Wellington: The Iron Duke

On 5 April 1799, the British completed their march, having taken thirty-one days in all to cover what they had measured as 153.5 miles from the Madras frontier. Harris proceeded to encamp south of the Cauvery, two miles west of Seringapatam. His army was too small to surround the place and mount a formal siege, and, with time of the essence, he planned to breach the fortress’s south-west face rather than attempt to secure a footing on the island further east. That day Wellesley wrote optimistically to the governor-general that ‘we are now here with a strong, a healthy and a brave army, with plenty of stores, guns, &c, &c, and we shall be masters of this place before much more time passes over our heads’. He added that the fatigue, heat and bad water had given him a bowel complaint, ‘which did not confine me, but teased me much’.13

He was teased a good deal more that night. On the afternoon of the 5th, Harris ordered him to carry out a night attack on the village of Sultanpettah and a nearby grove known as Sultanpettah Tope, using his own 33rd and two Madras battalions, while Lieutenant Colonel Shawe of HM’s 12th and two other Madras battalions launched a similar attack further north. The two features stood astride an aqueduct, slightly south of the army’s route to Seringapatam, and would have to be cleared before the main attack could begin. The ground as it stands today gives little real clue to the operation. The village and the grove have gone, and the aqueduct (Wellesley called it a nullah) is now a full-blown drainage canal, steeply banked, with lush paddy-fields below it. Even then the ground was confusing, and Wellesley, on horseback amongst the outposts when the message to attack arrived, asked Harris to meet him in front of the lines to clarify the order, suggesting that ‘when you have the nullah you have the tope’. Harris did not come forward – in fairness, he had much else to do – and at sundown Wellesley attacked a position he had not been able to reconnoitre with troops who had also not seen the ground.

He led the 33rd forward in column, with the Madras battalions behind. As they approached the nullah, almost dry at that time of year, they were engaged by Tipoo’s rocket men and by musket fire, but carried the nullah with little difficulty. There Wellesley dismounted, and led the grenadier and light companies of the 33rd forward, while Major Shee brought the rest of the battalion on. The patchwork of paddy-fields, dykes and bamboo clumps at the bottom of the slope, previously screened by the banks of the nullah, would have made no sense to the attackers, while they themselves would have been silhouetted against the sky as they climbed over the bank to begin their descent. If Tipoo’s infantry could not cope with the 33rd in open field, things were different here, and there was fierce hand-to-hand fighting: Lieutenant Fitzgerald, already hit in the arm by a rocket, was bayonetted and mortally wounded, and eight men of the grenadier company were captured. While the two forward companies fought for their lives, Shee took the remaining companies back across the nullah. Such was the confusion that five of Wellesley’s companies eventually joined Shawe to the north, where they helped secure the few gains of another largely unsuccessful attack, while Captain Francis West of the grenadiers emerged further south, where the Hyderabad outposts held the front line.

Wellesley himself got back to the watercourse, where he seems to have remounted and cantered along it, trying to restore order. He was hit on the knee by a spent musket-ball at some stage in the proceedings and, finding that there was little he could do, rode to Harris’s headquarters to report his failure. Harris wrote that he ‘came to my tent in a good deal of agitation to say that he had not carried the tope. It must be particularly unpleasant to him.’ Wellesley, exhausted as much from the expenditure of nervous energy as from the physical effort, lay down on a nearby mess table and went to sleep. The news was far from unpleasant to Wellesley’s critics, who resented his closeness to the governor-general and authority over the Hyderabad contingent. Captain George Elers of the 12th, who had fallen out with Wellesley by the time he wrote his memoirs, declared that: ‘Had Colonel Wellesley been an obscure officer of fortune, he would have been brought to a court-martial and perhaps received such a reprimand for bad management as might have induced him to have resigned His Majesty’s service.’14

Yet even Wellesley’s bitterest opponents could hardly claim that it was a major setback. There were less than twenty-five British casualties, and the following day Wellesley launched a fresh attack with a larger force, and took the whole position without losing a man. However, the whole scrambling affair left its mark. Wellesley resolved ‘never to attack an enemy who is prepared and strongly posted, and whose posts have not been reconnoitred by daylight’.15 He was also well aware of having lost control of his force, and his almost pathological need to remain in control was reinforced by the incident.

