Page:Viscount Hardinge and the Advance of the British Dominions into the Punjab.djvu/151

Rh at that period of life when public servants had some claim to repose, he trusted that in the following year he might be permitted to resign the high trust which had been conferred upon him. He wrote to his wife that it was essential to the last act of his public life not to shrink from the responsibility of his Punjab policy, for the whole of that policy had been accomplished without the advice of his Council in Calcutta, and its results rested entirely on his own shoulders.

The period of repose at Simla was interrupted in October, 1846, by the news of a short-lived insurrection in Kashmír. The Shaikh Imám-ud-din, not without the connivance of Lál Singh and possibly other members of the Sikh Darbár, at last openly refused to carry out that clause of the Treaty of Lahore by which Kashmír was to be transferred to Ghuláb Singh. Without an hour's hesitation, the Governor-General declared that the Treaty must be enforced by British troops. Eight regiments of Native infantry, with twelve field guns, were at once dispatched from the Jálandhar Doáb, accompanied by a Darbár contingent, consisting of 17,000 of those very Sikhs who had fought against us. The whole force was under the command of Brigadier Wheeler, with Henry Lawrence as Political Officer. The Sikhs behaved admirably on the march; and had the necessity arisen, no one doubted that they would have shown the same spirit on our side as in the hard-fought fields on the Sutlej.

But the Shaikh, who had at his disposal not more