Wellington (6 page)

Wesley, promoted colonel by seniority with effect from 3 May 1796, was determined to follow it, but there were arrangements to be made first. He resigned his seat and left advice on its management for his successor; received an assurance from Dublin Castle that it ‘should be very happy to relieve his mind from the embarrassment it feels on account of some pecuniary arrangements which he was obliged to leave unsettled’; but was pressed by his agent to ensure that Lord Mornington would deal with the £955 4s 8d of outstanding bills if something unpleasant happened. His future adversary Napoleon, now a
général de division
and just appointed to command the army of Italy, always rated luck as a great military virtue, and there is no doubt that Wesley was lucky that spring. He had escaped a voyage to the West Indies and an unhappy destiny in a yellow fever cemetery, and fortunate in leaving Ireland when he did. For, even in 1796, there was rebellion in the air: Grattan felt it ‘creeping in like a mist at the heels of the countryman’. The rebellion of 1798 was to be, as Thomas Pakenham has written, ‘the most violent and tragic event in Irish history between the Jacobite wars and the Great Famine’.
³⁸
The ‘Year of Liberty’ cost perhaps 30,000 men and women their lives, and in its aftermath Britain imposed on Ireland a union whose troubled legacy still persists. It was a good time to leave.

T
HE
I
NDIA
for which Colonel Wesley set sail from Portsmouth in June 1796 was not yet a British possession, though his efforts were to help make it one. In 1600, Elizabeth I had given a royal charter to ‘The Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’, and eight years later some of its merchants established a trading post at Surat, 150 miles north of modern Bombay. Over the next century the Company’s fortunes ebbed and flowed, with occasional conflict with the Dutch, Portuguese and French, who had their own mercantile interests in the subcontinent. It continued to jockey for favour with the Moghul emperor in his capital, first in Agra and then in Delhi, as well as with local rulers whose dependence on the emperor was often little more than nominal.

Madras was settled by the Company in 1639; in 1687 Bombay superseded Surat as the Company’s headquarters in western India; and in 1690 one of its agents founded the future city of Calcutta. These three great trading bases, termed presidencies, were run by a governor and council answerable to the Company’s court of directors in London, backed by locally recruited soldiers stiffened with British redcoats. It was a short step from defending trading bases to extending British power into the hinterland, and in 1757 Robert Clive defeated the ruler of Bengal at Plassey, a battle in which the deft bribery of opponents was at least as important as firepower. After Plassey the East India Company was a major political power in India, and in 1773 the Regulating Act acknowledged the fact by instituting a governing council in Calcutta, with three of its five members nominated by the British government. The council was presided over by a governor-general, who enjoyed ill-defined authority in both Madras and Bombay. It was indicative of the vast riches to be gained in India that the first governor-general, Warren Hastings, amassed a personal fortune of perhaps £200,000 at a time when a prosperous merchant in England might house and feed his family and servants for £350 a year.
¹

Not all young men who took the passage to India hoped to do quite as well as Hastings, but it was easy for a junior clerk to turn a small investment into a huge fortune without much effort and to return home as a nabob, a figure pilloried by playwrights and novelists as vulgar, corrupt and obscenely wealthy. Sir Philip Francis won £20,000 at cards at a single sitting, and a Mr Barwell lost a staggering £40,000. In 1777 William Hickey, an engaging young rake sent to India to make his fortune, complained that no man worked harder than he did, staying at his desk from eight in the morning till one in the afternoon with only half an hour off for breakfast. Although he was not a rich man by Calcutta standards, he maintained sixty-three servants, as well as ‘a handsome phaeton and a beautiful pair of horses, and also two Arabian saddle horses, my whole establishment being of the best and most expensive kind’.
²
Charles Danvers died in 1720 after only three years in India at a salary of £5 a year, but left enough money to have a lavish funeral. He modestly asked the governor ‘that I may have as many great guns fired as I am years old, which is now almost twenty-one’ and the rest of his estate was to be spent on rice, distributed daily to the poor at his burial place.
³

