William Hodson

William Stephen Raikes Hodson was an officer of the East India Company's army, born on 19 March 1821 near Gloucester. He fought in the First Anglo-Sikh War, where he was wounded, and was Assistant Commissioner at Amritsar from 1849. He helped organise the Corps of Guides from 1846 and commanded it from 1852. In 1855 he faced charges over the imprisonment of a Pathan chief and over regimental funds. Lord Dalhousie removed him from civil duties, and a later inquiry found his accounts honest though irregularly kept (Wikipedia).

Hodson's Horse

In 1857 he was authorised to raise an irregular cavalry regiment of about 2,000 men. Most of its recruits came from the Lahore and Amritsar districts of the Punjab, annexed only eight years before. The early troops included Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, Pathans, Dogras and border tribesmen (Wikipedia on the regiment). The regiment survives as the 4th Horse of the Indian Army, with two Sikh squadrons and one Dogra squadron.

Delhi

After the British retook Delhi, declared taken on 20 September 1857, Hodson rode to Humayun's Tomb with a party of horsemen and took the surrender of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, on a promise that his life would be spared. The next day he took the emperor's sons Mirza Mughal and Mirza Khizr Sultan and grandson Mirza Abu Bakr and shot all three at point-blank range near a city gate, now called the Khooni Darwaza, the Bloody Gate (Wikipedia, The Wire). Their bodies were left exposed at a police station. Hodson was made to give up jewellery taken from them, and his reputation suffered (Wikipedia on Mirza Mughal). Frederick Roberts later called the killings a blot.

He is sometimes confused with John Nicholson. Nicholson was mortally wounded in the assault on Delhi on 14 September 1857 and died on 23 September (Encyclopaedia of Sikhism). It was Hodson who took Zafar and shot the princes.

Hodson was shot on 11 March 1858 as his regiment stormed the Begum Kothi at Lucknow, and was buried the next day at La Martiniere. A school there honours him with a yearly wreathing, and, The Wire notes, no placard at the grave mentions the killing of the princes.

Key moments

• 1846: helps organise the Corps of Guides.
• 1857: raises Hodson's Horse from Punjab, Sikhs among the first troops.
• September 1857: Zafar surrenders at Humayun's Tomb; the next day three princes are shot.
• 11 March 1858: shot at Lucknow; buried on 12 March.

What he is remembered for. In Punjab and Sikh accounts of 1857 he is the officer whose regiment carried Punjab's horsemen into the Company's cause at Delhi. In Delhi he is the man at the Khooni Darwaza.