Over the course of Wellesley’s days in the Cape, the two remained cloistered as Kirkpatrick briefed his new boss on his perceptions of the French threat, and what steps the new Governor General could take to contain it. He told him of the well-equipped French-commanded Maratha sepoy battalions which had been trained up for Scindia by the brilliant Savoyard general Benoît de Boigne. De Boigne had now retired to Europe and handed over his battalions to a far less formidable commander named General Pierre Perron, but Kirkpatrick had witnessed the skills of the army he had created, and particularly its ruthlessly efficient artillery divisions. Three years earlier, in March 1795, he had been present when the Nizam of Hyderabad’s army had disintegrated under their fire at the Battle of Khardla. Kirkpatrick was under no illusions about the formidable nature of Scindia’s new army, which was now almost indistinguishable from that of the Company in uniform, drill, weaponry and even in its sepoys’ ethnic and caste backgrounds.
Wellesley was especially alarmed to hear about the degree to which the army of Tipu Sultan, the Company’s most implacable and relentless enemy, had fallen into the hands of a body of 500 Revolutionary French mercenaries, advisers, technicians and officers. Kirkpatrick told him how, in May 1797, Tipu’s French troops had gone as far as establishing a Revolutionary Jacobin club in Srirangapatnam: ‘The National Flag [the Tricolour] was hoisted to the sound of artillery and musketry of the camp’, while symbols of the pre-Revolutionary Bourbon monarchy were burned. Republican hymns were sung during the subsequent planting of ‘the Liberty Tree’ – a sort of Jacobin maypole – and while the tree was crowned with a ‘Cap of Equality’, the assembly ‘swore hatred of all Kings, except Tipoo Sultan, the Victorious, the Ally of the Republic of France, to make war on tyrants and to love towards the motherland as well as the land of Citizen Prince Tipoo’. Finally, they took a solemn oath to support the Republican constitution, ‘or die at arms … to live free or die!’6
At the end of the ceremony, the French corps marched to the Srirangapatnam parade ground, where the Citizen Prince awaited them. As they approached, Tipu ordered a salute from 2,300 cannon, 500 rockets and all the musketry his troops could muster. ‘Behold,’ announced Citizen Tipu, ‘my acknowledgement of the Standard of your country, which is dear to me and to which I am allied; it shall always be carried aloft in my country, as it has been in our sister Republic! Go, conclude your festival!’7
Wellesley’s greatest fear was that the different French mercenary units could unite to challenge the Company if war broke out again with Tipu. He wrote to London how
in the present weak state of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s Government, the French corps in his service would openly join with Tipu Sultan, and by a sudden blow, endeavour to seize the Nizam’s territories, and to secure them to the dominion of France, under an alliance with Tipu Sultan. The interest and inclination of Scindia, who also entertains a large army in his service under the command of a French officer, would lead him to engage with Tipu Sultan and the French. The junction which might thus be effected between the French officers, with their several corps in the respective services of the Nizam, Scindia and Tipu, might establish the power of France upon the ruin of the states of Pune and of the Deccan.8
As soon as he arrived in Calcutta, Wellesley began drawing up plans to send troops south to take on this threat. But his plans greatly accelerated when, on 8 June, he read in a Calcutta newspaper of a declaration, issued in Mauritius by the island’s French Governor General, M. Malartic. This publicised the intention of Tipu to conclude an offensive and defensive alliance with the French and ‘that he only waits for the moment when the French shall come to his assistance to declare war on the English, whom he ardently wishes to expel from India’.9
From that moment, Tipu’s fate was sealed. Wellesley’s priority was now to eradicate all traces of French influence before any French military expedition could arrive. In June he wrote to General Harris, the Commander-in-Chief at Madras, who was a veteran of Cornwallis’s campaign against Tipu, announcing his decision to ‘call upon our allies without delay and assemble the army on the coast with all possible expedition’, with a view to ‘striking a sudden blow against Tippoo before he can receive foreign aid’.10
By early August, Wellesley had completed his war plan. This he transmitted to Dundas in London, outlining ‘measures … most advisable for the purpose of frustrating the united efforts of Tippoo Sultan and of France’.11 As far he was concerned, Tipu was now a proven enemy and predator and must be immediately crushed: ‘The evidence of meditated hostility is complete,’ he wrote. ‘While professing the most amicable disposition, bound by subsisting treaties of peace and friendship, and unprovoked by an offence on our part, Tipu Sultan has manifested a design to effect our total destruction.’12
First, however, Wellesley decided to deal with Raymond’s French Revolutionary force in Hyderabad.
