For a while it looked as though Tayler’s measures had succeeded in damping down talk of revolt in Patna, but on 27 June virtually the entire garrison at Cawnpore, three hundred miles up-river, was massacred beside the Ganges after vacating their defences under a truce. Three days later Sir Henry Lawrence and his beleaguered garrison at the Lucknow Residency suffered a defeat so severe that it appeared they too were on the brink of destruction. Within days the news of these two reverses had reached Patna, and on 3 July a large mob waving banners, banging drums and chanting ‘Deen! Deen!’ attacked the Roman Catholic Mission in the heart of the native town. Word of the rioting was quickly brought to the Commissioner, and Rattray’s Sikhs were despatched to restore order. The riot was swiftly broken up, but not before Dr Lyell, assistant to the opium agent, had been set upon and killed. A wounded rioter was seized and taken to the hospital to be treated. There Subedar Hedayut Ali, Rattray’s second-in-command, gained his confidence and he began to talk. This led to the arrest of thirty-one alleged conspirators, including a bookseller named PIR ALI KHAN, ‘noted for his enthusiasm for his religion and his hatred of the English’. Tayler already had information suggesting that Pir Ali was the leading member of a cell taking its orders from the rebels in Lucknow, and now a bundle of letters found in his possession confirmed this. They had come from a fellow bookseller in Lucknow and contained instructions as to how Pir Ali was to further the cause of the Futteh ooper Nasara or Victory over the Nazarenes. Pir Ali had also been charged with the task of persuading the leaders of the Wahhabis in Patna to join the revolt, but in this he had failed, probably because the Lucknow correspondent had urged that the rebels should join forces with all religious groups in India, even if that meant working with Shias and Hindus.
All those arrested were tried before an emergency tribunal set up by Tayler, and were found guilty on various counts, Pir Ali and sixteen others being sentenced to death. Shortly before his execution Pir Ali was taken before Tayler to be questioned further. ‘He was calm, self-possessed and almost dignified,’ wrote Tayler later. ‘He taunted me with the oppression I had exercised, and concluded his speech by saying, “You may hang me, or such as me, every day, but thousands will rise in my place, and your object will never be gained”.’
With this last round of arrests Bill Tayler severed Patna’s links with the rebels in Delhi and Lucknow.
The immediate threat lifted, the Europeans quartered in the commissioner’s bungalow felt able to take life less seriously. The open ground in front of the circuit house holding the Wahhabi leaders was turned into a recreation area upon which, in Edward Lockwood’s words, ‘we challenged the Sikhs to cope with us in feats of agility and strength… The Wahabees used to sit in the verandah of their house telling their beads, and viewing what doubtless they called our antics unworthy of sober men. But it was quite impossible to judge from their Fagin-like faces, in which low cunning was mingled with ferocity, whether they were pleased or not, for they never laughed or even smiled.’
In the evenings Lockwood and his colleagues applied themselves to keeping up their spirits in other ways:
Occasionally we would have a dance – the Lancers being most affected – in which all were obliged to join. We wore no coats, but Garibaldi jackets of gaudy colours, and leather belts, in which our revolvers, hardly ever laid aside, were stuck, and high untanned leather boots, of native make. These in time were wont to draggle down, giving us the appearance of ruffians on the stage. Every one was obliged to do what, I believe, is called the steps, and when the fiddle struck up and we all went round, old and young together, those who smoked being armed with churchwarden pipes, which someone had procured somehow, the effect was so very comical, and we looked such awful idiots, that I could hardly stand for laughing.
To those sharing his quarters Bill Tayler was now the hero of the hour. ‘The Commissioner was daily receiving congratulations from all parts of India regarding his successful policy,’ recorded his youthful assistant. ‘Indeed some of us went so far as to address Mrs Tayler as “My Lady” in anticipation of the decoration we supposed in store for her gallant husband.’ However, a serious breach had now opened between Tayler and the Collector of Patna, Mr Woodcock, on the one hand, and the sessions judge, Mr Farquharson, and the two magistrates, Mr Lewis and Mr Elliott, on the other. The first party felt that the second were failing in their duties to uphold the law and were showing marked signs of pusillanimity, while the second considered that Tayler had cut too many judicial corners in arresting and sentencing on the basis of suspicion rather than proof. Furthermore, Tayler had acted without proper consultation with Calcutta and in some instances against the advice of his colleagues, so providing further ammunition for his critics. Both in Calcutta and in Patna Tayler’s enemies were already working to bring about his downfall.
Despite Major-General Lloyd’s assurances, the loyalties of the Bengal Native Infantry regiments in the military cantonment at Dinapore continued to trouble Tayler. His fears were at last realised when just after midday on 25 July Subedar Hedayut Ali appeared at his office ‘in a state of excitement’ and told him that the sepoys there were showing unmistakable signs of a ‘mutinous spirit’. Still unwilling to take the drastic step of disarming his BNI regiments, Major-General Lloyd had compromised. A battalion of British infantry, towed in barges by a steamer, had recently arrived at Dinapore on their way up-river to Benares. Heartened by their presence, he had ordered a general parade at which the sepoys were to be required to surrender the percussion caps of their muskets. Quite inexplicably, however, this parade was held while the British troops, HM 10th Regiment of Foot, were having their dinner in a mess-hall and while he himself took lunch aboard the steamer moored off Dinapore. The moment the first company of sepoys were commanded to hand over their percussion caps they broke ranks, ran for their weapons, and began firing on their officers.
Tayler immediately put out a general alarm: ‘I barely had time to summon the different residents to our house, and make all necessary arrangements for protection and defence, before the two signal guns were heard, and we knew that the ball had commenced.’ The rattle of musketry followed, which Tayler and those gathering at his bungalow took to be the British regiment suppressing the mutineers: ‘As we listened to the firing, which could be plainly heard from Patna, we calculated how many mutineers would be destroyed. Some said 600, others 800, some perhaps not more than 500!’
But at Dinapore one disaster had been followed by another. On hearing the firing the British troops in the mess-hall had run out on to the parade ground, but no senior officer appeared to give them any orders, Major-General Lloyd having decided that he ‘should be most useful on board the steamer with guns and riflemen etc.’ Astonished to find themselves at complete liberty, the mutineers loaded themselves with arms and ammunition and marched unimpeded out of Dinapore.
Fortunately for Patna, the three regiments headed westwards, away from the city and the civil lines and towards the sub-division of Shahabad, with the intention of joining the Rajput landowner Raja Kumar Singh. He now put himself at the head of a local army of Rajputs numbering some seven thousand men, and both armies then converged on the Shahabad district headquarters: the little town of Arrah. Here a local railway engineer named Boyle had long put up with the jeers of his friends as he converted what was intended to be the station billiard hall into a fortified redoubt. This now became the refuge of Arrah’s official staff, consisting of the Collector, Herewald Wake, his Muslim deputy, and fourteen other Britons and Eurasians. With them was a contingent of fifty Sikhs from Rattray’s police battalion, which Tayler had providentially sent back to Arrah from Patna only a few days earlier.