(vide page 174.)
In May, 1881, General Lionel Showers published a pamphlet containing some correspondence he had had with me on the subject of the insufficient notice I had given of his exploits in the earlier editions of my history of the Indian Mutiny. The first and second letters of that correspondence speak for themselves. The first contained the complaint of General Showers; the second, my answer to that complaint. The third letter reiterated his shallow claims, and ended, characteristically, with a sneer at myself. Utterly indifferent to the sarcasms which were the natural consequence of my refusal to endorse his shadowy claims, I declined to bandy personalities with General Showers, and left his second letter unnoticed.
In the pamphlet of 1881 no attack was made upon the late Sir George Lawrence. Sir George Lawrence was alive, and the Lawrences were still a power; but General Showers had not forgotten that, at an unexampled crisis in the history of British India, he had served under Sir George Lawrence, and that Sir George Lawrence had recorded his opinion that, in that crisis, he had found him, “when every other officer hurried to his post,” loitering at Abu and en route, neglectful of his orders, and guilty of repeated acts of disobedience and defiance of his authority. He waited, then, till that illustrious man should no longer be alive to reply to him; then, conveniently “clearing out a long-disused cabinet,” he proceeded to concoct “a missing chapter of the Indian Mutiny,” characterised by praise of himself and depreciation of his former chief. I say nothing of his remarks regarding myself; I plead guilty to the charge of declining to distort the truth in order to fabricate a hero out of inferior clay.
With respect to the conduct of General Showers during the Mutiny, I may repeat here what I have written in a footnote in the text, that the question was fully disposed of by the Governor-General of India in Council (Lord Canning), in letter No. 727, dated February 24, 1860. That letter thus concludes:
“On a full review of all the proceedings set forth in the correspondence, and especially of the particular instances above adverted to, his Excellency cannot avoid the conclusion that Captain Showers, notwithstanding his good abilities and his zeal for the public service, does not possess either the judgment or the temper required in an officer entrusted with political duties. His conduct has been marked by unjustifiable opposition to the orders of his superior, needless disputes with other officers, and a desire to
meddle with the duties which do not belong to him. He has failed to profit by the warning formerly addressed to him on this head. His Excellency therefore dismisses Captain Showers from the Rajputana Agency, and directs that his services be placed at the disposal of the Military Department. You will accordingly take measures to relieve Captain Showers at once.”
General Showers has the audacity to argue that that decision, which was final, and was never altered, was virtually cancelled by a letter addressed to him by the Secretary of State the 14th April, 1862. But what are the facts? Major Showers, as he then was, had represented to the Secretary of State that, in consequence of the non-confirmation by the Government of India of his appointment as Political Agent in Mewar, he had been subjected to a considerable pecuniary loss. The reply of the Secretary of State ran, with reference to that point, as follows:
“Adverting to the exceptional circumstances of the times, to the claims necessarily made on the hospitality of officers in the position you then held, and to the particular facts which you have stated, Sir Charles Wood is willing to take this part of your case into his favourable consideration. He will, therefore, call the attention of the Government of India to the subject, and to request that, if, as he believes, the full salary of the Mewar Agency has not been disbursed to any other officer, the difference between the allowances of the officiating and the confirmed appointment, during the period of your employment as Political Agent at Mewar, be disbursed to you.”
The sense of this decision is too plain, one would think, to be capable of being distorted. The Secretary of State says, in so many words, to Major Showers: “We will not punish you by fine as well as by dismissal. You probably incurred expenses which your full salary was intended to meet; therefore you shall have that full salary.” To those acquainted with the financial rules of the Government of India, even this explanation is superfluous. By those rules an officer who may not be confirmed in an acting appointment is entitled only to the half-staff salary. To disburse to him the full-staff pay the sanction of the Secretary of State is necessary; and when, as in the case of General Showers, exceptional circumstances occur, such sanction is rarely withheld.