Although many of Wellesley’s writings at this period have an air of Francophobe paranoia to them, the new Governor General was in fact quite correct about the potential threat posed to the Company by Raymond. As a recently discovered cache of papers has shown, Raymond was indeed in correspondence both with the French officers of de Boigne’s corps in Scindia’s service and those working for Tipu at Srirangapatnam, where Raymond had himself been employed before entering the Nizam’s service.
Raymond’s ambitions are revealed in the series of passionately patriotic letters he wrote in the early 1790s to the French headquarters at Pondicherry, pledging his loyalty to France and the Revolution: ‘I am ready to sacrifice all,’ he wrote to the Governor of Pondicherry, ‘if I am so fortunate that circumstances may ever put it in my power to prove the zeal for my country which animates me.’ To the Governor of Mauritius, he was even more explicit about his intentions: ‘I shall always follow as my first duty whatever [orders] you wish to give me … If ever I can be useful to France I am ready to pour my blood once more for her. I labour only to discharge this duty and gain your good opinion.’13
James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the new British Resident in Hyderabad, upon whom the job of ousting the French corps devolved, was the younger brother of Wellesley’s new Military Secretary. His task was far from easy. Raymond’s personal income was vast – his estates on their own yielded Rs500,000 a yeara – and in the early months of 1798 Raymond had persuaded the Nizam again to increase the size of his force, this time to over 14,000 men, with their own bespoke gun foundry and a complete train of artillery, drawn by a force of 5,000 of its own bullocks. The corps manufactured its own swords, muskets and pistols, besides its excellent artillery; there was even a small cavalry group numbering 600. To make matters worse Raymond was personally very popular with the Hyderabad court. The heir apparent, Sikander Jah, was so taken with the Frenchman that he went as far as swearing ‘by the head of Raymond’.14
Then, on the morning of 25 March 1798, Raymond was found dead, aged only forty-three; there was gossip that the cause may have been poison, possibly administered by the pro-Company faction in the durbar. Whatever the truth, the sudden death of Raymond gave Kirkpatrick his chance. It helped that one of the Nizam’s ministers, Mir Alam, had recently visited Calcutta and been astonished by the size and scale of the Company’s barracks and arms factories, and that other senior officials in the Hyderabad durbar were equally convinced that the Company was the rising power in India. They argued that an alliance was essential for the safety of Hyderabad, surrounded as it was by two much more powerful neighbours, Tipu’s Mysore to the south and the Marathas in Pune, immediately to the west.
Six months later, after weeks of hard negotiation, a secret treaty was signed, bringing Hyderabad and the Company into a close military alliance: 6,000 Company troops were to be resident in Hyderabad and available for the Nizam’s protection. In return the Nizam was to pay the Company an annual subsidy of £41,710,b and to dismiss the French corps. Exactly how or when this was to be done, however, was not made clear in the Treaty.
Following the
signing, an uneasy month passed as the new Company force of four battalions, along with a train of artillery, made its way slowly up the 150 miles from the coast near Guntur. This was the nearest Company-controlled town, where Wellesley had ordered them to collect two months earlier, in readiness to march on Hyderabad.15
Before first light on 22 October, the EIC troops quietly encircled the French cantonments, arranging their guns on the ridge above the French lines, not far from where a classical Greek temple and obelisk had just been raised as a memorial for Raymond. They achieved complete surprise. When dawn broke, the French corps woke up to find itself surrounded. At nine o’clock Kirkpatrick offered the mutineers payment of all salaries owing if they would surrender. They had ‘one quarter of an hour to stack their arms and march off to a protection flag, which was pitched about half a mile to the right of the camp. If they did not comply, they were immediately to be attacked.’16
For thirty minutes the French corps remained undecided. Two thousand Company cavalry massed on the right flank of the French camp; 500 more waited on the right. In the centre were 4,000 East India Company infantry. There was complete silence. Then, just after 9.30 a.m., to Kirkpatrick’s great relief, the sepoys finally sent out word that they accepted the terms.
