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William The 4th

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1997

Copyright © Christopher Hibbert 1997

Christopher Hibbert asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780586091098

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2010 ISBN: 9780007406944

Version: 2016-09-08

DEDICATION

For Pam Carpenter

With Love

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

Maps

PART I • 1769–1815

1 Eton, Dublin and Angers, 1769–87

2 An Officer in the 33rd, 1787–93

3 The First Campaign, 1794–5

4 A Voyage to India, 1796–8

5 The Tiger of Mysore, 1799

6 The Governor of Mysore, 1799

7 The Sultan’s Palace, 1800–1

8 Assaye, 1802–5

9 Return to London, 1805–6

10 Kitty Pakenham, 1790–1806

11 Ireland and Denmark, 1806–7

12 Portugal, 1808

13 Board of Enquiry, 1808

14 Across the Douro, 1809

15 ‘A Whole Host of Marshals’, 1809–10

16 From Bussaco to El Bodon, 1810–11

17 Life at Headquarters, 1810–12

18 Badajoz, Salamanca and Madrid, 1812

19 Retreat to Portugal, 1812

20 From Vitoria to the Frontier, 1812–13

21 St Jean de Luz, 1813

22 In London Again, 1814

23 Paris and Vienna, 1814–15

24 Brussels, 1815

25 Waterloo, 1815

PART II • 1815–52

26 The Ambassador, 1815

27 Cambrai and Vitry, 1815–18

28 Stratfield Saye, 1818–20

29 King George IV and Queen Caroline, 1820–1

30 Husband and Wife, 1821

31 Vienna and Verona, 1822–4

32 St Petersburg and the Northern Counties, 1825–7

33 The Prime Minister, 1828–9

34 Battersea Fields and Scotland Yard, 1829

35 The Death of the King, 1829–30

36 Riots and Repression, 1830–2

37 A Bogy to the Mob, 1832

38 Oxford University and Apsley House, 1832–4

39 Lady Friends, 1834

40 The Foreign Secretary, 1834–6

41 Portraits and Painters, 1830–50

42 Life at Walmer Castle, 1830–50

43 The Young Queen, 1837–9

44 Grand Old Man, 1839–50

45 The Horse Guards and the House of Lords, 1842–50

46 Hyde Park Comer, 1845–6

47 Disturbers of the Peace, 1846–51

48 Growing Old, 1850–1

49 Last Days, 1851–2

50 The Way to St Paul’s, 1852

Footnote

Keep Reading

References

Sources

Index

Photo Section

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

ILLUSTRATIONS

BLACK AND WHITE

Lieutenant-Colonel the Hon. Arthur Wellesley. Portrait by John Hoppner. Reproduced courtesy of The Duke of Wellington KG; photograph Courtauld Institute of Art.

Anne, Countess of Mornington. Reproduced courtesy of The Duke of Wellington KG; photograph Courtauld Institute of Art.

The Hon. William Wellesley-Pole. Portrait by John Hoppner. Reproduced courtesy of The Duke of Wellington KG; photograph Courtauld Institute of Art.

The Rev. the Hon. Gerald Valerian Wellesley. Reproduced courtesy of The Duke of Wellington KG; photograph Courtauld Institute of Art.

Richard Colley, Marquess Wellesley. Photograph Mary Evans Picture Library.

The Hon. Henry Wellesley. Portrait by John Hoppner. Reproduced courtesy of The Duke of Wellington KG; photograph Courtauld Institute of Art.

Caricature of soldiers on the march, by Thomas Rowlandson. Copyright British Museum.

‘Blücher the Brave’: caricature by Thomas Rowlandson. Guildhall Library, Corporation of London. Photograph Bridgeman Art Library, London.

The Duke of Wellington and Marshall Blücher. Photograph Mansell Collection.

Caricature by Isaac Cruikshank. Copyright British Museum.

The Duchess of Wellington, in a drawing by John Hayter. Reproduced courtesy of The Duke of Wellington KG; photograph Courtauld Institute of Art.

Lord Castlereagh. National Portrait Gallery, London. Photograph Mansell Collection.

Harriet Arbuthnot. Photograph Mary Evans Picture Library.

Charles Arbuthnot. Reproduced courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Frances Mary Gascoyne-Cecil, second Marchioness of Salisbury. Portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Hatfield House. Reproduced courtesy of Lord Salisbury and National Portrait Gallery, London.

Apsley House, No. i London. Reproduced courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Wellington Museum, Apsley House.

View of the proposed Waterloo Palace. Reproduced courtesy of the Duke of Wellington KG; photograph Courtauld Institute of Art.

Charles Greville. Photograph Mary Evans Picture Library.

Lady Charlotte Greville. Copyright British Museum.

Oil sketch of the Duke, by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Reproduced courtesy of The Duke of Wellington KG; photograph Courtauld Institute of Art.

‘Achilles in the Sulks’: caricature by Thomas Howell Jones. Copyright British Museum.

Repose, a lithograph by H.B. (John Doyle). Copyright Museum of London.

Punch drawing of the Duke’s statue. Pub. Vol. II, July-December 1846, p. 150. © Punch Ltd.

Walmer Castle. Photograph Mary Evans Picture Library.

‘The Field of Battersea’: caricature by William Heath. Reproduced courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Wellington Museum, Apsley House.

Sketch by Benjamin Robert Haydon for his Wellington Musing on the Field of Waterloo. Reproduced courtesy of The Duke of Wellington KG; photograph Courtauld Institute of Art.

Wellington Musing on the Field of Waterloo, by Haydon. Reproduced courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside (Walker Art Gallery).

Queen Victoria’s first Privy Council meeting, by Sir David Wilkie. The Royal Collection © Her Majesty The Queen.

Miniature engraving of the Duke aged seventy-five. Reproduced courtesy of The Duke of Wellington KG; photograph Courtauld Institute of Art.

Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s portrait of the Duke with Sir Robert Peel. The Royal Collection © Her Majesty The Queen.

Baroness Burdett-Coutts, by Sir William Charles Ross. Reproduced courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Elizabeth Hay, later Duchess of Wellington, the first Duke’s daughter-in-law. Photograph Mary Evans Picture Library.

Arthur Richard Wellesley, the Duke’s elder son, later second Duke of Wellington. Reproduced courtesy of The Duke of Wellington KG; photograph Courtauld Institute of Art.

Robert Thorburn’s painting of the Duke with his grandchildren. Reproduced courtesy of The Duke of Wellington KG; photograph Courtauld Institute of Art.

COLOUR

Goya’s portrait of Wellington painted in August 1812. The National Gallery London; photograph Bridgeman Art Library, London.

Wellington at Waterloo. Copyright British Museum.

Equestrian portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Private Collection; photograph Bridgeman Art Library, London.

Sir David Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Despatch. Reproduced courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Wellington Museum, Apsley House.

Princess Lieven, by Sir Thomas Lawrence. The Hermitage, St Petersburg; photograph Bridgeman Art Library, London.

The Stratfield Saye estate. Reproduced courtesy of The Duke of Wellington KG.

The library at Stratfield Saye. Reproduced courtesy of The Duke of Wellington KG.

The Duke’s bedroom at Apsley House. Reproduced courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Wellington Museum, Apsley House.

The Duke in 1824, painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence for Sir Robert Peel. Reproduced courtesy of Wellington College.

Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s The First of May. The Royal Collection © Her Majesty The Queen.

‘A Quartette in Character’: caricature by William Heath. Private Collection; photograph Bridgeman Art Library, London.

The Duke at seventy-five: portrait by Charles Robert Leslie. Copyright British Museum.

The Duke’s funeral procession, after a painting by Louis Haghe. Guildhall Library, Corporation of London; photograph Bridgeman Art Library, London.

AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Any biographer who now attempts to write a life of the Duke of Wellington does so in the shadow, so to speak, of Elizabeth Longford whose splendid book about him was published in two volumes in 1969 and 1972. This book does not, of course, pretend to take its place; but if, as has been suggested, a person really worth writing about deserves reappraisal every twenty years, the time has certainly come for a new look at the Duke. This one skates rather quickly over his generalship and his political entanglements to concentrate more fully on those aspects of his life suggested by the book’s sub-title.

The idea of my writing it came originally from the Hon. Georgina Stonor, whose knowledge of the Wellington Papers is extensive and whose library of books on the Duke and his family has been placed unreservedly at my disposal. I am extremely grateful to her for all her help, as I am to his Grace the eighth Duke of Wellington for allowing me to consult and quote from his great-great-grandfather’s personal papers at Stratfield Saye and for his assistance when I was there.

I must express my thanks also to Dr C.M. Woolgar, Archivist and Head of Special Collections at the Hartley Institute, the University of Southampton, in whose care are the Duke of Wellington’s official papers, and to Claire Jackson for her help when I was working at the Institute.

Southampton University and Stratfield Saye are the principal repositories of the Duke’s papers; but I have also made use of letters and papers by or about him elsewhere. I have therefore to acknowledge with gratitude the gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen to make use of material in the Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, and to express my thanks to Lord Raglan for the use of the Raglan Papers, including letters from the Duke to his brother William Wellesley-Pole, at Gwent Record Office; the Marquess of Tweeddale for use of the Yester Papers in the National Library of Scotland; the Marquess of Salisbury for use of papers at Hatfield House including the Westmeath Papers and letters from the Duke to the first wife of the second Marquess of Salisbury, her diary and the Duke’s letters to the second wife of the second Marquess; Mrs M. Fry of Fulbeck Hall for a letter from the Duke to the Countess Dowager of Westmorland in the Fane Papers; Adrian Francis for the ‘Manuscript Account of the Services of John Parker, Corporal 20th Foot’; Wellington College for letters to and from the Duke and his accounts in the college’s archives; and Miss S.M. Fletcher, Archivist, Hampshire Record Office for photocopies of the Duke’s Lieutenancy Papers.

For helping me with these and other papers I am most grateful to Oliver Everett, Librarian, Windsor Castle; David Rimmer of the Gwent Record Office; Mr I.F. Maciver, Assistant Keeper, Manuscripts Division, the National Library of Scotland; Robin Harcourt Williams, Librarian and Archivist to the Marquess of Salisbury; and Bijan Omrani, Deputy Archivist, Wellington College.

I am also much indebted to Dr Norma Aubertin-Potter, Sub-Librarian, All Souls College, Oxford; Simon Bailey of Oxford University Archives, Bodleian Library, Oxford; Richard Olney, Assistant Keeper, the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts; Judith Curthoys, Assistant Archivist, Christ Church, Oxford; Dr J.N. Mills of the Historical Search Room, Scottish Record Office; Penelope Hatfield, College Archivist, Eton College Library; Dr Peter Boyden of the National Army Museum; Dr Linda Washington, Head of the Department of Printed Books, National Army Museum; and the staffs of the British Library, the London Library and the Ravenscroft Library, Henley-on-Thames.

For help in tracing the Duke’s movements and activities when in the provinces I am most grateful to Elizabeth Rees, Chief Archivist, Tyne and Wear Archive Services; Rita Freeman, City Archivist, York; Jennifer Gill, County Record Office, Durham; Eileen Organ, Supervisor, Liverpool Record Office, Central Library, Liverpool; Jeremy McIlwaine, Archivist (Diocesan Records), Hertfordshire County Record Office; Richard Leonard, Research Archivist, Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone; Bruce Jackson, County Archivist, Lancashire Record Office; Penny Ward, Heritage Officer, Margate Library; and Janet Adamson, Heritage Officer, Folkestone Library.

