Meanwhile, in Gaya the local magistrate Alonzo Money was behaving in a most irrational manner. He had earlier reported to Tayler that Gaya was in a ‘ferment’ and that the local Nujeeb police could no longer be trusted. Within hours of receiving Tayler’s order to withdraw he set out for Patna with all the other Europeans on the station – but without the money in the sub-divisional treasury, amounting to £80,000. After travelling only a few miles he was persuaded by someone in his party to return to Gaya to collect the treasure, leaving the rest of the party to carry on to Patna. At midnight on 2 August William Tayler received a letter from Mr Justice Trotter, now leading the Gaya party on the road, ‘representing the dilemma in which Mr Money’s “vacillation” had left him and the other officers, and asking whether I adhered to my former order’. Tayler replied that Trotter should stick to his instructions and proceed to Patna.
Having returned to Gaya, Money was joined, providentially, by a party of reinforcements from HM 64th Foot. With their help he emptied the Gaya treasury and then left the town with his new escort, to proceed at a great pace – not to Patna, as ordered, but down the Grand Trunk Road to Calcutta. Here he was duly received as a hero: the man who, disobeying orders to cut and run, had gone back to Gaya to save the treasury. ‘Mr Alonzo Money,’ wrote Colonel G. B. Malleson, the first authoritative chronicler of the Indian Mutiny, ‘first disobeying then half obeying the directions of his commissioner, was, by his vacillating and impulsive action, converting a plain act of duty into a sensational drama, of which he, for a few brief moments, was the star-spangled hero.’
Alonzo Money’s unexpected appearance in Calcutta and his self-serving account of his actions coincided with the arrival of a batch of letters from Patna addressed to Frederick Halliday, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. They included the first account of Eyre’s sensational relief of Arrah – but also copies of Tayler’s order to Alonzo Money directing him to withdraw to Patna, and his letter advising that Vincent Eyre should wait for reinforcements before moving on Arrah. There was, additionally, a letter from Major-General Lloyd stating that he himself had ordered Eyre to advance – although, curiously, the actual letter containing that order appeared to have miscarried.
This was all the ammunition Halliday needed. On 5 August he informed the Governor-General that ‘it appears from a letter just received from Mr Tayler, that, whilst apparently under the influence of a panic, he has ordered the officials at all the stations in his division to abandon their posts and fall back in Dinapore… Under these circumstances I have determined at once to remove Mr Tayler from his appointment of Commissioner of Patna.’
On the basis of Halliday’s report, which cited Tayler’s withdrawal order but omitted the sentence (set in italics on page 151) instructing his two assistant commissioners to bring the treasure with them unless to do so would endanger their personal safety, Lord Canning confirmed William Tayler’s removal on three grounds: ‘showing a great want of calmness and firmness’; ‘issuing an order quite beyond his competency’; and ‘interfering with the military authorities’.
William Tayler received the news of his dismissal from one of his most persistent critics, Mr Justice Farquharson, now appointed acting commissioner pending the arrival of Tayler’s replacement. It coincided with news of a second great victory secured by Major Eyre in his pursuit of Kumar Singh’s army – a victory that to all intents put the Patna Division and most of Bihar out of danger. ‘My friends were congratulating me that the crisis had passed, that success had at length crowned my exertions,’ wrote Tayler. ‘In the midst of these congratulations, and, at the moment when I thought that, without presumption, I might look, if not for reward, at least for acknowledgement, I was dismissed from the Commissionership; by a singular coincidence, the appointment was made over for a time to the officer who had suggested the abandonment of Patna.’ To further salt Tayler’s wounds, his replacement as Commissioner of Patna turned out to be Edward Samuells, the placeman to whom Halliday had a decade earlier awarded a post allocated to Tayler.
