While Sindia and the raja of Nagpore were involved in hostilities with the Company, Holkar was employed in predatory expeditions in Hindostan, and on the conclusion of peace marched down to Muhesur, on the Nerbudda, a great emporium of commerce, and plundered it of wealth estimated at a crore of rupees. With this treasure he was enabled not only to satisfy his own troops for the time, but to take into his pay those whom Sindia and the raja had discharged on the peace. His army was thus augmented to 60,000 horse and 15,000 foot, a force far exceeding his requirements or his resources, and which could be subsisted only by pillage. The Governor-General had sedulously avoided any collision with him during the five months of the war with the confederates; and General Wellesley had repeatedly assured him that as long as he refrained from attacking the dominions of the Company and its allies, the government would abstain from all interference with him. This assurance was also communicated
to him by Lord Wellesley on the 10th February. But repose was incompatible with his plans of ambition and plunder. His fortune was in his saddle, and eighty thousand of the lawless soldiery of Central India followed his stirrup. By the humiliation of Sindia and Nagpore, he was the only Mahratta chief left with an unbroken army; but, heedless of the warning conveyed by their fate, he was impelled by his own reckless disposition to hazard a conflict with the British Government. He desired Ameer Khan to join him without delay, “as he had made up his mind to meet General Lake in the field.” He sought an alliance with the brother of Zemaun Shah, who had seized Cabul, and on a new seal which he had engraved, styled himself, “the slave of Mohamed Shah, king of kings.” Letters were intercepted from him to the British allies, exciting them to revolt. In the month of March he demanded of General Wellesley, then in the Deccan, the cession of certain districts which he said had once belonged to his family, adding that “if they were not restored, countries many hundred miles in extent should be plundered and burnt, and the English general should not have time to breathe, and calamities should fall on lacs of human beings, by a continued war, in which his armies would overwhelm them like waves of the sea.” He likewise despatched two envoys to General Lake, with claims of a similar character. During their communications with the General some allusion happened to be made to the friendly disposition now manifested by Sindia, when they affirmed that Sindia had within a few days requested the cooperation of their master in a war with the English, as a large French force had arrived on the Coromandel coast, and was about to come to his assistance. The envoys demanded with studied arrogance the restoration of the chout, as the inalienable right of the Mahrattas, and the restoration of twelve of the finest districts in the Dooab, which they affirmed were part of Holkar’s family possessions. These insolent demands were followed up by an inroad into the territories of our ally, the raja of Jeypore. General Lake, in his embarrassment, wrote to
Lord Wellesley, “If Holkar should break into Hindostan, he will be joined by the Rohillas. I never was so plagued as I am with this devil. We are obliged to remain in the field at an enormous cost. If we retire, he will come down upon Jeypore, and exact a crore from the raja, and thus pay his own army and render it more formidable than ever. If I advance and leave an opening, he will give me the slip, and get into our territories with his horse, and burn and destroy.”
Lord Wellesley felt that there could be neither peace nor prosperity while this vast predatory horde continued to roam through Central India, and that an army of observation was more expensive than an army of action. On the 16th April, therefore, he directed Generals Wellesley and Lake to take the field against Holkar, whom he regarded as a mere chief of freebooters. General Wellesley, who commanded in the south, ordered Colonel Murray to advance with a force of about 5,800 men from Guzerat into Malwa, and take possession of Holkar’s capital. General Lake moved with his army into the Jeypore territory, which Holkar was employed in plundering, on which he immediately withdrew his troops. Colonel Don was then sent with a large detachment against Rampoora, his stronghold in the north, and it fell on the 16th May. Holkar thus lost his footing in the country north of the Chumbul, and retreated in haste and confusion across that river. General Wellesley’s clear military perceptions led him to urge General Lake to continue the pursuit with rapidity, even though there might be little hope of bringing Holkar to action. If, he remarked, he is pushed with vigour, the war will not last a fortnight; if not, God knows when it will be over. But, by an act of unaccountable imprudence, General Lake, instead of continuing the pursuit, broke up his encampment, and withdrew his army into cantonments in Hindostan, sending Colonel Monson with a single brigade to follow the steps of Holkar. This was the fatal blunder of the campaign, and it entailed a tremendous catastrophe. Lord Wellesley, it is true, approved the retirement of General Lake’s
army, but it must not be forgotten that he also advised him, either to withdraw the force under Colonel Monson, or to strengthen it with a regiment of Europeans and two or three of cavalry. General Lake did neither. He had detached Colonel Monson, who was as remarkable for professional incompetence as for personal gallantry, into the heart of Holkar’s territories, on the eve of the rains, with a small force, unaccompanied by a single European soldier, or any cavalry except 2,000 or 8,000 irregular horse recently raised, and utterly inefficient, to encounter a force ten times its number, and commanded by the most daring soldier of the day. As if in emulation of this error, Colonel Monson made no arrangements on his march for supplies, and no provision for crossing the various streams in his rear, which cease to be fordable after the rains commence. He still farther augmented the perils of his expedition by advancing through the Mokundra pass, and even fifty miles beyond it, for the idle object of capturing an unimportant fort, and thus put 200 miles between his force and its nearest support.