The claim, then, made by General Showers, that the grant of his full-staff pay, accompanied as it was by an allusion to his “admitted zeal and ability,” cleansed him from the condemnation of his conduct during the Mutiny by the Government of India, is, then, simply impudent. Nor would it be necessary to notice it further but that the impudence, set forth with all the hectoring of a Captain Bobadil, is liable to be accepted as truth by the untravelled Englishman, to whom the antecedents of General Showers, and the measure of him taken in India, may not be known.
It is by the character a man has borne in the country where he has spent the best years of his life that his worth or worthlessness must be
judged; not by the veneer he may assume after he has retired from the scene of his life-labours. Now, General Showers spent all the best years of his life in India. His character was well known in that country, alike by those in the service as by those out of it. Let us see how he was regarded there.
Perhaps the best mode of ascertaining this fact is to record the impression of him which his recent book, published in 1888, has called forth. The leading paper of the North-western Provinces is ‘The Pioneer.’ The following are the terms in which that able and honest journal reviews General Showers’s latest work, ‘A Missing Chapter of the Indian Mutiny190:
“This brochure is, in the main, an attempt on the part of General Showers to vindicate himself, his action, and his policy as Political Resident in Mewar (Udaipur) from the blame, tacit and expressed, cast upon them at the time by the late General Sir George St. Patrick Lawrence. The vindication comes rather late in the day, and certainly loses all value and force from having been delayed until long after the death of the officer against whom it is mainly directed. Colonel Malleson, who, in his history of the Mutiny, took Sir George Lawrence’s view of the matter, comes in for some harsh and bitter remarks, backed by a manipulated quotation from Shakespeare: He, however, is to the fore, and, should he think it worth while, which is hardly likely, can ably protect himself. Against Sir George Lawrence, General Showers will hardly be allowed to score an ex-parte decree. General Showers, moreover, states (p. 191) that, having been removed by the Local Government for acting without orders, presumably upon report by General Lawrence, he was restored to office by the Secretary of State on appeal. He gives no copies, either of the original report or of either of these orders, though he prints copies of several other papers far less to the point than these would have been. If General Showers left the Court without a stain upon his character, surrounded by his friends,’ where the necessity for this long-delayed whitewash? General Showers’ appeal was apparently made in February, 1862, and presumably his restoration took place in that year. (Somewhat characteristically, he gives, as the grounds of his restoration by the Secretary of State, an extract from his memorandum of appeal.) It is not clear, therefore, why – sixteen years thereafter, when his opponent and many of the other actors in those scenes have passed away – he has now seen fit to open up this matter in so polemical a fashion. The necessity for the present work is the less apparent as General Showers claims to have ‘conclusively disposed of the matter’ by the publication of a counterblast to Colonel Malleson in 1881.
“Captain Showers placed on record, at the Board of Control, India Office (sic), in the spring of 1856, a memorandum in which, while criticising the annexation policy of Lord Dalhousie, he foretold the Mutiny as a result
thereof. A copy of this memorandum he brought out to India in the same year and laid before Lord Canning. It is unfortunate that so weighty a document as this must have been, and one so useful to future historiographers, has been lost to the world. The original is lost, the copy given to Lord Canning is not forthcoming, and the author of so important a State paper seems to have kept no copy of it. General Showers states, in words given as Lord Canning’s own, that that statesman, while convinced, or nearly so, by the views set forth in this paper, refrained from acting upon them because what he (Captain Showers) advocates would involve a reversal of the policy which I am sent to carry out, viz., the consolidation of the Empire (?) through the absorption of the Native States.’ The Italics and query are our own. We take liberty very gravely to doubt if Lord Canning ever permitted himself to say anything of the sort. Not only in this sentence, but in several other places, General Showers antedates the ‘Empire’ of India. He more than once styles the Queen of 1857–58 by her recently assumed Imperial title, as when he speaks of ‘assumption by the Queen-Empress of direct rule over India at the latter end of 1858.’
“We learn from this work (p. 8) that it was to Captain Showers that we owed the first inception of the design of the diversion of the troops of the China Expedition to the aid of India. We had been under the impression that that idea had first emanated, whence so many heroic ideas sprang, from Sir Henry Lawrence, who advised Lord Canning somewhat to that effect immediately after hearing of the events of the 11th May at Mirath.
