Lord Canning

Lord Canning was called Clemency Canning as an insult and it became the reason he is remembered well. He was the youngest son of the prime minister George Canning, held minor office under Peel and Aberdeen, and went out to India as governor-general in 1856 in succession to Dalhousie, inheriting the annexations and the army that rose a year later. Through 1857 and 1858 the European press in India and much of the press at home demanded indiscriminate retribution; Canning issued orders that mutineers were to be tried and that villages were not to be burned at will, restrained the worst of the summary hangings, and was pilloried for it in Calcutta and in London, where Palmerston had to defend him in the Commons. He carried out the transfer of India from the Company to the Crown and read Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1858 at Allahabad, with its promise of religious non-interference and of no further annexation. The Awadh land settlement afterwards confirmed the talukdars in their estates, buying stability at the cost of the peasantry. His wife Charlotte died in Calcutta in 1861. He went home the next year and died within months. He had opposed the doctrine of lapse in principle before arriving and did not use it. His confiscation proclamation for Awadh in 1858, declaring the proprietary right of the soil forfeit, was so severe that Ellenborough denounced it publicly from London and had to resign for doing so; Canning then softened its application. He became the first viceroy of India when the Crown took over in 1858. The Indian Councils Act and the beginnings of a penal code and a high court system date from his term. He collapsed after his wife s death and never recovered; he is buried in Westminster Abbey.

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