Cult of a Dark Hero

Nicholson of Delhi

Stuart Flinders

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781350254862
• eBook ISBN: 9781838608323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

In September 1857, a member of a religious sect killed himself on hearing the news that the object of his devout observance, Nikal Seyn, had died. Nikal Seyn was, in fact, John Nicholson, the leader of the British assault that recovered Delhi at the turning-point of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. What was it about Nicholson that prompted such devotion, not just from his religious followers, but from the general public? And why is he no longer considered a hero? The man called 'The Lion of the Punjab' by his contemporaries and compared to General Wolfe of Quebec, and even to Napoleon, has in recent times been dubbed 'an imperial psychopath' and 'a homosexual bully'. Yet his was a remarkable tale of a life of adventure lived on the very edge of the British Empire; of a man who was as courageous as he was ruthless, as loyal to his friends as he was merciless to those who crossed him. But it is also the story of how modern attitudes to race and Empire have changed in the years since he died.
Previously unpublished material, including the diaries of contemporaries and personal letters, helps build a new perspective on Nicholson's personality. The book considers his sexuality and ambivalent attitude towards religion. It traces his murderous thoughts towards the Chief Commissioner of the Punjab, John Lawrence, and reveals that, remarkably, the Nikal Seyni cult continued into the 21st century. This is the first book-length biography of Nicholson for over 70 years. A new account of the Irish soldier who became an Indian God, an examination of the cult of a dark hero, is long overdue.

CHAPTER 1

‘Trying to hit the Devil’

Ireland and India, 1822–40

THE SPIRIT OF John Nicholson continues to haunt India. According to the Indian Paranormal Society, his headless apparition walks the grounds of the Delhi cemetery in which he was buried more than a century and a half ago.¹ It seems that his name still has the power, as one of his near-contemporaries put it, to make a man ‘shiver in his pyjamas’.² His grave has become a minor tourist attraction, one of a handful of reminders of his brief but significant appearance in the city. The statue of Nicholson that used to stand across the road was removed long ago, but it still survives, given a new home by his old school. How it came to be there is a story in itself, told in Chapter 19. Nicholson, in statue form, was welcomed home to County Tyrone in Northern Ireland in 1960, thirteen years after Indian independence. It was fitting that it should have been unveiled by the last Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten. ‘I well remember the statue when it stood outside the Kashmir Gate at Delhi,’ he told the assembled boys, who had returned early from the Easter holidays for the occasion. ‘It is a triumph,’ he went on, ‘that it will stand here in future.’³ It stands there in the grounds of the Royal School Dungannon still, the figure of John Nicholson, sword unsheathed, ready for action. The sword itself, which should be gripped in his right hand, has been detached and is now kept in a storeroom to prevent accidents involving over-exuberant students celebrating the end of their exams.

The Royal School remains proud of its association with Nicholson and has a house named after him. His time there is well documented. However, since the deaths of his immediate relatives, there has been much confusion about his early life in general. That John Nicholson was the son of a doctor is without doubt. His father, Alexander, was the eldest of sixteen children. He studied medicine in Dublin and in 1820 married Clara Hogg from Lisburn, the daughter of a merchant.⁴ After their wedding in Lisburn Cathedral,⁵ they remained there for a short time before moving to Dublin.

Where and when John entered the world has itself been disputed. His grave in Delhi tells us, incorrectly, that he was thirty-five when he died (he was thirty-four). This has led even some recent authorities to give an incorrect birthdate.⁶ Then there is his place of birth. The author of the leading Victorian biography of Nicholson says he was born in Lisburn.⁷ Another biographer even provides a photograph of the very house in Lisburn where the birth was said to have taken place.⁸ But obituaries in the Belfast Newsletter and Belfast Daily Mercury gave Dublin as his birthplace, as does the Dictionary of National Biography.⁹ Conclusive evidence comes from Nicholson himself. At the start of his career in India he applied for a cadetship in the Bengal Infantry, signing statements that tell us he was born on 11 December 1822 in the parish of St Thomas, Dublin, and baptised a week later by Reverend George Bellett. His mother, Clara, confirmed that the details were true with her own signature.¹⁰ Bellett later recalled how he had become a friend of Alexander Nicholson. ‘When I was left alone at Magherahamlet it was the greatest possible treat to me to go to spend the day with him (Dr Nicholson) at Lisburn. After he settled in Dublin he became intimate with my family, and once, when I happened to be at North Lodge, he rode out from Dublin to bring me to baptise a little child of his just born; so I had the honour of baptising the great General and hero of India.’¹¹

