The subtle difference in tone was not lost on the Emperor.
Two Company armies, one in the north, the other in the south, were now actively preparing for the coming conflict. In the north, Lake was drilling his men at his forward post, ‘the vast ruins of the ancient city of Kannauj’. This lay close to the Company’s western border with the Marathas, ‘amidst lofty grass, covering the remains of splendid edifices and the tombs of princes, concealing a variety of game, such as wolves, jackals and tigers’.87
At the age of only seventeen, Lake had served close to Frederick the Great, and from him had learned the effectiveness of fast, light, horse-drawn artillery, or, as he called them, ‘galloper guns’. Now he brought this military novelty to India: ‘Two of these guns, six-pounders, were attached to each regiment of horse,’ wrote Major William Thorn, ‘and nothing could exceed the speed and exactness of the manoeuvres made with them at full speed by this large body of cavalry, whose combined movements were conducted with the most perfect order’, something which would soon provoke ‘terror among the Maratha horse’.88 Lake worked his troops hard, but also charmed his army with his lavish evening hospitality. Once war broke out, he would soon need all these reserves of trust and popularity to persuade his troops to face down the magnificent Maratha artillery.
In the south, Lord Wellesley’s younger brother, the newly promoted Major General Arthur Wellesley, was also deep in preparations for the forthcoming war: busy gathering in troops, rice and other provisions at Tipu’s old capital of Srirangapatnam. Here he had earlier absorbed some of Tipu’s troops, artillery and, most important of all, his vast transport machine – 32,000 bullocks and 250,000 strong white Mysore cattle – into his army.89 Like Lake, he put his men through a rigorous training programme, practising crossing fast-flowing rivers with coracles, while in the hills round about he ‘manoeuvred his future army, and taught us that uniformity of movement, which afterwards would enable him to conquer foes twenty times as numerous’.90
In early March 1803 Arthur Wellesley set off to march Peshwa Baji Rao II back into Pune and return him to his throne, now under British protection and the Wellesleys’ own firm control. This he achieved in early April, without firing a shot, as Holkar cautiously withdrew his army north-east, across the Deccan to Aurangabad. Baji Rao resumed his palace life, now less as a Maratha leader than a British puppet, but apparently ‘happy with his routine of baths and prayers, eating, drinking and making merry, having no bother of any outside concern … Sumptuous dinners with profuse decorations for plates are arranged daily. Hot discussion takes place on the selection of dishes …’91
The ease with which Arthur Wellesley achieved this success later led him to underestimate the bravery and skill of the Marathas, laughing at the former Resident, Lieutenant Colonel John Ulrich Collins, who warned him that ‘their infantry and guns will astonish you’. This was a serious mistake; it would not be long before the Maratha armies proved themselves by far the most formidable enemy ever tackled by the Company. One of the major general’s officers, who later remembered Collins’ warning, wrote in his memoirs how ‘riding home afterwards we amused ourselves, the General among the rest, in cutting jokes at the expense of “little King Collins.” We little thought how true his words would soon prove.’92
While his generals were busy with drilling and training their troops, the Governor General himself was in Calcutta, engaged in finalising the financial and diplomatic support for his forthcoming war.
The Company’s army had expanded very quickly under Wellesley’s rule and within a few years its muster roll had gone up by nearly half from 115,000 to 155,000 men; in the next decade its numbers would rise again to 195,000, making it one of the largest standing European-style armies in the world, and around twice the size of the British army. It had also belatedly recruited an impressive new cavalry arm, mounted on strong European and South African horses. Their job it was to protect the slow-moving and cumbersome infantry and artillery columns from flanking attacks by irregular Indian light horse, as had happened with fatal consequences at Talegaon and Pollilur. This was a form of warfare in which the Marathas were especially skilled.93
Unlike the perennially cash-strapped Warren Hastings, Wellesley had no problem paying for this vastly increased military establishment. After the rural upheavals of Cornwallis’s land reforms had settled down, the Company in Bengal found it had a considerable annual revenue surplus of Rs25 million. In contrast, Scindia was able to realise only Rs1.2 millionf from his poorly irrigated home base in Malwa. This dependable surplus in turn allowed the Company easy access to credit from the Bengal money market, so much so that under Wellesley, between 1798 and 1806, the Company’s debt in India more than tripled.
The Company was also able efficiently to redistribute these financial resources around India. The bankers of Benares and the west coast house of Gopaldas-Manohardas, both of whom were given the protection of the Company’s army, now began to send representatives to travel with it, supplying cash as required both to the troops themselves and their army paymasters. Indeed, bankers from across India began to compete among themselves to supply the Company army with finance. Two Benares banking houses, Mannu Lal and Beniparshad, went as far as asking for assurances that the Company ‘would honour them with a preference on being permitted to furnish supplies of cash that may be required for the use of the army’.94
Ultimately the East India Company succeeded in war precisely because it had found a way to provide a secure financial base for its powerful mercenary army, and always found it easier than any of its rivals to persuade Indian seths, sahukaras and shroffs quickly to realise the cash needed to pay the army’s salaries and feed its hungry troops. In contrast, as the young Arthur Wellesley noted, ‘there is not a Maratha in the whole country, from the Peshwa down to lowest horseman, who has a shilling’. This was hardly surprising as, by 1801, Arthur had noted that after the devastations of the Maratha civil war, there was ‘not a tree or an ear of corn standing for 150 miles around Pune’.95
Things were just as bad at the Mughal court where a Maratha envoy reported that ‘money is nowhere to be seen’.96 As a result Scindia and Holkar, both enormously in arrears to their troops and with their sahukaras often refusing further loans, found themselves in the same position as an earlier Maratha Peshwa who described himself as having ‘fallen into that hell of being beset by creditors … I am falling at their feet till I have rubbed the skin from my forehead.’97
But Richard Wellesley was far too cunning and ruthless an adversary to rely merely on brute military force or indeed the power of the Company’s money alone. His greatest pleasure always lay in moving his pieces on the chessboard in such a way as to frustrate or hopelessly entrap his enemies.
Messages were sent out to seduce, corrupt and buy the frequently unpaid mercenaries in Maratha service; the Commander-in-Chief of Scindia’s northern forces, General Pierre Perron, who had already invested his life savings of £280,000g in Company stock, was one of the first to show an interest in coming to a mutually beneficial financial arrangement.98 Lake was given authority ‘to conclude any arrangement with M. Perron for the security of his personal interests and property accompanied by any reasonable renumeration which shall induce him to deliver up the whole of his military resources and power into your hands’.99
The gnarled old warrior ascetic Anupgiri Gossain, now known as Himmat Bahadur, was also persuaded to come to terms with his former adversaries and ally his Bundelkhand-based Naga warriors with the Company. This happened despite warnings from one of Wellesley’s intelligence men that ‘Himmat Bahadur is not to be trusted … A native speaking of him said he was like a man who in crossing a river kept a foot in two boats, ready to abandon the one that was sinking.’100
Wellesley also worked hard to keep the warring Maratha armies from patching up their differences. In particular, adopting the old Roman maxim divide et impera, divide and rule, Wellesley did all he could to keep Scindia and Holkar from reconcili
ng. In this he was especially successful.
By the end of June 1803, Holkar had gathered his entire army near Aurangabad but still equivocated about joining the coalition with his brother’s murderers to fight the Company. Here Wellesley’s masterstroke was to send Holkar a captured letter from Scindia in which the latter plotted with Peshwa Baji Rao to overthrow Holkar after the war was over: ‘Let us make a show of satisfying his demands,’ wrote Daulat Rao. ‘After the war is over, we shall both wreak our full vengeance upon him.’101
After receiving this, Holkar, who had just made the first two days’ march towards Scindia, turned back, and firmly declined to join the coalition. Shortly afterwards, he recrossed the Narmada and set off back towards his central Indian base at Maheshwar.102 This allowed Wellesley first to pick off Scindia and his ally Raghuji Bhosle, Raja of Berar, and only later to move his forces against Holkar. This, perhaps more than any other factor, gave the Company its most overwhelming advantage against its still militarily powerful but politically fractured Maratha adversaries.
Behind all these manoeuvres, Wellesley was developing an aggressive new conception of British Empire in India, not as a corporate but as a state enterprise; and it was a vision that was markedly more nationalist and nakedly expansionist than anything his Company predecessors could have dreamed of. On 8 July Sir George Barlow first articulated it in an official memorandum: ‘It is absolutely necessary,’ he wrote, ‘that no Native State should be left to exist in India which is not upheld by the British power, or the political conduct of which is not under its absolute control.’103 It was from this idea of total British government control over the entire Indian peninsula that would grow the British Raj – and with it a future in which Mughal, Maratha and finally even the Company itself would all, in time, give way to the control of the British Crown.
As usual, Wellesley neglected to tell his nominal employers, the Company directors, what he was planning. Already there was growing nervousness in Leadenhall Street about Wellesley’s grandiose style of ruling. When the traveller Lord Valentia arrived in Calcutta he applauded Wellesley’s imperial style, writing that it was better that ‘India be ruled from a palace than a counting house’; but it was Wellesley’s increasingly wasteful and spendthrift use of Company funds that was steadily eroding his support among the directors, and provoking the first discussions about his eventual recall.104 Already the directors were sending shots across Wellesley’s bow, making it quite clear that ‘It by no means appears to us essential to the well-being of our Government in India that pomp, magnificence and ostentation of the Native Governments should be adopted by the former; the expense that such a system would naturally lead must prove highly injurious to our commercial interests.’105
In his usual spirit of dissimulation to his employers, well into 1803 Lord Wellesley was still promising the directors a ‘speedy and hasty conclusion of the late arrangements with His Highness the Peshwa, and of the amicable adjustment of the differences existing among the Maratha chieftains, through the mediation and influence of the British power’.106 Maybe that spring Wellesley really did still hope that Scindia could be intimidated into recognising the Treaty of Bassein, and, like the Nizam and the Peshwa Baji Rao before him, be bullied into accepting the protection of the Company. But as spring gave way to the summer of 1803, such dreams quickly faded, as the increasingly gloomy despatches from his envoy Colonel John Collins confirmed. In July, Wellesley sent Scindia an ultimatum to withdraw north of the Narmada or to face the consequences.
In the end, Daulat Rao Scindia did not back down; instead, like Tipu, he began making preparations for hostilities. On 1 August 1803, he gave Collins a formal declaration of war and dismissed him from his camp.
It took a week for express couriers to carry the news to Calcutta; but only a few hours for Lord Wellesley to give the order for his carefully laid war plans to be immediately put into action on no less than four fronts – with minor thrusts along the coasts of Orissa and Gujarat as well as the two main assaults which were designed to take control of the entire Deccan and all of Hindustan.107
To Scindia and Bhosle, the Governor General wrote a brief note: ‘While we have no desire to open war against you, you two chiefs have given a clear indication of your intention to attack us, since you have collected large forces on the Nizam’s frontiers and you have refused to move away from your positions. You have rejected the hand of friendship I have offered you, and I am now starting hostilities without further parleys. The responsibility is entirely yours.’108
Major General Arthur Wellesley heard the news of Scindia’s declaration of war on 4 August. On the 6th he broke camp and with 40,000 troops headed off north towards the mighty fortress of Ahmadnagar which he captured on the 11th after a brief bombardment and the payment of a large bribe to the French and Arab mercenaries holding the fort for Scindia. Inside was found large amounts of gunpowder, part of Scindia’s remaining treasure and ample food supplies. Arthur Wellesley garrisoned the fort as his base while he sent scouts out to search for the main Maratha army.