On the 7th July, Colonel Monson received the alarming intelligence that Holkar had called up all his battalions from the south, and was advancing against him with his entire force. It was likewise reported that the provisions in the camp were only equal to two days’ consumption, and his troubles reached their climax by the intelligence that Colonel Murray, who was advancing from Guzerat to his aid, had retired with all his troops. The bewildered commander took council of Bappoo Sindia, the commandant of Sindia’s contingent which accompanied the British force, but he was in league with Holkar, and advised Colonel Monson to fall back with his infantry and leave his irregular horse to follow. Acting upon this treacherous advice, he commenced his disastrous retreat. Holkar, who had the fullest intelligence of every movement in the British camp, immediately attacked the irregular horse and put it to flight. Bappoo Sindia fled on the first appearance of his troops, and
after announcing the rout of the cavalry to Colonel Monson, went over with all his troops to the enemy, not without his master’s concurrence. On the 10th July, Colonel Monson reached the Mokundra pass, where he was attacked vigorously by the whole of Holkar’s army, but obtained a signal victory. The success of this conflict establishes the fact, confirmed by every succeeding encounter, that the disasters of the army arose from no want of mettle in the troops, but from the incapacity of their leader, and that under an abler commander this little sepoy army would have baffled all the efforts of Holkar. The next morning, Colonel Monson continued his retreat, but on reaching Kotah, the regent, Zalim Sing, who had assisted him on his advance – for which Holkar subsequently exacted a fine of ten lacs of rupees – refused admission to his troops on his retreat. His difficulties increased at every step; all the rivulets were swollen, and it rained so incessantly that the guns sunk in the mud beyond recovery, and were spiked and abandoned. The army was seventeen days reaching Rampoora, though the distance from Kotah was only sixty miles. There Colonel Monson was reinforced by two battalions of sepoys and a corps of irregular cavalry, and supplied with provisions, sent to his aid by General Lake, on hearing of the commencement of his retreat. At Rampoora he remained twenty-four days, during the whole of which period Holkar, with all his superiority of force, never ventured to attack him. On the twenty-fifth day he most unaccountably determined to fall back on Kooshalgur, where he expected to be joined by Sudasheo Bhao, one of Sindia’s generals, with six battalions and twenty-one guns; but the Mahratta, seeing the helplessness of the commander, and the miserable plight of his army, not only went over to Holkar, but turned his guns upon the British troops. The game was now up; and on the 26th August, the Colonel spiked his last gun; the enemy allowed him no rest; all order and all discipline was lost; the retreat became a disorderly rout, and the last sepoy straggled into Agra on the last day of August, fifty days after the
retreat had commenced. Colonel Monson attributed his disaster to the failure of Colonel Murray to join him from Guzerat. Colonel Murray attributed it to Colonel Monson himself. Both of them, as General Wellesley observed, were apparently afraid of Holkar, and fled from him in different directions. Colonel Monson advanced without reason and he retreated without cause. Twenty-three years before Colonel Camac had, with equal indiscretion, marched from the Jumna to Seronge in pursuit of Mahdajee Sindia, and found himself in the same predicament as Colonel Monson, in the heart of the enemy’s country, destitute of supplies, harassed by an active foe, and abandoned by native allies in the hour of need. Yet, by the unfailing expedient of a bold and aggressive movement, suggested and carried out by Captain Bruce, he turned the tables on Sindia, captured his guns, ammunition, and camp, reduced him to extremity, and obliged him to sue for peace. But for the imbecility of the commander, the same triumph would doubtless have crowned the valour of the band of heroes under Colonel Monson, and Lord Wellesley would not have had to lament the annihilation of five battalions of infantry and six companies of artillery. This was the most signal disgrace inflicted on the British arms since the destruction of Colonel Baillie’s force by Hyder, in 1780, and its effect on the prestige and influence of the Company was felt throughout India. The defeat was celebrated in ribald songs in every bazaar, and one couplet, describing the utter confusion of the rout has survived the lapse of more than half a century, “Placing the houda of the elephant on the horse, and the saddle of the horse on the elephant, did Colonel Monson fly away in haste.” The raja of Bhurtpore, who had never been very steady in his fidelity, lost no time after this event in opening negotiations with Holkar.
