As a matter of fact he was only the chief figure amid a loosely-subjected crowd of ambitious military nobles. The Sikh leaders regarded the condemnation of the Prime Minister and the forced seclusion of the Queen Mother from public affairs, as a new chance for themselves. The Queen Mother perfectly understood the situation, and went to work with new machinations of amorous and political intrigue, in the hope of deriving her own advantage from the nominal supremacy of the British. When officially rebuked for the open treason talked in her darbars, she replied to the Resident with bitter irony; scarcely deigning to use the veil of a Persian idiom to disguise her arrogant claims to the sovereign power.
All these elements of weakness in Lord Hardinge's well-meant arrangements in the Punjab lie open to us now. It is clear that, only a spark was wanting to set fire to the combustible materials accumulated at Lahore, and in the other capitals of the Sikh Confederacy. But the system of secrecy in which all official transactions were then shrouded in India, rendered the danger invisible to the public and the Press. 'Everything seems to favour the new ruler,' said one journalist. 'India is in the full enjoyment of a peace which, humanly speaking, there seems nothing to disturb[1].'
- ↑ The Morning Herald, quoted in Sir Edwin Arnold's Dalhousie's Administration of British India, vol. i, p. 58, footnote, ed. 1862.
