She was a beautiful woman of thirty-eight, amusing and popular

From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 25.

His successor was Lord Canning whose capacity for unremitting work was quite as exceptional as Dalhousie's, but whose opinions were both less rigid and more humane. The son of George Canning - whose early death as Prime Minister had so grieved King George IV that his Majesty had arranged for his widow to be created a viscountess with remainder to his heirs male - Lord Canning had gone from Eton to Christ Church where he had taken a first class degree in classics and a second in mathematics. Three years later he had married the Honourable Charlotte Stuart, eldest daughter of Lord Stuart de Rothesay. Entering Parliament the following year, he had rapidly made a name for himself in the governments of Peel, Lord Aberdeen and Palmerston. He was still in his early forties when, in 1855, Palmerston offered him the Governor-Generalship of India.

Canning was a handsome man, ambitious and determined, warm and amusing in private but reserved with those whom he did not know well, sometimes aloof, even cold. Lord Granville who claimed to be one of his' greatest friends' admitted that this reserve prevented there being any deep intimacy between them. 'One great characteristic of Canning was his truthfulness,' Granville wrote, 'and inaccuracy of any kind was what he was most severe upon in others.'

When he was asked to succeed Lord Dalhousie, Canning did not at first feel drawn to accept the appointment. He knew that the generous salary of £25,000 a year was augmented by the East India Company, still the British Government's agent for the military and civil administration of India. The Company provided a large house in Calcutta as well as a house at Fort William, paid the salaries of various servants and met the cost of the ball which was customarily held at Government House on the Queen's birthday. But the expenses of the appointment were necessarily heavy; and, although Government House had some fine rooms, it was, as Canning was to discover, miserably furnished', with 'private apartments incapable of ever being made really comfortable', and without a single water closet. Moreover, the climate of Calcutta was such as to make any man hesitate before accepting responsible and arduous employment there.

Lady Canning did not much want to go to India either. She was a beautiful woman of thirty-eight, amusing and popular, very much at home in London society. But in the end, so people said, it was she who persuaded her husband to go, fearing that if he did not he would fall more deeply in love with another woman to whom he was already too dangerously attached.