Although there were financial risks, for a cargo might go to the bottom or be snapped up by pirates, privateers or enemy warships, the climate and disease were infinitely more dangerous. Europeans who survived the sea voyage – followed, at Madras, by a scarcely less hazardous passage through the surf – risked death from cholera, typhoid, dysentery and sunstroke, snakes, tigers, enraged ‘fanaticks’, resentful servants and merciless duellists, and undermined their constitutions by eating and drinking to excess. The walls of Indian churches are heavy with marble plaques and Latin tags lamenting death in its many forms, and cantonment cemeteries, so many of them sinking silently back into jungle, are a chilling reminder of human frailty. William Hickey could not resist making a joke of one tombstone:

Mynheer Gludenstack lies interred here
Who intended to have gone home last year.

The British cemetery at Seringapatam was established in 1805, not long after the British took the place, and now lies forgotten behind the Fort View Hotel. The tombs inside range from enormous obelisks, one commemorating the garrison commander and another the colonel of the Swiss Regiment de Meuron (a long way from his valleys), to more modest slabs. A sergeant’s wife, dead at twenty-two, lies there with her child, and the wife of a private in HM’s 9
^th
Lancers evidently had enough money to bestow on her husband in death a status that had eluded him in life. Some died shortly after their arrival in India or, more poignantly still, in the world itself. Others – a retired park-sergeant here and colonel’s widow there – had lived on to a ripe old age. There were indeed fortunes to be made in India, but more than half of the Europeans who went there in the eighteenth century died prematurely.

Colonel Wesley, travelling in a fast frigate, caught up with his regiment at the Cape, and he sailed on in the Indiaman
Princess Charlotte
, whiling away his time with his extensive library. It was weighted heavily towards Indian themes, and included Orme’s
Indostan, Sketches of the Hindoos
, Raynal’s
Histoire des Indes
and
Statutes Relative to the East India Company
, as well as Persian and Arabic grammars. There was a good deal of military history, including a book on the Flanders campaign, fifteen volumes on Frederick the Great and Major General Lloyd’s formalistic
Reflections on the General Principles of War
. Chapman’s
Venereal Disease
might have been a sensible precaution, while nine volumes of
Woman of Pleasure
and ten of the
Aventures du Chevalier du Faublas
catered for lighter moments. He landed in Calcutta in February 1797 and called on the governor-general, Sir John Shore, who found in him ‘a union of strong sense and boyish playfulness’, and predicted that he would distinguish himself if the opportunity arose.

Wesley lost no chance to chase the opportunity. Both Holland and Spain had now joined the war against Britain, and in August 1797 he was sent on an expedition to the Philippines. He drew up a list of hygiene precautions to be observed by the men. Hammocks were to be scrubbed at least once a fortnight, men were to wash their legs and feet every morning and if possible to have water thrown over them every day. He had agreed to take the Rev. Mr Blunt as chaplain to the 33
^rd
, but during the voyage that gentleman got ‘abominably drunk, and in that disgraceful condition exposed himself to both soldiers and sailors … talking all sorts of bawdy and ribaldry …’ When Wesley, on another vessel, heard what had happened he tried to console Blunt, explaining that ‘what had passed was not of the least consequence as no one would think the worse of him for little irregularities committed in a moment of forgetfulness’, but Blunt’s depression could not be lifted and ‘he actually fretted himself to death’.
⁴

The expedition was recalled when it reached Penang, and Wesley had returned to Calcutta by November. After his return William Hickey dined with him and John Cope Sherbrooke, the 33
^rd
‘s second lieutenant colonel, at a party consisting of ‘eight as strong-headed fellows as could be found in Hindustan’. After twenty-two bumper toasts, they drank steadily till two in the morning: Hickey never experienced ‘a more severe debauch’.
⁵
However, Wesley had by now heard news likely to ease even the worst hangover: his brother Mornington was being sent out to Calcutta as governor-general of British India. Richard was climbing as hard as he could, pressing Pitt for a marquessate, improving his coat of arms by judicious quarterings, and changing the spelling of the family name back to a form used until the seventeenth century. On 19 May 1798 Arthur, now down at Madras, signed himself Wellesley for the first time in a letter to Lieutenant General George Harris, commander-in-chief there, announcing that the new governor-general had just arrived. The three brothers, for Henry had also come to serve as Mornington’s private secretary, sailed on to Calcutta. Arthur first acted as unofficial chief of staff to Richard, and was then sent to Madras with the 33
^rd
to press ahead with preparations for war.