Lieutenant General Stuart’s detachment of the Bombay army, which had marched on Seringapatam from the west, arrived on the 14 April, escorted by a force sent out by Harris to meet it. Stuart’s force made camp north of the Cauvery, north-west of Seringapatam. After dark on the 17th, both the Madras and Bombay forces launched preliminary attacks, the former securing the Little Cauvery and the latter taking the ruined village of Agrarum and throwing up a battery which, in the event, was just too far west for effective bombardment of Seringapatam. On the morning of the 21st, the Madras force established a battery on newly captured ground between the Little Cauvery and the South Cauvery. Stuart’s men were also busy, and threw up batteries to engage the western walls. On the morning of the 26th, British guns took on Tipoo’s cannon, and by midday had silenced those facing them. That evening and the next morning, Wellesley, the duty brigade commander, cleared Tipoo’s men from the whole area between the Little Cauvery and the South Cauvery, enabling batteries to be established only 400 yards from the walls. They were ordered to concentrate their fire on an area between the westernmost ‘bastion’ and a pair of towers further south. The gunners’ objective was to cut a cannelure – a long groove – towards the base of the masonry, so that the wall and rampart behind it would slide forward, leaving a rough slope of earth and rubble. A breach was deemed practicable when a man could ascend it with his musket and accoutrements without needing to use his hands.

When a practicable breach was established, Major General Baird, who had volunteered for the task, was to lead an assault delivered by two columns, one from Stuart’s force and the other from the Mysore army. A third column, under Wellesley, would remain in reserve, to be committed only if there was a significant check. The assault was delivered on the afternoon of 4 May 1799, and although the unexpected strength of the inner defences caused a delay, the attackers fanned out once they were through the breach and were soon fighting deep inside Seringapatam against resistance that was fast collapsing. When it seemed clear that the attack had succeeded, Wellesley posted a guard from the reliable Swiss Regiment de Meuron to secure the breach. Other soldiers helped recover wounded from the river-bed and the breach itself, and the remainder were stood down. Wellesley walked up the breach, with its carpet of dead, and from the top he could see chaos as some soldiers dealt with embers of resistance while others set about looting and drinking. Most of the 33rd was drawn up outside Tipoo’s palace, where surrender negotiations were going on. Although it had now been discovered that thirteen British prisoners, including the men of the 33rd captured at Sultanpettah, had been murdered – either by having their necks broken or by having nails driven into their skulls – the occupants of the palace were to be spared, provided that resistance ceased.

Tipoo, however, was not amongst them. Then Wellesley heard that he had been killed in the fighting at the Water gate, and walked the short distance to the northern wall, where he found a long tunnel beneath the ramparts choked with dead. A well-dressed body was dragged out, and Wellesley himself checked the man’s pulse: it was Tipoo, and he was indeed dead. Witnesses had seen a short, fat officer play a conspicuous part in the defence, standing to fire at the attackers while retainers passed him loaded weapons. He had been hit several times, and seemed to have been killed by a close-range musket shot through the temple: some said that a British soldier had fancied the jewel in his turban. The Tiger of Mysore had snarled defiantly to the last.

Leaving the grenadiers of the 33rd to protect the palace, Wellesley went out to his brigade, marched it back to camp, washed – he had been in the same clothes for sixty hours in hot weather, and was always a fastidious man – and went to bed. He must, however, have been able to hear shots, yells, and drunken singing from Seringapatam, and the episode reinforced something he already knew. The British soldier had many virtues, not least cold, almost canine, courage and determination, but if discipline wavered and drink was at hand, brave soldiers could turn into drunken animals. The attackers lost 389 killed or wounded in the assault, and though reports of the number of Mysore dead vary, 8–9,000 were buried. The disparity suggests that the attackers, their mood hardened by the scenes at the breach and the discovery of the murdered prisoners, were not inclined to give quarter. When we later consider Wellesley’s inflexible view of discipline, we must remember the sounds that drifted through that sultry night as the victors remorselessly looted and raped in Seringapatam.

