Egerton’s force made slow progress uphill. On 30 December it finally reached the top of the ghats, having marched only one mile a day, with 19,000 bullocks pulling the guns and supplies up the steep switchbacks. They then spent a further eleven days trying to reach Karle, site of some celebrated Buddhist cave monasteries, a distance of only eight miles. By this time they had almost run out of supplies, as well as giving the Marathas ample time to prepare their defences. On arrival at Karle, Egerton was horrified to find a vast force of 50,000 Marathas drawn up to oppose them under the young Maratha leader Mahadji Scindia.*
Carnac was the first to realise the hopelessness of their position and wrote back to Bombay in despair that ‘Colonel Egerton’s military ideas seem to be wholly derived from the mode of practice he has seen observed during the short time he was in Germany, and he proceeds with the same precaution as if he had an European Enemy to deal with, whereas the only method of ensuring success in this country is to advance and be forward.’
If we continue as we have hitherto done, moving on slowly from post to post, it is hard to say when the campaign may be at an end, for advantage will be all on their side, the ground being throughout broken into gullies and covered with bushes and underwood where they find many lurking places … The Marathas hover about us and from the hours of 11 to three in the afternoon, playing their Artillery and Rockets upon us … I do not think Colonel Egerton can hold out much longer.100
By 9 January 1779, Company forces had advanced as far as Talegaon, only eighteen miles from Pune. They arrived to find the place had been ransacked and stripped of all supplies. At dawn the following morning, they realised they were now surrounded and that their supply route had been cut off. Maratha cavalry picked off stragglers, rustled Company bullocks and deterred banjara (itinerant trader) bands from risking their herds by attempting to supply the Company force.101 To compound the mess, Egerton was now seriously ill. Raghunath Rao begged them to continue their march, and said that if they only made it to the outskirts of Pune a few miles further on, his supporters would rise up to assist them. But the Company commanders had lost their nerve. Two days later, having run out of supplies, they threw their heavy cannon into a temple tank, burned what remained of their stores and at midnight began a chaotic, starving retreat. The Marathas soon detected their movements, surrounded them and fell on the column at first light: 350 were dead before noon. Egerton had no option but to surrender, and six days later signed the humiliating Treaty of Wadgaon. With this he handed over Raghunath Rao and several senior Company hostages and agreed to give up a swathe of Company territory to the Marathas.102
The reputation of the Company’s army would never be the same again. But as well as exposing the limits of the Company’s military power, the failed Pune expedition also revealed the degree to which the Company now had ambitions to reshape and interfere in the politics of the entire South Asian region. For the brilliant Maratha Prime Minister Nana Phadnavis, ‘the Maratha Machiavelli’, this was the moment that he realised the urgent need for the various Indian powers, whatever their differences, to pull together and form an alliance against the alien intruders, and to attack them with a united front while their leadership was still weak and divided.103
On 7 February 1780, a year after the Treaty of Wadgaon, Nana Phadnavis picked up his pen and wrote a letter to his old enemy Haidar Ali, offering to bury the hatchet if the Mysore Sultan would join forces and together make war on the Company: ‘The British,’ he wrote, ‘have grown intolerably belligerent. During these five years, their blind aggression has led them to violate solemn treaties.’
They first make sweet promises in such an alluring tone, that one is led to believe that the only real faith and honesty in this world are to be found only among them. But it does not take long for one to be undeceived. One quickly realises their evil genius.
They win over any disconnected member of the State and through him work its ruin. Divide and grab is their main principle. They are so blinded by selfish interest that they never observe written agreements. God alone can fathom their base intrigues. They are bent on subjugating the states of Pune, Nagpur, Mysore and Hyderabad one by one, by enlisting the sympathy of one to put down the others. They know best how to destroy Indian cohesion. They are adept at the art of creating insidious differences and destroying the harmony of any State.104
Haidar and Tipu responded positively, noting that ‘the supremacy of the English was a source of evil to all God’s creatures’.105 Within a month, the Nizam of Hyderabad had joined the other two powers. By the coming of the summer heats in May, concrete plans were being formed for a Triple Alliance to oversee ‘the expulsion of the English nation from India’. A month later, in June, news reached Madras that Haidar Ali had received a large shipment of arms and military stores from France. Other reports from Vellore brought the news that Haidar Ali was assembling a vast army in the plains around Bangalore.
Finally, on 17 July, Haidar Ali marched once again down into the plains of the Carnatic. This time he had twice the army he had gathered for his last invasion, thirteen years earlier: not much short of 100,000 men, including 60,000 cavalry, 35,000 European-style infantry and 100 guns. To his surprise, he found that yet again the Company had made no preparations for defence: what Company forces there were in the Carnatic lay scattered and dispersed in small groups around the country, and no preparations had been taken even to collect bullocks for transport or to gather supplies of food. Moreover, while on paper there were meant to be 30,000 Company men under arms guarding the Madras Presidency, it was quickly calculated that fewer than 8,000 could actually be gathered together in a month. The speed of Haidar’s movement reduced the numbers still further: many sepoys had families living in Arcot. When it fell to Haidar’s forces large numbers of sepoys deserted their regiments to attempt to protect their wives and children. Company efforts to organise defences in the Carnatic were completely ineffective. Garrisons willingly surrendered to Haidar’s forces or opened their gates in exchange for bribes.106
A ship was immediately sent to Calcutta to request military assistance from Bengal, but the situation there was even more confused than that in Madras. For at the same time as Tipu was returning once more to loot the rich villas of St Thomas Mount and San Thome, and while Haidar was harrying the land around Madras, Vellore and Arcot, setting villages on fire and destroying what remained of the Company’s food supplies, the feud between Hastings and Francis which had paralysed the Company’s administration for six years was reaching its final embittered climax.
On 14 August, Hastings wrote a public minute in which he denounced Francis as a liar and braggard: ‘I do not trust to his promise of candour,’ he wrote, ‘convinced that he is incapable of it, and that his sole purpose and wish is to embarrass and defeat every measure which I may undertake.’
Such has been the tendency and such the manifest spirit of all his actions from the beginning … I judge of his public conduct by my experience of his private, which I have found to be void of truth and honour. This is a severe charge, but temperately and deliberately made from the firm persuasion that I owe this justice to the public and to myself as the only redress to both, of artifices of which I have been a victim, and which threaten to involve their interests with disgrace and ruin. The only redress for a fraud for which the law had made no provisions is the exposure of it.107
The following day, on 15 August 1780, Philip Francis challenged Warren Hastings to a duel.
The two duellists, accompanied by their seconds, met at 5.30 on the morning of 17 August at a clump of trees on the western edge of Belvedere, a former summer house of Mir Jafar, which had since been bought by Warren Hastings.*
Hastings had hardly slept. He spent much of the night composing a farewell letter to his beloved wife Marian, to be delivered in the event of his death. It began: ‘My heart bleeds to think what your sufferings and feelings must be, if ever this letter be delivered into your hands … I shall leave nothing which I regret t
o lose but you. How much I have loved you, and how much, beyond all that life can yield, I still love you, He only knows. Do not, my Marian, forget me. Adieu, most beloved of women. My last thoughts will be employed on you. Remember and love me. Once more farewell.’108 Hastings then slept fitfully on a couch until 4 a.m. when his second, Colonel Thomas Deane Pearse, came to collect him in his carriage.
‘We arrived at Belvedere exactly at the time proposed, at 5.30,’ wrote Hastings afterwards, ‘and found Mr F[rancis] and Col Watson walking in the road. Some time was consumed looking for a private place. Our seconds proposed we should stand at a measured distance which both (taking a recent example in England) fixed at 14 paces, and Col Watson paced and marked 7. I stood to the southwards. There was, as I recollect, no wind. Our seconds (Col Watson I think) proposed that no advantage should be taken, but each choose his own time to fire.’