Flushed with success, Holkar advanced to Muttra with an army, estimated at 90,000 men. The British detachment stationed there retired upon Agra, and General Lake, with his accustomed energy, established his
head-quarters at that station, and lost no time in summoning the various corps from their cantonments to repel this new and unexpected eruption. Meanwhile, Holkar planned the daring project of seizing the city of Delhi, and obtaining possession of the person of the emperor. Leaving the greater portion of his cavalry to engage the attention of General Lake, he started in great secrecy, with his infantry and guns, and suddenly appeared before the gates of the city on the 7th October. It was ten miles in circumference, defended only by dilapidated walls and ruined ramparts, and filled with a mixed population, not as yet accustomed to British rule. The garrison was so small as not to admit of reliefs, and provisions and sweetmeats were therefore served to them on the battlements, but the British Resident, Colonel Ochterlony, animated by the spirit of Clive, and nobly seconded by the commandant, Colonel Burn, defended the city for nine days, against the utmost efforts of the enemy, 20,000 strong, with 100 pieces of cannon. At length Holkar, despairing of success, drew off his army, and sending back his infantry and guns into the territory of his new ally, the raja of Bhurtpore, set out with his cavalry to lay waste the British territories in the Dooab, in the ancient style of Mahratta marauding. General Lake also divided his force; the main body was left under General Fraser to watch Holkar’s battalions of infantry, while he placed himself at the head of six regiments of cavalry, European and Native, and his mounted artillery, and started in pursuit of him. In this expedition Holkar contrived invariably to keep twenty or thirty miles a-head, ravaging and burning the defenceless villages as he swept along.
After a very harassing march of three hundred and fifty miles in fourteen days, the General was so fortunate as to come up with his encampment at Futtygur, on the 17th November, having marched no less than fifty-six miles in the preceding twenty-four hours. Holkar had been led to believe from the report of his spies, that the British cavalry was a day’s march behind him, and had retired to rest. The horses were at picket, and the men
lay asleep by their side, wrapped in their blankets, when several rounds of grape gave them the first intimation of the arrival of their pursuers. Holkar mounted his horse and galloped off with the few troopers around him, leaving the rest of his troops to shift for themselves, and they were either cut up or dispersed in all directions. He hastened back to rejoin his infantry, but found on re-crossing the Jumna, that they had been subject during his absence to an irreparable defeat.
Four days before the action at Futtygur, General Fraser had encountered Holkar’s army, consisting of fourteen battalions of infantry, a large body of horse, and a hundred and sixty guns, in the vicinity of Deeg. The English force did not exceed 6,000, but contained in its ranks the 76th Highlanders, the foremost in the path of honour and danger, and they again bore the brunt of the battle. The enemy was completely routed, and left eighty-seven pieces of cannon on the field. But the victory was dearly purchased by the loss of 643 killed and wounded, and more especially of the noble general, who died three days after of his wounds. On his removal from the field during the action, the command devolved on Colonel Monson, who maintained the conflict with the utmost gallantry, and had the satisfaction of recovering fourteen of the guns he had lost in his retreat. During the engagement a destructive fire was opened on the British troops from the fort of Deeg, which belonged to the raja of Bhurtpore. A battering train was immediately ordered up from Agra, and the fortress was captured on the 23rd December.
