On 19 June Tayler received the Lieutenant-Governor’s response to his report sent to Calcutta eleven days earlier. To his astonishment, instead of congratulations he received a rebuke. ‘My letter was written on the 8th,’ he afterwards explained:
To my utter bewilderment I received his [Halliday’s] reply, dated the 13th, saying that he ‘could not satisfy himself that Patna was in any danger’, and that ‘the mutiny of the sepoys was inconceivable’. I leave my readers to conjecture what my sensations were on the receipt of this letter. I did not, however, waver for a moment. Mr Halliday was 400 miles distant, telegraphic communication had become uncertain, every Christian life was at stake, and moments were too precious to be wasted in remonstrance or argument.
Over the previous two weeks every post had brought news of further mutinies in Upper Hindustan. Bengal Army regiments had turned on their officers in Benares, Allahabad and Azimgargh, and in Oude the troops in half a dozen outlying districts had followed suit, isolating Sir Henry Lawrence and a small garrison in the British Residency at Lucknow. In the Punjab, sepoys were said to be deserting in droves to join the mutineers in Delhi; a score of Bengal Army regiments were in the process of being disarmed and disbanded before they too followed suit. Meanwhile, in Patna itself it had been reported to Tayler that ‘an intimacy’ had developed between the ‘saintly gentlemen’ who led the Wahhabis and a rich banker named Lootf Ali Khan. The latter was a Shia and thus a natural enemy of the Wahhabis, which made him, in Tayler’s eyes, ‘an unnatural subject for such a connex-ion’. Fearing that the Wahhabis had finally put aside their religious scruples to join forces with the Lucknow rebels, Tayler decided to make a pre-emptive strike. As he himself put it, ‘I came to the determination in my own mind, to take the initiative against the town, and deprive the disaffected, as far as I might, of all power of mischief.’
Among those now living in the Commissioner’s bungalow were two junior assistants, the youngest of whom was twenty-year-old Edward Lockwood. He had only recently arrived in Patna on his first posting, and he now slept on Tayler’s front veranda with a revolver under his pillow and a gun beside his bed. In later years Lockwood remembered his Mutiny days in Patna as the most exciting and ‘joyous’ period of his life. To begin with, however, their prospects appeared very bleak: ‘Truly there was no lack, most days, of news which was qualified to make one’s hair come out of curl… but we soon got used to it. The calm confidence felt by the Commissioner communicated itself to all the others, and with Tayler and Rattray at the head of affairs, I felt comfortable enough.’ On 19 June Lockwood was told by the commissioner that he had issued an invitation to ‘all the respectable natives’ in the city to meet in his house on the following day, and that he would need his help. Among those asked to attend were three Wahhabi leaders, described by Tayler as ‘three Puritan Moulvees, Shah Mahomed Hossein [Syed Muhammad Hussain], Moulvee Ahmad Oollah [Ahmadullah], and Moulvee Waiz-ool-Huq’.
‘Next day,’ wrote Lockwood, ‘when the Wahabee Chiefs arrived by invitation, I received them, and bowed them, with all due ceremony, into the large room in which we all used to dine.’ When all the local dignitaries were present, Tayler entered flanked by Captain Rattray and Subedar Hedayut Ali. After some perfunctory discussions the meeting was declared over, but then, as all got up to leave, the three Wahhabis were asked to stay behind. They were then informed by Tayler that he had decided to hold them ‘in safe keeping until matters had settled down’. They were to be conveyed in their palanquins to the Patna circuit house where a guard of Rattray’s Sikhs would be placed over them. To all intents, they were under arrest – but without any charges being laid against them.
The three took the news remarkably calmly, Ahmadullah responding ‘with a politeness of manner worthy of all admiration’ that whatever the commissioner ordered was best for ‘your slaves’. Young Lockwood was less impressed: ‘An old fellow [probably Muhammad Hussain] who sat next to me was the only one who appeared uneasy, for he looked at me slyly through the corners of his eyes as though he could not understand our little game; but I calmed his fears, and said: “Your Reverend, in your new abode… you will enjoy peace with honour whilst these troubled times remain; and you can tell your beads and study your Koran at leisure.”’
Tayler’s action was inspired by what he called ‘the most striking characteristic of the Wahabee sect… the entire subservience which they yield to the Peer, or spiritual guide’. He had taken the trouble to study the Wahhabis’ beliefs, and had been struck by the fact that once a follower had committed himself by taking the oath of allegiance to the leader of the movement he ‘henceforward abandons himself mind and body to a state of utter and unreflecting slavery to his saintly superior’. By removing the head, Tayler hoped to render the rest of the body incapable of independent thought or action. He believed he had now placed under house arrest two of the three most important leaders of the movement: Muhammad Hussain – ‘the Peer, or spiritual chief, to whom the entire body of converts of the last generation owe their admission to the fraternity’ – and Ahmadullah, considered by Tayler to be ‘the principal “Mureed”, or disciple, and… said to possess greater influence than his superior’. In this supposition he was entirely correct.
Following the death of Wilayat Ali at Sittana, Muhammad Hussain and Ahmadullah had assumed what was essentially joint command of the Wahhabi organisation in the plains. Both were men of influence. As well as senior imam, Muhammad Hussain was the head of one of the three founding families of the Wahhabi movement in Patna, while Ahmadullah, besides filling the role of deputy and chief counsellor to Muhammad Hussain, was also one of Patna’s leading public figures. He too was effectively the head of his family, for his father Elahi Bux was now a frail seventy-one-year-old and no longer played any significant role in the movement’s affairs. Tayler had in fact hoped to apprehend Elahi Bux in this same coup, but the old man had failed to attend the meeting in the commissioner’s bungalow. Balked, Tayler went out of his way to threaten Ahmadullah that his father’s freedom depended on his own good behaviour, using the phrase ‘His life is in your hands, yours in his.’
Tayler’s enemies subsequently chose to interpret these words as a threat to kill the old man, just as they chose to portray his tricking of the three mullahs as an act of treachery on a par with the seizing and murder of the British envoy Macnaghten during the Afghan War. Edward Lockwood and others present saw Tayler’s action in a very different light: ‘There appears to me’, argued Lockwood, ‘a vast difference between inviting a man to my house, in order to kill him when he gets there; and inviting him, in order that his followers shall not kill me, so long as I keep him handy.’ Tayler himself had no doubts as to the rights and wrongs of the case: ‘To this day I look at the detention of these men as one of the most successful strokes of policy which I was able to carry into execution.’ It was, however, a detention lacking the approval of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, for Frederick Halliday was notified by Tayler only after the event.
Having safely secured the three Wahhabi mullahs, the Commissioner next issued a proclamation calling on all Patna’s citizens to surrender their arms within twenty-four hours. This was backed up by a curfew, under which no one was allowed to leave his home during the hours of darkness. Shortly afterwards a Muslim magistrate suspected by Tayler’s right-hand man Dewan Mowla Baksh of being in league with conspirators in the city was also arrested. These measures had the desired effect: Patna and the surrounding districts remained relatively calm, and Farquharson and others who had taken refuge in the opium store were persuaded to return to their posts.