The Company cavalry rode in and quickly took possession of the French magazine, store houses, powder mills, gun foundries and cannon, while the French sepoys fled to the flag under which they were to surrender themselves: ‘at once a glorious and piteous sight’, thought Kirkpatrick.17 Within a few hours, the largest French corps in India, more than 14,000-strong, was disarmed by a force of less than a third that number. Not a single shot had been fired, not a single life lost.
Kirkpatrick watched the soldiers laying down their arms all afternoon from the roof of the British Residency. That evening, in a state of mixed exhaustion and elation, he wrote to his brother William that the ‘turning adrift of thousands of Raymond’s troops, all of which I saw this evening from the roof of my house with my spy glasses as plain as if it had been on the spot, was the finest sight I ever saw in my life.’
In a postscript written two hours later, there came even better news: had William heard yet the news, which had just arrived post-haste from Bombay, ‘of Admiral Nelson’s glorious naval action’? In the Battle of the Nile on 1 August, Nelson had sunk almost the entire French fleet in Aboukir Bay, wrecking Napoleon’s hopes of using Egypt as a secure base from which to attack India. It was an amazing turn of events. Ever since news had arrived of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, it had looked quite possible that India would be next and might even become a French colony. Now that threat was greatly diminished.18
The operation had been carried out with great skill and Wellesley was delighted. ‘You will enjoy my gentle conquest of an army of 14,000 men under the command of French officers in the service of the Nizam,’ he wrote to Dundas later that month. ‘My despatches do not mention a curious fact, that the standard of this army was the Tricolour flag: the first of that description erected on the Continent of India. This standard has fallen into my hands; and I shall send it home as the best comment upon the whole policy of making an effort to crush the French influence in India.’19
Now with Hyderabad secured, Wellesley was ready to move directly against his principal adversary, Tipu Sultan.
On 4 November 1798, Wellesley wrote a sarcastic letter to Tipu, telling him of the cataclysmic defeat of his French allies at the Battle of the Nile: ‘Confident that from the union and attachment subsisting between us that this intelligence will afford you sincere satisfaction, I could not deny myself the pleasure of communicating it.’20 Tipu replied in kind, penning an apparently friendly but equally disingenuous letter back, telling Lord Wellesley: ‘I am resident at home, at times taking the air, and at times amusing myself with hunting at a spot which is used as a pleasure ground.’21
When Wellesley next wrote, the Company’s alliance with Hyderabad had been secured and the French corps rounded up, and the Governor General was now much more confident of the strength of his position. This time his tone was very different: ‘It is impossible that you should suppose me ignorant of the intercourse between you and the French, whom you know to be inveterate enemies of the Company,’ he wrote. ‘Nor does it appear necessary or proper that I should any longer conceal from you the surprise and concern with which I perceived you disposed to involve yourself in all the ruinous consequences of a connection which threatens to subvert the foundations of friendship between you and the Company, and to introduce into your kingdom the principles of anarchy and confusion and … to destroy the religion which you revere.’22 But Tipu refused to be drawn: ‘Being frequently disposed to make excursions and hunt,’ he wrote back, ‘I am accordingly proceeding on another hunting expedition … Always continue to gratify me by friendly letters, notifying your welfare.’23
Wellesley was now busy putting the final touches to his invasion plans. The finances to fight the war were now secure and, having won the support of the Marwari bankers of Bengal, Wellesley sent to Bombay and Madras the vast sum of Rs10 million (£1 million, £130 million today), which he had managed to raise on the Calcutta money market.24 More money came in a timely injection of treasure from Europe.25
He wrote to the Resident in Pune, William Palmer, that he must at all costs get the Marathas to break off relations with Mysore and join the war against Tipu, in accordance with the Triple Alliance signed by Cornwallis. In due course a reluctant Peshwa promised Palmer that the Marathas would honour their commitments and send the Company 25,000 troops – though after much foot-dragging in Pune, these failed to arrive in time for action.26 A message was also sent to the Nizam to call up his troops to assist his new British allies, as had been agreed in the Treaty he and Kirkpatrick had signed five months earlier
In a process of vilification familiar from more recent Western confrontations with assertive Muslim leaders, Wellesley now stepped up his propaganda against Tipu, who he depicted as ‘a cruel and relentless enemy’, ‘a beast of the jungle’, an ‘intolerant bigot’ with ‘a rooted hatred of Europeans’ who had ‘perpetually on his tongue the projects of Jihad’. This tyrant was also deemed to be an ‘oppressive and unjust ruler … [a]; sanguinary tyrant, a perfidious negociator’, and, above all, a ‘furious fanatic’.27
At the same time he wrote to reassure the Court of Directors that he was not engaged in some vainglorious adventure at their expense: ‘Although I have deemed it my duty to call your armies into the field in every part of India,’ he wrote, ‘my views and expectations are all directed to the preservation of the peace, which in the present crisis cannot otherwise be secured than by a state of forward preparations for war.’28
This letter was as insincere as anything he had ever written to Tipu. For Wellesley had, in reality, absolutely no intention whatsoever of keeping the peace. Instead, he was hugely enjoying the prospect of using the directors’ private army to wage his entirely avoidable war against the French-led forces in India.
On Christmas Day, 25 December 1798, Lord Wellesley embarked from Calcutta for Madras, so that he could better control affairs from his southern base. He arrived on the last day of 1798, to be greeted by the new Governor of Madras. This was Edward, Lord Clive, the slightly slow-witted son of Robert Clive, whose victory at Plassey thirty-five years earlier had begun the East India Company’s transformation from a trading company to a privately owned imperial power with a standing army and territorial possessions far larger than that of its parent country. After their first meeting, Wellesley wrote that the younger Clive was ‘a worthy, zealous, obedient & gentlemanlike man of excellent temper; but neither of talents, knowledge, habits of business, or firmness equal to his present situation. How the devil did he get here?’29 Henceforth Wellesley more or less ignored his host and busied himself with managing the detail of his onslaught against Tipu without involving Edward Clive in any way.
By this stage, General Harris’s heavy siege train, with its batt
ering rams and mining gear, had already reached Vellore, the last British-held fort before the Mysore frontier. There 20,000 East India Company sepoys, 1,400 elite British grenadiers under Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, and a battalion of kilted Scottish Highlanders engaged in training exercises, while Harris waited for his orders to advance.30
Tipu had an extremely efficient network of spies and knew exactly what was happening beyond his borders: ‘It has lately come to my ears from report,’ he wrote, ‘that, in consequence of the talk of interested persons, military preparations are on foot.’31 While Lord Wellesley finessed his military plans, Tipu tried, with equal energy, to raise support from the last indigenous armies capable of taking on the Company, warning them that whatever differences they may have had in the past, this was their chance to unite and defeat the British.
On 8 January, James Kirkpatrick reported from Hyderabad that Tipu had written to the Nizam begging forgiveness if he had infringed any treaty and asking for an alliance, claiming that the English ‘intended extirpating all Mussulmans and establishing hat-wearers in their place’.32 Two days later, on 10 January, despatches from Pune reached Wellesley announcing the intelligence that a delegation of Tipu’s ambassadors had also presented themselves at the Maratha court, seeking military assistance.33
Wellesley’s spies reported that Tipu Sultan had even written to Ahmad Shah Durrani’s grandson, Zaman Shah, the ruler of Afghanistan. ‘It ought to be the duty of faithful chiefs to extirpate the infidels by uniting together,’ wrote Tipu, before proposing that, ‘after deposing the pathetic King [Shah Alam,] who has reduced the faith to such a state of feebleness’, they should divide India between them.34 But it was all too late.
The Anarchy Page 43