Scindia and Bhosle, meanwhile, had succeeded in bringing their forces together; they then marched their confederated army south to plunder the Nizam’s territories around Aurangabad and draw Wellesley out of the safety of his fortifications. In this they succeeded. Leaving a large garrison behind to guard Ahmadnagar, Wellesley moved eastwards to defend his allies’ territory and stop the Maratha advance. The two armies finally came within sight of one another in the dusty alluvial plain to the north of the Ajanta Pass, in the early morning of 23 September, after Wellesley’s troops had just marched eighteen miles through the night.
The major general had broken his force in two the day before to avoid the delay that would have taken place in sending his whole army through the narrow Ajanta defile; half he had sent off to the west under his deputy, Colonel Stevenson. He therefore had less than 5,000 men – half of them Madrasi sepoys, the other half kilted Highlanders – when he heard from his scouts that Scindia’s camp was only five miles away and that the Marathas were about to move off. His small army was exhausted from their night march. But, worried that his quarry might escape if he waited, Wellesley made an immediate decision to head straight into the attack, without giving his troops time to rest or waiting for the other half of his force.
Reaching the crest of a low hill, the major general saw the two Maratha armies spread out before him, next to the fortified village of Assaye. Their tents and qanats (tented enclosures) extended for as much as six miles along the banks of the shallow Khelna River to near where it reached a confluence with another smaller stream, the Juah. He calculated that there were around 10,000 infantry and around five times that number of irregular cavalry. They were clearly not expecting an attack and their artillery bullocks were out grazing along the riverbank.
Leaving his baggage and stores behind him under guard, Wellesley marched straight forward, as if to make an immediate frontal attack over the river. Then at the last moment he turned eastwards to cross the meandering Khelna at an unguarded ford whose position he had guessed at due to the proximity of two small villages just before it. His guess was a lucky one: the water was between knee and waist high, and Wellesley just managed to get all his troops across without them getting their powder wet. Even so, his artillery had trouble crossing, and several guns got stuck in the mud, leaving his infantry to form up and face the opening salvos of the Maratha bombardment without the protection of artillery cover.
Arthur Wellesley had hoped that the speed and surprise of his movement would leave the Marathas in disarray and allow him to attack their unguarded right flank; but to his surprise he found that Scindia’s troops had managed not only to get themselves into full battle formation but had also skilfully wheeled around to the left in order to face his new direction of attack, all the while maintaining perfect order. This was a difficult manoeuvre that he presumed they would be incapable of, but which they instantly effected with parade-ground precision.
/> This was only the first in a whole series of surprises in a battle that Arthur Wellesley would later remember as one of the hardest he had ever fought, and altogether tougher than his later confrontation with Napoleon at Waterloo. ‘Their infantry is the best I have ever seen in India, excepting our own,’ he wrote afterwards to his friend John Malcolm. ‘I assure you that their fire was so heavy that I doubted at one time if I should be able to induce our troops to advance. All agree that the battle was the fiercest that has ever been seen in India. Our troops behaved admirably; the sepoys astonished me.’109
A particular shock was Scindia’s heavy field guns which proved just as deadly as Collins had warned: ‘The fire of the enemy’s artillery became most dreadful,’ remembered Major John Blakiston. ‘In the space of less than a mile, 100 guns worked with skill and rapidity, vomited forth death into our feeble ranks. It cannot then be a matter of surprise if our sepoys should have taken advantage of any irregularities in the ground to shelter themselves from the deadly shower, or that even, in some few instances, not all the endeavours of the officers could persuade them to move forward.’110 Major Thorn concurred: ‘It was acknowledged by all the officers present, who had witnessed the power of the French artillery in the wars of Europe, that the enemy’s guns at the Battle of Assaye were equally well-served.’111
The major general himself had two horses shot under him and had several of his immediate staff killed around him by the clouds of grape the Maratha gunners sent in his direction. One large round shot just missed Wellesley as he was crossing the Khelna but decapitated his dragoon orderly as he paused midstream. The horrifying sight of the headless horseman features in many accounts of the battle, ‘the body being kept in its seat by the valise, holsters, and other appendages of a cavalry saddle, and it was some time before the terrified horse could rid himself of the ghastly burden’.112
The Anarchy Page 46