Wellington: A Personal History

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 Even then, the Colonel thought it would be best if most troops were withdrawn from the town since their presence, and their insatiable taste for plunder, occasioned ‘great terror and confusion among the inhabitants’, tending not only to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’.