Wellington (9 page)

Although Arthur’s direct responsibilities were at first confined to Seringapatam island, he was soon not only head of the commission, but, as the main armies withdrew, the senior military officer in the region. When the commission was dissolved he retained power, warning the governor-general that he would not accept ‘any person with civil authority who is not under my orders’. Lieutenant Colonel Barry Close, who he regarded as ‘the ablest man in the Company’s army’ was sent down as Resident, an arrangement which worked well. A five-year-old boy, the closest surviving descendent of the line of Hindu rajahs which had been overthrown by Hyder Ali, was appointed ruler of Mysore, with Purneah, an able man who had served Hyder Ali with distinction, as his chief minister.

Arthur Wellesley had played a principal part in winning a significant victory and had gone on to wield exceptional power for a thirty-year-old colonel. He had also been paid £4,000 of the prize money distributed when the proceeds of the victory were divided up, the shares varying with rank: Harris received £150,000, a British soldier £7, and a sepoy £5. Although Arthur had still not received the allowances to cover his campaign expenses, he immediately offered to repay Mornington ‘the money which you advanced to pay my lieutenant-colonelcy, and that which was borrowed from Captain Stapleton on our joint bond’.
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Richard generously replied that: ‘I am not in want of money and probably never shall be: when I am, it will be time enough to call upon you.’
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But the governor-general was not at his best. Although his hoped-for marquessate had arrived at last, he was Marquess Wellesley of Norragh – in the peerage of Ireland. It was, as he called it, a ‘double-gilt potato’. ‘As I felt confident there had been nothing Irish or pinchbeck in my conduct or its results,’ he wrote, ‘I felt an equal confidence that there should be nothing Irish or pinchbeck in its rewards.’
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Arthur dealt with the myriad of military and political issues that crossed his writing-desk in Tipoo’s cool and spacious summer palace, whose wonderful murals – some of which depicted the British being roundly beaten by Hyder Ali and his French allies – were restored on his orders. He denied a request from a French priest to have 200 Christian women who had been carried off by Tipoo ‘in the most indecent and tyrannical manner’ returned to their homes. This refusal was, he admitted, unjust, but they were currently living with Tipoo’s family, and as the Company had undertaken to protect the family, sending the women home would have been a breach of faith. He pondered the composition of courts, civil and military, though the demonstrative nature of justice was never far from his mind: ‘the criminals shall be executed after the facts have been clearly ascertained by an examination of witnesses …’
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He dealt sternly with officers who stole or accepted bribes, and although they sometimes had reason to complain of the slowness of the rajah’s government, ‘they had none to ill-use any man’. One senior officer whose conduct towards the Indians had caused complaint was warned that ‘he must either act as he ought, or he shall be removed from his command’.
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Yet Wellesley was moved to pity by the case of one of the Company’s lieutenant colonels, convicted of ‘very serious crimes’ before a general court-martial and stripped of his commission. Wellesley observed that when he had repaid the Company the money he owed it, he would be entirely destitute. Wellesley begged the governor of Madras ‘to give him some small pension to enable him to support himself, or … recommend him for some small provision … on account of his long services and his present reduced situation’.
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His chief concern, though, was with the assortment of freebooters – ‘polygars, nairs, and moplahs’ – in arms around the state. His most obdurate opponent was Dhoondiah Waugh, a tough mercenary who had escaped from Tipoo’s custody just before Seringapatam fell, recruited a substantial following from amongst Tipoo’s former soldiers and other malcontents, and proclaimed himself ‘King of the Two Worlds’. He was beaten in 1799 and escaped northwards into Maratha territory, but was back again the following year. In May 1800, Wellesley himself mounted a full-scale campaign against Dhoondiah, his well-organised transport system enabling him to move across a desolate area. Even so there were difficult moments. On 30 June, he told Barry Close that he was a day later than planned in crossing the River Toombnuddra, and its sudden rise delayed him on the south bank for ten days. As no supplies could be brought in, the army ate much of the corn it had with it, and was now held up. ‘How true it is,’ he mused, ‘that in military operations, time is everything.’
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He systematically took Dhoondiah’s fortresses and finally caught up with him at Conaghull, right up on the borders of Hyderabad, on 10 September.

