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It is an officer of the 38th who shall now tell his tale – how that his own personal troubles, when alone, were slight compared with those which he had afterwards to bear in company with other fugitive Europeans. This officer states that, while the refugees were anxiously watching the course of events at the Flagstaff Tower, they were momentarily expecting aid from Meerut. They could not believe that Major-general Hewett would have allowed the mutineers to march from Meerut to Delhi without either making an attempt to intercept them, or following on their heels; and their disappointment in this particular led to some of the unfavourable comments made on that general’s line of conduct. The officer of the 38th, whose narrative is now under notice, shared the difficulty of all the others in endeavouring to keep the men at their duty; and he speaks of the terrible sight, more than once adverted to, which met his eye at the mainguard inside the Cashmere Gate: ‘By the gate, side by side, and covered by pretty ladies’ dresses taken from some house, as if in mockery, lay the bodies of poor Captain Smith, Burrowes, Edwardes, and Waterfield, and the quarter-master-sergeant; some lying calm as shot dead, and others with an expression of pain, mutilated by bayonets and swords.’ When all became hopeless within the city, and the brigadier had given orders to retire, the officers made a show of bringing off their regiments as well as their families; but it was only a show; for such of the men as had remained faithful up to this time now fell away, and the Europeans found themselves compelled to escape as best they could. The officer hastened to the cantonment, disconsolate and helpless, but having no immediate idea of escape. With the colonel of the same regiment, however, he was urged to adopt that course, as the cantonment itself was now in a blaze. The two ran off in the dead of the night towards the river, crouching beneath trees when enemies seemed near; they forded the Jumna Canal, slaking their parched lips as they waded or swam; and they tore off the brighter parts of their glittering accoutrements, to prevent betrayal. In the morning, faint and hungered, they took refuge in a hut while a body of sepoys was searching around, as if for victims. A few Hindoo peasants discovering them, told them where they could hide in a tope of trees, and brought them chupatties and milk. Being able to ford across a narrow branch of the Jumna soon afterwards, they concealed themselves in the wild jungle; and there, to their joy and surprise, they found others of their friends in the same kind of concealment – joy damped, it is true, at the thought of educated English men and women crouching among long jungle-grass like savages or wild beasts. On counting numbers, they found they were thirteen, eight gentlemen and five ladies and children; and as they had several guns and swords among them, they took heart, and prepared to struggle against further difficulties.

To bring up the two parallel threads of the story, the escapes of the larger party, comprising the women and little ones, must now be told. In the afternoon of the preceding day, after arrangements had been made for conveying the ladies on gun-carriages from the city to the cantonment, the natives who had been trusted with this duty turned faithless, and the Europeans within the Cashmere Gate, finding themselves shot at, sought to escape beyond the walls in any way they could. One after another, women and children as well as men, leaped over into the ditch, scrambled up the other side, and ran off towards the house of Sir T. Metcalfe. One lady, the mother of three daughters who had to share in the flight, was shot through the shoulder, yet still kept on. The native servants – in the absence of their master, who afterwards had his own tale to tell of jungle-life and narrow escapes – gave them a little food; but just before the house was about being fired by the insurgents, the fugitives left it, and succeeded in fording the narrow stream to the spot mentioned above. When the thirteen had told their adventures, and formed a plan, they started anew, and sought a spot where they could ford the majestic Jumna. The officer must here tell the story of this perilous fording: ‘Our hearts failed, and no wonder, where ladies were concerned, as we looked at the broad swift river. It was getting dark, too. Two natives went across. We watched them anxiously wade a considerable portion of the river; then their heads alone appeared above water. It was our only chance of life, and our brave ladies never flinched. The water was so deep, that where a tall man would wade, a short man would be drowned. I thought it was all over when, on reaching the deep water with Mrs – on my left arm, a native supporting her on the other side, we were shot [drifted] down the river; however, by desperate efforts and the assistance of another native, we reached the bank in safety. I swam back once more for another of our party; and so ultimately we all got safe over. It was a brave feat for our ladies to do.’ But so it was throughout these terrific scenes: the heroism, the patience, the long-suffering endurance of these gentlewomen, bore up to the last; feebleness of frame was vanquished by nobility of spirit; and the men were often kept in heart, though deeply pained, by the uncomplaining perseverance of their gentle companions in misery. Our fugitives passed a wretched night after this fording of the Jumna, crouching in the jungle, with no sound ‘but the chattering of their teeth.’ The next day threw them into the hands of a large band of ruffians; and as the guns of the officers had been rendered useless by wet, the consequence was direful: the whole party were stripped and robbed, and then left without food, without clothing, without resource, to wander whither they could. With naked feet, and skins blistering in the sun, they toiled on. ‘How the ladies stood it,’ says the officer whose narrative we are following, ‘is marvellous; they never murmured or flinched, or distressed us by a show of terror.’ Fortunately, a fakeer, in a Hindoo village, ventured to give them shelter; they remained three days, obtaining a little food, but nothing more. A German zemindar or landowner, who had been so long in India as to be hardly distinguishable from a Hindoo, hearing of their plight, sent for them, gave them some rough cloth to huddle on as substitutes for garments, and caused a message to be sent to Meerut, which brought relief to them; and they reached that town in seven days after leaving Delhi – worn out in mind and body, haggard, lame, penniless, but thankful that their lives had been spared.

