LAWRENCE, SIR HENRY MONTGOMERY (1806-1857), British soldier and statesman in India, brother of the 1st Lord Lawrence (q.v.), was born at Matara, Ceylon, on the 28th of June 1806. He inherited his father’s stern devotion to duty and Celtic impulsiveness, tempered by his mother’s gentleness and power of organization. Early in 1823 he joined the Bengal Artillery at the Calcutta suburb of Dum Dum, where also Henry Havelock was stationed about the same time. The two officers pursued a very similar career, and developed the same Puritan character up to the time that both died at Lucknow in 1857. In the first Burmese War Henry Lawrence and his battery formed part of the Chittagong column which General Morrison led over the jungle-covered hills of Arakan, till fever decimated the officers and men, and Lawrence found himself at home again, wasted by a disease which never left him. On his return to India with his younger brother John in 1829 he was appointed revenue surveyor by Lord William Bentinck. At Gorakhpur the wonderful personal influence which radiated from the young officer formed a school of attached friends and subordinates who were always eager to serve under him. After some years spent in camp, during which he had married his cousin Honoria Marshall, and had surveyed every village in four districts, each larger than Yorkshire, he was recalled to a brigade by the outbreak of the first Afghan War towards the close of 1838. As assistant to Sir George Clerk, he now added to his knowledge of the people political experience in the management of the district of Ferozepore; and when disaster came he was sent to Peshawar in order to push up supports for the relief of Sale and the garrison of Jalalabad. The war had been begun under the tripartite treaty signed at Lahore on the 20th of June 1838. But the Sikhs were slow to play their part after the calamities in Afghanistan. No one but Henry Lawrence could manage the disorderly contingent which they reluctantly supplied to Pollock’s avenging army in 1842. He helped to force the Khyber Pass on the 5th of April, playing his guns from the heights, for 8 and 20 m. In recognition of his services Lord Ellenborough appointed him to the charge of the valley of Dehra Dun and its hill stations, Mussoorie and Landour, where he first formed the idea of asylums for the children of European soldiers. After a month’s experience there it was discovered that the appointment, was the legal right of the civil service, and he was transferred, as assistant to the envoy at Lahore, to Umballa, where he reduced to order the lapsed territory of Kaithal. Soon he received the office of resident at the protected court of Nepal, where, assisted by his wife, he began a series of contributions to the Calcutta Review, a selected volume of which forms an Anglo-Indian classic. There, too, he elaborated his plans which resulted in the erection and endowment of the noblest philanthropic establishments in the East—the Lawrence military asylums at Sanawar (on the road to Simla), at Murree in the Punjab, at Mount Abu in Rajputana, and at Lovedale on the Madras Nilgiris. From 1844 to his death he devoted all his income, above a modest pittance for his children, to this and other forms of charity.
The Review articles led the new governor-general, Lord Hardinge, to summon Lawrence to his side during the first Sikh War; and not these articles only. He had published the results of his experience of Sikh rule and soldiering in a vivid work, the Adventures of an Officer in the Service of Ranjit Singh (1845), in which he vainly attempted to disguise his own personality and exploits. After the doubtful triumphs of Moodkee and Ferozshah Lawrence was summoned from Nepal to take the place of Major George Broadfoot, who had fallen. Aliwal came; then the guns of Sobraon chased the demoralized Sikhs across the Sutlej. All through the smoke Lawrence was at the side of the governor-general. He gave his voice, not for the rescue of the people from anarchy by annexation, but for the reconstruction of the Sikh government, and was himself appointed resident at Lahore, with power “over every department and to any extent” as president of the council of regency till the maharaja Dhuleep Singh should come of age. Soon disgusted by the “venal and selfish durbar” who formed his Sikh colleagues, he summoned to his side assistants like Nicholson, James Abbott and Edwardes, till they all did too much for the people, as he regretfully confessed. But “my chief confidence was in my brother John, ... who gave me always such help as only a brother could.” Wearied out he went home with Lord Hardinge, and was made K.C.B., when the second Sikh War summoned him back at the end of 1848 to see the whole edifice of Sikh “reconstruction” collapse. It fell to Lord Dalhousie to proclaim the Punjab up to the Khyber British territory on the 29th of March 1849. But still another compromise was tried. As the best man to reconcile the Sikh chiefs to the inevitable, Henry Lawrence was made president of the new board of administration with charge of the political duties, and his brother John was entrusted with the finances. John could not find the revenue necessary for the rapid civilization of the new province so long as Henry would, for political reasons, insist on granting life pensions and alienating large estates to the needy remnants of Ranjit Singh’s court. Lord Dalhousie delicately but firmly removed Sir Henry Lawrence to the charge of the great nobles of Rajputana, and installed John as chief commissioner. If resentment burned in Henry’s heart, it was not against his younger brother, who would fain have retired. To him he said, “If you preserve the peace of the country and make the people high and low happy, I shall have no regrets that I vacated the field for you.”
