Who is this?

Queen Victoria

…and family

The Victorian World

Victorian Empire

The Victoria Memorial in the centre of Calcutta was intended by the British to be their answer to the Taj Mahal, a timeless expression of imperial grandeur that would awe those over whom they ruled.

Today, however, the statue of Queen Victoria, gazing wearily out over the Maidan, looks more like a symbol of the transient nature of British rule.

Taj Mahal

Victorian Empire

Victoria Memorial in Calcutta:

Victorian Empire

Victoria Memorial in Calcutta:

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The astounding thing is that for the better part of two centuries not just Bengal, but the whole of India was ruled by just a few thousand Britons.

The government of India was 'a gigantic machine for managing the entire public business of one-fifth of the inhabitants of the earth without their permission and without their help'.

Victorian Empire

The British were also able to use India to control an entire hemisphere, stretching from Malta all the way to Hong Kong.

It was the foundation on which the entire mid-Victorian Empire stood.

Yet behind the marble facade, the Raj was the conundrum at the very heart of the British Empire.

Victorian Empire

With just 900 British civil servants and 70,000 British soldiers, the Victorians managed to govern upwards of 250 million Indians.

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At the apex of the Victorian Empire was the Queen herself.

Industrious, opinionated, as passionate in private as she was impassive in public, indefatigably procreative and spectacularly long-lived.

Victorian Empire

Since the late 18th century, Britain had been pulling ahead from her rivals as a pioneer of new technology.

British engineers were in the vanguard of a revolution – the Industrial Revolution – that harnessed the power of steam and the strength of iron to transform the world economy and the international balance of power.

Victorian Empire

Fog permitting, the Queen could watch the comings and goings of her navy as she and her husband promenaded through Osborne House's gardens on the Isle of Wight.

By 1860 she would have been able to pick out with ease the supreme expression of mid-Victorian might: HMS Warrior.

Victorian Empire

Steam-driven, 'iron clad' in five inches of armour plate and fitted with the latest breech-loading, shell-firing guns, the Warrior was the world's most powerful battleship, so powerful that no foreign vessel ever dared to exchange fire with her.

And she was just one of around 240 ships, crewed by 40,000 sailors – making the Royal Navy the biggest in the world by far.

Victorian Empire

And thanks to the unrivalled productivity of her shipyards, Britain owned roughly a third of the world's merchant tonnage.

At no other time in history has one power so completely dominated the world's oceans as Britain did in the mid-nineteenth century.

Queen Victoria had good cause to feel secure by the seaside.

Victorian Empire

If the British wished to abolish the slave trade, they simply sent the navy. By 1840 no fewer than 425 slave ships had been intercepted by the Royal Navy off the West African Coast and escorted to Sierra Leone, where nearly all of them were condemned.

If the British wished the Brazilians to follow their example by abolishing the slave trade, they simply sent a gunboat. That was what Lord Palmerston did in 1848; by September 1850 Brazil passed a law abolishing the trade.

Victorian Empire

If the British wished to force the Chinese to open their ports to British trade, they could once again send their navy.

What these events had in common was that British naval mastery made them possible.

Victorian Empire

Steam power tended to knit the Empire together, too.

In the days of sail it had taken between 4 and 6 weeks to cross the Atlantic; steam reduced that to 2 weeks in the mid-1830s and just in 10 days in the 1880s.

Between the 1850s and the 1890s, the journey time from England to Cape Town was cut from 42 to 19 days.

Steamships got bigger as well as faster: in the same period, average gross tonnage roughly doubled.

Victorian Empire

In the early years of her reign – until the Indian Mutiny, in fact – Victoria had taken relatively little interest in foreign affairs outside Europe.

But the Mutiny awoke her with a jolt to her imperial responsibilities, and as her reign wore on they took up more and more of her attention.

In one of the more obscure corners of Osborne House is a clue to why the Queen felt in closer touch with her Empire as she grew older.

Downstairs in the Household Wing was the Queen's telegraph office.

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By the 1870s messages from India could reach the Isle of Wight in a matter of hours; and the Queen read them attentively.

This perfectly illustrates what happened to the world during Victoria's reign.

It shrank – and it did so largely because of British technology.

Victorian Empire

The telegraph cable and the steamship route were two of three metal networks that simultaneously shrank the world and made control of it easier.

The third was the railway. The British railway network had been

constructed after 1826 with only minimal state intervention.

But the railways the British built throughout their Empire, depended on generous government subsidies.

Victorian Empire

The Victorian revolution in global communication achieved 'the annihilation of distance'.

But it also made possible long-distance annihilation. In time of war, distance simply had to be overcome – for the simple reason that Britain's principal source of military power now lay on the other side of the world.

It was in India that the British kept the bulk of their offensive military capability.

India in 1765 and 1805 showing East India Company Territories

India in 1837 and 1857 showing East India Company and other territories

'Indian Mutiny', 1857-1859 The 1850s saw a deterioration in relations between the British officers

and the Indian other ranks in the East India Company’s Bengal Army.