Strange as these escapes and perils were, they were eclipsed in individual daring and fertility of resource by one which remains to be told, and which may form the last of this little group of painful narratives. Mr Batson, surgeon of the 74th regiment, was unheard of during so long a time after the events at Delhi on the fatal Monday that he was given up for lost; but in a letter which he wrote to announce his safety, he detailed such a series of adventures as appear to belong rather to romance than to real life – Defoe-like, but entirely true instead of fictitious. And here it may be again remarked that these narratives must not be suspected of boastful exaggeration; there were links which connected all the eventful stories into one chain – each receiving corroborative strength from the others. Mr Batson states that when it was found that the three regiments at Delhi refused to act against the mutineers from Meerut, and that when such of the women and children as could be collected were placed in the mainguard and the Flagstaff Tower, he went to Brigadier Graves, volunteering to convey a letter to Meerut, in hope of obtaining the aid of European troops. His offer being accepted, he took leave of his wife and three daughters in the Flagstaff Tower, went to his house, dressed himself like a native fakeer or mendicant devotee, and coloured his face, hands, and feet. Off he set on his perilous errand. He first tried to cross the Jumna by the bridge of boats, but found it broken. Then he ran to the cantonment, and endeavoured to cross by a ferry near that spot, but found the insurgent cavalry and the neighbouring villagers plundering and marauding. Next he hastened across the parade-ground, and, after escaping two or three shots, was seized by some of the villagers and stripped of every bit of his fakeer clothing. On he ran again, in his now truly forlorn state, towards the Kurnaul road, hoping to overtake some of the officers who were escaping by that route; but before he could do so, two of the insurgent troopers intercepted him. Just as they were about to cut him down with their drawn swords, his tact and knowledge saved him. Being familiar both with the Hindostani language and with the Mohammedan customs, he threw himself into a supplicating position, and uttered the most exalted praises of the great Prophet of Islam: begging them to spare his life for the sake of the Moslem. Had his assailants been infantry sepoys, he would probably not have attempted this manœuvre, for most of them were Hindoos; but knowing that the cavalry sowars were chiefly Mohammedans, he made the venture. It succeeded. Whether they knew him as a fugitive Englishman, is not certain; but they let him go, saying: ‘Had you not asked for mercy in the name of the Prophet, you should have died like the rest of the Kaffirs [infidels].’ After running another mile – at once shivering with nakedness and burning with excitement – he encountered some Mussulman villagers, who rushed upon him, crying: ‘Here is a Feringhee; kill the Kaffir! You Feringhees want to make us all Christians!’ They dragged him to a village, tied his hands behind him, and sent one of their number to a house hard by to get a sword, with which to despatch him. At this critical moment some excitement – the nature of which Mr Batson could not understand – caused them all to leave him, and he ran off again. He fortunately fell in with some smiths who had been employed in the Delhi magazine, and who were willing to save him; they urged him not to go forward, or the villagers would certainly murder him. They took him to a hut, gave him an article or two of apparel, and fed him with milk and bread. He tried to sleep, but could not; he lay awake all night, restless and excited. In the morning he bethought him of informing his protectors that he was a physician, a doctor, a ‘medicine-man;’ and this proved to be an aid to him; for the villagers, finding that he could answer questions relating to maladies, and was familiar with their religion, language, and customs, began to take much interest in the Feringhee doctor. He found that two officers were in hiding at no great distance, but he could reach neither of them. To get to Meerut in time to deliver his message was of course now out of the question: all that Mr Batson could do was to secure his own safety. More perils were in store for him. The villagers of Badree were informed that if they harboured any Feringhees, the now triumphant King of Delhi would direfully punish them; they became alarmed, and hid him in a small mango tope. ‘Here,’ the surgeon says, ‘I was left night and day alone. I was visited at night by some one or other of the villagers, who brought me bread and water in a ghurrah. I am unable to describe my feelings during this trying time. I was all day in the sun, in the extreme heat, and alone at night, when the jackals came prowling about and crying. It is only God and myself know what I have endured. After five nights and days in this tope of trees, I was again taken back to the village and concealed in a bhoosa house. I was here shut in for twenty-four hours; the heat and suffocation I cannot find language to describe. I do not know which was the greatest misery, the tope of trees in solitude or the bhoosa kotree.’ At length the villagers, afraid to keep him any longer, dismissed him – enabling him to dress himself up again as a fakeer. Tramping on from village to village, he acted his part so well as to escape detection. He gave himself out as a Cashmerian; and although one of the villagers suspected his European origin by his blue eyes, he did not betray him. He observed from village to village – and the fact is worthy of note in relation to the causes and details of the Revolt – that the Mohammedans were much more savage than the Hindoos in their expressions and threats against the Feringhees. The further he proceeded from Delhi, the less did Mr Batson find himself involved in danger; and he was fortunately picked up by Captain M^cAndrews and Lieutenant Mew of his own regiment. He had been out no less than twenty-five days, wandering from village to village, from tope to tope; suffering privations which none but himself could know, and not even he adequately describe. One great anxiety gnawed him the while – the fate of his family: one great joy awaited him – his family escaped.