It was at this point that it became clear, as Pearse noted, ‘that both gentlemen were unacquainted with the modes usually observed on these occasions’; indeed, neither of the two most powerful British intellectuals in Bengal seemed entirely clear how to operate their pistols. Francis said he had never fired one in his life, and Hastings said he could only remember doing so once. So both had to have their weapons loaded for them by their seconds who, being military men, knew how to operate firearms.
Hastings, ever the gentleman, decided to let Francis fire first. Francis took aim and squeezed the trigger. The hammer snapped, but the pistol misfired. Again, Francis’s second had to intervene, putting fresh priming in the pistol and chapping the flints. ‘We returned to our stations,’ wrote Hastings. ‘I still proposed to receive the first fire, but Mr F twice aimed, and twice withdrew his pistol.’ Finally, Francis again ‘drew his trigger,’ wrote Pearse, ‘but his powder being damp, the pistol again did not fire. Mr Hastings came down from his present, to give Mr Francis time to rectify his priming, and this was done out of a cartridge with which I supplied him finding they had no spare powder. Again the gentlemen took their stands and both presented together.’109
‘I now judged that I might seriously take my aim at him,’ wrote Hastings. ‘I did so and when I thought I had fixed the true direction, I fired.’
His pistol went off at the same time, and so near the same instant that I am not certain which was first, but believe mine was, and that his followed in the instant. He staggered immediately, his face expressed a sensation of being struck, and his limbs shortly but gradually went under him, and he fell saying, but not loudly, ‘I am dead.’
I ran to him, shocked at the information, and I can safely say without any immediate sensation of joy for my own success. The Seconds also ran to his assistance. I saw his coat pierced on the right side, and feared the ball had passed through him; but he sat up without much difficulty several times and once attempted with our help to stand, but his limbs failed him, and he sank to the ground.
Col. W[atson] then proposed that as we had met from a point of honour and not for personal rancour, we should join hands, or that Mr F should give me his. We did so; Mr F cheerfully, and I expressed my regret at the condition to which I saw him reduced. He found most ease lying on his back. A cot was brought from Major Tolley’s, he having no palikeen, and he was conveyed upon it to Belvedere, where he remains. Col P[earse] and I returned to our house in town. We went to seek Dr Campbell and I desired Dr Francis [Hastings’ personal physician] to follow. Both immediately went. They found the wound not dangerous, having entered the side before the seam of the waistcoat a little below the shoulder, and passing through both muscles and within the skin which covers the backbone, was lodged within visible distance of the skin in the opposite side.
As soon as I returned home I sent Mr Markham to Sir E [Elijah Impey, the Chief Justice] to inform him of what had passed, and that I should wait the event, which if fatal I should instantly surrender myself to him, that the law might take its course against me.110
But there was no need for Hastings to be arrested. The doctor later reported that Hastings’ musket ball ‘pierced the right side of Mr Francis, but was prevented by a rib, which turned the ball, from entering the thorax. It went obliquely upwards, passed the backbone without injuring it, and was extracted about an inch to the left side of it. The wound is of no consequence and he is in no danger.’111
Ten days later, on 25 August 1780, the Company’s largest concentration of troops in southern India finally marched out of Madras and headed south along the coast road towards Kanchipuram to confront Haidar. At their head was Sir Hector Munro, the Highland general who fifteen years earlier had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat when he broke Shuja ud-Daula’s lines at Buxar. This time, however, he had only managed to muster 5,000 sepoys – they were unpaid and semi-mutinous – and they were facing a force 100,000 strong.
Twenty-five miles to the north, another Scot, Colonel William Baillie, had just received instructions to rendezvous with Munro at Kanchipuram with a second force of 2,800, most of whom were local sepoys, accompanied by a few hundred newly arrived Highlanders. If these two small armies were able to join up, they would only be outnumbered ten to one, and might have some chance of taking on the Mysore troops; but divided as they were, neither force stood much chance of success against so well trained and disciplined a force as Haidar had assembled, an army that, according to Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘covered the plains like waves of an angry sea, and with a trail of artillery that had no end’.112 Munro should have waited for Baillie to join him, but, as impatient as ever, and hearing that there were ample provisions and a full magazine in Kanchipuram, which Haidar might otherwise have seized for himself, Munro headed off with his small force, when a single day’s delay would have allowed the two armies to unite.
On the evening of 25 August, Baillie camped on the banks of the small river Kortalaiyar, north-west of Madras. That evening, the monsoon broke and it rained heavily and without a break for twelve hours. By first light, the Kortalaiyar had become a raging torrent, impossible to ford. It was eleven days before Baillie was able to move his troops across it, and, by the time he did so, Tipu had managed to interpose 11,000 of his best cavalry between Baillie and Munro.113 He could now pick off Baillie’s vulnerable column at his leisure.
The first engagement took place on 6 September, when a long-range artillery duel took place between the two armies. Baillie’s small force ‘wandering about in thick, drizzling rain, knee-deep in rice fields’ was much more exposed and suffered heavy casualties, but neither army committed to close combat, and both called for reinforcements.114 Haidar sent a large force to his son, but Munro refused to move from the principal temple at Kanchipuram, which he had now fortified sufficiently to resist a siege.
His one concession was to send a column of a thousand sepoys, along with nine camels carrying ammunition, to join Baillie’s column and lead it back to the temple. The relief column moved swiftly at night, threw off the pursuing Mysore cavalry in the darkness and, making a wide detour to avoid running into Tipu’s main army, managed successfully to make a junction with Baillie, bringing the number of his troops up to 3,800 and ten field pieces. The officer in charge of the relief column begged Baillie to move immediately, and to use the cover of darkness to rejoin Munro’s force in the shelter of the Kanchipuram temple, now only nine miles away. But Baillie ignored the advice and did not move off until first light. It proved a fatal hesitation.
Baillie struck camp at dawn, and half an hour later, at around 5.30 a.m., while marching over an ascent that led down towards a river in the plain below, he found his way blocked by a small fortified village named Pollilur. It was full of Tipu’s troops and artillery, with more artillery dug in to their left. Both had been waiting in ambush for several hours since being informed of Baillie’s timing and exact route by Tipu’s spies the night before. Both now began a fierce artillery barrage onto Baillie’s exposed column. Baillie’s troops were strung out along an avenue, raised up and exposed upon an embankment, with muddy paddy fields on b
oth sides and a river at some distance to their right. Unable to advance, and with no real option of retreat, Baillie ordered his troops to form a hollow square, ‘huddled one on the top of the other, three corps deep’, with their baggage and ammunition in the middle. Within half an hour, Tipu’s troops had fanned out from their entrenchments to block all the different paths to Kanchipuram.
The cannonade continued with growing intensity, with the front ranks of Baillie’s square taking fire from around thirty of Tipu’s guns. Baillie was among those wounded, hit in the leg by a cannon ball; but he continued to give orders from a palanquin. There was then a lull of half an hour, when all shooting stopped and an eerie silence fell.
Thirty minutes later, troops in the front ranks reported hearing the distant sound of beating kettledrums and blaring nageshwaram (long Tamil oboes). As the Company troops watched, a great cloud of dust rose up in the distance. This soon resolved into several long lines of scarlet columns advancing steadily towards them. The Scots assumed it was Munro coming to save them and gave out a loud cheer. It was only when the columns grew closer that they realised it was actually Haidar’s main army – some 25,000 cavalry accompanied by thirty battalions of sepoys – closing in to seal their fate. ‘We were quickly surrounded by Haidar’s horse,’ wrote one Highland officer. ‘They were followed by his guns which joined a kind of semicircle round us, the number of about 50 at least, which opened upon us by degree.’115
The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire Page 32