Farzana Read online

  Such a blunderingly transparent forgery helps to explain why the British – and almost everyone else – dismissed Louis Balthazar as ‘too silly to be dreaded’.27 It is also indicative of Louis Balthazar’s greater blunder. He was hopelessly underestimating the crumpled figure spreadeagled on the gun carriage outside his window. Though he admitted fearing the ‘ability and intrigues of his mother-in-law’, he had not begun to get the measure of either.

  The Sardhana mutiny erupted in late May 1795, the peak of the Doab summer when temperatures regularly climb to over 45°C. The air shimmers in the intense heat and dry winds from the deserts of Rajasthan fill every crevice with grit. Farzana was left chained to the gun carriage in the middle of the parade ground for nearly a week in what amounted to an open-air furnace. Bedraggled, bloodstained, covered in dust, her lips cracked and her skin parched and her wound undressed, she was allowed nothing to eat or drink and would surely have died of dehydration but for the courage of a maidservant who crept out during the night to bring her food and water.

  During the daylight hours no one went near her. Louis Balthazar had sworn to shoot on sight anyone who tried – and he might just have done so. The mutineers thus faced the threat of immediate punishment if they helped her survive but the prospect of still worse punishment if she did survive. On the whole it was better she die.

  Farzana had other ideas. Her situation looked desperate; her career was in ruins, her life in the balance. Yet she was never one to despair. She had escaped the brothels of Chauri Bazaar, weathered Reinhardt’s death, kept the brigade together, rescued the emperor and propped up his tottering empire. She was not going to be defeated by the wretched Louis Balthazar. On the very first night of her ordeal she had whispered instructions to her maidservant to send for George Thomas. It seems not even to have crossed her mind that he might fail her. All she had to do was to somehow stay alive until he appeared.

  A TRUE CAVALIER

  Thomas was still gallivanting around Hindustan in the employ of Appa Khande Rao, ‘pursuing enemies through jungles’, ‘holding off bands of desperate men against overwhelming odds’, ‘subjugating revolted districts’, ‘capturing valuable booty’ and of course ‘reducing forts and cutting throats’. ‘The Governor [Appa Khande Rao] was so delighted with the thorough way his work was being performed that he presented him with several valuable presents including an elephant.’28

  Lately the Irishman had been directed to lead his little army against a band of Sikhs who were ‘committing great depredations in the vicinity of Saharanpur’. This was a familiar enemy in territory well known to Thomas. He had led similar excursions against the Sikhs whilst in Farzana’s employ and he had been personally involved in the obliteration of the Saharanpur fortress of Ghausgarh after Ghulam Qadir, its Rohilla occupant, had met his deserved but unspeakable death.

  The Sikhs, for their part, knew all about Jehazi-sahib. In Thomas’s own words, ‘he had on more than one occasion given them samples of his method of fighting’29 and they had no stomach for more. Thus the moment they heard the fiery Irishman was coming ‘they effected a rapid retreat into their own territory’. As a reward for this easy victory, Thomas had been granted the revenues of the district of Karnaul. Less than 60 miles from Sardhana, though west of the Jumna, Karnaul was no more in Appa Khande Rao’s gift than Jhajjar (now George-garh) had been. Thomas nevertheless began pummelling its reluctant population into accepting his authority, and it was while doing so that Farzana’s cry for help caught up with him.

  Eight years later, when reliving the story of the Sardhana mutiny for his biographer William Francklin, Thomas made a point of stressing the desperate nature of Farzana’s appeal. ‘In a manner most abject and desponding … she affirmed that her only dependence was on him [i.e., Thomas] and implored him to come to her assistance.’ Farzana had not made a habit of betraying her need for Thomas. That she did so now was a measure of her plight. Mutiny severed the unwritten bond between a mercenary commander and those who ‘took his [or her] salt’. No self-respecting officer, least of all Thomas, could afford to ignore it. Farzana’s appeal was therefore to his honour as much as his heart. Lovers they had been; comrades in adventure they still were. Relishing his role as an officer and gentleman, Thomas rose to the occasion, though not without delighting in Farzana’s equally improbable casting as a feisty damsel in distress.