Here this chapter may close. We have seen that on the morning of Monday the 11th of May, the European inhabitants of Delhi arose from their beds in peace; and that by the close of the same day there was not a single individual of the number whose portion was not death, flight, or terrified concealment. So far as the British rule or influence was concerned, it was at an end. The natives remained masters of the situation; their white rulers were driven out; and a reconquest, complete in all its details, could alone restore British rule in Delhi. At what time, in what way, and by whom, that reconquest was effected, will remain to be told in a later portion of this work. Much remains to be narrated before Delhi will again come under notice.

CHAPTER VI.
LUCKNOW AND THE COURT OF OUDE

Another regal or once-regal family, another remnant of Moslem power in India, now comes upon the scene – one which has added to the embarrassment of the English authorities, by arraying against them the machinations of deposed princes as well as the discontent of native troops; and by shewing, as the King of Delhi had shewn in a neighbouring region, that a pension to a sovereign deprived of his dominions is not always a sufficient medicament to allay the irritation arising from the deprivation. What and where is the kingdom of Oude; of what rank as an Indian city is its capital, Lucknow; who were its rulers; why and when the ruling authority was changed – these matters must be clearly understood, as a preliminary to the narrative of Sir Henry Lawrence’s proceedings about the time of the outbreak.

Oude, considered as a province of British India, and no longer as a kingdom, is bounded on the north and northeast by the territory of Nepaul; on the east by the district of Goruckpore; on the southeast by those of Azimghur and Jounpoor; on the south by that of Allahabad; on the southwest by the districts of the Doab; and on the northwest by Shahjehanpoor. It is now about thrice the size of Wales; but before the annexation, Oude as a kingdom included a larger area. On the Nepaul side, a strip of jungle-country called the Terai, carries it to the base of the sub-Himalaya range. This Terai is in part a wooded marsh, so affected by a deadly malaria as to be scarcely habitable; while the other part is an almost impassable forest of trees, underwood, and reeds, infested by the elephant, the rhinoceros, the bear, the wild hog, and other animals. Considered generally, however, Oude surpasses in natural advantages almost every other part of India – having the Ganges running along the whole of its southwest frontier, a varied and fertile soil, a genial though hot climate, and numerous facilities for irrigation and water-carriage. It cannot, however, be said that man has duly aided nature in the development of these advantages; for the only regularly made road in the whole province is that from Lucknow to Cawnpore: the others being mostly wretched tracks, scarcely passable for wheel-carriages. The railway schemes of the Company include a line through Oude, which would be of incalculable benefit; but no definite contract had been made at the time when the Revolt commenced; nor would such a railway be profitable until the trunk-line is finished from Calcutta to Benares and Allahabad. Although the Mohammedans have, through many ages, held the ruling power in Oude, the Hindoos are greatly more numerous; and nearly the whole of the inhabitants, five millions in number, speak the Hindostani language; whereas those nearer Calcutta speak Bengali. As shewing the kind of houses in which Europeans occasionally sought concealment during the disturbances, the following description of the ordinary dwelling-places of Oude may be useful. They are generally built either of unburnt brick, or of layers of mud, each about three feet in breadth and one foot high. The roofs are made of square beams, placed