For help with portraits and busts and the general inconography of the Duke I have to thank Dr Helen Smailes, National Gallery of Scotland; Dr Philip Ward-Jackson, Deputy Conway Librarian, Courtauld Institute of Art; Ian Ritchie, Archive Assistant, National Portrait Gallery; Paul Goldman, Assistant Keeper, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum; Liz Vance, Information Assistant, National Gallery; Fiona Pearson, Research Assistant, Scottish National Gallery of Modem Art; A.W. Potter, Information Assistant, Royal Academy of Arts; Julia Toffolo, Registrar, Government Art Collection; Helen Watson of the Scottish National Gallery; Christopher Eimer; Dr Peter Beal and Stephen Lloyd of Sotheby’s; John Kenworthy-Browne; Jonathan Marsden, Deputy Surveyor of the Queen’s Works of Art; Helen Valentine of the Royal Academy of Arts; Mireille Galinou of the Museum of London; and Marjorie Trusted of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

For their help in a variety of other ways I am most grateful to the Marquess of Anglesey, Lady Marioth Hay, Lady Pamela Barbary, Major D.A.J. Williams, Regimental Secretary of the King’s Royal Hussars, Captain J.G. Fergusson, Richard Way, Diana Cook, Dennis Flower, David Nugent, Peter Crane, Oliver Cooper, Margaret Lewendon, Rosemary Foster, Dr Francis Sheppard, Bruce Hunter of David Higham Associates and Richard Johnson of HarperCollins. I want also to thank Deborah Adams who edited the book; Anna Grapes who helped me choose the illustrations; Hamish Francis who read the proofs; and my wife who made the comprehensive index.

Finally I must say how grateful I am to Professor Norman Gash, biographer of Peel and author of the article on Wellington in the forthcoming New Dictionary of National Biography, for having read the book in typescript and given me much valuable advice for its improvement.

Christopher Hibbert

MAPS

I

1769–1815

1 Eton, Dublin and Angers

1769 – 87

‘My ugly boy Arthur is food for powder and nothing more.’

AMONG THE new boys whose baggage was set down at the gates of Eton in the autumn of 1781 were two of the five sons of the first Earl of Mornington. The elder, the Hon. Arthur Wesley, was twelve years old, the younger, Gerald, was nine. Neither had yet shown much aptitude for scholarship and they were not expected to shine at Eton in the glittering manner of their eldest brother, Richard, who had mastered Greek and Latin with equal facility, had, afterwards at Oxford, won the Chancellor’s Prize for Latin Verse, and would, no doubt, have taken an excellent degree had not the early death of his father necessitated his presence at home.

His father, Garret Wesley, Lord Mornington, had not been a practical man. Descendant of an ancient English family which had been settled in Ireland for generations, he had been a member of the Irish House of Commons before passing to the Irish House of Lords. But he had been more interested in music than in politics. His own father, Richard Colley Wesley, had been a musician of sorts, playing the violin quite well, so it was said, ‘for a gentleman’.¹ There was an organ in the hall of the Wesleys’ country house, Dangan Castle, in the county of Meath, another organ in the chapel there and a harpsichord in the breakfast room. But Richard Colley Wesley had been essentially an amateur, whereas his son, a composer as well as performer from his early youth, had been able to take his place among the virtuosi of Dublin’s musical world and had been appointed Professor of Music at Trinity College. His godmother, Mary Delany, however, while acknowledging Garret Wesley’s musical talents, found him rather deficient in ‘the punctilios of good breeding’, and had consequently been much gratified when he announced that he was to marry Lady Louisa Augusta Lennox, daughter of the second Duke of Richmond. Unfortunately, Lady Louisa had developed other ideas. Confessing that she had conceived ‘an insurmountable dislike’ for her noble suitor, she had accepted instead the hand of a richer young man; and Lord Mornington, whose father had died the year before, married Anne Hill, the eldest daughter of a banker, Arthur Hill, later Hill-Trevor, the first Viscount Dungan-non, a sixteen-year-old girl who, in the opinion of Mrs Delany, was modest and good-natured but, like her husband, rather gauche in manner,² and, according to Mrs Nicolson Calvert, the beautiful Irish wife of an English Member of Parliament, a somewhat ‘commonplace character’.³

The young couple had appeared to suit each other well. They had lived contentedly in the country at Dangan Castle and in Dublin in a handsome house facing Sefton Street. Their first child, Richard, had been born in 1760 and was styled Viscount Wellesley, that variation of the family name, which his brothers were later to adopt, being preferred as older and more aristocratic than Wesley with its associations of evangelical Methodism. Other children had followed at regular intervals: a second son, Arthur, who did not live long, a third son, William in 1763, then another boy, Francis, who died in childhood, followed in 1768 by a daughter, Anne, and on 29 April the following year by a sixth child who was named, like his little dead brother, Arthur, after his mother’s father. Arthur’s younger brother, Gerald Valerian, was born in 1770, the youngest son, Henry in 1773, and yet another child, Mary Elizabeth, soon afterwards.

By then the family had left their house in Dublin and moved to London where the children would grow up to speak without the Irish accent which, it was considered, ‘might be a disadvantage’ to them ‘in society hereafter’.⁴ They lived in rented rooms in Knightsbridge, their father by now in debt, struggling, not very successfully, to maintain a household befitting his rank, as well as a coach, on an income of £1,800 a year. His son, Arthur, who had been given his first lessons in a small school in the shadow of Dangan Castle, was sent to Brown’s Seminary, later known more grandly as Oxford House Academy, in King’s Road, Chelsea. He was, by his own admission, a shy, indolent and dreamy little boy who was often to be seen standing silently alone under a walnut tree while the other children played their rowdy games. So he was not sorry when, his eldest brother having mortgaged the family’s estates in Meath on their father’s death, he was sent with Gerald to Eton.⁵

Eton in 1781 was a school of some three hundred boys. The activities to be seen on the playing fields appeared to the uninitiated to be more like free-for-all fights than games; and so, indeed, they often were.* It was not until halfway through the next century that football rules became sufficiently standardized for public schools to play matches against each other without brawling on the pitch. An unsociable boy, quarrelsome in his reserve, Arthur Wesley seems to have enjoyed neither football nor cricket; nor is there record of his having played any of the other games with which his fellow Etonians passed the hours they spent outside the classroom, fives and hoops, hopscotch, marbles and battledore. In later years he recalled leaping over a wide ditch in the garden of his old house, but he said he could not remember a fight he had evidently had with an older boy, Robert Percy (‘Bobus’) Smith, the ugly, amusing brother of Sydney Smith, the witty Canon of St Paul’s, whom he had provoked by throwing a stone at him when he was bathing.⁶ According to the school’s historian, Arthur Wesley did ‘little else’, other than engage in this fight, ‘to attract the attention of his schoolfellows’.⁷ Certainly he did not look back upon his days at Eton with any pleasure and returned to the school but rarely.†

As for his work in class, he made very slow progress, labouring gloomily in the Fourth Form, his name appearing in the lists at number fifty-four out of a total of seventy-nine boys, many if not most of them younger than himself. His command of the classics, for all the hours he was required to spend poring over Ovid and Caesar, remained so highly uncertain that in later life he was to pronounce that his two standard rules for public speaking were never to take on subjects he knew nothing about and, whenever possible, to avoid quoting Latin.⁸

Early in 1784, after his younger brother, Henry, had entered the Lower Remove, it was decided that the family’s finances could no longer be stretched to keep Wesley major at a school whose education seemed to be profiting him so little. So he left Eton and, after a short spell with a tutor, a clergyman in Brighton, he was taken by his mother to Brussels where, it was hoped, she might live more economically and he would progress in French more satisfactorily than he had done in Greek and Latin. He did learn to speak French after a fashion and with a Belgian accent; but his other studies were not pursued with noticeable vigour and he spent much of his time in the lodgings his mother had taken for them in the house of a lawyer, Louis Goubert, playing the violin with patient assiduity and some of the skill of his father: a fellow lodger in the house, the son of a Yorkshire baronet, considered that Wesley played very well, adding that it was the only species of talent that the young man appeared to possess.⁹

After a few months his mother went home, having talked to him about his future career. His eldest brother, after succeeding his father as Earl of Mornington, had made a name for himself in the Irish House of Lords and been elected to the English House of Commons as Member for Beeralston in Devonshire. His second brother, William, having served for a time in the Navy, had assumed the additional surname of Pole, on becoming heir to the estates of his cousin William Pole of Ballyfin, Queen’s County, and had been elected Member for Trim in the Irish Parliament. Gerald Valerian, who had gone to Eton with Arthur, was destined for the Church and, in due course, for a prebendal stall at Durham. Henry, the youngest of the brothers, was still at Eton and had thoughts of joining the Army. Their mother, a woman now forty-two years old, rather severe in manner, ready to feel pride in her sons’ achievements but incapable of demonstrating much affection for them, considered that Arthur, too, might do worse than become a soldier. Indeed, in her opinion, her ‘ugly boy Arthur’ was ‘food for powder and nothing more’.*¹⁰ He himself was as yet undecided about his future; but he had no objections to going to Angers in western France to enrol in the celebrated Academy there and undergo a training, as much designed for men of fashion as for future officers, which would include fencing, riding and dancing lessons as well as some instruction in French grammar, mathematics and the science of military fortifications.

It proved to be a not too demanding course. Monsieur Wesley was quite regular in his attendance at the lessons of the dancing and fencing masters and the riding instruction given by the proprietor of the Academy, M. de Pignerolle, whose great-great-grandfather had presided over it in the days of King Louis XIV. Yet the seventeen-year-old Wesley found time to take his dog, a white terrier called Vick†, for walks around the town’s thirteenth-century moated castle, to play cards with M. de Pignerolle’s English and Irish students, known to the French as the groupe des lords, to occupy idle hours by dropping coins from upstairs windows on to the heads of unwary citizens in the streets below, to sit at café tables, in the Academy’s smart uniform of scarlet coat with blue facings and yellow buttons, watching the passing scene, and to accept the invitations which were readily offered to the more presentable of their number by the local noblesse. They were entertained in nearby chateaux by the duc de Brissac, the duc de Praslin and the duchesse de Sabran; and Wesley afterwards related how he met not only the Abbé Siéyès, who was soon to play so prominent a part in the revolutionary deliberations of the Estates General at Versailles, but also François René Chateaubriand, who, having decided he had no vocation for the priesthood, was then a cavalry officer a few months older than himself.¹¹

By the time he returned home in 1786, fluent now in French, and having impressed M. de Pignerolle as ’an Irish lad of great promise’,¹² Wesley decided that he would take his mother’s advice and allow his brother Richard to use his influence, as a junior member of William Pitt’s administration, to obtain a commission for him in the Army.

2 An Officer in the 33rd

1787 – 93

‘Those who think lightly of that lad are unwise in their generation.’

‘HE IS HERE at this moment, and perfectly idle,’ Lord Mornington wrote on his brother’s behalf. It was, he added, a ‘matter of indifference’ to him what commission his brother got, provided he got it soon and it was not in the artillery which would not suit his rank or intellect.¹ Early in March 1787, a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday, the reply came: Arthur Wesley could be offered a commission as ensign in the 73rd (Highland) Regiment of Foot.

His mother was delighted. She thought him much improved upon his return from Angers, she told two friends of hers, Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, who were living together on terms of romantic friendship, totally isolated from society in a cottage at Llangollen in North Wales. These ladies, described by Prince Pückler-Muskau as ‘certainly the most celebrated virgins in Europe’, had already met Arthur Wesley. He had been taken to see them by his grandmother, Lady Dungannon, who lived nearby, while still an Eton schoolboy, and he had been awkward in their company, disturbed by their semi-masculine attire and Lady Eleanor’s top hat. But he was not awkward now, his mother assured them. ‘He really is a charming young man,’ she said. ‘Never did I see such a change for the better in any body.’²

She used her influence with the Marquess of Buckingham, the Duke of Portland’s successor as Lord-Lieutenant in Dublin, to have him appointed to his lordship’s staff as aide-de-camp; and she recorded with satisfaction his promotion to Lieutenant in the 76th (Hindoostan) Regiment of Foot, and then, since this regiment was returning to India, his transfer to the 41st.