  Postponing the subjugation of Karnaul, which he did not really want anyway, he mustered his men and ‘hastened by forced marches to the rescue’. The Jumna was crossed without difficulty and the distance to Sardhana was covered inside two days. Setting up camp at a village just north of the town, he planned his rescue attempt. It was nearly three years since he had ridden off without so much as a backward glance and he was unsure how much influence he would still have with the brigade. But he knew that unless he could win over some of the mutineers, ‘not only would his exertions be fruitless, the Princess herself would be exposed to the greatest personal danger’.30

  Confident that word of his arrival had already reached Sardhana, Thomas issued a public proclamation to the effect that, unless the begum was immediately released and reinstated in her authority, ‘those who resisted must expect no mercy’. For good measure he added, quite fallaciously, that he was acting on instructions from Scindia’s heir, Daulat Rao. According to one of several spies sent to Sardhana to gauge the brigade’s reaction, the initial reaction to this announcement was promising. News that Jehazi-sahib was in the vicinity had persuaded a small group of Indian sepoys to swear undying loyalty to Farzana and then attempt to take Louis Balthazar prisoner. Unfortunately, the spy continued, this had failed, and a counter-revolution had declared that accepting the authority of ‘Sumroo’s son’ would be a prerequisite for any negotiations over releasing Farzana from her chains.

  ‘Thomas now determined on a coup de main’, says the military historan Herbert Compton. Escorted by a bodyguard of fifty trusted cavalry, and ordering 400 of his infantry to follow at a distance, he galloped straight to the Sardhana palace. There Louis Balthazar, fooled by the paltry size of Thomas’s escort into thinking he had the detested Irishman at his mercy, immediately ordered the Sardhana Brigade to attack. The mutineers hesitated, momentarily paralysed as much by guilt as by any reluctance to confront their former hero. Thomas took advantage of the uncertainty to make a typically passionate appeal. ‘If’, said he, ‘the Begum should die under the torture of mind and body to which you are subjecting her, the vakil [i.e., Daulat Rao Scindia] will resume the lands assigned for your payment, and disband a force so disorderly and so little likely to be of any use to him or the Emperor.’31

  As he spoke, clouds of dust churned up by his shuffling infantrymen were seen to rise along the wooded horizon. The impression was that of a mighty host. ‘Believing the whole Maratha army was at hand, the mutineers sought safety in a third revolution, deposed [Louis] Balthazar nemine contradicente, and tendered their humble submission to Thomas.’32

  Leaving her servants to release Farzana, George Thomas set about restoring the Sardhana Brigade to some kind of order. He lambasted the shame-faced sepoys for their disloyalty and threatened with immediate execution any European officers who, if sober enough to do so, did not return to their duties forthwith. He tempered his threats with a promise to make good any arrears in their pay, and even provided a substantial advance out of his own pocket.

  Surprisingly, no heads rolled as a result of the mutiny. But Thomas made the officers draw up a covenant swearing ‘that they would henceforward obey the Begum with all their hearts and souls, and recognize no other person whomsoever as commander’. It would appear that Jean-Rémy Saleur was still the only one who could sign his name in full on this document; the rest, according to William Sleeman, ‘to show their superior learning, put their initials, or what they used as such, for some knew only two or three letters of the alphabet which they put down, though they happened not to be their real initials’.33

  Having received Saleu
r’s assurances that far from being part of the mutiny he had done everything in his power to prevent it, he appointed the elderly Frenchman as Farzana’s deputy. Louis Balthazar was arrested, stripped of all his possessions and sent under guard to Delhi. And by the time Farzana had recovered sufficiently from her ordeal to send for George Thomas, he had vanished back into the byways of Hindustan.

