James Outram

James Outram was appointed to command the relief of Lucknow and handed the command back to Havelock, who had done the marching, which is why he was called the Bayard of India. He went out to Bombay at sixteen, spent years in Khandesh raising a corps from Bhil tribesmen who had been treated as bandits, and became a political officer - the branch that negotiated with Indian rulers rather than fighting them. He was Resident in Sind and opposed its annexation in print while carrying out the orders, which cost him promotion; Napier called him the Bayard of India, sans peur et sans reproche, partly in irony and it stuck without it. He was Resident at Lucknow in 1856 when Awadh was annexed on grounds of misgovernment, a seizure he had documented and which is among the grievances that produced the rising a year later. In September 1857, senior to Havelock and entitled to the credit, he accompanied the column as a volunteer and left him in command, then held the residency through the second siege until Colin Campbell arrived. He died at Pau and is buried in Westminster Abbey. He was known for hunting tiger and boar with a spear and survived being mauled early in his career. He commanded the Persian expedition of 1856-57 before being recalled to India for the rising. His conduct at Lucknow, waiving his own seniority in writing so that Havelock should finish what he had started, was published in the general orders and made his name in Britain. He later opposed the harshest of the post-rising confiscations in Awadh and argued in council that the talukdars had been given cause. A statue of him stands on the Thames Embankment and another in Kolkata.

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