Although Wellesley, pursuing with two regiments of British cavalry and two of Indian, was badly outnumbered, he formed up his little army in a single line and led a charge that routed Dhoondiah’s army. Wellesley reported to the adjutant-general in Madras that: ‘Many, amongst others, Dhoondiah, were killed; and the whole body dispersed, and were scattered in small parties over the face of the country.’
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He could be magnanimous in victory. Dhoondiah’s young son, Salabut Khan, was found amongst the baggage. Wellesley looked after him, and when he departed from India, he left money for the boy’s upkeep with the collector of Seringapatam. Salabut, ‘a fine, handsome, intelligent youth’, eventually entered the rajah’s service and died of cholera in 1822.

In May 1800, Arthur had been offered command of a force to be sent to capture Batavia in the East Indies from the Dutch, but he told his brother that although he would welcome the appointment, it would not be in the public interest for him to leave Mysore until ‘its tranquillity is assured’. With Dhoondiah beaten, however, he was able to accept the command and, after assembling a staff, he departed for Ceylon, where he arrived on 28 December. Arthur soon heard that the expedition was to go to Egypt instead, and he duly ordered it to concentrate in Bombay. He was on the way there himself when he heard that his brother, who had anticipated ‘great jealousy from the general officers in consequence of my employing you’, had been pressed to supersede him with Major General Baird. This was not as unreasonable a decision as Arthur maintained. He was still only a colonel, albeit a senior one, and the governor-general told him privately that ‘you must know that I could not employ you in the chief command of so large a force as is now to proceed in Egypt without violating every rule in the service …’ There were limits to how far Richard could go on his behalf. Baird had been infuriated by his supercession by the governor-general’s brother at Seringapatam, and made this very clear in three interviews with Richard Wellesley. In her sympathetic anecdotal biography of Arthur, Muriel Wellesley suggests that Richard had no alternative but to act as he did: ‘He must either sacrifice his brother, or lose the confidence of those he governed, which he inevitably would do once the stigma of favouritism and partiality were to become attached to him.’ There were times when Arthur, like Achilles, was capable of sulking in his tent, and this was one of them.

Right or wrong, he was deeply hurt, and now began his letters to the governor-general not as ‘My dear Mornington’, but as the coldly official ‘My Lord’. He was franker in a letter to their brother Henry:

I have not been guilty of robbery or murder, and he has certainly changed his mind … I did not look, and did not wish, for the appointment which was given me; and I say that it would probably have been more proper to give it to somebody else; but when it was given to me, and a circular written to the governments upon the subject, it would have been fair to allow me to hold it till I did something to deserve to lose it.
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Although he was appointed Baird’s second-in-command, Wellesley remained in Bombay when the expedition set sail. Although he assured Henry that Baird’s conduct towards him was ‘perfectly satisfactory’, he first suffered from fever, followed by an attack of ‘Malabar itch’, which obliged him to undergo a regimen of nitrous baths. He knew that the episode would not redound to his credit, and when he felt well enough, he returned to Mysore. Captain George Elers observed that he had begun to grey at the temples and did not laugh as explosively as before. Responsibility followed by disappointment had marked him: ‘He may already have forgotten how to play.’
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But even now, in the depths of his disappointment, he recovered something of his sparkle. Elers wrote that he kept a ‘plain but good’ table, and had an excellent appetite, with roast saddle of mutton served with salad as his favourite dish. He was abstemious, drinking only four or five glasses of wine with dinner and ‘about a pint of claret’ afterwards. ‘He was very even in his temper,’ wrote Elers, ‘laughing and joking with those he liked …’ He could even smile in the face of adversity. Riding hard for Seringapatam with Elers and a tiny escort through dangerous country, he joked that if they were captured: ‘I shall be hanged as being brother to the Governor-General, and you will be hanged for being found in bad company.’ Hearing that there had been a promotion of colonels to be major generals, he called for a copy of the Army List, but found that he was not included. He admitted ruefully that his only ambition was ‘to be a major general in His Majesty’s service’.

