Queen Victoria to the Earl of Clarendon

Balmoral Castle, 23rd September 1857.

The Queen hopes that the arrival of troops and ships with Lord Elgin will be of material assistance, but still it does not alter the state of affairs described by the Queen in her letter, which she wrote to Lord Palmerston, and which she is glad to see Lord Clarendon agrees in. Though we might have perhaps wished the Maharajah to express his feelings on the subject of the late atrocities in India, it was hardly to be expected that he (naturally of a negative, though gentle and very amiable disposition) should pronounce an opinion on so painful a subject, attached as he is to his country, and naturally still possessing, with all his amiability and goodness, an Eastern nature; he can also hardly, a deposed Indian Sovereign, not very fond of the British rule as represented by the East India Company, and, above all, impatient of Sir John Login's tutorship, be expected to like to hear his country-people called fiends and monsters, and to see them brought in hundreds, if not thousands, to be executed.

His best course is to say nothing, she must think.

It is a great mercy he, poor boy, is not there.

Footnote 40: Lord Clarendon had written that he was "sorry to learn that the Maharajah (Dhuleep Singh) had shown little or no regret for the atrocities which have been committed, or sympathy with the sufferers."

Footnote 41: Sir John Spencer Login, formerly surgeon at the British Residency, Lucknow, guardian of the Maharajah Dhuleep Singh, 1849-1858.