A letter was sent to Alexander Nicholson at 48 Lower Gardiner Street in the parish of St Thomas four months after John was born, which suggests that this address was probably his place of birth.¹² (It is now a hotel.) At the time, Alexander Nicholson held a position at the Lying-In Hospital in Dublin, but the family appears to have moved back to Lisburn. There John briefly received lessons from a private tutor, before returning once more to Dublin,¹³ this time to 35 Dawson Street (also now a hotel).¹⁴ John would run errands for his father, picking up books from the medical library and even, at six years old, collecting rent from the family’s tenants. On one occasion his father pinned a £100 note inside his pinafore and told him to take it to his grandmother. Clara Nicholson later recalled how she remonstrated with her husband: ‘“Alexander, how can you trust a child with such a sum?” “He will do very well,” Dr Nicholson insisted. “Let him go!”’ And he carried it safely from Dawson Street to Lower Pembroke Street.¹⁵

When Dr Nicholson died of a fever contracted from one of his patients, the family was forced once again to return to Lisburn, where Clara could rely on the support of relatives. Here her seven children – five boys and two girls – grew up in an atmosphere of strict religious observance. Clara was an evangelical Christian with an Ulster Church of Ireland background. John’s sister, Mary, kept a commonplace book (a scrapbook), into which she copied religious texts, hymns and devotional lists, including seventy different ‘Titles of Christ’.¹⁶ John, too, appears to have been preoccupied with the battle between good and evil from an early age. When he was three years old his mother found him striking at an invisible object with a knotted handkerchief. He was trying to hit the devil, he explained. ‘He is wanting me to be bad. If I could get him down I’d kill him.’¹⁷ When John was nine, he accompanied his mother as she went on her rounds as a ‘district visitor’, making house-calls on behalf of her local church. She decided to skip one house because of the notoriety of those who lived there, but young John, quoting the Bible at her, persuaded her to relent: ‘Oh, mother, God makes His sun to rise upon the evil and the good, and sends His rain upon the just and upon the unjust.’¹⁸ Stories such as these suggest the young Nicholson to have been something between a saint and a prig, but it is worth remembering that the main source of them was his own devout mother, who, not surprisingly, describes him as affectionate, generous, noble and truthful. When asked many years later, she could think of only one example of disobedience and that hardly revealed him to be a delinquent: John had ignored her wishes and given his brother a piggy-back. A story about him throwing his brother Alexander into the sea fully clothed comes as something of a relief.¹⁹ Another does perhaps point to his future as a man of action. He was playing with gunpowder when it blew up, leaving his face blackened and bloody. It was feared he might lose his sight, but he made a full recovery.²⁰

Young John was taught by a number of private tutors²¹ and attended the Moravian Academy at Gracehill near Ballymena.²² In the centenary year of his birth, 1922, a letter appeared in the Irish Times claiming that he had also been a pupil of Holywell High School, Killincarrick, and left his mark on the back of shutters there in the form of humorous verses.²³ He moved to the Royal School in 1834 when he was eleven. Here he seems to have found it hard to live within his means, and he was reminded by his mother of the financial difficulties caused by his father’s early death. ‘I will, for this time, give you the money you require. In future you must be content with your weekly allowance. What other Boys have or do, cannot be a rule for you, who are the son of a Widow, with five Boys to educate.’²⁴

John does not appear to have stood out academically,²⁵ but a fellow pupil later recalled him to have been ‘a fine manly fellow, of a firm, but open, generous disposition’. He remembered his ‘cool, resolute bearing in a fight he had with another boy’. Others say he had a strong sense of justice and a hatred of cowardice, and he was a favourite of both fellow students and teachers.²⁶ Of course, by the time these recollections were gathered, it was desirable to appear to have known Nicholson and to have recognised his virtues early on, but he does seem to have stood out for his fiery temper.²⁷ Perhaps a remark made by one who knew him as a boy better than most is revealing: one of his sisters, as an old woman, remembered her brother as ‘just a great big bully’.²⁸

At home, he appears to have been sensitive to his responsibilities as the eldest son in a family without a father. He was ‘very fond of his mother’. She was not to worry, he would tell her, because he would make lots of money and give it to her.²⁹ He had as an example a wealthy uncle, who had made a fortune in India and was now MP for Beverley. James Hogg, Clara’s brother, had been a lawyer in Calcutta. (His great-grandson was the prominent post-war Conservative politician, Quintin Hogg, Lord Hailsham.) When John left school at sixteen in need of a job, Uncle James, a future Chairman of the East India Company, used his influence to secure a military cadetship for his nephew.³⁰