He called upon the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’ on his way to take up his duties in Ireland; and they agreed with his mother that the eighteen-year-old boy was now greatly improved and had much to recommend him. He was ‘a charming young man’, Lady Eleanor decided, ‘handsome … and elegant’.³

Not everyone in Dublin concurred with her. One young lady was thankful to be able to escape from his company; another, older woman, Lady Aldborough, having taken him to a picnic in her carriage, declined to have him with her on the return journey because ‘he was so dull’; yet another refused to attend a party if that ‘mischievous boy’ was to be of the company: he had such an irritating habit of flicking up the lace from shirt collars. To the Napier family he gave the impression of being ‘a shallow, saucy stripling’. It had to be conceded, though, that the time spent in dancing classes in Angers had not been wasted, that he rode well even if his seat was a trifle ungainly, and that, while on occasions rather stiff, his manner, when not in one of his prankish moods, was pleasant enough, his conversation interesting, though small talk was never his forte.⁴

It was quite clear that he enjoyed the company of women and, when at ease with them, was ‘good humoured’ in their company. He also enjoyed the excitement of gambling. Indeed, it was said of him that, like the denizens of White’s club in St James’s, he would bet on anything. On one occasion, for example, he won 150 guineas by getting from Cornelscourt outside Dublin to Leeson Street, a distance of six miles, in under an hour. But he lost as often as he won; and sank ever deeper into debt. He seems not to have kept a mistress as his brother, Richard, did at great expense, having chosen to live with an attractive Frenchwoman of extravagant tastes and philoprogenitive inclinations whom he later married after she had given birth to five children;⁵ but Arthur does appear to have frequented a brothel, once evidently being fined for an assault upon a fellow customer of the establishment, a Frenchman whose stick he seized and beat him with.⁶

Yet Arthur Wesley had his serious and ambitious side. He took trouble to exercise his talent with the violin and to improve the quality of his playing. He read a great deal: he was once discovered studying Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The Hon. George Napier who had served on Sir Henry Clinton’s staff in America and was then a captain in the 100th Foot, commented, Those who think lightly of that lad are unwise in their generation: he has in him the makings of a great general.’⁷

He was already beginning to make a name for himself, as the ambitious Richard had done so quickly. Arthur contrived to get elected at the age of nineteen to the Irish House of Commons for the family seat of Trim, formerly held by his brother William, having first become a Freemason and having publicly declared his opposition to the Corporation of Trim’s decision to confer the freedom of the place upon Henry Grattan, the Irish patriot whose views on Roman Catholic emancipation were not conducive to the peace of mind of Lord Buckingham; and, although he did not speak in the House of Commons for two years, when he did so his maiden speech was quite well received. So were his subsequent interventions, even if, in the opinion of Jonah Barrington, a judge in the Irish court of admiralty, whom he met at a dinner party, he never spoke on important subjects.⁸

Lieutenant Wesley began to believe that he could become a politician if he so willed it. Yet, as revolution gained momentum in France with the storming of the Tuileries in August 1792, the September Massacres and the execution of the King, Wesley’s thoughts turned again and again from politics to the Army and to service overseas. By transfers and purchase, he was advancing in his profession. From the 41st Foot he had been transferred to the 12th Light Dragoons; from the Dragoons he had returned to the infantry as a captain in the 58th Foot; from the 58th he had gone back to the cavalry as a captain in the 18th Light Dragoons; and, having appealed to his brother Richard for the money, he had bought a major’s rank in the 33rd Foot.

Tired of trotting about at the Lord-Lieutenant’s heels in Dublin for a paltry ten shillings a day, though this was a welcome addition to his scanty private income of £125 a year,* he was anxious to go to war. He gave up gambling; he paid off what debts he could, including one to the boot-maker with whom he lodged; he resigned his Trim seat, and gave away his violin, believing, so a friend later recorded, that playing the fiddle was ‘not a soldierly accomplishment and took up too much of his time and thoughts’.⁹

He wrote to Richard to ask him to approach the authorities on his behalf and tell them that, if any part of the Army were to be sent abroad, he wanted to go with it. ‘They may as well take me as anybody else.’¹⁰

For the moment they did not take him. He was kept in Ireland drilling the soldiers of the 33rd and supervising the logging of the regimental accounts, a responsibility he did not find as tedious as might have been expected, for he had a good head for figures, a respect for detail and a pride in his talent for ‘rapid and correct calculation’.¹¹ In the autumn of 1793 he made a brief visit to England where he witnessed his brother’s signature to the deed of sale of Dangan Castle; but he was soon back in Ireland, a lieutenant-colonel by then, in command of the 33rd, frustratingly confined to regimental duties while news came from Paris of the horrors of the Terror and the blade of the guillotine rose and fell.

3 The First Campaign

1794 – 5

‘I was on the Waal, I think from October to January and during all that time I only saw once one General from the headquarters.’

THE WAR which France had declared on Britain after the execution of the King was not going well. The British army had been ejected from Dunkirk and was soon to be thrown out of Flanders, through which it was vainly hoped an attack could be made on the heart of France; while the French, commanded by the young generals of the Revolution, brave, impromptu and roturier, occupied Holland. The British troops – led by the Duke of York who was quite at home at the Horse Guards, the headquarters of the general staff in Whitehall, but as inexperienced in the field as most of his regimental officers – were ill-clothed and ill-fed, less than competently served by a Royal Waggon Corps, whose men, raised from the rookeries of Blackfriars and Seven Dials, were known as the Newgate Blues. For the sick and wounded, to be carried to such military hospitals as there were was to be consigned to a probable death. Surgeons’ mates were slipshod, negligent and very often drunk. A Dutchman counted forty-two bodies thrown overboard from a hospital barge on which they had been left unattended on the open deck. Officers were likely to go as hungry as their men. Colonel Wesley was warned by an old Guards officer, ‘You little know what you are going to meet with. You will often have no dinner at all. I mean literally no dinner, and not merely roughing it on a beefsteak or a bottle of wine.’¹

Arthur Wesley, twenty-five years old, was at last to find this out for himself. The orders for which he had long been waiting had come; and in the middle of June 1794 he disembarked the 33rd Foot on the quayside at Ostend from a ship that had brought them over from Cork. At Ostend he was given command of two other battalions as well as his own and handed orders to take them over post haste to Antwerp to reinforce the Duke of York’s position. But the Duke’s position was not tenable for long; and, as the summer weather gave way to a cold autumn and a freezing winter, the British fell back in slow retreat. The 33rd were briefly in action in September at Boxtel where their Colonel handled them well; and later, in the depths of winter, they fought their way through another small town with bayonets fixed. Yet for most of those weeks officers and men alike struggled merely to keep warm and alive in the dreary, frozen countryside of polder and canal. We turn out once, sometimes twice every night,’ the Colonel reported in a letter to a cousin. ‘The officers and men are harassed to death … I have not had my clothes off my back for a long time; we spend the greater part of the night upon the bank of the river [the Waal] … Although the French annoy us much at night, they are very entertaining during the day time; they are perpetually chattering with our officers and soldiers, and dance the carmagnole upon the opposite bank whenever we desire them; but occasionally the spectators on our side are interrupted in the middle of the dance by a cannon ball from theirs.’²

Utrecht fell; French trees of liberty were set up in Amsterdam; and the ragged British army straggled back, leaving broken carts and dead animals in its wake, towards the Ems and the Weser at Bremen. Colonel Wesley did not wait to see his battalion embark. Leaving a junior officer in charge, he set sail in March for London.

His first campaign had been a most unpleasant experience; but at least, so he comforted himself, he had learned ‘what one ought not to do, and that is always something’.³ He had also learned that, while many of the British regiments were ‘excellent’, the generals had little idea how to manage an army. ‘I was left to myself with my regiment … thirty miles from headquarters which latter was a scene of jollifications,’ he recalled, ‘and I do not think that I was once visited by the Commander-in-Chief.’⁴ He remembered, too, an occasion when a dispatch was brought in after dinner in the mess. ‘That will keep till tomorrow,’ said the senior officer complacently, returning to the port decanter.⁵

‘I was on the Waal, I think from October to January,’ Wesley complained, ‘and during all that time I only saw once one General from the headquarters … We had letters from England, and I declare that those letters told us more of what was passing at headquarters than we learned from the headquarters themselves … The real reason why I succeeded in my own campaign is because I was always on the spot – I saw everything and did everything myself.’⁶

While his battalion went into camp in Essex, Colonel Wesley resumed without enthusiasm his duties as aide-de-camp to the Lord-Lieutenant in Dublin. Before leaving for Ostend, he had done his best to settle his debts, assigning his income to a tradesman who agreed to pay them off by instalments. But he returned to find that they had not yet all been discharged, while his lieutenant-colonel’s pay and his allowances as an aide-de-camp were meagre in the extreme for a man without private fortune who wished to cut a figure in the world. His brother Richard was generous: he did not seek repayment of the sums he had advanced for the purchases in rank from captain to lieutenant-colonel; but there were limits to what he could ask of him and what Richard himself could afford. As it was, Richard was doing all he could to press his brother’s claims to some office of profit under the Crown. He wrote to the Lord-Lieutenant, an appointment now held by the second Earl Camden, proposing that Arthur was ideally qualified to fill the situation of Secretary-at-War which was ‘likely to be opened soon’. Colonel Wesley himself approached Camden to suggest that he might be appointed to fill vacancies on the Revenue or Treasury Boards, or, perhaps, he might be considered for the post of Surveyor-General of the Ordnance for Ireland when the present incumbent resigned. But Camden was not responsive; nor did he show due appreciation when his aide-de-camp, as Member for Trim, rose to answer Henry Grattan and defend the record of Lord Camden’s predecessor as Lord-Lieutenant, the 10th Earl of Westmorland, who had been recalled in 1795 because of his firm opposition to the emancipation of the Roman Catholics.

Despairing of getting any help from Lord Camden, Colonel Wesley sought leave of absence from Dublin and returned to England to his battalion which was now stationed near Southampton under orders to sail for the West Indies. He wrote to say that he intended to set out with his men; but, if he hoped to receive some opposition to this plan, he was disappointed. Lord Camden was ‘very sorry to lose him’ but quite approved of his decision to go to the West Indies, being ‘convinced that a profession once embraced should not be given up’. ‘I shall be very glad if I can make some arrangement satisfactory to you against you come back, but if a vacancy should happen in the Revenue Board I fear the Speaker’s son must have the first.’⁷

So, all hopes of employment in Ireland or England abandoned, Wesley prepared to sail. He was not feeling at all well. As a boy he had repeatedly suffered from minor illnesses, colds and low fever; and his recent campaigning on the Continent had exacerbated what his doctor called his ‘aguish complaint’. He was advised to take calomel and cinnamon, opium and quassia, camphorated spirit of wine and tincture of cantharides.⁸ Doubtless wary of these prescriptions, he consulted another doctor but this physician also seems to have been unable to effect a cure, while finding his patient a remarkable personality. ‘I have been attending a young man whose conversation is the most extraordinary I have ever listened to,’ he is said to have observed. ‘If he lives he must one day be Prime Minister.’⁹

The chances that he would at least live were much improved when fortune decided that he was not, after all, to go to the West Indies, the graveyard of so many British soldiers.

