But in the midst of these triumphs a twofold blow was to strike his heart. Ever since leaving India he had maintained an affectionate correspondence with Lady Canning. That cherished friend he was now deprived of to his great sorrow. Her constitution impaired by the climate and by the anxiety which she had suffered during the strain of the Mutiny, Lady Canning fell a victim to an attack of fever. Lord Clyde's last letter to her arrived after her death, and was acknowledged by Lord Canning, who expressed in a few touching words, "how cordially she whom he had lost reciprocated the regard Lord Clyde entertained for her." A few months later Lord Canning himself, on whose constitution, enfeebled by climate, labour, and anxiety, disease had made rapid inroads, died on the day of his arrival in England. Of the many who followed to their grave in Westminster Abbey the remains of the first Viceroy of Queen Victoria's Indian Empire, none mourned him more deeply than did his former Commander-in-Chief, who had been his associate in the triumph of restoring British ascendancy in the East. By the grave of their dead master and friend Clyde and Outram stood arm in arm, both destined at no long interval to be laid in the earth now covering the coffin of their revered Chief.
His latest honour was the highest to which a British officer can attain. In an _Extraordinary Gazette_ published on the 9th of November 1862,--the twenty-first anniversary of the birth of the Prince of Wales--it was intimated that the Duke of Cambridge, Sir E. Blakeney, and Lords Gough and Clyde were promoted to the rank of Field-Marshal. If Colin Campbell had served for over forty-six years before attaining the rank of major-general, his subsequent promotion had been exceptionally rapid, since in eight years he had run up through the list of general officers into the highest position of the military service.
With the exception of health, Lord Clyde had "all which should accompany old age--honour, love, troops of friends." But he was visibly, if gradually, breaking up. He had never spared himself when duty called, but when the strain slackened with the extinction of the mutiny, his constitution began to fail. His illness in Lucknow after leaving the Nepaul frontier was the first premonition of decay. During his stay in Simla he had begun to relax his custom of early rising and to manifest an indisposition to take his morning walk; while a casual cold, of which a year earlier he would have thought nothing, resulted in a sharp attack of influenza accompanied by fever and inflammation of the eyes. When on his subsequent tour up-country with the Viceroy, he began to evince a disinclination for the saddle, and preferred, contrary to his old predilection, to be driven in a wheeled vehicle. Later, after returning to Europe, he suffered much at times from fever and ague which he traced back to the old Walcheren days; and in the end of 1861 he had a serious illness which left him permanently enfeebled even after he had been pronounced convalescent. Yet he was still able to make long journeys, and he commanded the Volunteer Review on the Brighton Downs on the Easter Monday of 1862, when some twenty thousand men were in the field. He expressed his surprise at the steadiness and intelligence of the citizen soldiery. "It was not," he wrote, "a simple affair of marching past and saluting, but a readiness of movement and facility of change of position not always surpassed by the oldest and most practised troops." This was the last occasion of his appearing at the head of troops in the field.