a foot apart, and covered with planks laid transversely; over these are mats, and a roofing of well-rammed wet clay half a yard in thickness. The walls are carried to a height six or seven feet above the upper surface of the roof, to afford a concealed place of recreation for the females of the family; and during the rainy season this small elevated court is covered with a slight awning of bamboos and grass. Though so simply and cheaply constructed, these houses are very durable. Around the house there is usually a verandah, covered with a sloping tiled roof. Inside, the beams overhead are exposed to view, without any ceiling. The floors are of earth, well beaten down and smoothed, and partially covered with mats or cotton carpets. In the front of the house is a chabootra or raised platform of earth, open to the air at the sides, and provided with a roof of tiles or grass supported on pillars. This platform is a pleasant spot on which neighbours meet and chat in the cool of the evening. The dwellings of the wealthy natives of course present an aspect of greater splendour; while those of the Europeans, in the chief towns, partake of the bungalow fashion, already described.

There are few towns of any distinction in Oude compared with the area of the province; and of these few, only two will need to be mentioned in the present chapter. As for the city whence the province originally obtained its name – Oude, Oudh, or Ayodha – it has fallen from its greatness. Prinsep, Buchanan, and other authorities, regard it as the most ancient, or at any rate one of the most ancient, among the cities of Hindostan. Some of the coins found in Oude are of such extreme antiquity, that the characters in which their legends are graven are totally unknown. Buchanan thinks that the city was built by the first Brahmins who entered India, and he goes back to a date fourteen hundred years before the Christian era for its foundation; while Tod and Wilford claim for Oude an origin even six centuries earlier than that insisted on by Buchanan. The value of such estimates may not be great; they chiefly corroborate the belief that Oude is a very ancient city. With its eight thousand inhabitants, and its mud and thatch houses, the grandeur of Oude lives in the past; and even this grandeur is in antiquity rather than in splendour; for the ruins and fragments give a somewhat mean idea of the very early Hindoo architecture to which they belong. On the eastern side of the town are extensive ruins, said to be those of the fort of Rama, king of Oude, celebrated in the mythological and romantic legends of India. According to Buchanan: ‘The heaps of bricks, although much seems to have been carried away by the river, extend a great way – that is, more than a mile in length, and half a mile in width – and, although vast quantities of materials have been removed to build the Mohammedan Ayodha or Fyzabad, yet the ruins in many parts retain a very considerable elevation; nor is there any reason to doubt that the structure to which they belonged was very large, when we consider that it has been ruined for above two thousand years.’ A spot among the ruins is still pointed out by the reverential Hindoos from which Rama took his flight to heaven, carrying all the people of the city with him: a hypothetical emigration which had the effect of leaving Oude desolate until a neighbouring king repopulated it, and embellished it with three hundred and sixty temples. The existing buildings connected with the Hindoo faith are four establishments kept up in honour of the fabled monkey-god, the auxiliary of Rama; they have annual revenues, settled on them by one of the rulers of Oude; they are managed by maliks or spiritual superiors; and the revenues are dispensed to several hundreds of bairagis or religious ascetics, and other lazy Hindoo mendicants – no Mussulman being ever admitted within the walls.