The impact of Richard’s arrival as governor-general on Arthur’s career can scarcely be overstated. India contained many more senior officers, but as the governor-general’s brother, he enjoyed great advantages in a world where patronage counted for so much. Mere influence could never cause the dull to shine, but it could give a bright man the opportunity to make his way. That is precisely what it did for Arthur Wellesley, and we should not be astonished that it caused great resentment amongst the less well-connected.

We might be more surprised by the level of Arthur’s own confidence. Andrew Roberts is right to observe that while it was possible to write a long book on Napoleon’s early career, not much could be said of Arthur Wesley until he took the 33
^rd
to Flanders. By 1798, however, he was not only confident in his profession, but was capable of helping his brother hustle the governor of Madras along the road to war. His correspondence reveals the importance of the family nexus, in which Henry played an important role as go-between, but also shows not the least glimmer of self-doubt. Experience was soon to teach Arthur Wellesley that he might be let down by others – Richard amongst them – but he had utter confidence in himself and he never lost it.

Mornington had arrived already convinced that British India should be expanded. This was not simply a matter of personal ambition, although it could only accelerate his rise, but it would also contribute to the public good, enhancing the Company’s trading position, damaging French interests and, in a paternalistic sense, bringing good and settled government to more of the native population. He acted quickly to re-establish Britain’s influence over the Nizam of Hyderabad, nominally a liegeman of the Moghul emperor, who ruled a huge tract of central southern India. This was accomplished by the end of October 1798, leaving Mornington free to concentrate on a more dangerous target – Tipoo Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore.

Tipoo was the son of Hyder Ali, a Muslim who had seized the largely Hindu and vast southern state of Mysore. He had fought the British before and in 1790–92 he had been defeated by a previous governor-general, Lord Cornwallis, and was compelled to cede part of his territory. Unabashed, Tipoo had a mechanical model depicting a British officer being mauled by a tiger, which made the appropriate growls when set in motion. His habit of keeping his captives chained upright in a dungeon that flooded regularly, leaving them up to their necks in water, did not endear him to the British. Neither did his warm relations with the French, to whom he was Citizen Tipoo. Although French power in India had been broken during the Seven Years War, French agents and military advisers were active in several Indian courts and the prospect of a French revival was disconcerting. Less than a month after his arrival, Mornington read a proclamation by the governor of French Mauritius announcing an alliance between Tipoo and France.

In contrast to the views of his adversaries, Tipoo is affectionately remembered in Madras as a devout Muslim who practised religious toleration; a ruler anxious to enhance the economic strength of his state; an intellectual with a lively scientific interest; and a brave man who did not flinch from a death he might easily have avoided. His interest in technology had led him to develop rockets that resembled large versions of the familiar firework. Some of them were small enough to be carried in a quiver on a man’s back, and others were carried in carts fitted with adjustable frames from which they could be fired. The larger ones probably had a range of a thousand yards, and although they were inaccurate, they were terrifying to troops who were not used to them.

Arthur Wellesley and the 33
^rd
sailed from Calcutta to Madras in August 1798. It was a dreadful voyage: their ship, the Indiaman
Fitzwilliam
, ran into a shoal and only the exertions of the soldiers got her out. The water aboard was so bad that although Wellesley himself was only afflicted with the flux, fifteen of his soldiers died. While still in Calcutta he had been trying to persuade Lord Clive, the newly arrived governor of Madras, that Mornington was not set on an immediate and unwarranted war, but after he reached Madras he worked hard to draw Clive into the war party. The governor was nicknamed ‘Puzzlestick’ by the Wellesleys, although Arthur wrote that ‘I doubt whether he is as dull as he appears, or as people think he is.’ Arthur found this sort of work uncongenial, and told Henry that he would consider becoming governor of Ceylon if there was no war. Then, gradually, Clive yielded to the pressure. Wellesley wrote to Henry that: