Begum Hazrat Mahal Answered Queen Victoria's 1858 Pardon With a Five-Point Proclamation of Her Own and Died in Nepal Without Accepting It

On 4 December 1858, J. D. Forsyth, secretary to the Chief Commissioner of Oudh, wrote from Lucknow to G. J. Edmonstone, the Government of India’s Foreign Secretary, and enclosed an English translation of a proclamation that was passing through the province. The Begum of Oude, Hazrat Mahal, had issued it, and it answered Queen Victoria’s offer of pardon to rebels one clause at a time. William Dalrymple cites the file, which is held in the National Archives of India.

Hazrat Mahal was a junior wife of Wajid Ali Shah, the last king of Awadh (spelt Oudh in British papers), and the mother of his son Birjis Qadr. After sepoys took Lucknow in the summer of 1857 she ran the city in the boy’s name until Colin Campbell’s army retook it in March 1858. She did not accept the pardon, and she died in Kathmandu in 1879.

The kingdom annexed in February 1856

On 4 February 1856, Colonel James Outram, the British Resident at Lucknow, put a new treaty before Wajid Ali Shah and warned him that refusing it would cost him his title and the revenue the Company was ready to guarantee. T. Rice Holmes, whose 1898 history defends the annexation, writes that the king burst into tears, said the British had robbed him of everything and would not sign. Three days later it was proclaimed that the government of Oudh was “vested exclusively and for ever in the Honourable East India Company.”

The Company’s stated reason was misgovernment. Holmes accepts it and says Colonel Sleeman, an earlier Resident, and Henry Lawrence both pleaded for a takeover. Charles Allen, reviewing a biography of the king in 2014, says Sleeman opposed annexation and warned that within a few years the tables would be turned on the British. Dalhousie’s private letters, quoted in our piece on the Doctrine of Lapse, called Awadh a cherry that would drop into British mouths some day.

Wajid Ali Shah did not fight. The British sent him to Calcutta, where, Allen writes, he lived for about three decades as a government pensioner.

A boy proclaimed king in July 1857

On 30 June 1857, Henry Lawrence marched some 700 men out of Lucknow to meet a rebel army at Chinhat, was beaten, and fell back into the Residency compound. A shell burst in his room on 2 July and he died early on the 4th. The siege of the Residency had begun, and by 2 July the British held nothing in Lucknow outside its compound.

Nagasaki Nobuko dates Lucknow’s rebel government to July 1857. A 1970 paper in the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Oriental Culture bulletin works from the documents on the enthronement of Birjis Qadr and finds that Hazrat Mahal and an old court figure, Mammu Khan, won support for the boy by negotiating with the sepoys. Sepoys set conditions but did not object to the old ruling class backing him.

Outlook India’s review of Rosie Llewellyn-Jones’s 2026 biography fills in the bargaining. By that account, two other princes were in British hands, a third refused the throne with ₹3 lakh (₹300,000) offered, and a fourth was deaf and mute. That left Birjis Qadr, the king’s fourth son. The sepoy junta asked for doubled pay, autonomy for battalion commanders, the power to install and dismiss the ruler, approval from the Mughal emperor in Delhi, and a free hand against anyone suspected of British sympathies. Llewellyn-Jones calls it the closest thing 1857 produced to a constitutional bargain, struck with a boy and his mother who could not refuse.

The besieged British heard of it within weeks. Gubbins, the Financial Commissioner shut up in the Residency, records that by late July a messenger had told them a boy “of eleven or twelve years of age” had been proclaimed king, “his mother, the Begum, being regent.” His age is unsettled. Outlook’s review gives 13 and 14 in different places, and Himal says 12.

What she ran

Rudrangshu Mukherjee, in A Begum and a Rani (2021), argues that Hazrat Mahal has been ranked well below Lakshmibai and given far less attention. A Penguin excerpt draws on V. D. Savarkar’s 1909 book to list what she did. She appointed officers to the judicial, revenue, police and military departments, held a daily durbar (court) in the Nawab’s name, sent word to the emperor in Delhi under her seal that Oudh was free of English rule, and wrote to neighbouring zamindars and rajas asking them to come to Lucknow with armed followers. Mukherjee adds that she drew up battle plans and deployed troops, which Savarkar left out.

Holmes, writing from the British side, judged her in spirit and ability a rival of the Rani of Jhansi. He called the Maulvi of Faizabad, Ahmadullah Shah, probably the most capable of the men who fought the British in the rising.

Her authority had limits. Nagasaki finds two political centres in Lucknow, a majority group of old ruling-class figures and sepoys, and the followers of Ahmadullah Shah. The two never reconciled, and the sepoys finally chose Ahmadullah Shah as chief. Nagasaki puts the majority court’s decline down partly to the outsized power of Mammu Khan and Hazrat Mahal.

The Residency, then the palaces

The Residency held for months. Havelock and Outram fought their way in on 25 September, Campbell’s relief force reached it on 17 November, and the garrison slipped out on the night of 22 November. Campbell left Outram at the Alambagh, a fortified post outside the city, and the rebels kept Lucknow through the winter. That included the Qaisarbagh, a palace of courtyards and orange groves that Holmes says they regarded as their citadel.