Lucknow, however, is the city to which our attention will naturally be most directed – Lucknow, as the modern capital of the kingdom or province; as a city of considerable importance, political, military, commercial, and architectural; and as a scene of some of the most memorable events in the Revolt.

The city of Lucknow stands on the right bank of the river Goomtee, which is navigable thence downwards to its confluence with the Ganges between Benares and Ghazeepore. It is rather more than fifty miles distant from Cawnpore, and about a hundred and thirty from Allahabad. As Cawnpore is on the right bank of the Ganges, that majestic river intervenes between the two towns. The Goomtee is crossed at Lucknow by a bridge of boats, a bridge of substantial masonry, and an iron bridge – an unusual fulness of transit-channels in an Indian city. Lucknow displays a varied, lively, and even brilliant prospect, when viewed from a position elevated above the level of the buildings; but, once in the streets, the traveller has his dream of beauty speedily dissipated; for oriental filth and abomination meet his eye on all sides. The central portion of the city, the most ancient, is meanly built with mud-houses roofed with straw; many of them are no better than booths of mats and bamboos, thatched with leaves or palm-branches. The streets, besides being dirty, are narrow and crooked, and are dismally sunk many feet below the level of the shops. The narrow avenues are rendered still less passable by the custom of employing elephants as beasts of burden: unwieldy animals which almost entirely block up the way. In the part of the city occupied by Europeans, however, and containing the best public buildings, many of the streets are broad and lively. Until 1856, when Oude was annexed to British India, Lucknow was, to a stranger, one of the most remarkable cities of the east, in regard to its armed population. Almost every man went armed through the streets. One had a matchlock, another a gun, another a pistol; others their bent swords or tulwars; others their brass-knobbed buffalo-hide shields. Men of business and idlers – among all alike it was a custom to carry arms. The black beards of the Mussulmans, and the fierce moustaches of the Rajpoots, added to the warlike effect thus produced. Oude was the great storehouse for recruits for the Company’s native army; and this naturally gave a martial bent to the people. The Company, however, deemed it a wise precaution to disarm the peaceful citizens at the time of the annexation.