Twice the ships of the convoy were swept back by winter gales, on the second occasion after tossing for seven weeks in seas so heavy that one of them was sent scudding helplessly through the Strait of Gibraltar and on to the Spanish coast, while others were scattered across the Atlantic or into the Solent.

4 A Voyage to India

1796 – 8

‘In person he was about 5 feet 7 inches with a long pale face, a remarkably large aquiline nose, a clear blue eye and the blackest beard I ever saw.’

COLONEL WESLEY was aboard one of the ships that were blown home. He stepped ashore in poorer health than ever in January 1796. He went to see his doctor again when he returned to Dublin to settle his affairs there before taking the 33rd on their next tour of duty, this time in the East Indies rather than the West.

There was much to do before they sailed: he had to instruct his successor in the duties of the Lieutenant-General’s aide-de-camp, to write a paper for the guidance of the man who was to take over as Member of Parliament for Trim, to give instructions to the agent who was managing the family’s estates in Meath which had not been sold with the castle, to make such arrangements as he could about the liquidation of his debts, which now stood at over £1,000. He was still busy in Dublin when the 33rd were on the point of sailing for India by way of the Cape of Good Hope. He let them go without him. The voyage would take several weeks and, if he sailed after them in a fast frigate, he would be able to catch them up before they got into the Arabian Sea.

He left Dublin for London in June and, taking rooms at 3 Savile Row, he set out for the shops to equip himself for what might prove to be a long absence in the East. There were clothes to buy and, equally important, there were books. For these he went to Faulders, the booksellers and book-binders in Bond Street, and from here and other shops he came away with a library that could surely not have been packed in its entirety in the trunk, complete with ‘Cord Etc.’, which he bought from Mr Faulder for £1 11s 6d. There were histories of warfare, sieges and military campaigns, an account of the topography of the Indian sub-continent, a copy of the Bengal Army List, books about Egypt and the East India Company, maps and German, Arabic and Persian grammars and dictionaries, as well as two volumes of Richardson’s Persian dictionary costing the extraordinarily large sum of twelve guineas. There were three volumes of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, four of the works of Lord Bolingbroke and of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, five of the theological expositions of William Paley, six of Plutarch’s lives, nine of the philosophical works of John Locke, thirteen of David Hume’s History of England, fifteen volumes by Frederick the Great and, for lighter reading, twenty-four volumes of the works of Jonathan Swift. There were books by Voltaire, Crébillon and Rousseau, Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and the memoirs of Marshal Saxe. Listed between books by Smollett and the licentious Amours du Chevalier de Fauhlas were nine volumes of Women of Pleasure. Between a history of France and Cambridge’s War in India was a medical treatise on venereal disease.¹

With these and many other books safely corded in their trunks, Wesley, by now a full colonel, sailed from Portsmouth when the wind was sufficiently fresh and rejoined the 33rd at the Cape. Here he also found two young ladies, not long out of their schoolroom, on their way to India. The elder of the two, Jemima Smith, was described by a young officer who met them at this time as ‘a most incorrigible flirt, very clever, very satirical, and aiming at universal conquest. Her sister, Henrietta [aged seventeen] was more retiring, and I think more admired … with her pretty little figure and lovely neck [that was to say bosom] … She made a conquest of Colonel Arthur Wesley who had arrived at the Cape with the 33rd Regiment.’*²

Certainly in the company of these two girls, the Colonel, so studious in the frigate on her long passage down the west coast of Africa, became lively and entertaining, ‘all life and spirits’. A captain in the 12th Regiment, Maria Edgeworth’s cousin, George Elers, who had recently arrived at the Cape, provided this sketch of him:

In person he was about 5 feet 7 inches [actually more like 5 feet 8 or 9 inches] with a long pale face, a remarkably large aquiline nose, a clear blue eye and the blackest beard I ever saw … I have known him shave twice in one day, which I believe was his constant practice … He was remarkably clean in his person …

His features always reminded me of [the tragedian] John Philip Kemble, and, what is more remarkable I also observed the great likeness between him and the performer, Mr Charles Young, which he told me he had often heard remarked. He spoke at this time remarkably quickly, with a very, very slight lisp. He had very narrow jaw bones, and there was a great peculiarity in his ear, which I never observed but in one other person, the late Lord Byron – the lobe of the ear uniting to the cheek. He had a particular way, when pleased, of pursing up his mouth. I have often observed it when he has been thinking abstractedly.³

Colonel Wesley was not detained at the Cape for long: in the middle of February 1797, at the age of twenty-seven, almost eight months after leaving England, he went ashore at Calcutta after a more than commonly tedious passage across the Indian Ocean and up the Bay of Bengal in an East Indiaman, named after Princess Charlotte, King George Ill’s eldest daughter. As soon as he could he called upon the Governor-General, Sir John Shore, a schoolfellow of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan at Harrow, who had started his career as a writer in the service of the East India Company by which his father had also been employed as a supercargo. Shore was a conscientious and hard-working though unremarkable man and ‘as cold as a greyhound’s nose’; but he was astute enough to recognize in Colonel Wesley a promising young man of strong common sense who might well one day be a person of distinction.⁴

The Colonel, Shore added, also had about him an air of ‘boyish playfulness’; and it was this quality which struck William Hickey, the memoirist, then practising as an attorney in Calcutta and a popular and highly hospitable member of the British community there. Hickey saw him first at a St Patrick’s Day dinner in Calcutta at which the Colonel had been asked to take the chair, a duty which he performed ‘with peculiar credit to himself’.⁵

‘On the 20th of the same month [March 1797],’ Hickey continued, ‘a famous character arrived in Bengal, Major-General John St Leger, who had for a long period been a bosom friend and companion of the Prince of Wales. From having lived so much with His Royal Highness, he had not only suffered in his health, but materially impaired his fortune, and was therefore happy to get out of the way of the Prince’s temptations by visiting Bengal, upon which Establishment he was placed upon His Majesty’s staff.’

As soon as St Leger arrived, Hickey, who had known him in England, invited him to join a party of guests he was to entertain at his house at Chinsurah. Colonel Wesley was also of the party which, Hickey congratulated himself, was a great success.

We rose early every morning making long excursions from which we returned with keen appetite for breakfast. That meal being over we adjourned to the billiard room … When tired of that game [we played] Trick Track [backgammon] … Thus the morning passed. At about half past three we retired to our respective rooms, of which I have seven for bachelors, to dress, and at four precisely sat down to dinner.⁶

Hickey gave another party at Chinsurah on the King’s birthday, 4 June; and again on that occasion Colonel Wesley was one of the guests. Their host had procured a ‘tolerably fat deer’ and a ‘very fine turtle’ and engaged ‘an eminent French cook from Calcutta to dress the dinner’. He had taken ‘especial care to lay in a quantum sufficit of the best champagne that was procurable’; his ‘claret, hock, and madeira’, he knew, were ‘not to be surpassed in Bengal’. The party accordingly went off with the ‘utmost hilarity and good humour’. ‘We had several choice songs … followed by delightful catches and glees … and General St Leger in the course of the evening sang “The British Grenadiers” with high spirit.’ The party did not break up until between two and three o’clock in the morning; and nearly all the guests woke up with dreadful hangovers.

Freely as the claret was pushed about at Chinsurah, however, the drinking there was moderate when compared with that in the officers’ mess of the 33rd Foot, over which Colonel Wesley presided, and in the house of Wesley’s second-in-command, Lieutenant-Colonel John Sherbrooke, at Alypore, three miles from Calcutta. Here the drinking of the 33rd’s officers was astonishing. One of the 33rd’s parties, so Hickey wrote, consisted of eight as strong-headed fellows as could be found in Hindustan, including Colonel Wesley.

During dinner we drank as usual, that is, the whole company each with the other at least twice over. The cloth being removed, the first half-dozen toasts proved irresistible, and I gulped them down without hesitation. At the seventh … I only half filled my glass whereupon our host said, ‘I should not have suspected you, Hickey, of shirking such a toast as the Navy,’ and my next neighbour immediately observing, ‘it must have been a mistake,’ having the bottle in his hand at the time, he filled my glass up to the brim. The next round I made a similar attempt, with no better success, and then gave up the thoughts of saving myself. After drinking two-and-twenty bumpers in glasses of considerable magnitude, the [Colonel] said, everyone might then fill according to his own discretion, and so discreet were all of the company that we continued to follow the Colonel’s example of drinking nothing short of bumpers until two o’clock in the morning, at which hour each person staggered to his carriage or his palankeen, and was conveyed to town. The next day I was incapable of leaving my bed, from an excruciating headache, which I did not get rid of for eight-and-forty hours; indeed a more severe debauch I never was engaged in in any part of the world.⁷

For Colonel Wesley these days in Calcutta were a pleasant interlude; but he had not studied McKenzie’s War in Mysore and General Dirom’s Narrative of the Campaign in India to sit drinking bumpers of claret at camphor-wood dinner tables under gently swishing punkahs and passing the mouthpiece of hookahs to the wives of Company officials on lamplit verandas. There was talk of an attack on the Pacific colonies of Spain which had recently come into the war on the side of France, or upon the Dutch, now also England’s enemies, in Java, and Wesley hoped that if such an assault were to be mounted, he might be given a command in it, perhaps the chief command. Yet, as a recent arrival in India, he did not want to appear too importunate. So, when it was suggested he might command such an expedition, he demurred, proposing the name of another more senior officer, with the proviso that if anything should prevent that officer taking it, he would be prepared to accept the command himself, ‘taking chance,’ as he told his brother Richard, ‘that the known pusillanimity of the Enemy’ and his own exertions would ‘compensate in some degree’ for his lack of experience. ‘I hope,’ he added, not troubling to hide his low opinion of them, ‘to be at least as successful as the people to whom Hobart [Lord Hobart, Governor of the Presidency of Madras] wishes to give command … Of course, the Chief Command of this expedition would make my fortune; going upon it at all will enable me to free myself from debt, therefore you may easily conceive that I am not very anxious for the conclusion of a peace at this moment.’⁸ As though to confirm his qualifications as commander, he sent Sir John Shore a résumé of what was known of the places which were to come under attack and information he had gleaned about the harbours where the expeditionary force might be put ashore.

His hopes, however, were not to be realized; he was not given the chief command but went instead as commanding officer of the 33rd with orders to land them at Manila in the Philippines, and then launch an attack across the Sulu and Celebes Seas and through the Straits of Makassar upon the Dutch garrison in Java. But the expedition was as inconclusive as the 33rd’s attempted crossing of the Atlantic in 1795.

It got off to an unfortunate start: a young clergyman, the nephew of a friend of William Hickey, appointed by Colonel Wesley at Hickey’s request as chaplain of the 33rd, turned out to be ‘of very eccentric and peculiarly odd manners’. A day or two out of Calcutta he got ‘abominably drunk’ and ‘gave a public exhibition of extreme impropriety, exposing himself to both soldiers and sailors, running out of his cabin stark naked into the midst of them, talking all sorts of bawdy and ribaldry, and singing scraps of the most blackguard and indecent songs’. Overcome with remorse when sober, he took to his bunk and, though kindly assured by Colonel Wesley that his behaviour was ‘not of the least consequence’, that no one would think the worse of him for ‘little irregularities committed in a moment of forgetfulness’, ‘that the most correct and cautious men were liable to be led astray by convivial society’, and that ‘no blame ought to attach to a cursory debauch’, the poor young clergyman remained inconsolably penitent, refused to eat and ‘actually fretted himself to death’.⁹

A week or so later the entire expeditionary force was recalled. There were reports of spreading unrest in British India, while Napoleon Bonaparte, appointed to the command of the French Army of Italy, was triumphantly justifying the trust the Directory in Paris had reposed in him. There had, besides, been mutinies in the British Navy at Spithead and the Nore which were so serious in the eyes of the First Lord of the Admiralty that the Channel Fleet was now ‘lost to the country as much as if it was at the bottom of the sea’. It had consequently been decided in Calcutta that the British forces in the East must be concentrated, and the 33rd brought home forthwith across the Indian Ocean. So it was that before long Colonel Wesley – who had planned his regiment’s part in the expedition with characteristic care and attention to detail – was once more back in India in the company of William Hickey.