In the comparative rest of Rajputana he once more took up the pen as an army reformer. In March and September 1856 he published two articles, called forth by conversations with Lord Dalhousie at Calcutta, whither he had gone as the hero of a public banquet. The governor-general had vainly warned the home authorities against reducing below 40,000 the British garrison of India even for the Crimean War, and had sought to improve the position of the sepoys. Lawrence pointed out the latent causes of mutiny, and uttered warnings to be too soon justified. In March 1857 he yielded to Lord Canning’s request that he should then take the helm at Lucknow, but it was too late. In ten days his magic rule put down administrative difficulties indeed, as he had done at Lahore. But what could even he effect with only 700 European soldiers, when the epidemic spread after the Meerut outbreak of mutiny on the 10th of May? In one week he had completed those preparations which made the defence of the Lucknow residency for ever memorable. Amid the deepening gloom Lord Canning ever wrote home of him as “a tower of strength,” and he was appointed provisional governor-general. On the 30th of May mutiny burst forth in Oudh, and he was ready. On the 29th of June, pressed by fretful colleagues, and wasted by unceasing toil, he led 336 British soldiers with 11 guns and 220 natives out of Chinhat to reconnoitre the insurgents, when the natives joined the enemy and the residency was besieged. On the 2nd of July, as he lay exhausted by the day’s work and the terrific heat in an exposed room, a shell struck him, and in forty-eight hours he was no more. A baronetcy was conferred on his son. A marble statue was placed in St Paul’s as the national memorial of one who has been declared to be the noblest man that has lived and died for the good of India.
His biography was begun by Sir Herbert Edwardes, and completed (2 vols. 1872) by Herman Merivale. See also J. J. McLeod Innes, Sir Henry Lawrence (“Rulers of India” series), 1898.
LAWRENCE, JOHN LAIRD MAIR LAWRENCE, 1st Baron (1811-1879), viceroy and governor-general of India, was born at Richmond, Yorkshire, on the 24th of March 1811. His father, Colonel Alexander Lawrence, volunteered for the forlorn hope at Seringapatam in presence of Baird and of Wellington, whose friend he became. His mother, Letitia Knox, was a collateral descendant of John Knox. To this couple were born twelve children, of whom three became famous in India, Sir George St Patrick, Sir Henry (q.v.) and Lord Lawrence. Irish Protestants, the boys were trained at Foyle college, Derry, and at Clifton, and received Indian appointments from their mother’s cousin, John Hudleston, who had been the friend of Schwartz in Tanjore. In 1829, when only seventeen, John Lawrence landed at Calcutta as a civilian; he mastered the Persian language at the college of Fort William, and was sent to Delhi, on his own application, as assistant to the collector. The position was the most dangerous and difficult to which a Bengal civilian could be appointed at that time. The titular court of the pensioner who represented the Great Mogul was the centre of that disaffection and sensuality which found their opportunity in 1857. A Mussulman rabble filled the city. The district around, stretching from the desert of Rajputana to the Jumna, was slowly recovering from the anarchy to which Lord Lake had given the first blow. When not administering justice in the city courts or under the village tree, John Lawrence was scouring the country after the marauding Meos and Mahommedan freebooters. His keen insight and sleepless energy at once detected the murderer of his official superior, William Fraser, in 1835, in the person of Shams-uddin Khan, the nawab of Loharu, whose father had been raised to the principality by Lake, and the assassin was executed. The first twenty years, from 1829 to 1849, during which John Lawrence acted as the magistrate and land revenue collector of the most turbulent and backward portion of the Indian empire as it then was, formed the period of the reforms of Lord William Bentinck. To what became the lieutenant-governorship of the North-Western (now part of the United) Provinces Lord Wellesley had promised the same permanent settlement of the land-tax which Lord Cornwallis had made with the large landholders or zemindars of Bengal. The court of directors, going to the opposite extreme, had sanctioned leases for only five years, so that agricultural progress was arrested. In 1833 Merttins Bird and James Thomason introduced the system of thirty years’ leases based on a careful survey of every estate by trained civilians, and on the mapping of every village holding by native subordinates. These two revenue officers created a school of enthusiastic economists who rapidly registered and assessed an area as large as that of Great Britain, with a rural population of twenty-three millions. Of that school John Lawrence proved the most ardent and the most renowned. Intermitting his work at Delhi, he became land revenue settlement officer in the district of Etawah, and there began, by buying out or getting rid of the talukdars, to realize the ideal which he did much to create throughout the rest of his career—a country “thickly cultivated by a fat contented yeomanry, each man riding his own horse, sitting under his own fig-tree, and enjoying his rude family comforts.” This and a quiet persistent hostility to the oppression of the people by their chiefs formed the two features of his administrative policy throughout life.
