Wellington: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert

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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.

      

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