Many Indians believed that the British were seeking to destroy traditional Indian social, religious and cultural customs, a view shared by the sepoys of the Bengal Army, a substantial number of whom were high-caste Brahmins.

Discipline, administration and command in the Bengal Army had for some time been inferior to that in the Company’s other two armies and matters were brought to a head by the introduction of the Pattern 1853 Enfield Rifle.

The rumour spread that its cartridges were greased with pig and cow fat, thus offending both Muslims and Hindus.

In February 1857 the 19th (Bengal Native) Infantry refused to use the cartridges. They were quickly disbanded but their actions were to spark a chain of similar events through central and northern India.

Outbreak The Mutiny began in earnest at Meerut on 10 May

1857 when 85 members of the 3rd (Bengal) Light Cavalry who had been imprisoned for refusing the cartridges were rescued by Indian comrades.

The following day Delhi fell to the mutineers. News of these events spread rapidly, leading to further mutinies elsewhere. Eventually all ten Bengal Light Cavalry Regiments and most of the 74 Bengal Native Infantry Regiments were affected.

Some regiments were disarmed before they had the chance to mutiny while in other cases British officers simply refused to doubt the loyalty of their men until it was too late.

Many local rulers supported the mutineers, having been alienated by the East India Company’s annexation of native states.

There were only 35,000 British soldiers in the whole sub-continent and these were widely scattered.

Furthermore, reinforcements took months to arrive.

Fortunately for the British the Mutiny was almost exclusively confined to the Bengal Army. The Company’s Madras and Bombay Armies were relatively unaffected and other units, including Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims and Gurkhas, remained loyal.

Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, one of the principal leaders of the Great Uprising of

1857.

Delhi The walled city of Delhi became the focal point of the

Mutiny.

It was the seat of Bahadur Shah, the aged Mughal Emperor, and it occupied a key strategic position between Calcutta and the new territories of the Punjab.

The recapture of Delhi became a priority for the British.

On 7 June 1857 a hastily-raised force of 4,000 men succeeded in occupying a ridge overlooking Delhi but was far too weak to attempt to retake the city itself.

Faced by over 30,000 mutineers they came under increasing pressure themselves and began to suffer losses through cholera.

However reinforcements gradually arrived from the Punjab, including a siege train of 32 guns and 2,000 men under Brigadier-General John Nicholson.

By 14 September the British had about 9,000 men before Delhi.

A third were British while the rest were Sikhs, Punjabis and Gurkhas.

Breaches were made in the city walls, a gate was blown and after a week’s vicious street fighting, Delhi was back under British control.

Although operations continued until 1859, notably in central India, the recapture of Delhi proved a decisive factor in the suppression of the Mutiny.

Bahadur Shah II

Brigadier-General John Nicholson (11 December 1822 – 23 September 1857)

Lucknow When news of the Mutiny reached Sir Henry Lawrence, the

Chief Commissioner of Oudh, he fortified the group of buildings that made up his Lucknow Residency and stockpiled supplies, ready for a siege.

Lawrence had about 1,500 troops, half of them loyal Bengal sepoys, to defend the Residency and a similar number of civilians to protect.

The Mutineers began attacking the Residency on 4 July 1857. Lawrence was killed almost immediately and command passed to Colonel John Inglis of the 32nd (The Cornwall) Regiment of Foot, which formed the main part of the British half of the garrison.

A relief force under Major-General Sir Henry Havelock fought its way into Lucknow on 25 September but was too weak to evacuate the defenders of the Residency.

Lucknow Residency 1858

However a month later a stronger force under Lieutenant-General Sir Colin Campbell arrived and on 16 November his troops stormed the Secundra Bagh, a walled enclosure that barred the way to the Residency.

Campbell’s men had learned of the massacre at Cawnpore where over 200 British women and children had been butchered by mutineers. Enraged by this, they showed no mercy to the Secundra Bagh’s 2,000 defenders, slaughtering all but a handful.

On 22 November Campbell was able to evacuate the Residency.

After routing a large rebel force under the rebel leader Tantia Topi outside Cawnpore on 6 December and clearing the area of Mutineers, Campbell returned to Lucknow in March and, reinforced by Gurkha troops sent by the King of Nepal, he finally recaptured the city.

Interior of the Secundra Bagh after the Slaughter of 2,000 Rebels by the 93rd Highlanders and 4th

Punjab Regiment. First Attack of Sir Colin Campbell in November 1857, Lucknow.

Field Marshal Colin Campbell, 1st Baron Clyde, (October 20, 1792 – August 14,

1863)

Ramachandra Pandurang Tope (1814 - 18 April 1859), also known as Tatya Tope

AftermathFollowing the Mutiny the East India Company was abolished by

Act of Parliament and the government of India was transferred to the Crown.

To ensure that British rule could never be threatened in such a way again the Indian Army was reorganised so that it needed its British components to function effectively.

The Indian soldiers were issued with a rifle that was inferior to that of their British counterparts and given only limited logistical support.

Control of the Indian Army’s artillery remained firmly in British hands.

In effect the Sepoys became auxiliaries to rather than substitutes for British soldiers.