Strange to say, the villagers of Oudh, who had profited so much by the new land settlement, had a secret grievance of their own which no one seems to have suspected. They held their lands on better terms than their fathers or grandfathers, but many families had lost position in the eyes of their neighbours. For generations Oudh had been the chief recruiting ground for the Asiatic soldiery of the Bengal army; and under Mohammedan rule every sepoy was the great man of his family, and indeed the patron of his native village. If any villager had a grievance, he applied to the sepoy, and the sepoy applied to his British officer, and his petition was forwarded to the British Resident at Lucknow; and the Mohammedan court was too anxious to please the Resident to make any difficulty about redressing wrongs so strongly supported, whatever might have been the abstract merits of the case. When, however, the king was replaced by a chief commissioner, the sepoy was referred to a British court for justice, and was no better off than his neighbours. This loss of privilege and prestige rankled in the heart of sepoys from Oudh, and they began to look upon annexation as a wrong done to themselves, although they had not, and could not have, any sympathies for the deposed king. [Sidenote: Coming catastrophe.] Such was the state of affairs in India when the storm of 1857 was about to burst upon Hindustan, which was to shake British power in Northern India to its very foundations, and sweep away the East India Company for ever. The outbreak was hardly felt in the older presidencies of Bengal, Madras, or Bombay, nor in the Punjab or Pegu, nor in Nagpore or Satara, the provinces recently annexed without conquest, nor, with few exceptions, in the feudatory states under British suzerainty. The main fury of the storm was spent on Oudh and the North-West Provinces; and the significance of this localisation will appear in the after history. FOOTNOTES: [25] The capture of Ghazni was mainly due to the cool intrepidity of the late Sir Henry Durand, then a lieutenant in the Bengal Engineers. [26] As these pages are passing through the press Upper Burma has been annexed to the British empire. In 1870 the author was sent by the British government on a semi-political mission to Mandalay and Bhamo. In those days the reigning king respected British supremacy, and British representatives were maintained at the capital and the frontier. These political ties were subsequently loosened, and annexation became a state necessity. Like most of the Buddhist kings of Burma, Theebaw was a professed water drinker, but much given to strong liquors, in which state he committed the most revolting cruelties. Similar horrors are related of the old kings of Burma in the author's _Short History of India, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Burma_, chap. xv. CHAPTER V. SEPOY REVOLT: BENGAL, DELHI, PUNJAB. 1857.