Early the next day, Wellesley was ordered to take command of Seringapatam. Baird had already asked to be relieved because he was physically exhausted – although he later claimed to have cancelled this request – and Wellesley, although not, strictly speaking the next brigade commander for duty, was appointed, probably because Barry Close, Harris’s adjutant-general, had a high opinion of him. Wellesley went straight to Baird’s headquarters in Tipoo’s summer palace, outside the fort, and told Baird that he had been superseded. Baird, breakfasting with his staff, snapped ‘Come, Gentlemen, we have no longer any business here.’ ‘Oh,’ replied Wellesley, ‘pray finish your breakfast.’16 Wellesley later told John Wilson Croker that:

I never inquired the reason for my appointment, or for Baird being laid aside. There were many other candidates besides Baird and myself, all senior to me, some to Baird. But I must say 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.

He added that:

Baird was a gallant, hard-headed, lion-hearted officer, but he had no talent, no tact, had strong prejudices against the natives; and he was peculiarly disqualified from his manners, habits &c., and it was supposed his temper, for the management of them.

Although Baird fiercely resented his supersession, in 1813 he told Sir John Malcolm that he had long since forgiven Wellesley, and: ‘His fame is now to me joy, and I may also say glory, and his kindness to me and mine has all along been most distinguished.’17

As soon as Wellesley was in command, he went into Seringapatam to restore order: four soldiers were hanged and others flogged. He was soon writing to Harris that ‘plunder is stopped, the fires are all extinguished, and the inhabitants are returning to their houses fast’. He asked Harris ‘to order an extra dram and biscuit for the 12th, 33rd and 73rd regiments, who got nothing to eat yesterday, and were wet last night’ and emphasised that the place needed a permanent garrison with its own commander. Harris decided that Wellesley was the man for the job. The governor-general had already declared that when Tipoo was beaten, his policy would be one of conciliation, and Wellesley had made a very good start. A commission with military and civilian members had been appointed at the start of the campaign to run affairs in captured territory, and after the fall of Seringapatam a new commission was set up, its members including Arthur and Henry Wellesley.

Although Arthur’s direct responsibilities were at first confined to Seringapatam island, he was soon not only head of the commission, but, as the main armies withdrew, the senior military officer in the region. When the commission was dissolved he retained power, warning the governor-general that he would not accept ‘any person with civil authority who is not under my orders’. Lieutenant Colonel Barry Close, who he regarded as ‘the ablest man in the Company’s army’ was sent down as Resident, an arrangement which worked well. A five-year-old boy, the closest surviving descendent of the line of Hindu rajahs which had been overthrown by Hyder Ali, was appointed ruler of Mysore, with Purneah, an able man who had served Hyder Ali with distinction, as his chief minister.

Arthur Wellesley had played a principal part in winning a significant victory and had gone on to wield exceptional power for a thirty-year-old colonel. He had also been paid £4,000 of the prize money distributed when the proceeds of the victory were divided up, the shares varying with rank: Harris received £150,000, a British soldier £7, and a sepoy £5. Although Arthur had still not received the allowances to cover his campaign expenses, he immediately offered to repay Mornington ‘the money which you advanced to pay my lieutenant-colonelcy, and that which was borrowed from Captain Stapleton on our joint bond’.18 Richard generously replied that: ‘I am not in want of money and probably never shall be: when I am, it will be time enough to call upon you.’19 But the governor-general was not at his best. Although his hoped-for marquessate had arrived at last, he was Marquess Wellesley of Norragh – in the peerage of Ireland. It was, as he called it, a ‘double-gilt potato’. ‘As I felt confident there had been nothing Irish or pinchbeck in my conduct or its results,’ he wrote, ‘I felt an equal confidence that there should be nothing Irish or pinchbeck in its rewards.’20

Arthur dealt with the myriad of military and political issues that crossed his writing-desk in Tipoo’s cool and spacious summer palace, whose wonderful murals – some of which depicted the British being roundly beaten by Hyder Ali and his French allies – were restored on his orders. He denied a request from a French priest to have 200 Christian women who had been carried off by Tipoo ‘in the most indecent and tyrannical manner’ returned to their homes. This refusal was, he admitted, unjust, but they were currently living with Tipoo’s family, and as the Company had undertaken to protect the family, sending the women home would have been a breach of faith. He pondered the composition of courts, civil and military, though the demonstrative nature of justice was never far from his mind: ‘the criminals shall be executed after the facts have been clearly ascertained by an examination of witnesses …’21 He dealt sternly with officers who stole or accepted bribes, and although they sometimes had reason to complain of the slowness of the rajah’s government, ‘they had none to ill-use any man’. One senior officer whose conduct towards the Indians had caused complaint was warned that ‘he must either act as he ought, or he shall be removed from his command’.22 Yet Wellesley was moved to pity by the case of one of the Company’s lieutenant colonels, convicted of ‘very serious crimes’ before a general court-martial and stripped of his commission. Wellesley observed that when he had repaid the Company the money he owed it, he would be entirely destitute. Wellesley begged the governor of Madras ‘to give him some small pension to enable him to support himself, or … recommend him for some small provision … on account of his long services and his present reduced situation’.23