The fortunes of Holkar were now at the lowest ebb. He had lost all his forts in the Deccan. General Jones, who, under the advice of General Wellesley,. had been appointed in the room of the incompetent Colonel Murray to the Guzerat command, had taken all his fortresses in Malwa, and marched up through the heart of the Mahratta dominions, unmolested, and joined General Lake’s camp. The vast army with which Holkar had proudly crossed the Jumna four months before, had dwindled away under repeated reverses,
and the entire destruction of his power appeared inevitable, when every advantage which had been gained in the campaign was thrown away by the fatal resolution of General Lake to invest Bhurtpore. It was a town and fortress eight miles in circumference, surrounded by the invulnerable bulwark of a lofty mud wall of great thickness, and protected by numerous bastions, and a deep ditch, filled with water. It was garrisoned by about 8,000 of the raja’s troops, and the remnant of Holkar’s infantry. General Lake refused to listen to any argument, and without a sufficient siege train, without an engineer officer of any experience, without even a reconnaissance, resolved, with breathless impetuosity, at once to besiege the town. This memorable siege commenced on the 4th January, 1805, and the army did not break up before the 21st April. Four unsuccessful attacks were made which entailed the unprecedented loss of 3,200 men in killed and wounded, of whom 103 were officers. The raja was joined at his own request during the siege by Ameer Khan, but the exorbitant demands of that chief speedily dissolved the union, on which he proceeded with his predatory horse into his native province of Rohilcund, in the hope of raising it against the English. General Smith was detached in pursuit of him, and after performing the extraordinary march of seven hundred miles in forty-three days, overtook him at the foot of the Himalaya, and chased him back across the Jumna. Though the siege of Bhurtpore had not been successful, the raja severely felt the loss of all his territorial revenues, and the exactions of Holkar, and became anxious to bring the war to a close.
He therefore sent a vakeel to General Lake, ostensibly to congratulate him on his advance to the peerage, of which intelligence had just been received, but, in reality, to open negotiations; and a treaty was speedily concluded on condition that he should pay twenty lacs of rupees towards the expenses of the war, in four instalments. But the submission of the raja, under such circumstances, could not repair the loss of reputation which the British Government
sustained by the notorious failure of the siege. Nothing has filled the princes of India with greater dismay than the easy and rapid reduction of their strongest fortresses in positions which appeared to be absolutely impregnable. But in the present case, a British army, under the Commander-in-chief in person, had been foiled for several months in every attempt to capture a mud fort, situated in a plain, and the Native chiefs began to flatter themselves that our skill and our prowess were on the wane. The remembrance of our disgrace was perpetuated even in remote districts by rude delineations on the walls of British soldiers hurled from the battlements of Bhurtpore, nor was the impression created by this failure completely removed till the capture of the fort by Lord Combermere, twenty-one years afterwards.
This accommodation with Bhurtpore was hastened by the menacing attitude of Sindia, to whose proceedings we now return. By the treaty of Sirjee Angengaom, he had engaged in general terms to relinquish all claim on the rajas and feudatories in the north, with whom the Governor-General had concluded defensive alliances. When the list of these chiefs was for the first time presented to him, in April, 1804, with the ratified treaty, he was mortified to find the name of the rana of Gohud, together with the fort of Gwalior, included in it, and he urged the most vehement objection to these alienations. Gwalior, on which he set a high value, was, he said, the personal gift of the emperor to him; and his servant, Ambajee Inglia, to whom it had been entrusted, had no right whatever to dispose of it, when he treacherously joined the English. As to the rana of Gohud, he scouted the idea of acknowledging the existence of such a being, whose power he had extinguished, and whose territories he had annexed to his own twenty years before. It was an unfortunate circumstance that General Lake in the north and General Wellesley in the south should have been making arrangements and alliances affecting the interest of Sindia, in total ignorance of the proceedings of each other.