  12

  A SALUTORY EXPERIENCE

  As much speculation has been provoked by Farzana’s apparent suicide attempt as by her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Then and since, sympathizers have been convinced that she genuinely intended to kill herself. Despair over her disastrous marriage to Levassoult, plus the knowledge that her beloved brigade had turned against her, seemed reason enough; and the attempt only failed because she lacked the courage to repeat the blow. Those of a romantic disposition go further, casting Farzana and Levassoult as Romeo and Juliet; unable to live without each other and under threat from all sides, the lovers had made a suicide pact; when she saw her adored husband fall into the hands of enemies who would show him no mercy, Farzana ‘fulfilled her part of the compact’ by stabbing herself; and though the wound was not fatal, she had fainted from shock or loss of blood and was unable to repeat it. The screams of her maidservant and the sight of her bloodstained shawl nevertheless convinced Levassoult that she was dead and, ‘true to his vow’, he put his gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  But these tragic and compelling explanations cut no ice with George Thomas. As her long-time employee, sometime lover, boon companion and occasional foe, the Irishman probably knew Farzana better than anyone, and he was convinced that the whole episode was a charade. Desperate to get rid of a husband who had brought her nothing but trouble and of whom she had long since tired, Farzana, claimed Thomas, had seen the mutiny as offering her a convenient solution to an impossible situation. She had persuaded Levassoult to agree to a suicide pact with no intention of carrying it through; she had talked him into flight and had timed it so that they would soon be caught; and her maidservant had been her accomplice, primed first to scream and then to brandish a shawl daubed with blood not from a fatal stab wound but from a shallow cut made by ‘running the point of her poignard across her breast’. Thinking her dead and, to Thomas’s jaundiced eye, more terrified of suffering an excruciating fate at the hands of the mutineers than of facing life without her, Levassoult had pulled the trigger. Farzana’s ingenious deception had thus succeeded, although her subsequent plight on the parade ground had presumably not been part of it.

  It never occurred to either George Thomas or William Francklin, to whom he told the story some six years later, that there was anything reprehensible in what Farzana had done. Instead of condemning her for hatching such a devious and cold-hearted scheme, they admired her for having the courage to carry it out. Gratuitous brutality was commonplace. Beheadings, blindings, garrottings, hangings, mutilations, dismemberings, disembowellings – nothing was taboo. Success – even survival – depended on a willingness to stop at nothing, to get in first and do one’s worst. In the context of the times, the suicide of a friendless French gun founder, however contrived, seemed trivial to the point of irrelevance.

  Her courage, on the other hand – well that was remarkable. Not because the risks had been so great (although her plan could indeed have gone badly wrong – and nearly did), but because Farzana was a woman. William Francklin, William Sleeman, James Skinner, and George Thomas all knew her personally, and all paid her identically the same compliment. Higher praise no gentleman adventurer could imagine; ‘she was endowed by nature with masculine intrepidity’, (Francklin); ‘she had uncommon sagacity and a masculine resolution’, (Sleeman); ‘her uncommon ability and discretion were united to a masculine firmness and intrepidity,’ (Skinner).

  Courage was a masculine quality. Men were expected to be intrepid, but a fearless woman was an anomaly, a phenomenon to be marvelled at – and not just by men. On meeting Farzana in Sardhana some years after the mutiny, Anne Deane, the wife of a colonel in the British army, was moved to corroborate the male chorus: ‘this woman has an uncommon share of natural abilities, with a strength of mind rarely met with, particularly in a female’.1

  Although she had in the end survived her ordeal, the mutiny and its immediate aftermath had been a salutory experience. She had never imagined that she would be taken prisoner or treated so harshly. She had come close to death and had dangerously underestimated the depth of hostility in the brigade against both herself and Levassoult. It was a warning. Under no circumstances could she take the loyalty of her army for granted. ‘Learning to conquer the impulse that sometimes leads a female sovereign to make one courtier her master, at the expense of making all the rest her enemies, the astute woman never again allowed the weakness of her sex to imperil her sovereignty,’2 says Keene.

  She arranged for Levassoult’s remains to be quietly buried just outside the walls of the palace compound, from where they would later be moved to the grounds of her church. H.G. Keene, who visited the churchyard in 1880, reported finding ‘the resting place of poor Levassoult, with an inscription in his native French recording that he died 18 October 1795* agé de 47 ans, requiescat in pace - prier pour son âme.’ She confirmed Jean-Rémy Saleur in command of the brigade, and demonstrated her commitment to its future by telling him to add another battalion to its strength. Then she headed for Delhi to repair the damage she had done to her relationship with the emperor Shah Alam.

