John Nicholson

[...] He was feared for his foul temper and authoritarian manner, but also gained the respect of the Afghan and North Punjabi tribes in the area for his fairhandedness and sense of honour. He inspired the Nikal Seyn, or Nikal Seyni cult, which had a short and popular hey-day but survived in surprising forms and ways in some remoter parts of North-West Pakistan, well into the 1980s. Nicholson was best known for his role in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, planning and leading the Storming of Delhi. Famously dismissive of the incompetence of his superiors, he said, upon hearing on his deathbedof Colonel (later General Sir) Archdale Wilson’s hesitancy [at Delhi], ‘Thank God I have yet the strength to shoot him, if necessary’.
One famous story recounted by Charles Allen in Soldier Sahibs (2002) is of a night during the Mutiny when Nicholson strode into the British mess tent at Jullunder, coughed to attract the attention of the officers, then said, “I am sorry, gentlemen, to have kept you waiting for your dinner, but I have been hanging your cooks.” He had been told that the regimental chefs had poisoned the soup with aconite. When they refused to taste it for him, he force fed it to a monkey - and when it expired on the spot, he proceeded to hang the cooks from a nearby tree without a trial.
Nicholson also called for the Indian Mutiny to be punished with greater severity. He proposed an Act endorsing a “new kind of death for the murderers and dishonourers of our women”, suggesting, “flaying alive, impalement or burning”, and commenting further, “I would inflict the most excruciating tortures I could think of on them with a perfectly easy conscience.” Nicholson never married, the most significant people in his life being his fellow Punjab administrators Sir Henry Lawrence and Herbert Edwardes.
At Bannu, Nicholson used to ride one hundred and twenty miles every weekend to spend a few hours with Edwardes, and lived in his beloved friend’s house for some time when Edwardes’ wife Emma was in England. At his deathbed he dictated a message to Edwardes saying, “Tell him that, if at this moment a good fairy were to grant me a wish, my wish would be to have him here next to my mother.” The love between him and Edwardes made them, as Edwardes’ wife latter described it “more than brothers in the tenderness of their whole lives”.