When General Wellesley negotiated the treaty with Sindia he was not aware that Lord Wellesley had determined to re-establish the principality of Gohud, and to make the rana independent. Sindia deprecated the revival of these ancient and extinct claims, and justly observed that “it could not fail to weaken the fundamental rights of actual possession, as the greater portion of the Company’s territories as well as his own had no other foundation.” General Wellesley affirmed that Sindia had agreed to the treaty in the fullest confidence that Gwalior was to remain with him, and that, for his part, “he would sacrifice it and every other frontier town ten times over to preserve our credit for scrupulous good faith, and that the advantages and honour we had gained in the last war and peace must not be frittered away in arguments drawn from the overstrained principles of the law of nations, which was not understood in India.” Major Malcolm, the envoy at the court of Sindia, entertained the same views, and anxiously laboured for the restoration of these possessions to Sindia. Lord Wellesley resented this opposition to his wishes, and when the Major pleaded, in extenuation of his conduct, that his sole object was to promote the public interests, remarked, “Major Malcolm’s business is to obey my orders and enforce my instructions; I will look after the public interests.” The Governor-General was all the more pertinacious on this occasion from being entirely in the wrong, and his conduct cannot be more accurately described than by the expressive Indian word, zid. Sindia was obliged to yield to his imperious demand, and submit to the alienation of Gohud and Gwalior, but it continued to rankle in his bosom.
Hostility of Sindia, 1804–5.
The disastrous retreat of Colonel Monson produced a profound sensation throughout Hindostan; it created an impression that fortune was at length deserting the standard of the Company, and it strengthened the hope that the Mahrattas might yet regain their former ascendency. Wittul Punt, Sindia’s great minister, died in October, 1804, and was succeeded by Sirjee Rao Ghatkay, the inveterate
enemy of the British power. Under his sinister advice, Sindia addressed a defiant letter to the Governor-General, impugning the good faith of the British Government in numerous instances. The letter, instead of being sent direct, was transmitted to his vakeel at Benares, who journeyed with it by slow stages to Calcutta, watching the progress of events, and it would never have been delivered at all but for our discomfiture before Bhurtpore. It reached the Governor-General four months after it was penned. Meanwhile, a secret affiance was formed against the Company, which included Sindia and Holkar, Ameer Khan, and the raja of Bhurtpore; and Sindia, emboldened by our reverses, ventured to attack the territories of our allies, and to invade Sagur. At the beginning of 1805, the encampment of Mr. Richard Jenkins, the British representative at his court, was assailed and plundered at the instigation of Sirjee Rao, in the hope of irretrievably compromising his master with the British Government. Sindia likewise put his army in motion, and announced his intention to march to Bhurtpore, and negotiate a peace between the raja and the Company, an insult which the Governor-General could not but feel acutely. But both he and General Wellesley were equally anxious to avoid a rupture with Sindia at this critical juncture. The army before Bhurtpore was disheartened by repeated failures; the British frontier, for several hundred miles, from Calpee to Midnapore was defenceless, and a combined attack of the allies might have been followed by disastrous results. Sindia continued to advance with 40,000 men, including Pindarees, and encamped eighteen miles beyond Subulgur, where he was joined by Ambajee Inglia. The Resident remonstrated against his crossing the Chumbul, as it would in all probability lead to a war, and urged him to return to his own capital. Sindia made the most amicable professions, but assured him that the embarrassment of his finances was so great as to prevent his retracing his steps; but if some arrangement could be made for relieving his pressing necessities, he would act in accordance with the Governor-General’s desire. General
Wellesley, who was satisfied of the truth of this assertion, and who believed that Sindia was really impoverished, advised his brother to grant him some pecuniary aid, and he immediately made a retrograde movement of a few miles.
Five days after this retirement, Sirjee Rao, apparently without Sindia’s concurrence, marched up to Bhurtpore with a part of his master’s cavalry, and all his Pindarees; but before his arrival the treaty with Lord Lake had been completed, though without the knowledge of the Mahrattas, and the raja refused to meet him. After the preliminaries of peace had been signed, a division of British troops attacked Holkar, who had been hovering about the fort during the siege, and completely defeated him, leaving under his standard only 3,000 or 4,000 exhausted cavalry. Sirjee Rao returned with Holkar to Sindia’s encampment at Subulgur, where all the confederates, except the raja of Bhurtpore, were now assembled. Holkar and Ameer Khan soon intimated to Sindia that it would be impossible to keep their forces together without funds, and that all their projects against the Company must therefore be abandoned. He replied that his treasury was empty, and that although he had jewels enough, no money could be raised on them, but his general, Ambajee, was possessed of boundless wealth, yet would not part with a rupee. Ambajee had been Sindia’s lieutenant in Rajpootana and Hindostan for many years, and had amassed two crores of rupees, which he had deposited for safety in Kotah. With the full concurrence of Sindia, he was seized and confined, and Ameer Khan subjected him to the most exquisite tortures, till he consented to part with fifty-five lacs from his hoards, of which Sindia appropriated one-half to his own use. As Sindia and his confederates continued to encamp at Subulgur, General Lake moved down upon them as soon as the Bhurtpore treaty was signed, and the whole body retreated in haste and consternation towards Kotah. At the beginning of June the atrocities of Sirjee Rao constrained Sindia to displace him, and Ambajee was raised to the post of minister. With a lively recollection.
of the injuries he had received from Holkar, he endeavoured to sow dissension between him and Sindia, and at length succeeded in breaking up the alliance, which paved the way for an amicable adjustment of all differences with the British Government. Soon after, Lord Lake addressed a letter to Sindia, stating that if the Resident, who was still detained by him, though treated with great respect, was not dismissed within ten days, the relations subsisting between the two states would be no longer considered binding. The day before the expiration of this period, one of Sindia’s principal ministers waited on the Resident, and entreated him to waive the demand for his dismissal, “because it would give an appearance of enmity to the relations of the two states.” Sindia had nothing to gain but everything to risk by a war, and he was sincerely desirous of establishing a good understanding with the Company. He had not forgotten how, in August, 1803, the departure of Colonel Collins from his camp had been the signal of hostilities, and he feared lest the retirement of Mr. Jenkins should produce the same disastrous result. On his part, Lord Wellesley was equally desirous of peace. He had made up his mind to restore Gohud and Gwalior, as a matter of policy, and was ready to discuss any other concessions which might enable him to place the army on a peace establishment and reduce the burdens of the state.
Another month or two would have brought about an amicable adjustment of all differences, and placed the tranquillity of India upon, a solid basis. But on the 30th July Lord Cornwallis landed in Calcutta, and assumed charge of the Government and Lord Wellesley’s whole scheme of policy was at once subverted.
The administration of Lord Wellesley is the most memorable in the annals of British India. He found the empire beset with the most imminent perils in every quarter, and he bequeathed it to his successor in a state of complete security. He found a feeling of contempt for our power gradually increasing at every court,
and threatening its existence, and he set himself with unexampled energy to restore our prestige. In rapid succession he annihilated the French force at Hyderabad, and converted all the resources of the Nizam to the use of the Company. He extinguished the Mysore power and became master of the Deccan. He extirpated the French battalions of Sindia, and turned his possessions in Hindostan into a British province. He paralysed the power of the great Mahratta princes so effectually that, notwithstanding the timid and retrograde policy of the next twelve years, they were never able to recover it. He remodelled the map of India and introduced greater and more important changes in all its political relations than had been effected by any single prince, Hindoo or Mohamedan. He doubled the territories and the resources of the Company. He had a peculiar genius for creating and consolidating an empire. He was the Akbar of the Company’s dynasty. His individual character was impressed on every branch of the administration, and his inspiration animated every member of the service in every department, and in every province. To those around him, who were under his immediate influence, he was the object of “hero worship,” and the designation usually applied to him was “the glorious little man.” But his attention was chiefly directed to those great measures of state which were required to secure and strengthen the Government. The time had not arrived when the moral and intellectual improvement of the people was considered within the province of the ruler. Lord Wellesley made no effort to promote the education of the natives, and the erroneous policy initiated by Lord Cornwallis of excluding them from all share in any branch of the Government, and working it exclusively by European agency, was approved and perpetuated. But he constrained the civilians to acquire the language of the people they were appointed to govern, which the Court of Directors had neglected for thirty-five years; and to his administration belongs the distinguished honour of having, under the influence of Mr. Udny and Dr. Carey, passed
the humane regulation prohibiting the sacrifice of children at Sagur.
