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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