Three or four structures in and near Lucknow require separate description. One is the Shah Nujeef, or Emanbarra of Azof-u-Dowlah, a model of fantastic but elegant Mohammedan architecture. English travellers have poured out high praise upon it. Lord Valentia said: ‘From the brilliant white of the composition, and the minute delicacy of the workmanship, an enthusiast might suppose that genii had been the artificers;’ while Bishop Heber declared: ‘I have never seen an architectural view which pleased me more, from its richness and variety, as well as the proportions and general good taste of its principal features.’ The structure consists of many large buildings surrounding two open courts. There are three archways to connect the courts; and in the centre of these is the tomb of the founder, watched by soldiers, and attended by moullahs perpetually reading the Koran. This structure is often called the king’s Emanbarra or Imaumbarah, a name given to the buildings raised by that sect of Moslems called Sheahs, for the celebration of the religious festival of the Mohurrum. Every family of distinction has its own emanbarra, large or small, gorgeous or simple, according to the wealth of its owner, who generally selects it as his own burial-place. The central hall of the Shah Nujeef, the king’s emanbarra, is of vast size and very magnificent; and the combination of Moslem minarets with Hindoo-pointed domes renders the exterior remarkably striking; nevertheless the splendour is diminished by the poverty of the materials, which are chiefly brick coated with chunam or clay cement. Near or connected with this building is the Roumee Durwaza or Gate of the Sultan, having an arch in the Saracenic style. Another public building is the mosque of Saadut Ali, one of the former nawabs of Oude; its lofty dome presents a remarkable object as seen from various parts of the city; and, being provided with terraces without and galleries within, it is especially attractive to a sight-seer. Southeast of the city, and near the river, is a fantastic mansion constructed by Claude Martine, a French adventurer who rose to great wealth and power at the late court of Lucknow. He called it Constantia, and adorned it with various kinds of architectural eccentricities – minute stucco fretwork, enormous lions with lamps instead of eyes, mandarins and ladies with shaking heads, gods and goddesses of heathen mythology, and other incongruities. The house is large, and solidly built of stone; and on the topmost story is the tomb of Martine; but his body is deposited in a sarcophagus in one of the lower apartments. The favourite residence of the former nawabs and kings of Oude was the Dil Koosha or ‘Heart’s Delight,’ a richly adorned palace two miles out of the city, and placed in the middle of an extensive deer-park. When Colonel (afterwards General Sir James) Outram was appointed British resident at the court of Lucknow, about a year before the annexation, the Dil Koosha was set apart for his reception; and the whole ceremonial illustrated at once the show and glitter of oriental processions, and the honour paid to the Englishman. As soon as the colonel arrived at Cawnpore from Calcutta, the great officers of state were sent from Lucknow to prepare for his reception. After crossing the Ganges, and thereby setting foot in the Oude dominions, he entered a royal carriage replete with gold and velvet; a procession was formed of carriages, cavalry, and artillery, which followed the fifty miles of road to the capital. On the next day, the king was to have met the colonel half-way between the city palace and the Dil Koosha; but being ill, his place was taken by the heir-apparent. The one procession met the other, and then both entered Lucknow in state. A Lucknow correspondent of a Bombay journal said: ‘Let the reader imagine a procession of more than three hundred elephants and camels, caparisoned and decorated with all that barbaric pomp could lavish, and Asiatic splendour shower down; with all the princes and nobles of the kingdom blazing with jewels, gorgeous in apparel, with footmen and horsemen in splendid liveries, swarming on all sides; pennons and banners dancing in the sun’s rays, and a perfect forest of gold and silver sticks, spears, and other insignia of imperial and royal state.’

A work of remarkable character has appeared, relating to Lucknow and the court of Oude. It is called the Private Life of an Eastern King, and has been edited from the notes of an Englishman who held a position in the household of the king of Oude, Nussir-u-Deen, in 1834 and following years.⁹ Though the name of the author does not appear, the work is generally accepted as being trustworthy, so many corroborations of its statements having appeared in other quarters. Speaking of the king’s palace within the city, this writer says: ‘The great extent of the buildings, generally called the king’s palace, surprised me in the first instance. It is not properly a palace, but a continuation of palaces, stretching all along the banks of the Goomtee, the river on which Lucknow is built. In this, however, the royal residence in Oude but resembles what one reads of the Seraglio at Constantinople, the khan’s residence at Teheran, and the imperial buildings of Pekin. In all oriental states, the palaces are not so much the abode of the sovereign only, as the centre of the government: little towns, in fact, containing extensive lines of buildings occupied by the harem and its vast number of attendants; containing courts, gardens, tanks, fountains, and squares, as well as the offices of the chief ministers of state. Such is the case in Lucknow. One side of the narrow Goomtee – a river not much broader than a middle-sized London street – is lined by the royal palace; the other is occupied by the rumna or park, in which the menagerie is (or was) maintained… There is nothing grand or striking about the exterior of the palace, the Fureed Buksh, as it is called. Its extent is the only imposing feature about it; and this struck me more forcibly than any magnificence or loftiness of structure would have done.’

These few topographical and descriptive details concerning Oude and its two capitals, the former and the present, will prepare us to enter upon a subject touching immediately the present narrative: namely, the relations existing between the East India Company and the Oudians, and the causes which have generated disaffection in the late royal family of that country. It will be needful to shew by what steps Oude, once a Hindoo kingdom, became under the Mogul dynasty a Mohammedan nawabship, then a nawab-viziership, then under British protection a Mohammedan kingdom, and lastly an Anglo-Indian province.