  George Thomas, meanwhile, had returned to Jhajjar and the service of Appa Khande Rao. Farzana was probably relieved by his discreet withdrawal. There was too much history between them. In 1792 she had spared his life when he might have been hanged for rebellion, a gesture that had felt gratifyingly seigniorial. But when, in extremis, she had been forced to plead for his help the balance had shifted. He had saved not only her life but her livelihood. She owed him a debt of gratitude that she would never be able to repay; nor would she ever be able to forget the humiliating circumstances under which she had incurred it. Far better then that he stay away.

  A FREEBOOTER PURE AND SIMPLE

  But her resolve to banish the memory of George Thomas became harder to keep as news of his exploits filtered back to Delhi. In the months that followed the Sardhana mutiny Thomas’s star rose as high as her own. His campaigns on behalf of Appa Khande Rao were so successful that his grateful employer ‘adopted the Irish sailor as his son, augmenting his force, and endowing him with lands (always belonging to others) estimated to yield one hundred and fifty thousand Rupees a year’.3 Though punctilious in collecting these ample revenues, Thomas showed little inclination to involve himself in the administration of his new estates. Nor, despite the fact that Maria had by now presented him with a third son, Jacob, was he inclined to settle down and embrace the role of paterfamilias.

  Fighting was his trade. He was only truly happy when in the saddle, sword in hand, sleeves rolled back, hurtling into combat at the head of his augmented army. With 2,700 sepoys, twenty officers and fourteen pieces of artillery, Thomas had become a force to be reckoned with. Repeatedly called upon to foil Sikh expansion into the Doab, he was also summoned to Rajasthan to join the wider Maratha confederacy in the perennial struggle to subdue the ever-restive Jaipur ruler. This meant co-operating with de Boigne. Luckily, as a Savoyard, de Boigne did not really qualify as French and was anyway sworn never to fight against the British. Like Farzana, de Boigne came to value Thomas’s prowess and got on well with him. But the relationship was short-lived, and by the end of 1795 Thomas’s career was once again in free fall.

  Although de Boigne had done his best to support Daulat Rao, Mahadji Scindia’s heir was still no more than ‘a weak, self-indulgent, silly boy’. The effort of sustaining Daulat Rao’s position as head of the senior Maratha house and managing his vast military machine had drained all the Savoyard’s remaining strength. ‘I have had so bad state of health these six months that with the greatest difficulty have I been able to
attend to the duties of my station,’ he wrote to a friend in Calcutta. It was time to hang up his spurs and, not for the first time, resign his commission. Accordingly, he promoted his second-in-command to replace him, and on Christmas Day 1795 took his final salute in Agra. Travelling ‘with an escort of 610 cavalry, four elephants, 150 camels and many bullock-waggons laden with his effects’, he reached Calcutta and finally left India in September 1796 with a fortune estimated at £400,000 (£22 million today).

  His successor was an altogether different proposition. Christened Pierre Cuiller but always known in India as ‘Perron’, he was a man of humble origin and little education who had once hawked handkerchiefs in the streets of Nantes. Coarse and unscrupulous where de Boigne had been fastidious and incorruptible, Perron’s inclinations were with the Jacobins, his hopes lay with Napoleon and his dreams were of Paris, not Savoy. His career in India had followed a familiar path: a spell in the service of the Jat rajah of Bharatpur, a failed attempt to join the Sardhana Brigade (Farzana was said to have had a surfeit of Europeans in her service at the time), and then enrolment by de Boigne. At the siege of Najaf Kuli Khan’s fortress of Kanaund in 1791 he had refused to leave his post even after his hand had been blown off by a faulty grenade. His valour earned him de Boigne’s lasting admiration and instant promotion from sergeant to captain. By the time he took over de Boigne’s command he held the rank of Lieutenant General and, as the Maratha army would discover to its cost, was deeply ‘entangled in the far spreading meshes of the Napoleonic scheme’.4 Lewis Ferdinand Smith, then a Major in de Boigne’s brigade, was disgusted.