Lord Wellesley’s great predecessor, Warren Hastings, was the first ruler who contemplated the necessity imposed by our position of extending British influence over every court, and making the Company the leading power in India. For the attempt to carry out this great conception, he was subjected to an impeachment and reduced to poverty. Twelve years after he had left India, Lord Wellesley felt the pressure of the same necessity, and resolved to pursue the same object, not by the simple exertion of influence, but by the exercise of authority. He was anxious to extinguish those internecine contests among the princes of India which for more than a century had turned its fairest provinces into a desert, encouraged a predatory and military spirit among the inhabitants, and formed an inexhaustible source for the supply of military adventurers, prepared to join the standard of any turbulent chieftain, for the purposes of ambition, plunder, and rebellion. He felt, as General Wellesley described it, that “no permanent system of policy could be adopted to preserve the weak against the strong, and to keep the princes for any length of time in their relative situations, and the whole body in peace, without the establishment of one power, which by the superiority of its strength, and its military system and resources, should obtain a preponderating influence for the protection of all.” The Company was to be this preponderant power, but the Company was still a commercial body, and had an instinctive dread of all military operations which interrupted its investments and disturbed its balance-sheet. In the conflict between the merchant and the sovereign in Leadenhall-street, the influence and interest of the merchant prevailed, although Lord Wellesley maintained that “as long as the Company represented the sovereign executive authority in this vast empire, its duties of sovereignty must be paramount to mercantile interests.” This irreconcilable difference of views created a strong feeling of
antipathy towards him at the India House, which, though mitigated for a time by the influence of Lord Castlereagh, broke out at length with irrepressible violence. His policy was denounced, his measures were thwarted, and his government was humiliated and weakened. For a time he manifested, as he said, “an invariable respect even for the errors of every branch of their authority,” but this respect was at length extinguished by the virulence of their opposition, and in a moment of exasperation, he designated them the “cheese-mongers of Leadenhall-street,” an expression never forgiven. The India House accused him of “illegal appointments,” of “evasions of the law,” of “contempt of Parliament,” and above all, of “a disdain of constituted authority,” meaning the Court of Directors. He charged them with “vindictive profligacy,” and “ignominious tyranny,” and in writing to a ministerial friend said that “no additional outrage, injury, or insult which could issue from the most loathsome den in the India House would accelerate his departure from India, while the public interests seemed to require the aid of his services.”
The impartiality of history requires that great allowance should be made for the feelings of the Court of Directors and the Court of Proprietors. Parliament had thought fit to interdict all increase of territory, and even to forbid all alliances with the native princes, and the Directors fondly believed that under the shadow of this wise and prudent injunction, as they deemed it, they would be enabled to continue at peace with the native powers, and to pursue their mercantile enterprises, which they prized above all things, without interruption. But the present Governor-General, in utter defiance of the authority of Parliament, had been engaged in wars from Cape Comorin to the Sutlege, had broken the power of prince after prince, completed a gigantic revolution, and seated the Company on the throne of the Great Mogul, and invested it with the responsibility of governing one half and controlling the other
half of India. It was impossible that a body constituted like the East India Company should not take alarm at the audacity of his aspirations, and the vastness of his schemes, and forebode the certain loss of the country, through the resentment excited against British ambition in every province. Even Lord Wellesley’s friend, Lord Castlereagh, questioned whether an empire founded on so broad a basis could be fed with its due proportion of British troops from England. He feared that the frame of the government had become too complicated and unwieldy for any other hands than those of Lord Wellesley, and, like the Directors, regarded with a feeling of consternation the vast extent of our dominions in India, and the ruinous consequences which seemed to be the inevitable result of it. The announcement of the war with Holkar filled up the measure of Lord Wellesley’s delinquencies, and of the terror of the public authorities in England. Even before the news of Colonel Monson’s retreat arrived, Mr. Charles Grant, the Corypheus of the Court of Directors, declared that he had “not only wantonly but criminally involved the Government in all the difficulties of another war with an able and powerful chieftain.” Lord Castlereagh thought there could be no safety but in bringing back things to the state the Legislature had prescribed in 1793, in other words, in putting the clock back a dozen years. Sir George Barlow had been nominated provisional Governor-General at the special recommendation of Lord Wellesley, but at such a crisis it was deemed unsafe to entrust the destinies of the empire to one of his disciples. Lord Cornwallis was known to disapprove of Lord Wellesley’s system of policy, and he was entreated to proceed to India and deliver the Company from its fatal effects, as he had been sent out twenty years before to rescue the British interests in India from the mischievous consequences of Hastings’s plans. But before entering on his proceedings it is necessary to wind up the history of Lord Wellesley’s career by a brief notice of the treatment he experienced on his return to England.
