Margaret Frances Wheeler

Margaret Frances Wheeler, also known as Ulrica (12 August 1837 - possibly survived until 1907) was a British woman who survived the Siege of Cawnpore during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 having been abducted and kept prisoner by Ali Khan, a sowar, during the Satichaura Ghat massacre, thereby avoiding the Bibighar massacre. Her subsequent actions unknown, a rumour (possibly started by Ali Khan himself)^[1] was spread that she valiantly executed her captors and subsequently committed suicide to preserve her honour; this was used as war propaganda by the British press.^[2] Other accounts suggest her death in Nepal after fleeing with the Indian rebels, or her survival until 1907 having spent her life in seclusion at Cawnpore as wife of Ali Khan, who "was kind to her".^[3][4] Her ultimate fate was never confirmed.

Margaret Frances Wheeler was born to Hugh Wheeler and his wife Frances Matilda, daughter of East India Company Army officer Frederick Marsden and an Indian woman.

She experienced the Siege of Cawnpore with her parents and her sister Eliza Matilda Wheeler. Her brother was killed in battle during the siege. During the Satichaura Ghat massacre, her parents and her sister were killed. She was however abducted ("either captured or rescued")^[5] by the sowar Ali Khan, who took her as his captive wife. She thus avoided the Bibighar massacre.

When the British retook Cawnpore, they were informed by an Indian witness that she had survived the Satichaura Ghat massacre. However, the British did not know what had happened to her after her abduction. A rumour was spread that she had killed her kidnapper in self defense, thereafter committing suicide to avoid sexual assault. This version of events was viewed as a heroic act of courage, and was widely described in British press during the Indian rebellion, in which she was praised as a heroine. An image was made of her "Defence of honour", depicting her as a heroine who killed her aggressor (accounts differing between using a sword or a pistol) and then committed suicide while defending herself against rape, and this image was reprinted numerous times and became well known.^[6] Margaret Wheeler thus became a prominent figure in the British war propaganda.^[7]

Her ultimate fate was never confirmed. G. O. Trevelyan, in his book Cawnpore (1886), recounts the "impudent fabrication" that occurred after the Siege, with the "elastic memory" of "witnesses who will swear to anything" resulting in claims ranging from, on one hand, having seen Miss Wheeler emerging from Ali Khan's quarters carrying a sword and proclaiming her triumph over him, to on the other hand having witnessed her "taken out, dead and swollen" from the well into which by some accounts she cast herself after killing her captors. Trevelyan, identifying Ali Khan as the source of the rumour of Miss Wheeler's defeat of her captor and subsequent suicide, lambasts the "ready credence" with which these varying stories were received in England, "the imaginations of men... excited by a series of prurient and ghastly fictions." Trevelyan states that whilst these heroic stories circulated Miss Wheeler was in fact "living quietly in the family of her master under a Mohammedan name".^[8]

Leckey recounts that "a Eurasian named Fitchett" who converted to Islam to save his life during the rebellion, claimed that he "frequently saw Miss Wheeler" at Futteghur, "with a sowar who had taken her from Cawnpore", Fitchett being tasked with reading to them extracts from the English newspapers the rebels received from Calcutta. Fitchett claimed she "had a horse with an English side-saddle", and that she "rode close beside" the sowar "with her face veiled". He claimed that when the British came to Futteghur in 1858, "orders were sent to the sowar to give Miss Wheeler up, but he escaped with her at night."^[9] Per Trevelyan, following police inquiries, a conclusion was reached with the "strong conviction" that she had been carried along with the flight of the rebels, and "after being hurried about from camping-ground to camping-ground, had died a natural death in a corner of Nepaul."^[10]

Per one account, in 1907 a missionary doctor was called to a Muslim household in the Cawnpore bazaar, where an "old, dying native woman"^[11] requested the attendance of a Roman Catholic priest. The woman, "speaking cultured English", claimed to be Miss Wheeler and to have married the Indian who saved her life and treated her kindly.^[12][13]