The Tale of the Great Mutiny

by W. H. Fitchett

At Delhi the British, from the outset, were the besiegers, and nothing in British history—not the story of Sir Richard Grenville and the Revenge, of the Fusileers at Albuera, or of the Guards at Inkerman—is a more kindling tale of endurance and valour than the story of how for months a handful of British clung to the Ridge outside Delhi, fighting daily with foes ten times more numerous than themselves, and yet besieging—or maintaining the show of besieging—the great city which was the nerve-centre and heart of the whole Mutiny.

LORD LAWRENCE

Reproduced from the Life of Lord Lawrence by permission R. Bosworth Smith, Esq.

At Cawnpore and Lucknow the British fought for existence. At Delhi they fought for empire! While the British flag flew from the Ridge at Delhi it was a symbol that the British raj was still undestroyed. It was a red gleaming menace of punishment to all rebels. Had that flag fallen for twenty-four hours, India, for a time at least, would have been lost to England. But it flew proudly and threateningly aloft, undestroyed by a hundred attacks, till at last Nicholson led his stormers through the Cashmere Gate, and the fate of the Mutiny was sealed!

The mutineers from Meerut rode into Delhi on May 11. It was the city of the Great Mogul. It appealed by a thousand memories to both the race-pride and the fanaticism of the revolted Sepoys. Here the Mutiny found, not only a natural stronghold, but an official head, and Delhi thus became a far-seen signal of revolt to the whole of Northern India. But on June 7—or less than four weeks after Willoughby in heroic despair blew up the great magazine at Delhi—Sir Henry Barnard’s microscopic army made its appearance on the Ridge, and the siege of Delhi began. It was a real stroke of military genius that thus, from the earliest outbreak of the Mutiny, kept a bayonet, so to speak, pointed threateningly at its very heart!

And the hero of the siege of Delhi is not Barnard, or Wilson, or Baird-Smith, or Neville Chamberlain, or Nicholson—but a man who never fired a shot or struck a sword-stroke in the actual siege itself—John Lawrence. Lawrence, and not Havelock, nor Outram, nor Canning, was the true saviour of the British raj in India in the wild days of the Mutiny.

John Lawrence was five years younger than his gallant brother Henry, who died in the Residency at Lucknow. He had no visible gleam of the brilliancy which makes Henry Lawrence a character so attractive. Up to middle life, indeed, John Lawrence was a silent, inarticulate, rugged man, with the reputation of being a great worker, but whom nobody suspected to be a genius, and for whom nobody—least of all Lawrence himself—dreamed fame was waiting. He came of that strong-bodied, strong-brained, masterful race of which the North of Ireland is the cradle. But England, Ireland, and Scotland all had a share in the making of John Lawrence. He was actually born in England. His father was a gallant Irish soldier, who led the forlorn hope at the storming of Seringapatam. His mother was a lineal descendant of John Knox, the Scottish reformer. And perhaps the characteristic traits of the three countries never met more happily in a single human character than in John Lawrence. In Ulster he was known amongst his schoolmates as “English John.” At Haileybury, in England, he was looked upon as a typical Irishman.

The truth is, he was Englishman, Irishman, Scotchman all in one. He had Celtic glow and fire under a crust of Scottish silence and caution; and he added the Englishman’s steady intelligence and passion for justice to Scottish hard-headedness and the generous daring of the Irish character. Or, to put the matter in a different way, in any perilous crisis he could survey the situation with the balanced judgment of an Englishman; could choose his course with the shrewd and calculating sagacity of a Scotchman; then carry it out with Irish fire and daring!

Lawrence shone as a youth neither in studies nor in games, and both as a youth and man he had a magnificent faculty for silence. By blood and genius he was a soldier. But duty was the supreme law of life for him; and at the bidding of what he deemed to be duty, he surrendered a soldier’s career and entered the Indian Civil Service. His silent energy, his strong brain, his passion for work, his chivalrous loyalty to righteousness, quickly assured him a great career. He was above the middle height, strongly built, with an eager, forward gait. His massive head gave him a sort of kingly look—the forehead broad, the eyes deep-set and grey, but with a gleam in them as of a sword-blade. The firm lips had a saddened curve; the face was ploughed deep with furrows of thought and work. His voice, when his feelings were aroused, had a singular resonance and timbre, and his whole aspect was that of silent, half-melancholy simplicity and strength.