Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [50]
Just when it seemed things could get no worse, they did. A relief force fought its way through to the Residency and then became trapped inside; the main consequence was that there were now many more mouths to feed, and no more food than previously. (One of the rebels’ taunts was to mount chickens and chapattis on poles and wave them at the defenders.) Finally, in November, a second relief column reached Lucknow. When the soldiers broke into the rebel strongholds, slaughter was savage and indiscriminate. Women and children died alongside the mutinous sepoys – anyone attempting to surrender was bayoneted. But the ‘Cawnpore Dinner’ – 6 inches of steel – was just the start of it. ‘The scene was terrible,’ said a Lieutenant Fairweather, ‘but at the same time it gave me a feeling of gratified revenge.’ Loyal soldiers now butchered any rebel they could find, beheading some and trying, literally, to tear others to pieces. A witness counted nearly 2,000 corpses dragged by elephants from the rebel positions to be thrown into mass graves.
The savagery of the British revenge afterwards is striking. Entire villages were burned down; mutineers were smeared in pig fat before execution, tied to the muzzles of cannon and blown to pieces. At the site of the Cawnpore massacre rebels were made to lick the dried blood from the floor of the bibighar. In particular, there was the treatment of women and children to be avenged. A brigadier serving in Punjab believed that the gallows were too good for the mutineers. ‘Let us propose a Bill for the flaying alive, impalement, or burning of the murderers of the women and children at Delhi,’ he said. ‘The idea of simply hanging the perpetrators of such atrocities is maddening.’ Such a reaction was only to be expected of a military man who had previously demonstrated his commitment to law and order by personally lopping the heads off criminals and piling them up on his desk. But the desire for vengeance affected everyone. Charles Spurgeon, the ‘Prince of Preachers’, thrilled an audience of 25,000 at the Crystal Palace in London when he told them that it was time for a holy war on the Indians. The Mutiny became the stuff of epic poetry and bad art. Edward Armitage’s hugely popular painting Retribution caught the mood – an enormous, well-muscled Britannia towering over the corpses of a mother and child, driving a sword into the chest of a tiger. The Times demanded that ‘every tree and gable end should have its burden in the shape of a mutineer’s carcass’. ‘I wish I were Commander in Chief in India,’ the normally quite civilized Charles Dickens wrote to Angela Burdett-Coutts. ‘I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested … and raze it off the face of the Earth.’
Mercifully, wiser counsels prevailed. Although it earned him the contemptuous nickname ‘Clemency’ Canning, the Governor General, Viscount Canning, attempted to insist that punishment be confined merely to those Indians who had perpetrated specific acts. He even abolished the East India Company’s Doctrine of Lapse, which had given Nana Sahib such incentive to join the rebels in Cawnpore. But although he presided over an administration which established the first Indian universities, developed a new penal code and devised and revised the taxation system, Canning was never quite the hand-wringing liberal that his nickname suggests. While he appreciated the need to nurture an elite sympathetic to the British, the peasants were another matter. ‘Our endeavour to better, as we thought, the village occupants of Oudh has not been appreciated by them,’ he said, and therefore they deserved ‘little consideration from us’. But he was wise enough to recognize that confiscating their lands would merely provoke resentment. Canning concluded that if the peasants were going to retain their blind fealty to local chieftains, then the British might as well do whatever they could to make life better for the existing ruling class. From now on, the British would run much of India with and through the indigenous princes,