Wellington: A Personal History

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