His chief concern, though, was with the assortment of freebooters – ‘polygars, nairs, and moplahs’ – in arms around the state. His most obdurate opponent was Dhoondiah Waugh, a tough mercenary who had escaped from Tipoo’s custody just before Seringapatam fell, recruited a substantial following from amongst Tipoo’s former soldiers and other malcontents, and proclaimed himself ‘King of the Two Worlds’. He was beaten in 1799 and escaped northwards into Maratha territory, but was back again the following year. In May 1800, Wellesley himself mounted a full-scale campaign against Dhoondiah, his well-organised transport system enabling him to move across a desolate area. Even so there were difficult moments. On 30 June, he told Barry Close that he was a day later than planned in crossing the River Toombnuddra, and its sudden rise delayed him on the south bank for ten days. As no supplies could be brought in, the army ate much of the corn it had with it, and was now held up. ‘How true it is,’ he mused, ‘that in military operations, time is everything.’24 He systematically took Dhoondiah’s fortresses and finally caught up with him at Conaghull, right up on the borders of Hyderabad, on 10 September.

Although Wellesley, pursuing with two regiments of British cavalry and two of Indian, was badly outnumbered, he formed up his little army in a single line and led a charge that routed Dhoondiah’s army. Wellesley reported to the adjutant-general in Madras that: ‘Many, amongst others, Dhoondiah, were killed; and the whole body dispersed, and were scattered in small parties over the face of the country.’25 He could be magnanimous in victory. Dhoondiah’s young son, Salabut Khan, was found amongst the baggage. Wellesley looked after him, and when he departed from India, he left money for the boy’s upkeep with the collector of Seringapatam. Salabut, ‘a fine, handsome, intelligent youth’, eventually entered the rajah’s service and died of cholera in 1822.

In May 1800, Arthur had been offered command of a force to be sent to capture Batavia in the East Indies from the Dutch, but he told his brother that although he would welcome the appointment, it would not be in the public interest for him to leave Mysore until ‘its tranquillity is assured’. With Dhoondiah beaten, however, he was able to accept the command and, after assembling a staff, he departed for Ceylon, where he arrived on 28 December. Arthur soon heard that the expedition was to go to Egypt instead, and he duly ordered it to concentrate in Bombay. He was on the way there himself when he heard that his brother, who had anticipated ‘great jealousy from the general officers in consequence of my employing you’, had been pressed to supersede him with Major General Baird. This was not as unreasonable a decision as Arthur maintained. He was still only a colonel, albeit a senior one, and the governor-general told him privately that ‘you must know that I could not employ you in the chief command of so large a force as is now to proceed in Egypt without violating every rule in the service …’ There were limits to how far Richard could go on his behalf. Baird had been infuriated by his supercession by the governor-general’s brother at Seringapatam, and made this very clear in three interviews with Richard Wellesley. In her sympathetic anecdotal biography of Arthur, Muriel Wellesley suggests that Richard had no alternative but to act as he did: ‘He must either sacrifice his brother, or lose the confidence of those he governed, which he inevitably would do once the stigma of favouritism and partiality were to become attached to him.’ There were times when Arthur, like Achilles, was capable of sulking in his tent, and this was one of them.

Right or wrong, he was deeply hurt, and now began his letters to the governor-general not as ‘My dear Mornington’, but as the coldly official ‘My Lord’. He was franker in a letter to their brother Henry:

I have not been guilty of robbery or murder, and he has certainly changed his mind … I did not look, and did not wish, for the appointment which was given me; and I say that it would probably have been more proper to give it to somebody else; but when it was given to me, and a circular written to the governments upon the subject, it would have been fair to allow me to hold it till I did something to deserve to lose it.26