But, having been denied the opportunity of distinguishing himself, he felt even less inclined to fritter his afternoons and evenings away at dinner tables or to be satisfied with the undemanding routine of regimental life. He found time to study his books on Indian affairs and even produced a long and detailed refutation of a work that had recently appeared entitled Remarks upon the Present State of the Husbandry and Commerce of Bengal. He also became a familiar figure in the corridors of both Fort St George, where Lord Hobart exercised his authority as Governor of the Presidency of Madras, and Fort William, the headquarters of the Governor-General of India.

5 The Tiger of Mysore

1799

‘Had Colonel Wellesley been an obscure officer of fortune he would have been brought to a court-martial.’

SHORE’S DAYS as Governor-General were now coming to an end. As the recently created Baron Teignmouth, he sailed home in March 1798, leaving the Government in the hands of the Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Alured Clarke, until his successor arrived in India.

This successor, whose ship, carrying a huge quantity of his baggage, docked at Calcutta on 17 May 1798, was the thirty-seven-year-old Richard Wesley, Earl of Mornington, soon to be created Marquess Wellesley of Norragh in the peerage of Ireland. The Marquess insisted upon that spelling of the family name which his brother Arthur now adopted, as did Henry whom the new Governor-General had brought out as his Private Secretary.*

The Marquess, stately and patrician, long desirous of a marquessate, did not consider an Irish title at all adequate; nor did he hesitate to inform Mr Pitt, the Prime Minister, of his feelings in the matter. But he was well satisfied with his appointment which was, indeed, in his estimation, ‘the most distinguished situation in the British Empire after that of Prime Minister of England’.¹ He was also satisfied that he had ‘firmness enough to govern the British empire in India without favour or affection to any human being either in Europe or Asia’.²

As though prompted by this assertion, his brother Arthur hastened to assure him that even he would not expect to derive any more advantage from his close relationship to the Governor-General than he would had any other person been appointed.³ All the same, he offered his services to Richard who, anxious though he was to avoid all imputations of nepotism, employed him as an unofficial Military Secretary, seeking his advice on matters that might well have been supposed the province of the staff of the Commander-in-Chief, and receiving in return detailed papers and memoranda on all manner of subjects of which Colonel Wellesley had taken the trouble to inform himself, from strategic considerations to fortifications and supplies, even to such problems as the methods which should be employed in the collection of adequate numbers of bullocks.

The Colonel’s energetic activity led him to step on a number of sensitive toes. He much offended General St Leger by opposing his scheme for the creation of an Indian Horse Artillery, bluntly pointing out that there were insufficient horses for such an establishment: bullocks were the answer. He was also on extremely bad terms with Lord Hobart, Governor of the Presidency of Madras, whom he had much annoyed by openly opposing the appointment of General John Braithwaite to the command of the abortive expedition to Manila. Hobart had given the command to Braithwaite on the grounds that he was the senior officer and would be well supported by a reliable staff and a good army. ‘But he is mistaken,’ Colonel Wellesley objected, ‘if he supposes that a good, high-spirited army can be kept in order by other means than by the abilities & firmness of the Commander-in-Chief.’⁴ Colonel Wellesley’s forthright criticism of the Governor’s decision had resulted in his receiving in reply such a letter as, ‘between ourselves’, he indignantly told his brother Richard, ‘I have been unaccustomed to receive & will never submit to’.⁵

It was considered ‘most unfortunate’ that there should be quarrels and disagreements like these in high places when affairs in India were in such a critical state.

The area of the sub-continent administered by the British authorities was a very small proportion of the whole. There were still enormous princely states from Oudh in the north to Mysore and Travancore in the south with the sprawling territories of the Mārāthas and the Nizam of Hyderabad between them. Relations between these states and the East India Company were very uncertain, while French influence in India was still strong. There had been persistent outbreaks of hostilities, most recently between the British and Mysore whose Sultan, Tippu, known as the ‘Tiger of Mysore’, remained an inveterate enemy of British power.

The Governor-General proposed a pre-emptive strike against Tippu. He had heard that the French, who had landed a large expeditionary force in Egypt, were preparing to support the Sultan in an attempt to drive the British out of India. It would surely be wise to attack Mysore before the French alliance materialized. Colonel Wellesley disagreed. He did not take the threat of immediate French intervention too seriously. There were, at present, very few French troops available; and, if more were to be sent from France, they would have difficulty in evading the attention of the British fleet. It would be far better, he argued, to leave the Sultan in no doubt as to the Governor-General’s determination not to tolerate French interference in India and to give him an opportunity to deny that he wished to encourage it. ‘In the meantime,’ he concluded, ‘we shall be prepared against all events.’

In August 1798 he sailed with the 33rd for Madras. It was a highly unpleasant voyage in which his ship sprang a leak and an impure supply of water led to an outbreak of dysentery which cost him the lives of fifteen men and days of illness himself. He had already had cause to complain of the management of the sick soldiers by ships’ surgeons at sea, and had issued regimental orders for the supply of clean water, the fumigation of the lower decks, the scrubbing of hammocks, regular exercise with dumb-bells, the washing of feet and legs every morning and evening and the frequent dowsing of their naked bodies with bucketfuls of water, as well as the dilution of their allowance of spirits with three parts of water. He now castigated the commissariat for supplying his men with bad water: it was ‘unpardonable’ and he would be forced to make ‘a public complaint’ of the men responsible.⁶

In Madras Colonel Wellesley found Lord Clive installed as Governor of the Presidency in succession to Lord Hobart. Lord Clive was a very different man from his father, the great Governor of Bengal. Had he been born with a different name it is most probable that he would not have risen so high in the service of the East India Company. ‘How the Devil did he get there?’ asked Lord Wellesley.⁷ It was a question difficult to answer; for Lord Clive was ponderous in both thought and speech, though, it had to be conceded, of a remarkable physical vigour which was to last him into old age when, in his eightieth year, by then the Earl of Powis, he could be seen digging in his garden in his shirtsleeves at six o’clock in the morning. Despite his apparently stodgy temperament, he struck Colonel Wellesley as being probably not as dull as he appeared or as people in Madras took him to be. ‘Lord Clive opens his mind to me very freely upon all subjects,’ Colonel Wellesley reported. The truth is that he does not want talents, but is very diffident of himself … He improves daily.’ So the Governor-General was persuaded to change his mind about Lord. Clive. Indeed, it was not long before the Governor-General was convinced that he was ‘a very sensible man’. Certainly, as Governor, Lord Clive was quite ready to cooperate fully with the military men, both in Calcutta and in his own Presidency of Madras, in whatever were considered to be the best interests of British India.⁸

For the moment, in Colonel Wellesley’s sustained opinion, the best interests of British India lay in not provoking Tippu Sultan. ‘Nothing,’ the Colonel proposed, ‘should be demanded of him [which was] not an object of immediate consequence’; and it was his advice that the demand should, for the moment, be limited to his receiving a British ambassador in his capital of Seringapatam.⁹ In the meantime Colonel Wellesley continued to do his best to ensure that, were force found to be necessary, the means at the Governor-General’s disposal would be adequate to the task. The work was peculiarly frustrating: there were so many officers and Company officials whose inefficiency was an almost constant exasperation. Commissaries were in general ‘a parcel of blockheads’; two particular officers of the Company were worse than useless, one of them ‘so stupid’ that he was unfit for the simplest tasks, the other ‘such a rascal’ that he had to be watched all the time; neither of them understood ‘one syllable of the language’.¹⁰ The Colonel experienced as much difficulty in getting the siege-train moved nearer to the frontier between Mysore and the Madras Presidency as he did in having supplies placed in depots along the planned route of the army’s proposed march.

Exasperated as he was by inefficient subordinates, the Colonel was further troubled by the scandalous quarrelling of regimental officers, one of these quarrels resulting in a duel in which Colonel Henry Harvey Aston of the 12th was mortally wounded. There had followed a court of enquiry which had occupied hour upon hour of Colonel Wellesley’s time and kept him at work far into the night.¹¹

The General who was to command the army which Wellesley was so conscientiously helping to prepare for action was Lieutenant-General George Harris, a parson’s son who had trained as an artilleryman and had fought with distinction in the war in America where he had been wounded more than once. He was a good-natured man of no remarkable talents but deemed perfectly capable of conquering Mysore.

That Mysore must, indeed, be conquered was decided towards the end of 1798 after a lengthy, convoluted and entirely unsatisfactory correspondence between the Governor-General and the Sultan had merely widened the breach between the two men and failed to settle the question as to whether or not a representative of the King of England would be accepted in Seringapatam.

In General Harris’s army of some 50,000 men Colonel Wellesley was given a large command. As well as his own 33rd he was to have six battalions of the East India Company’s troops, four ‘rapscallion battalions’ of the army of Britain’s ally, the Nizam Ali of Hyderabad, which were accompanied by no fewer than 120,000 bullocks, and ‘about 10,000 (which they called 25,000) cavalry of all nations, some good and some bad, and twenty-six pieces of cannon’.¹² Wellesley was soon to decide it was, all in all, ‘a strong, a healthy and a brave army with plenty of stores, guns, etc.’, but he did not want the staff at Fort William in Calcutta to suppose victory was a foregone conclusion. They must be prepared for a failure; it was ‘better to see and to communicate the difficulties and dangers of the enterprise, and to endeavour to overcome them, than to be blind to everything but success till the moment of difficulty comes, and then to despond’.¹³

He was somewhat despondent himself, not having felt very well of late in Madras and soon to be pulled down by another attack of dysentery. He was also rather short tempered: when his brother the Governor-General asked him whether he should join the expeditionary force himself, he responded curtly, ‘All I can say upon the subject is, that if I were in General Harris’s situation, and you joined the army, I should quit it.’¹⁴

The Colonel was still feeling unwell when, on a moonless night on the outskirts of Seringapatam, the column which he was commanding entered a dense thicket of bamboos and betel palm where they came under heavy fire in the darkness. The men fled in all directions, stumbling into irrigation ditches, shouting to each other across the thick undergrowth as rockets exploded around them and musket balls whistled through the foliage. Several of them were captured, some later killed by strangulation or by having nails driven into their skulls. The Colonel, hit on the knee by a spent musket ball, unable to see anything in the blackness of the night, and despairing of the possibility of reforming the column, limped away to report the disaster in the camp where the fires were still flickering at midnight.¹⁵

Some officers, disliking what they took to be Colonel Wellesley’s bumptious arrogance and jealous of his close relationship with the Governor-General, were not sorry to learn of his failure. His second-in-command was one of them. Captain Elers, in a book published after he had fallen out with Wellesley, reported that, having gone to make a report to General Harris, he was turned away at the tent by a servant who told him that ‘General Sahib had gone to sleep’. ‘Overcome with despair and in a state of distraction, Colonel Wellesley threw himself, with all his clothes on, on the table (at which a few hours before he had dined), awaiting the dawn of day.’¹⁶ In fact, so General Harris noted in his journal, at about midnight Colonel Wellesley came to his tent ‘in a good deal of agitation to say he had not carried the tope [thicket]. It must be particularly unpleasant to him.’¹⁷