When Wellesley returned to Mysore, India was on the verge of another major conflict, this time between the British and the Maratha Confederacy, now the East India Company’s principal rival on the subcontinent. The Hindu Marathas controlled the great mass of central India, bordered by the Ganges in the north and Hyderabad in the south, running from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal, and eventually including Delhi. In 1761 they had been beaten with great loss at Panipat, just outside Delhi, by the Afghan, Ahmad Shah Durrani, Muslim ruler of Kabul. However, they enjoyed a revival after Panipat and in 1778–82, the East India Company fought an inclusive war against them. Thereafter the Company was preoccupied with Mysore, but by 1800 the Maratha state had fragmented into what were, in effect, independent principalities, themselves uniting the fiefs of smaller semi-independent chiefs. The Peshwa Baji Rao, nominally the most senior, ruled at Poona, although his writ ran only around the frontiers of Hyderabad and Mysore. The most powerful of the maharajas was Daulat Rao Scindia, who controlled the northern Maratha lands from his capital at Ujjein, while at Indore, Jeswant Rao Holkar ruled a central slab of land between the Narmada and Godavari Rivers. The Bhonsla Rajah of Berar, with his capital at Nagpur, dominated the south-east Maratha lands. The Gaikwar of Baroda, fifth of the great princes, ruled territory in the west, around the Gulf of Cambay, but was to throw himself onto the Company’s protection and play no part in the coming conflict.

The fragmentation of Maratha power was both risk and opportunity for the Company. On the one hand growing instability meant there was a chance of war breaking out while the Company was busy elsewhere – it was for this reason that Sir Alured Clarke had been left in Calcutta when Mornington began his campaign against Tipoo. But, on the other, the Company might be able, as it had elsewhere, to exploit friction between local rulers. Their chance came in 1800, when Holkar defeated the Peshwa and Scindia at Poona. Scindia fell back into his own territory, but the Peshwa fled to Bassein, in British territory, and signed a treaty agreeing to give the Company control over his foreign affairs and to accept (and pay for) a garrison of six of the Company’s battalions in return for the Company’s help in restoring him to his throne.

The task of restoring the Peshwa was given to Arthur Wellesley in November 1802. He had just heard that he had been gazetted major general on 29 April that year, (news had only reached him in September), and given an appointment on the Madras establishment, where Lieutenant General Stuart, who had led the Bombay army column that fought at Seringapatam, was now commander-in-chief. As he had told Barry Close, soon to be political Resident with the Peshwa, in September 1801, ‘before long we may look to war with the Mahrattas’. He had already made a lengthy analysis of the terrain he might have to cover, highlighting the problems of providing food and water and crossing the many rivers that would lie across his path. As usual he delved into detail. He would need 10,000 gallons of arrack (native spirit) for his European troops, and this should be carried in 6 gallon kegs, ‘well fortified with iron hoops’. There would also have to be 90,000 lbs of salt meat, ‘packed in kegs well fortified, 54lbs in each keg, besides pickle, &c.; and the same quantity of biscuits in round baskets, containing 6olbs each; these baskets to be covered with waxed cloth’.
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Major General Wellesley moved off in March 1803, his own army numbering just under 15,000 men, with a Hyderabad force of nearly 9,000 also under his command. He was well aware that his task was to restore the Peshwa but not to bring about a wider war with the Marathas as he did so. In fact, there was no resistance. The careful preparations ensured that the march of some 600 miles was swift, and rigid discipline ensured that local inhabitants were not alienated by plundering. His leading cavalry reached Poona on 20 April, but the Peshwa would not re-enter his capital till 13 May, when the stars were propitious. Wellesley observed that he was ‘a prince, the only principle of whose character is insincerity’. He made heavy weather of re-establishing himself, but at the same time was already negotiating with the other Maratha princes. In May, Holkar raided into Hyderabad territory, replying civilly to Wellesley’s letter of remonstrance, stating that the Nizam of Hyderabad owed him money. The Nizam was in fact mortally ill, which induced Stuart in Madras to send troops to Hyderabad to help maintain order. This added to the political tension between the Marathas and the Company. Although open war was still not inevitable, Scindia was striving to draw the other Maratha chiefs into a coalition against the British.