his after-life.