NDIAN HEROES AND THEIR MONUMENTS IN WESTMINISTER ABBEY.

Kumara Times, Issue 928, 20 September 1879, Page 4

NDIAN HEROES AND THEIR MONUMENTS IN WESTMINISTER ABBEY.

The following excellent artile ia from the columns of the Daily Telegraph “In the western aisle of the north transept of the Abbey—a little aside from the flood of purple and amber lights which fall from the great rose window, and In undisturbed earth, but among many a memorial of departed valous and merit—they have dug the grave for John, Lord Lawrence of the Punjaub. Looking around the little shadowy pit which now* contains the mortal remains of him whose stout spirt ruled the Five Waters liked an uncrowned king, and helped in the black days of the mutiny to save India, we see the dead man will lie in goodly company. Here in the north aisle is Sir Fowell Buxton in marble, and close by are the ashes of Follett, Francis Buller, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and Horner. Near at hand reposes the ‘dauntless, loyal, virtuous Beauclerk,’ who at Carthagena in 1740 would not suffer his wounds to be dressed till he had communicated his orders to his first lieutenant, ‘ to fight his ship to the last extremity ’; Cobden’s name shines forth in the vicinity, and but little removed from the slab which will cover the Indian Viceroy the monuments or tombs present themselves of Chatham, Mansfield, Fox, Grattan, Pitt, Castlereagb, Wilberforce, Canning, Peel, and Palmerston. Hard by are the great musicians, Arnold, Purcell, Blow, and Croft, of each of whom it may be said, as is written on one of their tombs, ‘ He is gone to that blessed place where only his harmony can be exceeded,” All around are dead kings, queens, heroes, and magnates of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Hanoverian days, great captains and mariners; artists, poets, men of letters, travellers, scholars in science, theologians, physicians, historians, and noble lords and ladies, the great company of whom, if they could rise from their calm sleep and revisit earth together, would surely furnish a whole world with beauty and learning, wit and valour, wisdom and mighty parts. “ Those palm-trees and sculptured turbans on Admiral Watson’s monument recall the stout sailor who, in 1756-57, with Clive, avenged the horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta, and captured Ohandernagore, taking his ships up the river, and laying them alongside the enemy’s ramparts in a manner which is still the wonder and talk of the pilots of the Hooghly. Side by side with Clive, this great sailor, who sleeps by Ganges, laid deep and strong the foundations of our Indian Empire, battering the French defences with his carronade, and clearing the way for the soldier-civilians march to Plassey’s field along with the glorious 39th Regiment, which still bears the legend upon its colors of • Primus in Indis,’ Conqueror, together with Clive; of the cruel Suraj-ood-Dowlah and of Bussy, and subduer of the Mahratta pirates, Admiral Watson leads the way in the procession of Eastern heroes. General Lawrence’s monument in close neighborhood—bearing, perhaps, the name of an ancestral connection—has upon the famous bill of Trichinoply. which all the efforts of Dupleix and the French could not keep from that sturdy warrior, illustrious afterwards for his defence of Madras. These two men, with another great companion, whose memorial is not far off, Sir Eyre Coote, defeated Bussy and Lally, and broke practically, if not finally, the dangerous ambition of France in the East Indies. Coote’s monument carries on it a Mahratta and the figure of an elephant—tokens of the bold soldier who in 1760 gained the fierce fight of Wandewash, which gave the Company Arcol, the Coromandel Coast, and finally Pondicherry. Coote, to, was the hero of the war with Hyder Ali. redeeming the great disaster under Bailie in 1780, and winning that famous day of Cuddaldore, wherein, as a historian says, every Englishman ‘ fought as if the fate of the flag depended upon his single efforts.’ The very name of Coote was tantamount with victory in those days, and his death at Madras, in 1783, just as he was rejoining his army, was mourned like a defeat. Clive and Lawrence, amid this noble band, were especially comrades; and when the City of London offered the great Governor a diamond-hilted sword, he refused it till one had been presented also to Lawrence. “Sir John Malcolm, great wk)h pen as with sword, and Sir George Staunton are here, one present by his relics, one by his memorial; and under the aisle-roof the honoured name of Sir Stamford Raffles shows on the marble. No man knew better the peoples, politics, and languages of the Eastern Archipelago, and he it was who sailed with Lord Minto to wrest Java from the French and Dutch in that extraordinary campaign when ‘ the Dutch Settlements were gained before tiffin time,’ and the British took as many prisoners as their whole force amounted to. But the greatest of all Anglo names is nigh at hand. Here is the cenotaph of Warren Hastings, of whom Macauly wrote that only one cemetery was fit to contain his remains.’ What talk there would be in the eternal leisure of the departed—if any talk were at all—between this great shade and John Lawrence. Both were called in their time ‘ Saviours of India,’ but the great Governor who daunted Tippoo, the Nizam, and the five Mahaattu Princes does not sleep in the Abbey ; his bones lie at Daylesford by the parish church. “ Farther away, in the shadows of the Abbey—where the stained glass window gleams over the tomb of the gentle and beloved Lady Augusta Stanley, worthily reposing near the kings and queens of England, and by the side of a brother of a French aovereign- the life and death of

the able and amiable Lord Elgin are memorialised, who succeeded Canning in the Viceroyalty, and died at Dhurrutnsala, in the Himalayas, in 1863, adding new lustre to his great family name. The period thus marked includes all the splendid and valorous memories which attach to the names of Clyde and Outram, And not memories alone of these bold and faithful servants of the State haunt the solemn shadows ; their mortal remains repose in its earth, and these two comrades in the tremendous events of 1857 at Cawnpore and Lucknow are quiet now together in the fellowship of death. James Outram is buried here, one of the companions of Lawrence, the gentle, fearless, faithful Outram—the Bayard of India—who in his leisure time shot more tigers and tamed more savages than any man of his day, and rode to battle with a walking-stick in his hand, “ being innocent of fear and danger.” So generous a gentleman, too, that he would not take from Havelock’s hand in the nick and crisis of glory the splendid credit of relieving Lucknow, but marched in there side by side with his subordinate and junior, merely fighting as a volunteer. Lord Clyde it was, as everyone knows, who, as Sir Colin Campbell, relieved the brave pair of them after the hard fighting of the Secunderabagh and the bridge, but who in Britain can forget the painful and glorious memories linked with these days and these noble names ? “ Even so the gallary of great Indians at rest in the Abbey around John Lawrence is not exhausted. Pollock is here Sir George—the colleague of Nott in those dark days when the Kyber Pass, where Yakoob Khan lately made his submission, was red with British blood. His vigorous spirit forced the Khyber, relieved Jellalabad ; anl, when the fitful mind of Ellenborough ordered the evacuation of Afghanistan, this stout and sagacious general managed to save our honor by waiting till the GovernorGeneral changed his policy again. ‘There must be wisdom with the dead,’ otherwise Lord Lawrence and Sir George would hardly be at one in the other world on the subject of Indian frontier politics. There ought to be—we think there is—somewhere in this Abbey a memorial of Herbert Edwardes, the gallant Lieutenant of Bunnoo, who grappled so pluckily with the treachery of Moolraj, and, though only a subaltern, won two great battles —Kinayree and Suddoosain—quite unaided. Edwards, too, in 1857, was the bold and tenacious associate of John Lawrence in crushing rebellion in the Punjaub, and sending forward succours to the force beleaguering Delhi. Outside this same aisle where Lawrence will lie rises, moreover, the decorated granite column commemorating those Westminister scholars who fell in the time of the Sepoy Mutiny, the honored names upon which list of death and duty are further recorded by the softly colored window in the north transept which makes the light of heaven their funeral herald.”