It was fortunate for the British power that, when the first Sikh War broke out, John Lawrence was still collector of Delhi. The critical engagements at Ferozeshah, following Moodkee, and hardly redeemed by Aliwal, left the British army somewhat exhausted at the gate of the Punjab, in front of the Sikh entrenchments on the Sutlej. For the first seven weeks of 1846 there poured into camp, day by day, the supplies and munitions of war which this one man raised and pushed forward, with all the influence acquired during fifteen years of an iron yet sympathetic rule in the land between the Jumna and the Sutlej. The crowning victory of Sobraon was the result, and at thirty-five Lawrence became commissioner of the Jullundur Doab, the fertile belt of hill and dale stretching from the Sutlej north to the Indus. The still youthful civilian did for the newly annexed territory what he had long before accomplished in and around Delhi. He restored it to order, without one regular soldier. By the fascination of his personal influence he organized levies of the Sikhs who had just been defeated, led them now against a chief in the upper hills and now to storm the fort of a raja in the lower, till he so welded the people into a loyal mass that he was ready to repeat the service of 1846 when, three years after, the second Sikh War ended in the conversion of the Punjab up to Peshawar into a British province.
Lord Dalhousie had to devise a government for a warlike population now numbering twenty-three millions, and covering an area little less than that of the United Kingdom. The first results were not hopeful; and it was not till John Lawrence became chief commissioner, and stood alone face to face with the chiefs and people and ring fence of still untamed border tribes, that there became possible the most successful experiment in the art of civilizing turbulent millions which history presents. The province was mapped out into districts, now numbering thirty-two, in addition to thirty-six tributary states, small and great. To each the thirty years’ leases of the north-west settlement were applied, after a patient survey and assessment by skilled officials ever in the saddle or the tent. The revenue was raised on principles so fair to the peasantry that Ranjit Singh’s exactions were reduced by a fourth, while agricultural improvements were encouraged. For the first time in its history since the earliest Aryan settlers had been overwhelmed by successive waves of invaders, the soil of the Punjab came to have a marketable value, which every year of British rule has increased. A stalwart police was organized; roads were cut through every district, and canals were constructed. Commerce followed on increasing cultivation and communications, courts brought justice to every man’s door, and crime hid its head. The adventurous and warlike spirits, Sikh and Mahommedan, found a career in the new force of irregulars directed by the chief commissioner himself, while the Afghan, Dost Mahommed, kept within his own fastnesses, and the long extent of frontier at the foot of the passes was patrolled.
Seven years of such work prepared the lately hostile and always anarchic Punjab under such a pilot as John Lawrence not only to weather the storm of 1857 but to lead the older provinces into port. On the 12th of May the news of the tragedies at Meerut and Delhi reached him at Rawalpindi. The position was critical in the last degree, for of 50,000 native soldiers 38,000 were Hindustanis of the very class that had mutinied elsewhere, and the British troops were few and scattered. For five days the fate of the Punjab hung upon a thread, for the question was, “Could the 12,000 Punjabis be trusted and the 38,000 Hindustanis be disarmed?” Not an hour was lost in beginning the disarming at Lahore; and, as one by one the Hindustani corps succumbed to the epidemic of mutiny, the sepoys were deported or disappeared, or swelled the military rabble in and around the city of Delhi. The remembrance of the ten years’ war which had closed only in 1849, a bountiful harvest, the old love of battle, the offer of good pay, but, above all, the personality of Lawrence and his officers, raised the Punjabi force into a new army of 59,000 men, and induced the non-combatant classes to subscribe to a 6% loan. Delhi was invested, but for three months the rebel city did not fall. Under John Nicholson, Lawrence sent on still more men to the siege, till every available European and faithful native soldier was there, while a movable column swept the country, and the border was kept by an improvised militia. At length, when even in the Punjab confidence became doubt, and doubt distrust, and that was passing into disaffection, John Lawrence was ready to consider whether we should not give up the Peshawar valley to the Afghans as a last resource, and send its garrison to recruit the force around Delhi. Another week and that alternative must have been faced. But on the 20th of September the city and palace of Delhi were again in British hands, and the chief commissioner and his officers united in ascribing “to the Lord our God all the praise due for nerving the hearts of our statesmen and the arms of our soldiers.” As Sir John Lawrence, Bart., G.C.B., with the thanks of parliament, the gratitude of his country, and a life pension of £2000 a year in addition to his ordinary pension of £1000, the “saviour of India” returned home in 1859. After guarding the interests of India and its people as a member of the secretary of state’s council, he was sent out again in 1864 as viceroy and governor-general on the death of Lord Elgin. If no great crisis enabled Lawrence to increase his reputation, his five years’ administration of the whole Indian empire was worthy of the ruler of the Punjab. His foreign policy has become a subject of imperial interest, his name being associated with the “close border” as opposed to the “forward” policy; while his internal administration was remarkable for financial prudence, a jealous regard for the good of the masses of the people and of the British soldiers, and a generous interest in education, especially in its Christian aspects.