Campbell came back on 2 March 1858 with 17 battalions of infantry, 28 squadrons of cavalry and 134 guns and mortars, by Holmes’s count. Jung Bahadur’s Gurkha army, sent from Nepal, joined on 11 March. On 14 March the stormers took the Imambara and then the Qaisarbagh, where Holmes describes soldiers breaking doors for plunder and burning what they could not carry. Outram retook the Residency ground on the 16th.

As the city fell, Lord Canning issued his proclamation for Awadh. It named six loyal landholders as the sole owners of their lands and declared the proprietary right in the soil of the rest of the province confiscated to the British government. Ball notes that it became a subject of heated debate in Parliament. Llewellyn-Jones, per Outlook, says it caused a political crisis in London and was later softened, with submitting landholders getting estates back from 1859.

Hazrat Mahal left the city with the retreating rebels. Press reports from the weeks after the fall, printed by Ball, put her about 30 miles from Lucknow, and Ball’s own narrative has her in a fortress on the Ghaghara (Gogra) river by the end of April.

The Queen’s pardon and the five answers

Queen Victoria’s Proclamation was published at Allahabad on 1 November 1858 and moved the government of India from the Company to the Crown. It accepted the treaties the Company had made with Indian princes and said the Crown wanted no extension of its territory. On religion, it disclaimed any wish to impose Christianity and said no one would be favoured or molested for their faith. On rebels, it promised unconditional pardon to those who returned home before 1 January, excluded anyone convicted of directly taking part in the murder of British subjects, and offered only their lives to leaders and to those who had knowingly sheltered murderers.

Ball says the Begum’s reply was circulated widely, even in Lucknow, and prints it as a translation made by order and certified as a true one by the Chief Commissioner’s secretary. Outlook says it was issued in her son’s name. It has a preamble and five numbered points.

Her first point says the Company’s laws, courts, officials and governor-general were all unchanged, so nothing had really been handed over. On treaties, the second point lists the Peshwa imprisoned at Bithoor, the chief of Lahore carried off to London and the seizure of Awadh itself. It adds: “why does her majesty not restore our country to us when our people wish it?”

The third takes on religion. It lists the greased cartridges, temples pulled down to make roads, churches, street preachers and English schools, then asks “how can the people believe that religion will not be interfered with?” The proclamation adds: “The rebellion began with religion, and, for it, millions of men have been killed.” Our piece on Mangal Pandey covers the cartridges, by then the best-known grievance of the whole rising.

Her fourth point reads the pardon as covering no one. “No one, be he guilty or innocent, can escape” under it, the proclamation says, and it orders village heads who had presented themselves to the English to come to her camp before 1 January, the Queen’s own deadline. A reader can set that fourth point against what British officers wrote about their own conduct in 1857, as set out in our account of the British revenge. The fifth notes that the Queen promised Indians no better work than making roads and digging canals.

What survives is a British translation. Brannon Ingram, writing in Victorian Literature and Culture in 2024, says he could not locate an original Urdu version.

Terms asked, terms refused

Holmes reports that on 22 December the Begum’s vakil, her agent, came into Campbell’s camp to ask what terms she might expect, as the agents of other rajas and landholders had done. Llewellyn-Jones, per Outlook, says the British offered a pension and a residence in return for submission and that Hazrat Mahal refused. Both can be true, and Holmes does not say what terms were discussed.

On 31 December, Holmes writes, Campbell beat a rebel force at Banki near the frontier and drove the rebels out of Oudh. Next day the Queen’s deadline ran out.

Nepal

Earlier in 1858 Birjis Qadr had written to Jung Bahadur asking him to join the rebels. The Nepalese prime minister’s reply, printed by Ball, refused, said anyone who had not murdered a British lady or child could surrender to the Chief Commissioner and be pardoned, and warned that “no rajah or king in the world will give you an asylum.”

In early 1859, Holmes writes, columns under Hope Grant pushed the remaining rebels to the foot of the Himalayas, after Jung Bahadur asked Canning to send British troops against them. Many threw away their arms and went home.

Hazrat Mahal reached the Kathmandu valley all the same. Himal says she arrived in 1858 with a small band of supporters, and The Himalayan Times says Jung Bahadur gave her asylum in 1859. The Kathmandu Post reports that historians largely agree he granted her a monthly stipend in exchange for the jewellery she brought, on condition that she stay out of politics. By the historian Purusottam Rana’s account, as the Post reports it, she lived in a residence called Barf Bagh inside the Thapathali palace grounds. Himal notes how little reliable information survives about her two decades there.

She died on 7 April 1879, according to a stamp catalogue, and the Indian embassy held its 2016 death-anniversary ceremony on that date. Her grave is in the compound of Jame Masjid in Bagbazaar, Kathmandu. When Himal visited in 2008 the tomb was a small enclosure with a lone tree and nothing to show whose it was.

Remembered late

Her grandsons Anjum, Kaukub and Nayyer Qadr asked Jawaharlal Nehru to see her honoured, the Kathmandu Post reports, and the Indian embassy located the tomb. In 1959, it adds, Nayyer Qadr asked Nepal’s prime minister B. P. Koirala to preserve the site. Outlook gives 1962 as the year Lucknow’s Victoria Park was renamed for her and given a marble memorial, more than eighty years after her death.

India issued a 50 paise stamp for her on 10 May 1984, one of four in the “India’s Struggle for Freedom” series. The Indian ambassador laid a wreath at her tomb on 18 April 2018, the sixth such ceremony, The Himalayan Times reported.