Raven Castle: Charles Napier in India 1844-1851

'A distant and perilous empire' an ex Governor-General, Ellenborough, described British India in 1845. Letters took three months to go to and from the home Government; and plenty could happen in three months. Though disease killed more Britons than did war, the peril of mutiny was real. The East India Company that still ruled India had fallen from its earlier splendours and seemed chiefly concerned with its dividends, maintaining these by what Charles Napier (never mealy-mouthed) called 'a dirty parsimonious defrauding of the sepoy'. He was not the only one to warn the authorities of impending mutiny - Richard Burton warned urgently, Brigadier Hearsey, Colonel Colin Campbell, Major Hugh Troup warned, and a host of others could see what was coming unless the system were changed. This is the story of one man's efforts to change it, largely unavailing; but many more of those larger-than-life figures cross the landscape of the Raj - John Jacob, Richard Burton, the Lawrences, Havelock, Hardinge, John Nicholson and James Outram. From home are heard the voices of Wellington, Peel, Ripon, Shaftesbury, Thackeray, and Charles's historian brother, William Napier - the noise of party politics often several bars behind the music. This book tells of the Hill campaign that sparked off the poem 'The Red Thread of Honour', of the battles of the Punjab, of the vital twelve years that led up to the terrible disaster of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and its aftermath, which not all the good government of the next ninety years could wholly efface from either British or Indian consciousness.