Although he was appointed Baird’s second-in-command, Wellesley remained in Bombay when the expedition set sail. Although he assured Henry that Baird’s conduct towards him was ‘perfectly satisfactory’, he first suffered from fever, followed by an attack of ‘Malabar itch’, which obliged him to undergo a regimen of nitrous baths. He knew that the episode would not redound to his credit, and when he felt well enough, he returned to Mysore. Captain George Elers observed that he had begun to grey at the temples and did not laugh as explosively as before. Responsibility followed by disappointment had marked him: ‘He may already have forgotten how to play.’27

But even now, in the depths of his disappointment, he recovered something of his sparkle. Elers wrote that he kept a ‘plain but good’ table, and had an excellent appetite, with roast saddle of mutton served with salad as his favourite dish. He was abstemious, drinking only four or five glasses of wine with dinner and ‘about a pint of claret’ afterwards. ‘He was very even in his temper,’ wrote Elers, ‘laughing and joking with those he liked …’ He could even smile in the face of adversity. Riding hard for Seringapatam with Elers and a tiny escort through dangerous country, he joked that if they were captured: ‘I shall be hanged as being brother to the Governor-General, and you will be hanged for being found in bad company.’ Hearing that there had been a promotion of colonels to be major generals, he called for a copy of the Army List, but found that he was not included. He admitted ruefully that his only ambition was ‘to be a major general in His Majesty’s service’.

When Wellesley returned to Mysore, India was on the verge of another major conflict, this time between the British and the Maratha Confederacy, now the East India Company’s principal rival on the subcontinent. The Hindu Marathas controlled the great mass of central India, bordered by the Ganges in the north and Hyderabad in the south, running from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal, and eventually including Delhi. In 1761 they had been beaten with great loss at Panipat, just outside Delhi, by the Afghan, Ahmad Shah Durrani, Muslim ruler of Kabul. However, they enjoyed a revival after Panipat and in 1778–82, the East India Company fought an inclusive war against them. Thereafter the Company was preoccupied with Mysore, but by 1800 the Maratha state had fragmented into what were, in effect, independent principalities, themselves uniting the fiefs of smaller semi-independent chiefs. The Peshwa Baji Rao, nominally the most senior, ruled at Poona, although his writ ran only around the frontiers of Hyderabad and Mysore. The most powerful of the maharajas was Daulat Rao Scindia, who controlled the northern Maratha lands from his capital at Ujjein, while at Indore, Jeswant Rao Holkar ruled a central slab of land between the Narmada and Godavari Rivers. The Bhonsla Rajah of Berar, with his capital at Nagpur, dominated the south-east Maratha lands. The Gaikwar of Baroda, fifth of the great princes, ruled territory in the west, around the Gulf of Cambay, but was to throw himself onto the Company’s protection and play no part in the coming conflict.

The fragmentation of Maratha power was both risk and opportunity for the Company. On the one hand growing instability meant there was a chance of war breaking out while the Company was busy elsewhere – it was for this reason that Sir Alured Clarke had been left in Calcutta when Mornington began his campaign against Tipoo. But, on the other, the Company might be able, as it had elsewhere, to exploit friction between local rulers. Their chance came in 1800, when Holkar defeated the Peshwa and Scindia at Poona. Scindia fell back into his own territory, but the Peshwa fled to Bassein, in British territory, and signed a treaty agreeing to give the Company control over his foreign affairs and to accept (and pay for) a garrison of six of the Company’s battalions in return for the Company’s help in restoring him to his throne.

The task of restoring the Peshwa was given to Arthur Wellesley in November 1802. He had just heard that he had been gazetted major general on 29 April that year, (news had only reached him in September), and given an appointment on the Madras establishment, where Lieutenant General Stuart, who had led the Bombay army column that fought at Seringapatam, was now commander-in-chief. As he had told Barry Close, soon to be political Resident with the Peshwa, in September 1801, ‘before long we may look to war with the Mahrattas’. He had already made a lengthy analysis of the terrain he might have to cover, highlighting the problems of providing food and water and crossing the many rivers that would lie across his path. As usual he delved into detail. He would need 10,000 gallons of arrack (native spirit) for his European troops, and this should be carried in 6 gallon kegs, ‘well fortified with iron hoops’. There would also have to be 90,000 lbs of salt meat, ‘packed in kegs well fortified, 54lbs in each keg, besides pickle, &c.; and the same quantity of biscuits in round baskets, containing 6olbs each; these baskets to be covered with waxed cloth’.28