John Nicholson was one of many Ulstermen drawn to India in the days of empire. Ireland provided soldiers, administrators and viceroys, and Nicholson’s contemporaries typically put this down to national characteristics. ‘Nowhere within the circuit of the British Islands is a more interesting, a more vigorous, a more strongly marked type of character to be found than among the inhabitants of the North and North-east of Ireland,’ wrote one.³¹ The reality was more mundane. Opportunities for the sons of the gentry and professional families were limited in this part of Ireland, forcing them to seek their fortunes elsewhere. India was an appealing career move.³²

Early in 1839, John headed for England to stay with his uncle while the final preparations for his journey were made. His mother’s parting words: ‘Never forget to read your Bible.’³³ Having sworn an oath of allegiance to the East India Company in a ceremony at its headquarters, India House, John boarded his ship, the Camden.³⁴

The India for which Nicholson set sail fell far short of what was to become the jewel in the imperial crown. The British never did take legal control of the entire subcontinent. Princely kingdoms covering thousands of square miles continued to enjoy nominal independence until after the British withdrew in 1947. Nor was ‘British India’ the result of a conscious effort at empire-building. It was trade that took the British there and led them to gain a foothold, first in Surat on the north-west coast, then at Calcutta in the north-east under the auspices of the East India Company, established in 1600. The British formed local alliances, sometimes to protect their investments, sometimes with an eye on expanding their trade at the expense of others. The competition came not just from indigenous rulers, but from European rivals too – Portugal and the Netherlands and, later, the French. Success on the battlefield earned the Company new ways of making money: local rulers were forced to hand over tax-raising powers in some areas. Now the Company had a vested interest not just in trade with India, but in the land itself.

By the time Nicholson was born the British controlled three centres of power around the cities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, each with its own government answerable to the East India Company in London. They called them ‘Presidencies’. In 1833, a sense of a growing ‘British’ India was formalised with the promotion of the governor-general of Bengal in Calcutta to governor-general of India.

The need to protect British interests continued to result in pressure being applied to neighbouring rulers. As Nicholson left London, the Amirs of Sind were being bullied into a new treaty requiring them to pay for the privilege of having a British garrison of 5,000 men stationed there. Within four years their territory had been formally annexed. The danger of incursions by European rivals continued to cause anxiety in London and Calcutta too. Fears of Russian expansion towards India led to a growing interest in the politics of Afghanistan. In 1838, a decision was made to replace the Amir of Afghanistan, Dost Mohammed, with Shah Shuja, a previous occupant of the Afghan throne. The stated aims of a British invasion were to secure India’s western frontier and to support the British garrison at Herat in Afghanistan. Dost Mohammed was also accused of unprovoked attacks on the territories of Ranjit Singh, ruler of the Punjab and Britain’s ally. On 10 December 1838, the Army of the Indus left Ferozepore. The invasion of Afghanistan initially went well: Kandahar, in the south of the country, fell without a fight in 1839. But getting out of Afghanistan proved to be harder than getting in and John Nicholson’s experience there would leave him with a lasting hatred of Afghans.³⁵

Days before British troops forced their way into the Afghan fort of Ghazni, the Camden landed in Calcutta. If ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Maps
• Foreword by Sir Mark Tully
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘Hero of Delhi’ or ‘Great imperial psychopath’?
• Chapter 1: ‘Trying to hit the Devil’
• Chapter 2: ‘A bloodthirsty and treacherous Race’
• Chapter 3: ‘I dislike India and its inhabitants’
• Chapter 4: ‘A fearless, self-reliant, fierce and masterful man’
• Chapter 5: ‘A skirmish in the hills’
• Chapter 6: ‘What corner of the Punjab is not witness to your gallantry?’
• Chapter 7: ‘There is not one in the hills who does not shiver in his pyjamas when he hears his name mentioned’
• Chapter 8: ‘The evil spirit within me’
• Chapter 9: ‘A good Mahomedan of the kind told of in old books’
• Chapter 10: ‘The word is said and death surely follows’
• Chapter 11: ‘I have been hanging your cooks’
• Chapter 12: ‘Not a bad sliver, that!’
• Chapter 13: ‘When an Empire is at stake, women and children cease to be of any consideration whatever’
• Chapter 14: ‘I wish I had the power of knighting you on the spot’
• Chapter 15: ‘Woe to the bloody city!’
• Chapter 16: ‘Is Nicholson any better?’
• Chapter 17: ‘His loss is a national misfortune’
• Chapter 18: ‘The mother of heroes’
• Chapter 19: ‘I’m a little baffled about why they are valourising Nicholson now’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates