The Madras infantry sepoys in the centre and the Highlanders on the right wing of Wellesley’s front line were targeted with particular violence, as the Maratha gunners tried to blow away the core of Wellesley’s formation with large canisters of anti-personnel chain and grapeshot, fired at short range and at close quarters: whirring through the air with a terrifying screeching noise, ‘it knocked down men, horses and bullocks, every shot’.113
Nevertheless, Wellesley’s infantry continued to advance at a steady pace, through the smoke. They fired a single volley, then charged the Maratha guns with bayonets, killing the gunners as they stood at the gun muzzles ‘and none quitted their posts until the bayonets were at their breasts … nothing could surpass the skill or bravery displayed by their golumdauze [gunners]’.114
A final surprise awaited the British as they marched forward to drive Scindia’s men from their fallback position. Once the British infantry lines had safely passed by, many of the Maratha ‘dead’ around the cannons ‘suddenly arose, seized the cannon which had been left behind by the army, and began to reopen a fierce fire upon the rear of our troops, who, inattentive to what they were doing, were eagerly bent upon the pursuit of the flying enemy before them’. The British lines were raked with yet more canister shot until the major general personally led a desperate cavalry charge ‘against the resuscitated foe’, during which he had his second horse shot beneath him.115
Two hours later, after a final stand in the village fort, Scindia’s Marathas were driven from the field and back over the Juah, leaving ninety-eight of their guns in British hands; but the casualties on both sides were appalling. The Marathas lost around 6,000 men. Wellesley lost fewer, but as the smoke cleared the major general found he had just left fully one-third of his army dead on the battlefield: 1,584 out of 4,500 of his troops were later burned or buried on the plains of Assaye.116 Indeed, so battered were his forces that Wellesley declared pursuit of Scindia and his fleeing men impossible, writing to his elder brother, ‘Scindia’s French[-trained] infantry were far better than Tipu’s, his artillery excellent, and his ordnance so good, and so well equipped, that it answers for our service. We never could use Tipu’s. Our loss is great, but the action, I believe, was the most severe that ever was fought in this country.’117 As one of Wellesley’s senior officers wrote to the major general soon afterwards: ‘I hope you will not have occasion to purchase any more victories at such a high price.’118
Because of Arthur Wellesley’s later celebrity after Waterloo, Assaye has long come to be regarded as the crucial victory of the Maratha War; but at the time, most eyes were actually on the north, where, long before Assaye, the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Lake, was already advancing rapidly on the Mughal capital, in what was seen at the time as the final chapter of the Company’s conquest of what had once been the Mughal Empire.
As Richard Wellesley wrote unequivocally to Lake: ‘The defeat of Perron is certainly the first object of the campaign.’ Lake, he stressed, must understand the crucial ‘importance of securing the person and nominal authority of the Mogul against the designs of France, and the increase in reputation to the British name which would result from offering an honourable asylum to the person and family of that injured and unfortunate monarch’.119
Lord Lake, who liked to claim descent from the Arthurian hero Lancelot of the Lake, was not a man who admired diplomacy or who liked being told what to do: ‘Damn your writing,’ he is alleged to have cried at an army book-keeper. ‘Mind your fighting!’ The phrase became his maxim. Although sixty years old, and a veteran of the Seven Years War and, more recently, the American War of Independence, where he fought against Washington at Yorktown, he was still famous for his boyish charm and immense energy, often rising at 2 a.m. to be ready to lead the march, blue eyes flashing.120
Determined to take the offensive, Lake left Kanpur on 7 August, a day after he heard about the declaration of war, even though it was in the middle of the monsoon and the roads were awash with mud. He headed due west towards Perron’s fortress at Aligarh. Intent on fighting a fast-moving campaign, Lake brought with him a small but highly trained Grand Army of 10,000 men, including a cavalry division armed with his light galloper guns; but he deliberately brought little heavy artillery and no siege equipment.
His intention to lead a small and mobile force was, however, somewhat challenged by Indian reality. By the early nineteenth century, East India Company armies had accumulated a huge establishment of attendants and assistants and support staff. In the end, the total body heading west amounted to more than 100,000 people, including mahouts and coolies, grass-cutters and horse-keepers, tent lascars and bullock-men, Banjarrah grain-collectors and money-changers, ‘female quacks, jugglers, groups of dancing girls, and votaries of pleasure’. These numbers did not, of course, include the thousands of elephants, camels, horses, poultry and flocks of goats and sheep which followed close on their heels: ‘The march of our army had the appearance of a moving town or citadel,’ remembered Major Thorn, ‘in the form of an oblong square, whose sides were defended by ramparts of glittering swords and bayonets.’121
After three weeks of difficult marching through heavy rain, wading through mud and badly flooded roads with carefully sealed ammunition boxes carried aloft on men’s heads, on 29 August Lake’s army crossed into Maratha territory and advanced swiftly on the mighty polygonal fortress of Aligarh, with its massive French-designed walls, reinforced corner towers and deep moat.
Aligarh was regarded as one of the strongest and best-provisioned forts in Hindustan; a siege could have taken months. Throughout the march, however, Lake had been in negotiations with General Perron over what he would charge to deliver the fortress into the hands of the British.122 Through intermediaries, the two commanders had eventually come to an understanding, and when Lake’s army advanced on his headquarters, Perron obediently withdrew, along with his bodyguard, after only the briefest of skirmishes with Lake and a few salvoes from his galloper guns.
Perron told his men he was off to gather reinforcements from Agra and Delhi, and to his deputy, Colonel Pedron, ‘a stout, elderly man with a green jacket with gold lace and epaulettes’, he sent a remarkably disingenuous letter: ‘Remember you are a Frenchman,’ he wrote, ‘and let no action of yours tarnish the character of your nation. I hope in a few days to send back the English general as fast, or faster, than he came. Make yourself perfectly easy on the subject. Either the Emperor’s army or General Lake shall find a grave before Allyghur. Do your duty, and defend the fort while one stone remains upon another. Once more remember your nation. The eyes of millions are fixed upon you!’123
These brave words were belied by the last conversation he had before fleeing up the Delhi road. One of his junior cavalry officers, of mixed Scottish and Rajput blood, attempted to ride with him, but was waved away, ‘Ah, no, no! It is all over!’ Perron shouted over his shoulder, ‘in confusion and without his hat’, at the young James Skinner. ‘These fellows [the cavalry] have behaved ill: do not ruin yourself, go over to the British; it is all up with us!’124
Distrusted by the French, all the Anglo-Indians among the Maratha forces, including Skinner himself, crossed the battle lines at this point: ‘We went to General Lake and were kindly received,’ wrote Skinner later.125 Pedron and many of Perron’s French mercenary colleagues were equally happy to surrender if they were assured of a safe passage home with their lifetimes’ savings intact. But Lake had not reckoned with the honour of Scindia’s Rajput and Maratha officers, who stoutly refused all inducements to drop their weapons and quickly withdrew behind the walls to begin their defence. There they deposed and imprisoned Pedron, elected a Maratha commander of their own, and prepared to fight to the death.
For three days Lake continued to negotiate, making the men a variety of extravagant promises, but the defenders remained firm. ‘I tried every method to prevail upon these people to give up the fort,’ wrote Lake, ‘and offered a very large sum of money, but they were determined to ho
ld out, which they did most obstinately, and, I may say, most gallantly.’126
Lake was daunted by the challenge now lying in front of him: ‘The strength of the place cannot be described,’ he wrote to Wellesley. ‘A Seventy-Four [gun ship] might sail in the ditch.’127 But ever the hyperactive sexagenarian, Lake was temperamentally incapable of conducting a patient siege, and anyway had left his siege equipment in Kanpur. So, on 4 September he opted for the only alternative: a frontal assault on the main gate of a fortress long considered impregnable. An Irish deserter from Scindia’s garrison, Lieutenant Lucan, offered to lead the storming party, under the supervision of Lake’s deputy, Colonel Monson.
Two hours before dawn, the storming party set off and shortly after that had their first stroke of luck. Had the Marathas withdrawn behind the moat and destroyed the bridge, there was very little Lake could have done. But the defenders had stationed a piquet of fifty men with a 6-pounder gun behind a breastwork in front of the fort, leaving the bridge undamaged and the wicket gate open. Lucan and his storming party edged up in the dark and found the men smoking at their post. ‘They ran at them like lions,’ wrote Skinner, and slit the throats of as many as stood their ground. The rest ‘ran away to the wicket, and got in. The assaulting party attempted to get in along with them, but were shut out.’
Instead, however, of retreating, these brave fellows stood upon the goonjus [bridge] under one of the heaviest fires of musketry and great guns I have seen … [attempting to scale the walls.] Only at sunrise did they fall back about one hundred yards … and in going back they carried with them the [abandoned] Maratha gun.128
They fired the gun twice, then a third time, but failed to blow open the heavily reinforced gate. While waiting for a new and larger cannon to be hauled up, the attackers continued their attempts to mount the walls with scaling ladders. As before, they were driven down by the Marathas on the battlements, who had long pikes waiting for them. A heavy 12-pounder cannon was finally wheeled forward to the gate, but just before it could be fired its weight broke through a mine gallery that the defenders had skilfully tunnelled under the area in front of the wicket gate, leaving the gun half in, half out of the tunnel beneath.
As Monson and Lucan tried to lever the cannon out, the attackers were raked with musketry from above and exposed to the fire from two heavy mortars filled with grape that the defenders had prepared and positioned for just this moment. To add to the chaos, the defenders then began to climb down the scaling ladders that the British troops had left propped against the walls. One of them wounded Monson in the thigh with a thrust of his pike; four of his officers were also killed.129 ‘This misfortune detained us considerably, and at this time it was that we lost so many of our officers and men. Never did I witness such a scene. The sortie became a perfect slaughter house, and it was with the greatest difficulty that we dragged the gun over our killed and wounded.’130
In the Company camp, Lake was on the verge of blowing the bugle to call off the attack. But at the last minute the cannon was righted, pressed against the wood of the gate and fired. It was a muzzle-blast containing no shot, but the pressure from the powder charge at close quarters finally buckled one of the great doors open.131 ‘I was close to Lord Lake,’ wrote Skinner, ‘and saw and heard everything that passed.’
The God of Heaven certainly looked down upon those noble fellows … for they blew open half the gate, and giving three shouts, they rushed in. The Rajputs stood their ground, like brave soldiers, and from the first to the second gate the fight was desperately maintained on both sides, and the carnage was very great … Then spurring his horse [Lake] galloped to the gate. When he saw his heroes lying thick there, tears came to his eyes. ‘It is the fate of good soldiers!’ he said; and turning round, he galloped back to the camp, and gave up the fort to plunder.132
In the hours that followed, the garrison of 2,000 was massacred. No quarter was asked for and none was given. ‘Many of the enemy were killed in attempting to escape by swimming the ditch after we got in, and I remarked an artilleryman to snap his piece at a man who at the same instance dived to save himself,’ wrote John Pester, Lake’s quartermaster. ‘The soldier coolly waited his coming up and shot him through the head.’
As the heat of the business was over, I remonstrated with him on putting them to death at that time, but the man declared he had lost some of his oldest comrades that morning, and that he wished to be revenged, reminding me also that we had received orders to spare none … Guards were disposed over the different magazines, and at each gate as soon as we had possession, and the enemy were all disposed of; scarcely a man of them escaped for those who swam the ditch were cut up by the troopers on the plain, and all we found in the place were bayonetted.133
At midnight on the night of 1 September, the Qu’tb Minar, built in the twelfth century as a symbol of the establishment of Islamic rule in India, was hit by a massive earthquake and its top storey collapsed to the ground: ‘In Delhi and all around many buildings were toppled from their foundations,’ wrote Shah Alam’s biographer, Munna Lal. ‘In several places the earth cracked wide open. Had it lasted a moment longer, it would have ushered in the Day of Resurrection. The wise interpreted it as a bad omen, signifying that disasters would appear in these times.’134
Shah Alam, always sensitive to omens and premonitions, was alarmed. He was, after all, in a difficult position. For much of his adult life he had had no option but to choose between the protection of the Marathas and that of the Company. Both had used him for their own ends, and both had, at crucial junctures in his life, let him badly down. But when the news arrived that Perron had finally surrendered himself to Lord Lake, and been given safe passage to Calcutta with his family, his diamonds and his fortune, the Emperor took the view that the Company was now clearly in the ascendant, and it was time to reopen negotiations.
Shah Alam calculated that his best chance lay in covertly reaching out to Wellesley, while appearing to obey his French and Maratha masters who still garrisoned his fort and staffed his bodyguard. Thus, while putting his seal to proclamations that he would fight against the Company which had ‘seized of the whole country and laid aside allegiance to the throne’, he authorised Sayyid Reza Khan to enter into renewed correspondence with Lake, explaining that ‘the public letter which the Emperor has written and the announcement of his taking to the field are not voluntary acts but arise from compulsion and are directly contrary to his own wishes … He says, “I shall resist it to the utmost, but as I am in their power, I am helpless.”’135
Shah Alam nevertheless could not forget the way that Hastings had unilaterally cut the promised payment of the Diwani revenue from Bengal due to him under the terms of the Treaty of Allahabad, and he asked for written assurances that his allowances would be properly paid before he committed to throwing his lot in with the Company: ‘Conceiving therefore that when the English gain possession of the Country they may prove forgetful of me, it becomes necessary for the General [Lake] to settle this point with the Governor General, that hereafter there be no want of obedience or cause of dissatisfaction to me.’136 At the same time the Emperor firmly refused to allow Scindia’s men to take his heir apparent, Akbar Shah, with them into battle.
Since Perron’s defection, military authority in the Red Fort had devolved to Lieutenant Colonel Louis Bourquien, who had once earned his living by making both fireworks and tartlets in Calcutta, ‘his craft in culinary matters being superior to his skill in military ones’.137 But wherever his true talents lay, Scindia’s troops remained loyal to him, and were determined to revenge the massacre of their brothers-in-arms in Aligarh.
When news came that Lake was advancing rapidly up from Aligarh and had decided to skirt Agra with a view to capturing Delhi and ‘liberating’ the Emperor as soon as possible, Bourquien ferried his army of 19,000 troops across the Yamuna from the ghats under the Red Fort over to Shahdara. The area was flat and, in places, marshy, but he found a low hill commanding the approach to the c
ity and prepared an ambush near the Hindan River, at a point where two swampy lakes flanked the road. This meant that any force coming towards the city from Aligarh would have to funnel themselves into a narrow causeway between the bogs. He then hid his one hundred heavy guns in a semicircle behind tall fans of elephant grass at the base of the hill and waited for Lake to approach.
On the afternoon of 10 September, Lake had camped his men to the north of Akbar’s Tomb at Sikandra. Towards evening his spies brought news that Scindia’s army had crossed the Yamuna and were preparing to block his crossing; but they brought little specific information about the whereabouts of the army. Word quickly circulated that the final battle for the control of Mughal Delhi would be fought the following day: ‘We drank an extra bottle of claret upon this intelligence,’ wrote Quartermaster Pester, ‘and without much reflection on the fate of a battle enjoyed ourselves until after nine.’138
Lake woke his troops at 2 a.m., as was his habit, and the final march towards the Mughal capital began an hour later, at 3 a.m. At 10 a.m., after marching eighteen miles, with the sun beginning to beat down on the column, Lake ordered a halt for breakfast beside a marshy lake on the banks of the Hindan. Tents were erected, boots were removed, fires lit and the sepoys began to cook their parathas. The general sent a dram around his officers.
Quite suddenly there was a series of bright flashes and the thunder crash of heavy artillery, ‘shattering not only the tranquillity of the day but the eardrums of men closest to the guns … The accompanying pressure wave generated by the explosive muzzle-blasts, which flattened the obstructing grass, was immediately followed by other, unnatural and far more eerie auditory sensations that played upon deafened ears. Grape shot tore and chain shot scythed through the grass with a shearing sound which was followed by a metallic clatter or muffled thuds depending on whether the projectiles struck equipment or the flesh of men and horses.’139
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