The mode in which the great services of Lord Clive and Warren Hastings had been requited in England forbade the hope that the brilliant administration of Lord Wellesley would escape the homage of censure. A Mr. Paull, who, on the testimony of General Wellesley, was originally a tailor, had gone out as an adventurer to India, and taken an investment of goods to Lucknow, where he was so fortunate as to obtain the countenance of the Nabob Vizier, and amassed a large fortune. On his return to India, after a short visit to England, the Nabob refused to admit him into the city, and it was only through the intercession of Lord Wellesley that the interdict was removed. Mr. Paull expressed unbounded gratitude to his benefactor, and professed the highest respect for his character. This feeling was not, however, of long duration. On his final return to England, in 1805, he bought a seat in Parliament, and on the 22nd May, 1806, brought forward “articles of charge of high crimes and misdemeanours committed by the Marquis of Wellesley in his transactions with respect to the Nabob of Oude.” In the course of his speech he assured the House that, “from the accursed day when Lord Wellesley set foot in India till the day of his departure, he had exhibited a constant scene of rapacity, oppression, cruelty, and fraud, which goaded the whole country into a state of revolt.” Mr. Paull then moved for papers relative to the transactions in Oude, in Furruckabad, and in Surat. The members of the Court of Directors who had seats in the House, while they disapproved of many of Lord Wellesley’s measures, refused their support to so preposterous a charge; and Mr. Fox, then prime minister, declared that, since the trial of Mr. Hastings, he had shrunk from all Indian impeachments. The House, however, did not see fit to resist the production of evidence; but, after it had been taken on the first charge, a dissolution terminated all proceedings. At the ensuing election Mr. Paull stood for Westminster, and failed, and then put a period to his existence. Twenty months after, Lord Folkstone took up the thread of the prosecution, and
moved twelve resolutions, which charged Lord Wellesley with having, “under the impulse of unjustifiable ambition and love of power, formed schemes of aggrandisement and acquisition of territory, contravened two Acts of Parliament, violated every principle of good faith, equity and justice, and the sacred obligations of a solemn treaty, and affixed a lasting stigma and reproach on the British name.” The resolutions were negatived by 182 to 31, after which Sir John Anstruther, who had been chief justice of Calcutta, moved a resolution to the effect that Lord Wellesley, in the late arrangements in Oude, had been actuated by an ardent zeal for the public service, and it was carried by a triumphant majority. Two months later, Sir Thomas Turton brought the Carnatic question before the House, and accused Lord Wellesley of atrocious delinquencies, and went so far as to hint that he was accessory to the death of the late Nabob. The resolution was indignantly rejected by the House, and a vote approving of Lord Wellesley’s proceedings was carried, with only nineteen dissentient voices.
Conduct of the Directors and Proprietors, 1807.
Far different was the conduct of the Directors and Proprietors, among whom the feeling of animosity towards Lord Wellesley was still unabated. Towards the close of his administration, the Court of Directors compiled a despatch, in which all the charges which could be raked up were elaborately set forth. It was the concentrated essence of the spirit of malignity which had been fermenting in Leadenhall-street for several years. The Board of Control judiciously substituted for it a brief letter asking for explanations in a tone of great moderation, and to it the Court of Directors were obliged to affix their signature. The Proprietors, however, ordered the original despatch to be printed, and a motion was brought forward in their Court impugning Lord Wellesley’s policy, and applauding the Directors for having “restrained a lavish expenditure of public money, and opposed all schemes of conquest and extension of empire.” After a long and acrimonious debate, 928 voted the condemnation of Lord Wellesley, and only 195 his acquittal. But, after the
lapse of thirty years, when passion and prejudice had given way to the voice of reason, the Court of Directors availed themselves of the publication of his dispatches, in five volumes, to assure him that in their judgment he had been animated throughout his administration “by an ardent zeal to promote the well-being of India, and to uphold the interest and honour of the British empire,” and that they looked back to the eventful and brilliant period of his government with feelings common to their countrymen. They voted him a grant of £20,000, and ordered his statue to be placed in the India House, as a recognition of the great services he had rendered to the Company.
This collection transcribed by Chris Gage