wife soon became a sense of comfort and spiritual guidance to an often isolated Nicholson. 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 later described it "more than brothers in the tenderness of their whole lives". Upon learning of Nicholson's death, Edwardes wrote to Neville Chamberlain, eulogizing his friend as "So undaunted, so noble, so tender, so good, so stern to evil, so single-minded, so generous, so heroic and yet so modest. I never saw another like him, and never expect to do so. And to have had him as a brother, and now to lose him in the prime of his life. It is an inexpressible and irreparable grief." On the day that the last Lord Lieutenant of Ireland formally ceded control of Dublin Castle to the government of the Irish Free State, 16 January 1922, a sword-wielding figure of John Nicholson was unveiled in Lisburn's Market Square. For Sir James Craig, the first prime minister of a Northern Ireland, and for other dignitaries speaking, the East India Company Brigadier was "a symbol of the defence of Empire in Ireland as well as India." A memorial relief (by John Henry Foley), placed by his mother sixty years before in the town's Cathedral, depicts the final assault upon Delhi's Red Fort. The inscription reads in part: Rare gifts had marked him for great things in peace and war. He had an iron mind and frame, a terrible courage, an indominable will [...]. Soldier and civilian, he was a tower of strength; the type of the conquering hero. Most fitly, in the great siege of Delhi, he [... dealt] the death blow to the greatest danger that ever threatened the British Empire. Notwithstanding the psychopathic and racist nature that he harboured, according to his deeds and William Darlymple; he is praised for his "Pure Christian soul" by many. See also Sir Henry Lawrence James Abbott Herbert Benjamin Edwardes References Sources Flinders, Stuart, Cult of a Dark Hero: Nicholson of Delhi, 2019, Bloomsbury, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography McCracken, Donal P. (2018), 'Nicholson: How an angry Irishman became the hero of Delhi', The History Press Ireland, Stroud, UK, . Further reading