It undoubtedly was so. Ashamed of a failure that he was to remember for the rest of his life, he bitterly blamed himself for entering the thicket in darkness without reconnoitring it first. He told his brother Richard that he was determined never to make such a mistake again. ‘Had Colonel Wellesley been an obscure officer of fortune,’ commented Captain Elers, ‘he would have been brought to a court-martial and perhaps received such a reprimand for bad management as might have induced him in disgust to have resigned His Majesty’s service.’¹⁸

The next morning when the advance to Seringapatam was resumed Colonel Wellesley was late in starting off because of a message which failed to reach him. General Harris, accordingly, told another officer to lead the attack instead. This officer was Major-General David Baird, a tough, blunt Scotsman, twelve years Wellesley’s senior. He had never been an even-tempered man. As a young captain in the 73rd Highlanders on a previous campaign he had been wounded, taken prisoner and held captive by Tippu Sultan for three years and eight months; and, with the bullet still in his wound, he had been chained to a fellow prisoner. When the news reached his mother in Scotland that her son was treated in this way, she acknowledged the fact of his savage temper in an observation of maternal percipience. ‘God help,’ she said, ‘the puir child chained to our Davie.’¹⁹

Age had not mellowed him. ‘He is,’ one of his officers declared, ‘a bloody old bad tempered Scotchman.’ He had no reason to regard Colonel Wellesley with benevolence. He considered that he should have been offered the command of the expedition to Manila which it had seemed likely at one time would be given to the far junior Colonel the Hon. Arthur Wesley; he also thought that he should have been given command of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s troops which had been assigned instead to the well-connected young Colonel and, in his disappointment, he had unwisely sent General Harris ‘a strong remonstrance’. Even so, according to his biographer, he demurred when the offer of superseding Wellesley was made to him. ‘Don’t you think, Sir,’ he said to Harris, ‘it would be but fair to give Wellesley an opportunity of retrieving the misfortune of last night.’*²⁰

So Colonel Wellesley was given his chance; and over the next few days, his knee less painful, he made amends for the débâcle of that miserable night. Having driven the Sultan’s men from the wood, he successfully attacked one of Seringapatam’s defensive works, as the army settled down to the formalities of a siege. He was not, however, to lead the final assault, for this duty was assigned to General Baird so that he might take revenge for the privations and ignominy of his long captivity. Waving his sword and shouting, ‘Forward, my lads, my brave fellows, follow me and prove yourselves worthy of the name of British soldiers!’, he led his men over the walls and into Seringapatam where Tippu Sultan – having put to death as oblations various animals, including two buffaloes, a goat, a bullock and an elephant, as well as, so it was said, various women of his court – was found dead, shot through the temple.²¹

6 The Governor of Mysore

1799

‘I must say that I was the fit person to be selected.’

GENERAL BAIRD expected to be placed in command of the captured city in which much treasure had to be guarded and a terrified populace reassured. But he was not considered a suitable officer for the task. ‘He had no talent, no tact,’ Colonel Wellesley said later, while acknowledging his bravery and the regard in which he was held by his men. ‘He had strong prejudices against the natives, and was peculiarly disqualified from his manner, habits and temper for the management of them. Having been Tippoo’s prisoner for years, he had a strong feeling of the bad usage which he had received during his captivity.’ ‘I must say,’ Wellesley added, ‘that I was the fit person to be selected. I had commanded the Nizam’s army during the campaign, and had given universal satisfaction. I was liked by the natives.’¹ General Harris, who had not forgiven Baird for his ‘strong remonstrance’ over the command of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s troops, accepted that this was the case.

So, while Baird and his staff were having breakfast in the Sultan’s palace, news that he was not to be left in command at Seringapatam was broken to him by the Colonel himself who displayed on the occasion just that want of tact of which he accused the bluff Scotsman.

‘General Baird,’ he said to him, ‘I am appointed to the command of Seringapatam, and here is the order of General Harris.’

‘Come gentlemen,’ replied Baird, rising angrily from the table and ignoring Colonel Wellesley, ‘we have no longer any business here.’

‘Oh, pray,’ said the Colonel. ‘Finish your breakfast.’²

Baird stormed from the palace and sat down to write a furious letter to General Harris which elicited another reprimand for once more displaying ‘a total want of discretion and respect’. Baird was told to go back to Madras. He stormed out of Seringapatam; but Colonel Wellesley had not yet seen the last of him.³

As it happened it was just as well that Wellesley not Baird was appointed to command in Seringapatam; for the situation demanded talents and insights that the brave, blunt Scotsman did not possess. At first there was much looting and frantic selling of treasures and gold bars stolen from the late Sultan’s palace before order was restored by the hanging of four men and the flogging of others. Even then, the Colonel thought it would be best if most troops were withdrawn from the town since their presence, and their insatiable taste for plunder, occasioned ‘great terror and confusion among the inhabitants’, tending not only to obstruct the ‘settlement of the country’ but also to destroy the confidence which, he was pleased to say, the people reposed in him.

He had no particular affection for the Indian peoples in general. Indeed, not long after his arrival in Calcutta he had decided that the climate and the natives combined to make India a ‘miserable country to live in’, and he came to the conclusion that a man might well deserve some of the wealth that was brought home as a reward ‘for having spent his life here’.⁴ The natives were ‘the most mischievous, deceitful race of people [he had] ever seen or read of. ‘I have not yet met with a Hindoo who had one good quality,’ he added, ‘and the Mussulmans are worse than they are. Their meekness and mildness do not exist.’⁵ When he was offered two half-caste officers for the 33rd, he replied that they might well be ‘as good as others’, but he had been told that they were ‘as black as my hat’ and he declined to have them.⁶ And when he heard that the Resident of Hyderabad was openly living with an Indian princess he delivered himself of the outraged opinion that it was ‘a disgrace to the British name and nation’. Yet he was well aware how unwise it would be to offend against Indian customs and susceptibilities, and was determined not to tolerate in Mysore any of the ‘dirty things’ which he had been told, soon after his arrival in India, were ‘done in some of the commands’.⁷ On being informed that the Commander-in-Chief had issued an order for a search of the Sultan’s zenana for hidden treasure, he strongly disapproved of it and, in carrying out his instructions, took ‘every precaution to render the search as decent and as little injurious to the feelings of the ladies as possible’.* In the same way, when the Abbé Dubois, who was making a vain attempt to convert Hindus to Roman Catholicism under the auspices of the Missions Etrangères, asked for the return of two hundred Christian women from the zenana, the Colonel, having satisfied himself that they were not ill-treated there, refused the request on the grounds that it was ‘not proper that anything should be done which can disgrace [the East India Company] in the eyes of the Indian world, or which can in the most remote degree cast a shade upon the dead, or violate the feelings of those who are alive’.⁸

Throughout his administration in Mysore he displayed this concern for Indian feelings. He asked the headquarters in Madras for a chaplain for the British garrison; but the people of Seringapatam were to be left free to practise their religion in their own way, and to be governed by their own laws in separate Muslim and Hindu courts.

While the tenor of Indian life in Seringapatam was allowed to continue undisturbed, there was much for the British Governor to do. There were the Sultan’s tigers to care for; there was the reconstruction of buildings damaged during the siege and assault; there was the surrounding country to pacify; there were forts to inspect, punitive expeditions to control and punishments to ameliorate. There was advice to be given on the partition of the conquered state of Mysore and on the vexed question of the Marāthās’ frontier: ‘I recommend it to you not to put the Company upon the Mahratta frontier,’ he wrote, showing how well he had studied his texts on Indian affairs. ‘It is impossible to expect to alter the nature of the Mahrattas; they will plunder their neighbours, be they ever so powerful … It will be better to put one of the powers in dependence upon the Company on the frontier, who, if plundered, are accustomed to it, know how to bear it and retaliate, which we do not.’⁹

The Colonel had personal problems, too. It was an expensive business being Governor. To be sure, he had his share of prize money which amounted to £4,000, a very welcome sum if hardly to be compared with General Harris’s £150,000. But his expenses were heavy, and he thought that people probably did not get quite as rich in India as was imagined in England. Indeed, he began to believe that he was ruined – certainly he was not yet able to pay off all his debts – and he enquired about the prospects of other more profitable appointments.¹⁰ His brother, the Governor-General, offered him the opportunity of commanding an expedition against the Dutch in Java, where he would be sure to get more prize-money, if he could ‘safely be spared from Mysore’. But he did not think he could be spared from Mysore. Some of his troops were in the field; and who, after all, could replace him? British generals were, for the most part as he had so often said, ‘so confoundedly inefficient’. Besides, he was conscious that in Seringapatam he was rendering a ‘service to the public’; and that service was not yet completed.¹¹

Moreover, there was trouble to the north of Mysore where the warlord Dhoondiah Waugh, soi-distant ‘King of the Two Worlds’, was threatening the peace by assembling an army of warriors in the territory of the Marathas. In the middle of 1800, Colonel Wellesley marched out of Seringapatam with a large force to deal with him. He proved an elusive quarry. Rivers were crossed, forts stormed, forests encountered (though not entered until reconnoitred). But nearly four months had passed before Dhoondiah Waugh was brought to bay, and forced to face his pursuers who were able at last to mount an attack in which Colonel Wellesley, for the first and last time in his life, led a cavalry charge.¹²

‘We have now proved (a perfect novelty in India),’ he reported with pride having sent the enemy scattering away, ‘that we can hunt down the lightest footed and most rapid armies as we can destroy heavy troops and storm strong fortifications.’¹³

Soon there came an opportunity for the Colonel to demonstrate his prowess on a more prominent stage. The Governor-General, deeply concerned by the French threat, had been considering ways of dealing with it. Bonaparte, by now First Consul, had left his army in Egypt and on 14 June had overwhelmed the Austrians at Marengo. A British force was to be assembled in Ceylon with a view to an attack on the French in Egypt; and, despite ‘the great trouble’ that would be caused in consequence among the general officers in India, Colonel Wellesley was to lead it. ‘I employ you because I rely on your good sense, discretion, activity, and spirit,’ his brother told him, ‘and I cannot find all those qualities united in any other officer in India.’¹⁴ Besides, in his brother’s opinion, Arthur should have been promoted long ago, and the fact that, now thirty years of age, and despite his distinguished services, he was still a colonel, reflected badly upon himself as Governor-General, just as the British Government’s fobbing him off with a mere Irish marquessate had done. Colonel Wellesley’s being ‘not only unnoticed but his promotion protracted so studiously’, the Marquess had written earlier, had led to ‘every Intriguer’ in India believing it ‘to be delayed for the express purpose of thwarting me’.¹⁵

Seemingly undisturbed by the thought that older and more experienced generals in Madras and Calcutta would not take at all kindly to his appointment, Colonel Wellesley sailed for Trincomalee in Ceylon towards the end of 1800, leaving behind in Seringapatam, for the guidance of his successor, detailed notes on all manner of subjects from the administration of Mysore to the relevant features of its topography.

By the time Colonel Wellesley landed in Trincomalee, the proposal for an assault on French troops in Egypt by way of the Red Sea had been superseded by plans for an attack upon the French island of Mauritius. But differences with the naval Commander-in-Chief in the area led to the abandonment of Mauritius as an object of attack and its replacement by Java. Plans for an attack on the Dutch were, however, also abandoned when definite orders came from England for the implementation of the original operation, a landing on the southern Egyptian coast in the region of Suez and a march from there against the French in Lower Egypt.¹⁶

Colonel Wellesley welcomed the opportunity to command such an expedition and was chagrined to learn that the Governor-General had been overborne by the army chiefs who had impressed upon him the impropriety of appointing – indeed the outrage to military tradition which would be occasioned by appointing – so junior an officer to the command over the heads of others so senior to him in rank and so much more seasoned by experience. The command was to be entrusted instead to General Baird.

