[Illustration:  BRIGADIER-GENERAL SIR HENRY LAWRENCE, K.C.B. From a photograph taken at Lucknow.]

In no part of India was there greater need for the services of a strong, enlightened, and sympathetic Ruler and Statesman.  Difficult as were the positions in which many men in authority were placed in 1857, none was more difficult than that in which Henry Lawrence found himself when he took over the Chief Commissionership of Oudh in the spring of that year.  His colleagues in the administration were at feud with each other, and by their ignorance of the proper methods of dealing with the people they had succeeded in alienating all classes.

While Lawrence was engaged in pouring oil on these troubled waters, and in earning the gratitude of the people by modifying the previous year’s undue assessment, signs appeared of the disaffection, which had begun amongst the troops at Barrackpore, having spread to the cantonments in Oudh.  Sir Henry met this new trouble in the same intelligent and conciliatory spirit as that in which he had dealt with his civil difficulties.  He summoned to a durbar some Native officers who had displayed a very proper feeling of loyalty by arresting several fanatics who had tried to tamper with the soldiery, and he liberally rewarded them, pointing out at the same time in forcible language the disgrace to a soldier of being faithless to his salt.  But while doing everything in his power to keep the Natives loyal, and with a certain amount of success, he did not neglect to take every possible precaution.

When first he heard of the outbreak at Meerut, he telegraphed to the Governor-General advising him to send for British troops to China and Ceylon, and to call on the Nepalese to assist; at the same time he applied to Lord Canning for, and obtained, the rank of Brigadier-General, which gave him military as well as civil control—­a very necessary measure, for none of the senior military officers in Oudh were men to be relied upon; indeed, as in so many other places, they had to be effaced when the troubles began.

Very early in the day Henry Lawrence commenced his preparations for the defence of the Residency; he cleared the ground of all cover in its immediate vicinity, as far as it was possible to do so; he fortified it, mounted guns, stored ammunition, powder, and firewood; arranged for a proper supply of water; collected food, which proved sufficient, not only for the original number of refugees, but for the 3,000 additional mouths belonging to Outram and Havelock’s force; in fact, he did everything which forethought and ingenuity could suggest to enable the garrison to hold out in what he foresaw would be a long and deadly struggle against fearful odds.  There was no fort, as there was at Agra, capable of sheltering every European in Oudh, and strong enough to defy any number of mutineers, nor was there, as at Cawnpore, a well-stocked and strongly-fortified magazine to depend upon.  But Henry Lawrence was not cast down by the difficulties which surrounded him; he was fully alive to the danger, but he recognized that his best, indeed, his only, chance of delaying the inevitable rebellion until (as he hoped) assistance might arrive, was to show a bold front.