“Into the controversial matter, which is clearly the main motif of the work, we need not enter further. As a contribution to the history of the Mutiny and Rebellion of 1857–58 there is little that is new. The title is a misnomer. There is no ‘missing chapter’ of that time which is now told for the first time. The only things ‘missing’ – and as to those we have to take General Showers’ authority – are Captain Showers’ despatches of the time, or some of them, which he roundly charges General Lawrence with having burked or misrepresented. The historical part of the work is an account of the occurrences of the Mutiny in Mewar, principally at Udaipur and Nimach and the neighbourhood, which has all been told and recorded, officially and otherwise, far more ably and clearly than it is recounted in this book; for General Showers’ is not the pen of a ready writer. Some local touches and episodes, both before and behind the scenes, such as could only be given by a leading local actor in the drama, there undoubtedly are. In particular, the staunch and universally recognised loyalty of the House of Mewar, in the person of the Maharaj Rana Sarup Singh, is set forth more precisely, and with greater insistence and detail, than we remember to have seen elsewhere. Indeed, one of the chief raisons d’être of the book is the establishment of the position, that the active loyalty of the Maharaj Rana in those troublous and trying times, and the powerful material aid given by the Durbar to the British arms, were mainly due to the policy of Captain C. L. Showers, which set aside and was, ab initio and throughout, antagonistic to that previously
pursued and subsequently advocated by his predecessor and thereafter chief, Brigadier-General George St. Patrick Lawrence.”
But this is not all. General Showers had apparently forgotten that, although the Old Lion was dead, there were young lions ready and resolute to vindicate their father’s fame. One of these, Mr. A. J. Lawrence, as soon as he read the review I have just quoted from the ‘Pioneer,’ hurled at the presumptuous libeller of his sire’s name the sharp-pointed javelin I have extracted from that paper. Addressing the editor of the ‘ Pioneer, Mr. Lawrence wrote:
“Your notice of General Showers’ attack on my late father requires some notice. I gather from the little mention made of this book in my letters from home that neither my brother nor any of Sir George’s old assistants think Showers worth powder and shot. He was re-employed in Gwaliar in 1864, and after six months was dropped. The Gwaliar officials have probably a warm remembrance of him. Most native states where he served found him expensive, and, if my recollection is right, the attack on Nimbhara and the Tonk intrigue were the cause of his leaving Rajputana, and of his (long-delayed) abuse of Sir George Lawrence. Showers had a certain cleverness and facility with his pen, which, however, by your account, seems to have left him; but he was vain, unscrupulous, and self-laudatory. Refused employment by the Foreign Office, not wanted by the Army, he did general duty at Peshawar for some time. I have the best authority for knowing the opinion there held of him. He offered himself, in Lord Mayo’s time, as a member of the Legislative Council, on the supposed strength of his acquaintance with the criminal tribes of India. Great was Lord Mayo’s surprise and indignation on hearing of this suggestion. Showers subsequently lived, and tried to raise cotton, at Dehra Dun; and his last appearance in India was an unsuccessful application for exemption of stamp duty. And this is the man who presumes, five years after my father’s death, and thirty years after the time of which he professes to be the only true historian, to attack a man with whom, when Lord Lawrence came out as Viceroy, and my father was with him in Calcutta, he was willing and anxious to renew his acquaintance.
“Allahabad, 20th July (Signed) A. J. LAWRENCE.”
In this letter Mr. Lawrence describes his father’s assailant as “vain, unscrupulous, and self-laudatory.” The description will be accepted by all who knew General Showers in India. In that country the qualities denoted by those adjectives were constantly leading him into hot water. In a word, they did much to ruin his career. I much fear that in this, the last of his many warfares – all of his own seeking – they have not contributed to his reputation with posterity. It can scarcely be a consolation to General Showers to know that, whilst his two self-laudatory books are but little known now, and will be absolutely unknown to the generation that will come after, this self-sought exposé of himself will be read wherever the English language is spoken.
190. ‘A Missing Chapter of the Indian Mutiny:’ by Lieutenant-General Charles Lionel Showers. Longmans, Green and Co., London and New York.
This collection transcribed by Chris Gage