Wellesley, who was already on his way to Egypt by way of Bombay, was furious on receipt of the new orders which placed him second-in-command and determined that, whatever orders he was subsequently to receive, he would endeavour to interpret them in such a way that they would not deny him this opportunity of advancing his career. The apologetic tone of his brother’s letter breaking the news and offering him the alternative of returning to Seringapatam did nothing to mollify him.¹⁷ He wrote to Calcutta to express his indignation, angrily and unreasonably refusing to accept his brother’s reasons for what he took to be his degradation in the eyes of the world. He had not, he wrote, been informed of the possibility that he would be superseded. It was all very well for his brother to plead that he could not now employ him ‘in the chief command of so large a force’ which was now to proceed to Egypt ‘without violating every rule of the service’. How could the Governor-General think that General Baird would ever allow him to be of the smallest service to him? He stood ‘publicly convicted of incapacity’ to do more than equip a force to be led by others.¹⁸

At first he decided he would return to Mysore rather than serve under Baird; but then he learned that Sir Ralph Abercromby had landed at Abū Qir Bay with some 15,000 men and had advanced on Alexandria. Wellesley, therefore, determined to leave Bombay immediately for the Red Sea, although General Baird had not yet arrived, since delay would entail the loss of the opportunity of cooperating with Abercromby in a pincer movement which would drive the French from Egypt. As soon as Baird appeared he would, of course, hand over the command to him, although, as he reported to the Governor-General’s office, this would much annoy him as his former letters would surely have shown. However, he had ‘never had much value for the public spirit of any man who does not sacrifice his private views and feelings, when it is necessary’. It was, therefore, his ‘laudable and highly disagreeable intention’ to obey his brother’s instructions.¹⁹

As it happened, he was not able to obey them. He was suddenly taken ill and became feverish with a complaint known as Malabar Itch, a kind of ringworm, a ‘breaking out all over [his body] of somewhat of the same kind as venereal blotches’, which entailed an unpleasant treatment of nitric acid baths in Bombay.²⁰ When this drastic remedy, which burned the towels used to dry him, had at least partially cured him, he returned to Mysore, still deeply resentful of his brother’s first giving him an independent command, then removing it from him. The angry resentment continued for months, the few letters he wrote to the Governor-General at this time being formal in the extreme, hints of intimacy being limited to his correspondence with his brother Henry, from whom he was gratified to learn that he was considered ‘still top of the tree for character’, and that Henry had never heard any man ‘so highly spoken of, so generally looked up to’.²¹ He corresponded also in a friendly manner with David Baird, with whom he had had companionable talks in Bombay before the General’s departure for Egypt, finding the Scotsman more sympathetic and understanding than he had expected, and ready to listen to what the Colonel had to tell him about Egypt, the Nile and the Nubian and Libyan Deserts, being not much of a reader himself. Accordingly he learned of Baird’s subsequent successes in Egypt without the rancour that continued dislike of the man might otherwise have aroused in him.

7 The Sultan’s Palace

1800 – 1

‘If we are taken prisoner, I shall be hanged as brother to the Governor-General, and you will be hanged for being found in bad company.’

RECOVERED FROM the Malabar Itch, Colonel Wellesley returned to Seringapatam in more cheerful mood than his companions might have expected in so disappointed a man. But he was still not very well, one of them thought; and, although he was no more than thirty-two years old, his closely cropped, wavy, light brown hair, parted in the middle, was already touched with grey.¹

He never wore powder [one of his staff recorded], though it was at that time the regulation to do so. I have heard him say he was convinced the wearing of hair powder was very prejudicial to health as impeding the perspiration … His dress at this time consisted of a long coat, the uniform of the 33rd Regiment, a cocked hat, white pantaloons, Hessian boots and spurs, and a large sabre, the handle solid silver.²

Having taken ship south from Bombay he rode towards Mysore ahead of his escort, nonchalantly observing to Captain Elers who accompanied him, ‘If we are taken prisoner, I shall be hanged as brother to the Governor-General, and you will be hanged for being found in bad company.’³

One night the two men were sitting drinking wine after dinner and, as Elers recalled, ‘congratulating ourselves that we had arrived safely … in the country of the Coorga Rajah … when, looking through the tent doors, we saw the forest suddenly illuminated with torches and many men carrying all sorts of game on Bamboos’, including cheetahs, jackals, tigers, foxes, a boa constrictor sixteen feet long, eleven elephants’ tails and three carp.

The next day the Rajah’s green and red striped tents were pitched nearby and from these were sent over to the British officers presents of ‘backgammon boards of the handsomest sort, inlaid with ebony and ivory’ and a chess board with pieces of ‘the finest kind, carved in ivory’. The Rajah himself then appeared wearing Indian pantaloons but ‘the rest of his dress was English including English boots’.

‘In one part of the conversation,’ Elers wrote, ‘I admired Colonel Wellesley’s quickness in detecting [the interpreter] giving an erroneous translation of a speech of his to the Rajah. The Colonel was clever in quickly acquiring languages but spoke none very correctly.’⁴

The Colonel settled down to his duties in Seringapatam if not with enthusiasm certainly with diligence, restoring order to a regiment which, while in the incapable hands of his second-in-command during his absence, had become notorious for drunkenness and quarrelling. He wrote letters and memoranda on a familiar variety of subjects, dealing with breaches of discipline and occasional criminal conduct, ‘scenes of villainy which would disgrace the Newgate Calendar’,⁵ involving commissaries – a breed of men, so he once threatened, he would hang at the rate of one a day were he ever to be in a position to do so – and even implicating army officers, one of whom had been selling the East India Company’s supplies of saltpetre, which was used in the manufacture of gunpowder, as well as copper bands stripped from the pillars of the Sultan’s palace, while another had been disposing of new firearms from the weapons store and replacing them with ancient firelocks bought cheaply from native dealers. Also involved in this illicit arms dealing was an elderly lieutenant-colonel of previously good character who had been court-martialled and ruined. Taking pity on him, Colonel Wellesley, in a long and carefully worded letter, offered a plea of mitigation in view of the old man’s former good conduct, asking for a small pension to enable him – once he had repaid the Company’s officials the sums due to them – ‘to support himself on account of his long services and his present reduced situation’.⁶

Wellesley remained equally sympathetic towards the feelings and interests of the natives, though he still did not entertain a very high opinion of their probity. He came down firmly on soldiers who maltreated them, taking the opportunity presented by the case of an officer who had merely been reprimanded for flogging an Indian for refusing to supply him with free straw for his horse, to remind all ranks that they were ‘placed in this country to protect the inhabitants, not to oppress them’. He made it clear to headquarters, too, that he strongly disapproved of such disgraceful behaviour being so lightly punished. When a lieutenant, who had forced a group of Indians to hand over money by making them stand in the sun with heavy weights on their heads, and who was believed to have flogged one of them to death, was given no more severe a punishment than a reprimand and six months’ suspension of pay, he protested against such leniency, emphasizing the disgrace which would fall upon the whole army were the man not to be discharged from the service.⁷

Stern as he could be on occasions, he was a friendly and easy companion in the officers’ mess in the Sultan’s palace, tolerant without being over-indulgent of occasional drunkenness, believing a drunken quarrel is very bad, and is always to be lamented, but probably the less it is enquired into the better’.⁸ He did not drink as much himself as he had done in Calcutta and as officers customarily did in India, where half a bottle of Madeira a day, with a complementary amount of beer and spirits, was considered abstemious. But he drank four or five glasses of wine with his meal and about a pint of claret afterwards. It was noticed, however, that he was quite incapable of distinguishing a fine wine from a vin ordinaire. Nor was he much interested in food, though he had a marked partiality for rice and for roast saddle of mutton with salad.

He was very even in his temper [Captain Elers recalled], laughing and joking with those he liked, speaking in his quick way, and dwelling particularly upon the few (at that time) situations he had been placed in before the enemy, the arrangements he had made, and their fortunate results, all of which were applauded by his staff … This generally formed the topic of conversation after dinner.⁹

The Colonel, it was also said of him, liked to be in the company of ladies whenever he could; and there was no doubt that they in turn found him attractive. He was not considered to be conventionally handsome; but he was alert and vital, attentive and eager; his body was lithe and strong, and the lingering gaze of those ‘clear blue eyes’ was pleasantly unsettling. He had a ‘very susceptible heart’, a fellow officer thought, ‘particularly towards, I am sorry to say, married ladies’. There was, for example, a Mrs Stephenson, ‘pretty & lively’, who had special apartments assigned to her at headquarters; and Mrs Gordon and Mrs Coggan; and the wife of another officer, Captain J.W. Freese, ‘his pointed attention’ to whom ‘gave offence to, not her husband, but to an aide-de-camp [Captain West] who considered it highly immoral and indecorous, and a coolness took place between him and West and they did not speak all the time I lived with the Colonel. Lady Tuite, then Mrs Goodall, interfered in the same officious way, which the Colonel did not forget; for, in after times, upon meeting him at a large party, when she held out her hand to shake hands with him, he put both his hands behind his back and made a low bow’.* ¹⁰

When there were no ladies to entertain at Seringapatam or to talk to with brisk intimacy, Colonel Wellesley would enjoy a game of billiards; but, having steadfastly set his mind against gambling, he still did not play cards for money, nor did he enjoy the idle chat of fellow officers, preferring to talk of the business of soldiering, his own experiences of it, and of the affairs, successes and misdemeanours of the East India Company and its officials. He could not hide his love of gossip, though; and when amused his loud whoops of laughter, ‘easily excited’, would reverberate around the room, ‘like the whoop of a whooping-cough often repeated’†.¹¹ He enjoyed the mess’s amateur theatricals well enough to send for the texts of plays suitable for officers and their ladies to perform.¹²

From time to time, when his duties permitted, he clambered up into a ‘very handsome howdah, entirely covered with superfine scarlet cloth, hanging within two feet of the ground’, and went hunting antelope with the Sultan’s leopards which, together with their keepers, he maintained at his own expense, since the Government declined to pay for them.¹³

Often he would go for long, fast rides in the countryside for the peaceful administration of which he was responsible. It was essential to take exercise in India, he thought, just as it was necessary ‘to keep the mind employed’, to eat moderately, drink little wine, and, if possible, to keep in good company with the world. The last is the most difficult,’ he decided, ‘for there is scarcely a good-tempered man in India.’¹⁴

He was all the better tempered himself when news reached him that he had been promoted major-general. He had long hoped for this, once telling Captain Elers that to achieve that rank was his ‘highest ambition’,¹⁵ and he had been much disappointed on his way back to Seringapatam from Bombay to find, on eagerly looking through the latest Army List, that his own name had not been included in a roll of colonels to be promoted. In April 1802, however, the promotion came through at last, much to the satisfaction of Marquess Wellesley, who had continued to regard his brother’s earlier failure to obtain it as a slight upon his own dignity and who was to consider a decision to reduce Arthur’s allowances as commander of the troops in Mysore, Malabar and Canara as another affront, a ‘most direct, marked and disquieting personal indignity’.