With the revolt still raging in Delhi, Lucknow and elsewhere, there was little Tayler’s many friends and supporters could do other than grit their teeth and continue to carry out their duties. Mr Samuells duly arrived, bringing with him his own deputy to replace William Tayler’s right-hand man, Dewan Mowla Baksh, dismissed on the grounds that he and a Muslim banker who had also rendered great assistance in the house-arrest of the Wahhabi leaders had both been motivated by jealousy. Among the first acts of this new administration was to order the release of the three detained Wahhabis. This was accompanied by the profuse apologies of the Government of India and a proclamation that they were ‘innocent and inoffensive men’, against whom there was ‘no cause for suspicion’, but who had, on the contrary, shown ‘exceptional and unprecedented loyalty’. This was done at the express instruction of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Frederick James Halliday.
To his dismay, Edward Lockwood was among the officials then ordered to attend a ‘conciliatory, let bygones be bygones pic-nic’ on the river organised by the new Commissioner to honour the Wahhabis. As he made his way down to the steamer he met the now disgraced assistant magistrate Mowla Baksh: ‘I asked him if he also had received an invitation to the pic-nic, but he, in melancholy tones, which made me laugh heartily, said, “Alas! Dear sir, a new king has arisen here who knows not Joseph.”’
The river picnic itself was a subdued affair. ‘If those little rascals had possessed any sense of the ridiculous’, declared Lockwood of the Wahhabi leaders,
how they would have roared with laughter at all this humbug. But when I found them assembled on the steamer which was to take us on our pleasure trip down the Ganges, they looked as good as grace in their priestly petticoats, as though a joke was neither here nor there to them. Directly I arrived, however, they one and all gave me a sly look through the corners of their eyes, and although they said nothing, I knew very well they meant to say, ‘Aha! My fine fellow, you and your Governor [Tayler] have had your combs pretty closely cut, we guess!’
The pusillanimity of the Government of Bengal in failing to order the disarming of the sepoys in Dinapore and in turning its back on Commissioner Tayler’s actions has to be set against the shared determination of the Governor-General of India and the Lieutenant-General of Bengal not to further alienate the Indian public, which for the most part had watched the Mutiny unfold from the sidelines, waiting to see which way the struggle went before coming forward to profess loyalty to the winning side. In this they succeeded admirably, and the Government of Bengal in particular was quick to congratulate itself in an official report on its conduct, written by none other than Frederick James Halliday.
Once released, the leaders of the chota godown in Patna behaved with circumspection, doing nothing that might attract the attention of the authorities, and so apparently justifying the trust placed in them by Halliday. The replacement Commissioner, Mr Samuells, was able to report to him that Maulvi Ahmadullah, the Wahhabis’ acknowledged leader, bore no grudges, and that he and his fellow-Puritans in Patna were in every respect model citizens.
Banished to a subordinate post in Bengal, Tayler fought furiously for his reinstatement and the recognition he regarded as his due. Finding the doors of Government closed to him, he went into print, setting out his case with chapter and verse but also claiming that his dismissal was due to the ‘covert machinations’ of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, inspired by an ‘intense political, perhaps personal dislike’ of him. This was a mistake, for the Governor-General, Lord Canning, had only just declared Halliday to have been ‘the right hand of the Government’ during the dark days of the Mutiny – which was indeed the case in almost a literal sense, as Halliday had moved out of his own residence, Belvedere Lodge, and into Lord Canning’s Government House for the duration. Canning’s response was to suspend Tayler and threaten a judicial enquiry to examine the charge that Tayler had condemned men to death on insufficient evidence. Such an enquiry would only have drawn attention to the high-handed measures adopted by many other local magistrates and judges besides Tayler, but it was enough to force Tayler to back down. He resigned the service and set up his own legal firm in Patna, while continuing his fight to clear his name. He found many champions among the Anglo-Indian community, but Sir Frederick Halliday, KCB – as he became in 1859 – was too powerful to be moved. Despite the support of The Times and many influential public figures both in India and in Britain William Tayler remained, in the words of the historian Colonel G. B. Malleson, ‘in the cold shade of official neglect’.