While browsing S. C. Burchell's "The Suez Canal", 2016, I came across this...
"...But a day came when the opposition to the canal received a serious setback. In March 1857, near Calcutta, the disastrous Great Mutiny began. Native troops revolted against the British, and reinforcements had to be rushed to India in order to put down the rebellion. Of course, the only way they could be rushed from England was by ship on the four-month-long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. It was painfully obvious that a canal through the Isthmus of Suez would have saved countless British lives. As it turned out, the British government was finally forced to beg Said’s permission to send troops through Egypt overland across the isthmus to the Gulf of Suez. English newspapers were quick to see their government’s folly. “Nothing could be a more complete avowal of the utility of M. de Lesseps’ scheme,” said the London Daily News, “and the action of the Government is the implicit condemnation of Lord Palmerston and Lord Stratford de Redcliffe.”
A personal opponent of de Lesseps’s was removed when, because of a general lack of confidence in his government, Lord Palmerston’s cabinet fell in February 1858...."
Look at the situation in 1855:
"...Britain’s powerful navy patrolled the waters from Gibraltar to Alexandria and guarded the sea lanes that led to India around the Cape of Good Hope. Any threat in these two areas was a blow at her heart. And it happened in 1855 that the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps was making such a threat. To Great Britain, the idea of a canal through the Isthmus of Suez was unthinkable. The British had long dominated the route to the Far East around the Cape of Good Hope and were not interested in any change. Moreover, the canal now proposed - the British government felt with some justice - would be monopolized by the French, despite de Lesseps’s insistence that it was to be an international undertaking. If France controlled the canal, British prestige would decline throughout the Middle East. Its Indian empire would be in danger and so, too, would its leadership in trade with the Orient. In the eyes of the British government, the political aspect of a Suez canal was a simple one. De Lesseps had hold of a dangerous idea, and to add to the unpleasantness, he was a Frenchman as well. The British were going to fight, and the first battlefield they chose was Constantinople...."
cover artist: Dinanath Dalal