Marquess Wellesley held his dignity in high esteem. He was conscious of having merited the gratitude of both the British government and the Court of Directors of the East India Company. He was, after all, in the process of consolidating the empire of which Lord Clive had laid the foundation; and he much resented criticisms of his autocratic manner and the exercise of his patronage. Certainly he lived in a grand style with a splendidly uniformed bodyguard which he increased from a mere fifty men in his predecessor’s time to four hundred, together with a band. He occupied a magnificent house, ‘the Kedleston of Bengal’; he entertained on a princely scale. But it was all for the glory of the Company and the empire in the East; and it irked him beyond measure to have to listen to guarded complaints from cheeseparing, pettifogging nonentities in the Company’s offices in Leadenhall Street who had no conception of the workings of the oriental mind. He dismissed their rumblings of discontent and, so far as he could, he determined to carry on as he thought best or he would resign. His brother Arthur supported him. ‘I hope you do not propose to stay in India longer than the end of this year,’ he wrote when their relations had been more or less restored to their former amity. ‘Such masters do not deserve your services.’¹⁶

8 Assaye

1802 – 5

‘I never saw a man so cool and collected as he was.’

EARLY IN 1802 the Governor-General authorized an expedition, to be led by his brother, against a troublesome rajah in Bullum, north-west of Seringapatam. The short campaign, which ended with the hanging of the rajah, gave General Wellesley further experience of forest warfare which was to stand him in good stead in the days to come. For the operations had not long been over when he was called upon to take to the field again. This time he was to operate in the territories of the Marathas north of Mysore. Here the Peshwah, the titular chief of the Maratha confederacy who had accepted the position of a prince under British protection, had been driven from Poona by Jaswant Rāo Holkar, an illegitimate son of TukojI Holkar, Maharajah of Indore. General Wellesley’s prescribed task was to restore the Peshwah to his throne in Poona and to defeat or scatter Holkar’s army.

As the author of a recent ‘Memorandum upon Operations in the Mahratta Territory’ and as an officer with experience of that country in the pursuit of Dhoondiah Waugh, he felt himself as well qualified as any officer in India to do so; and he set about preparing for the campaign with his accustomed thoroughness and energy, paying particular and necessary attention to the problem of supplying an army which would be operating so far from its bases. He arranged for the acquisition of beef and sheep, rice and forage and bullocks to be stocked in depots in northern Mysore close to the Maratha border. He dealt in detail with packing cases and containers, with kegs for salt, gunny bags for rice, with four-gallon, iron-hooped casks for arrack. Nothing was left to chance, no detail was overlooked.

His army of nine thousand men marched into Maratha territory in March 1803; and the next month he was approaching Poona when he learned that the place was to be set on fire as soon as he drew near it. Making a forced night march of forty miles with 400 cavalry, he arrived on 20 April in time to save it. The Peshwah was welcomed back there three weeks later.

The General now hoped that the other Maratha chiefs would give no more trouble. ‘I think,’ he wrote, ‘that, although there will be much bad temper and many threats, there will be no hostility.’¹ Nevertheless, he made plans for a further campaign if one proved to be necessary, and gave much thought to the outwitting of enemy forces by the swift crossing and re-crossing of rivers in the Maratha territories by means of pontoons and basket-boats.

Throughout May and June an uneasy peace was maintained, but two chiefs in particular, the Bhonsle of Berar and Daulat Rāo Sindhia, Maharajah of Gwalior, whose troops were trained by French officers, gave him increasing cause for concern; and he was eventually authorized by the Governor-General to deliver an ultimatum to both of these chiefs to disband their armies. He set no time limit, wanting to leave himself free to decide when to ‘strike the first blow’ should he find ‘hostile operations to be necessary’. Having received no undertakings by the end of July, he decided to deliver the first strike of the contest by making a sudden attack upon the hill fortress of Ahmednuggur which was stormed and quickly taken.

He did not expect to be able to follow up this success by bringing ‘the enemy to an action’. But, as he said, ‘we must try to keep him in movement, and tire him out.’² On 23 September, however, he did bring him to action; and he did so in circumstances that he would not have chosen. He came across Daulat Rāo Sindhia’s forces unexpectedly at the village of Assaye. There were some 40,000 of them drawn up in a strong position in an angle formed by two rivers. His own army numbered no more than 7,000 men, many of them tired after a march of over twenty miles that morning. He had twenty-two cannon, Scindia over a hundred, while the enemy’s cavalry outnumbered his own twenty to one. An engagement could not, however, well be avoided; and his quick, perceptive eye, which was one of the keys to his military prowess, detected a feature of the landscape that could be turned to his advantage. Guides assured him there were no fords across the river Kaitna beyond which the village of Assaye stood. But Wellesley, surveying the countryside through his telescope, caught sight of two villages close together on opposite banks, and concluded that they would not have been built there ‘without some habitual means of communication between them’.³ There was, indeed, a ford there and he took his army towards it under heavy fire of cannon shot which tore off his orderly’s head.

The subsequent battle was ferocious, ‘one of the bloodiest for the numbers’ that he himself had ever seen, and ‘one of the most furious battles that [had] ever been fought in this country’.⁴ The General conducted it with energy, skill and much bravery. He was ‘in the thick of the action the whole time’, wrote Colin Campbell, a volunteer in the 78th. ‘I never saw a man so cool and collected as he was … though I can assure you, till our troops got the order to advance the fate of the day seemed doubtful; and if the numerous cavalry of the enemy had done their duty I hardly think it possible we could have succeeded.’⁵ He led infantry charges against the Maratha guns, ninety-eight of which were captured; and, before the enemy’s lines were broken, two horses had been shot under him. That night, having learned of the heavy casualties, the exhausted General was seen sitting outside his tent quite still, as though in prayer, his head between his knees.*⁶

The next morning, having given orders for bottles of his Madeira to be distributed to the wounded, he made ready to march off in pursuit; and at Argaum at the end of September he brought his quarry to battle once again. Once more he defeated them, this time with less bloodshed, congratulating himself afterwards that, if he had not been there to restore order to two battalions of Sepoys in panic-stricken flight, ‘we should have lost the day’.⁷ He followed up this second victory by capturing the fortress of Gawilghur which brought the campaign to an end.⁸

The Governor-General was delighted. He and his brother were now once more on the best of terms, their difficulties reconciled if not quite forgotten, Arthur’s letters no longer coldly formal, Richard’s full of praise: Arthur had done splendidly though no more than had been expected. Earlier his conduct in Mysore had secured his ‘character and advancement’ for the remainder of his life; now his endeavours had culminated in a ‘brilliant point in the history of this country’ and brought to a ‘noble termination’ his own ‘military glory’.⁹

The General himself was well satisfied with what he had done, with his proven capacity to keep his army well supplied – with him always one of the most essential prerequisites of military success – and to move it with speed – which was ‘everything in military operations’. On one memorable occasion he had moved five regiments sixty miles in thirty hours. Army officers and ‘mercantile gentlemen’ alike congratulated him upon his achievements. Presentations were made to him, dinners given in his honour, speeches were delivered, letters of congratulation received and acknowledged. In Bombay an ‘elegant transparency’ of his coat of arms was displayed in the theatre.

He was not above enjoying the acclaim, referring to himself with satisfied amusement in a letter to Mrs Gordon in Bombay, as now being ‘a great man. To this lady he issued an invitation:

We get on well, but we want you to enliven us. Allow me to prevail upon you. If you’ll come I’ll go and meet you with my Servts. at the top of the Ghaut [mountain pass] so that you will only have 24 miles to travel in palanqueen.

There is excellent galloping ground in the neighbourhood of the camp, & the floor of my Tent is in a fine state for dancing, & the fiddlers of the Dragoons & 78th & Bagpipes of the 74th play delightfully.¹⁰

He could also promise good food in his mess, although no epicure himself: accounts showed generous expenditure on York ham and Gloucester cheeses, oysters, pale ale and much Madeira as well as sword belts and saddlery. They also showed expenditure on presents for ladies, on a ‘Brilliant hoop Ring and 2 pearl guards to ditto, 150 R[upee]s’, and on a pearl necklace, bracelets and a silk-worked shawl.¹¹

He was still buying books and several of these revealed a desire to be as well versed in European affairs as he was now in Indian, for in lists of volumes bought – among the 34 volumes of the British Theatre, the 19 of Bell’s edition of Shakespeare and various French novels – were works such as The State of Europe before and after the French Revolution, and Summary Account and Military Character of the Several European Armies that have been engaged during the late War, a work which, incidentally, included the dispiriting observation that ‘an English general, who returns from India, is like an Admiral who has been navigating the Lake of Geneva’.¹²

Such remarks made him all the more anxious to leave India as soon as he could be spared. He would not hesitate to stay, ‘even for years’, if British India were in danger. But it was not in danger now; and he had, after all, served in the sub-continent ‘as long as any man ought who [could] serve any where else’. ‘I am not very ambitious,’ he wrote disingenuously, ‘and I acknowledge that I have never been very sanguine in my expectation that military services in India would be considered in the scale in which are considered similar services in other parts of the world. But I might have been expected to be placed on the Staff in India.’¹³

As it was, he had no hand in the direction of such operations as were being conducted, and conducted most incompetently. Colonel William Monson was defeated by Jaswant Rāo Holkar, Maharajah of Indore, who pursued the greatly outnumbered British forces from the banks of the Chumbul to Agra which only a few hundred of them survived to reach; while Lord Lake, Sir Alured Clarke’s successor as Commander-in-Chief, lost nearly 400 men killed and two thousand wounded in an unsuccessful siege of the fortress of Bhurtpore, the stronghold of an ally of Holkar, the Rajah of Bhurtpore.

General Wellesley’s desire to go home was increased by failing health. He had recently undergone another bout of fever; and, having been much annoyed by the lumbago’ in the early months of 1804, was now, at the end of the year, suffering from rheumatism.

At the beginning of 1805 he wrote to Madras to enquire about shipping. He would prefer ‘the starboard side of a quiet ship’, he said, but he was ‘not very particular about accommodation’ and did not ‘care a great deal about the price’ or who the captain was, so long as he could sail soon. ‘I am anxious to a degree which I can’t express,’ he said, ‘to see my friends again.’¹⁴

While awaiting notification of a berth, he said his goodbyes, gave portraits of himself to friends,* made arrangements for the welfare of two elephants which had been given to him by a grateful rajah, settled a sum of money on the son of Dhoondiah Waugh whom he had undertaken to look after on his father’s death; and, in the shops of Madras, bought presents to take to England, including ten pairs of ladies’ shoes. He also bought more books to while away the hours of the long voyage, not the instructive volumes with which he sailed out but much lighter reading: The Letters of Madame de Pompadour, for example, and Beauties of the Modern Dramatists as well as a number of novels with such titles as Illicit Love, Lessons for Lovers, Fashionable Involvements, Filial Indiscretion or the Female Chevalier and, in five volumes, Love at First Sight.¹⁵

He sailed in March 1805, not too sorry to see the last of India and convinced that, if he had not left when he did, he would have had a ‘serious fit of illness’.¹⁶ All the same he was grateful to have had the opportunity of displaying his talents as an officer there and, so he said years later, of learning ‘as much of military matters’ as he had ‘ever done since’. Moreover, it was certainly true that his command at Seringapatam had afforded him ‘opportunities for distinction, and then opened the road to fame’.¹⁷

Nor did he go home unrewarded. He had left England impecunious; he was returning with a fortune of between £42,000 and £43,000.¹⁸ He was also going home as a Knight Companion of the Order of the Bath, the insignia of which his friend, Sir John Cradock, who had brought it out from England, got a servant to pin to his coat while he was asleep in bed. He was also presented with the thanks of Parliament, a sword of honour given by the people of Calcutta, a service of plate embossed with Assaye from the officers of his division, and an address from the ‘native people of Seringapatam’ who, having lived for ‘five auspicious years’ under his protection, trusted that the ‘God of all castes and all nations’ would ‘deign to hear with favour’ their prayers for his health, glory and happiness.¹⁹

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