John Inglis

**Major-General Sir John Inglis KCB, U.E. (15 November 1814 - 27 September 1862)** was a Canadian colonial administrator, military officer and soldier. He was a veteran of the Quebec Revolution (1837-1838), the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848-1849) and the Indian Rebellion (1857-1858.) During his career, he served as the Colonel-In-Chief of the British Army's 32nd Regiment of Foot.

Under his leadership, H.M. 32nd Regiment was among the ten regiments which conquered the lands of the Sikh Raj of Lahore and Punjab for the Empire of India and famously defended the British Residency of Lucknow against tens of thousands of Awadhi and Bengali rebels.

Personally, Sir John commanded the defence of 1,300 civilians during the 148 day siege of Lucknow, fought with his subordinates in the conquest of the Sikh Raj, served at St. Denis and St. Eustache during the suppression of the Quebecois Revolution and supervised the British garrison of the Ionian Islands Protectorate.

## Biography

#### Family and Youth

John Eardley Wilmot Inglis was born on 15 November 1814 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to the Right Reverend John Inglis and his wife, Elizabeth (née Cohcrane). His father was the Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Nova Scotia, the third priest to carry the title; his grandfather, Charles Inglis, was the first to hold the office.

His father's family was a third-generation, colonial lineage, descended from the Loyalists of the American Revolutionary War and the Protestant Ascendancy of the Kingdom of Ireland, where his great-grandfather was the Rector of the Parish of Glean Cohm Cille in Túath Tir Connaill. His mother's household was a second-generation, colonial family with a history of involvement in the early independence of Nova Scotia; his maternal grandfather, Thomas Cochran, made a career as a legislator in one of the first independent, provincial governments in Canada: he served as a member of the Parliament of Nova Scotia for 26 years, between 1775 and 1801, during the Province's 5th, 6th 7th and 8th Legislative Assemblies.

### Career

#### Canada - Rebellion in Quebec (1833-1837)

On 2 August 1833, at the age of 18, he enlisted as an ensign with the 32nd Regiment of the British Army and was stationed with the garrison of the Province of Quebec for four years leading up to the Quebec Revolution in 1837; on 23 November, he was present at the Battle of St. Denis, in which the numerically-superior French rebels temporarily routed the Province's forces until facing defeat two days later at the Battle of St. Charles-sur-Richelieu.

The following month, on 14 December, Inglis was present when Provincial forces put an end to the revolution at the Battle of St. Eustache: the Governor-General abolished the Legislature of Quebec and placed the territory of the Province under the jurisdiction of Ontario, effectively annulling the political independence of the Quebecois. Meanwhile, hundreds of rebels had been exiled to the penal colonies in New South Wales or fled to the United States: these individuals would return after the Governor-General offered to pardon all participants in the rebellion to reconcile the sense of division between the British and French races in Canada.

Between 1839 and 1843, Inglis was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant and then to the rank of Captain.

#### Punjab - Conquest of the Sikh Raj (1846-1849)

In 1846, the 32nd Regiment of Foot was stationed at Meerut in the United Presidencies of India; they would remain in India for another decade.

Since the late 1830s, the Sikh Raj of Punjab (territorially equivalent to the modern state of Pakistan,) had been experiencing an internal collapse of government due to courtly intrigues that had devolved into a pattern of assassinations and usurpation: since the death of Punjab's first Maharaja, Ranjit Singh, each of his successors had been killed by their courtiers or relatives and, like most instances of British expansion during company rule, the motivation for annexation was the degeneration of native polities into failed-states as a consequence of royal familicide and predatory, militant diplomacy with neighbours.

The trend of corruption in the states that succeeded the Mughal Empire was so common that, by the time of the administration of Governor-General Lord Dalhousie, the United Presidencies had developed the "Doctrine of Lapse," a policy directing the Presidencies to pursue the annexation of failed states or guarantee their independence in the face of outside hostility. The Sikh kingdom initially had British support for it's continued independence following the First Anglo-Sikh War, but became an instance of the former after declaring war on the Presidency of Bengal just two years after the conclusion of the first war.