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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2014
During the unusually hot summer of 1857 English society was shocked and outraged by reports of atrocity and mass murder. News of the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny reached London on June 26, 1857 and, during the succeeding months, tales of massacre and torture followed. Polite Victorian society was incensed. This article examines Parliament's response to this crisis. It reveals that there exists no simple relation between events occurring outside Westminster and the response within. Parliamentary perception passes through the medium of public rhetoric, established policy, party circumstance, and the private concerns of prominent personalities. This creates less a refractive distortion of events than a new aspect to their understanding. Issues such as India acquired significance within a continuing context of parliamentary circumstance long preceding the immediate cause of substantive concern. This article, then, is not about India as such, but about the particular form the Indian question assumed within Westminster. This is a significant concern in itself because of the insight preoccupation with India provided into the tensions, antagonisms, aspirations, and hopes shaping party alignment during the mid-nineteenth century.
A further aspect of this translation of external circumstance into parliamentary perception is that an issue only became the occasion of crisis when it was portrayed as critical. Once again, there existed no simple relation between external events and the response within Westminster. Popular moral outrage over native atrocities became a political crisis over administrative reform. This particular parliamentary response was neither necessary nor inevitable. The recognition of crisis and the particular crisis perceived are themselves historical events that require explanation.
Mr. Alan Beattie, Dr. Andrew Jones, Mr. Stephen Lawrence, and Professor John Vincent advised, cautioned, and encouraged me during the writing of this article. Anything of worth owes much to them. I am also grateful to the Social Science Research Council for the grant that made the research upon which this-article is based possible.
1 National Register of Archives, London, Palmerston Diary, June 26, 1857, Broadlands Mss. D/4. I am grateful to the Trustees of the Broadlands Archive Trust for permission to quote from this collection. Throughout this article I have referred to the events in India during 1857–8 as the Mutiny. This was the term within which events were perceived in Britain, despite Disraeli's unsuccessful attempt in July 1857 to broaden the terms of debate. Note should be made of the fact that some historians of India prefer to speak of a war of independence or rebellion.
2 A parliamentarian who gave eloquent expression to popular outrage was the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury. See Hodder, EdwinThe Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury K. G. 1 vol. ed. (London, 1887) pp. 544–47Google Scholar.
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11 PRO, Granville to Canning, September 9, 1857. Granville Mss., 30/29/21/2 fol. 32. Clarendon feared that “if great disasters occur…the first thing that John Bull will as usual do is to look for a victim and that victim will be the government who is more to be charged with want of energy and for having lagged behind public opinion and for not having availed itself of the readiness which the country has manifested.” National Register of Archives, Clarendon to Palmerston, September 1, 1857. Broadlands Mss. GC/CL 1083. Argyll feared that sufficiently active and vigorous measures were not “being carried into effect with the necessary expedition.” Argyll to Palmerston. September 29, 1857. Broadlands Mss. GC/AR 16.
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15 Leeds Record Office, Palmerston to Canning, October 11, 1857, Canning Mss. 2/10.
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147 National Register of Archives, Palmerston Diary, May 21, 1858, Broadlands Mss. D/18.
148 University of Durham, Grey Diary, May 20, 1858, Grey Mss. C3/21.
149 BL, Graham to Aberdeen, May 28, 1858, Aberdeen Mss. 43192 fol. 218.
150 It has often been an assumption underlying received narrative that Derby's second ministry, because it was in a minority, was inevitably destined to a short-lived existence and that the consequent Liberal consolidation that occurred in 1859 was thus a natural outcome of party feeling. This is to ignore much contemporary speculation. Palmerston's ascendancy by the summer of 1859 was neither certain nor necessary.
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165 It is this particular strategic impulse that led to the years 1859–1865 being referred to as a period of ‘party truce’ or ‘party logomachy’ as Lord Campbell described it.
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