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Chapter 6 – The Second French War

In 1756, when a rupture with France over the North American colonies was imminent, George II, to save Hanover, made a treaty of affiance with Frederick of Prussia, against whom the Austrian empress, Maria Theresa, had prepared an overpowering hostile coalition. Fortunately for England, the French government, then under the sinister influence of Madame de Pompadour, was persuaded into a rash and unwise conjunction with the Austrians; so that during the war France had to meet the Prussian army on land and the English navy at sea, a very formidable amphibious combination. From the beginning of the year 1756 both the English and the French in India had been expecting war, and each side had been protesting against the other’s breaches of Godeheu’s treaty; so that when, toward the year’s end, news arrived of an open rupture in Europe, the effect was merely to substitute formal hostilities for the indirect skirmishings and threatening manoeuvres that the two Companies had been carrying on in the Karnatic. But as most of the English troops had been despatched with Clive to Bengal, and as the

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French were expecting strong reinforcements, no immediate collision occurred on the Coromandel coast.

The French government, having resolved to attack the English possessions in the East, laid out their plan of operations, prudently enough, on the principle of a regular military campaign. They committed the charge of a strong expeditionary force to Count Lally, instructing him to abstain from attempting to penetrate inland, to avoid participation in the quarrels of the native princes, and to concentrate his efforts upon seizing the fortified stations of the English on the coast and uprooting their commerce. They warned him, in short, against reverting to the system of Dupleix and Bussy. The directors of the French Company had no wish to set out again on schemes of territorial aggrandizement; they chiefly desired the restoration of their finances and the secure establishment of their commercial monopoly by the total expulsion of the English from the Coromandel coast.

These views are treated somewhat impatiently by M. Tibulle Hamont, the latest French biographer of Lally, who writes that the French directors were better fitted to weigh out pepper than to comprehend the problems of a people’s expansion; and who lays very great stress upon Bussy’s magniloquent reports of his conquests in the Deccan and of his supreme influence at Haidarabad. It will be recollected that the reigning Nizam (Salabat Jang) had been established on his throne by the French auxiliary troops under Bussy, who from that time forward exercised paramount influence

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The temple tank at Tirupatl

in the state, being commandant of a small disciplined army under French officers, and in full possession of some rich districts assigned for its payment. After the peace of 1753, Bussy, whose position had not been shaken by the fall of Dupleix, went on strengthening himself in the Deccan; but the military dictatorship of a foreign adventurer inevitably aroused great jealousy and suspicion; so that not only the ministers and the nobles, but the Nizam himself, were intriguing against him with the Marathas and even with the English. His firmness and ability enabled him to hold his ground, though not without bloodshed, and he had just put down a dangerous attempt to overthrow him in 1758, when he received a letter from Lally ordering him to repair immediately to Pondicherri.

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Bussy was now in this serious dilemma, that if he should obey and quit Haidarabad, the field would be left open to his enemies there, whereas if he remained, not only must he take the consequences of insubordination, but Lally’s failure on the coast would unquestionably entail ruin, sooner or later, upon the French party at Haidarabad. Very reluctantly, and after much remonstrance, he obeyed the order. It is probable, on the whole, that he was right in believing himself likely to serve Lally better by remaining to assist the French army with supplies drawn from the resources of the Deccan than by joining him on the coast with a small reinforcement; but this is by no means certain. For the fact remains that the one essential point was to drive the English out of the country, that Lally was quite right in declaring no peace or security to be possible for France in India until this had been done, and that when the struggle came Bussy might have not been able to co-operate decisively from so distant a base as Haidarabad. Clearly the first step was to beat the English by adroit and straightforward fighting, whereby the problems of expansion would have been mightily simplified and could have been solved afterwards at leisure.

Unluckily for the French, Lally, a soldier of great bravery and self-devotion, was yet a man totally unfit for the work. The French minister, D’Argenson, when the directors asked the Crown for Lally’s services, warned them in words that almost exactly foretold what subsequently ensued that he was a hot-headed, stiff-necked

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martinet, who would burst out into thunderous fury at the least check or blunder, and would make himself so generally detested that his own officers would thwart him, trip him up, and foil all his operations for the satisfaction of ruining their general.

However, as the directors insisted, Lally was sent out with a force, which, in experienced and capable hands, would have been quite sufficient to have reduced, at least temporarily, all the Coromandel settlements, particularly if it had reached India twelve months before it did arrive. If the expedition, which was determined upon in 1755, had left France in 1756, soon after the declaration of war, it might have descended upon the coast at a very critical moment. For in June, 1756, the English had been driven out of Calcutta by the Nawab Siraj-ad-daulah, losing all their forts and factories in Bengal; and in October Clive had taken all the Company’s best troops northward with the fleet from Madras to rescue his countrymen and recover Fort William.

When these troops were despatched, the Madras president and his council fully realized the situation; they knew that war had been declared in Europe, that a strong French force was under preparation for India, that whenever it reached Pondicherri, Bussy at Haidarabad would co-operate with Lally on the coast, and that the southern presidency would be in great danger if this joint attack were made while the troops were absent in Bengal. They decided, nevertheless, with remarkable promptitude and judgment, to run the risk

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Brahmans of Bengal

of sending at once a large relieving force under Clive’s command, in the hope that it might settle matters in Bengal and return before the French could appear on the Coromandel coast. Their venture met with the success it deserved; for the preparations in France were so dilatory and the outward voyage was so slow that Lally did not land at Pondicherri until April, 1758.

By that time the opportunity had been irremediably lost. The English had not only driven Siraj-ad-daulah out of Calcutta and dispersed his army at Plassey, but had dethroned him and set up another Nawab, had become masters of Bengal, the richest province of India, and had expelled the French from all that region. A few months later Clive could report that “perfect tranquillity reigns in Bengal”; so that he was able to co-operate

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powerfully by supplies of men and money in the gallant defence of Madras. He also made an effective diversion by despatching Colonel Forde to drive the French out of those important districts, the Northern Sirkars, which was done very smartly and successfully. Masulipatam, the headquarters of the French administration, was taken by assault; and the French army was thenceforward deprived of the immense resources which it had been drawing during this war from the advantage of Bussy’s influence and possessions. For as these were the districts which had been assigned to him by the Nizam for payment of his troops, their loss was a heavy blow to Bussy’s credit at that court; it disclosed the real instability of his imposing position, and gave a strong impulse to the revolution which soon afterwards destroyed all French preponderance at Haidarabad.

Meanwhile Lally had landed his men, had taken Fort St. David, which was not very resolutely defended, and would have marched on Madras if he had not been prevented by want of money and supplies and by the refusal of the French admiral, D’Aché, to co-operate. He was entirely without tact or temper, suspected all the civil authorities of corruption, knew nothing of Oriental feelings or customs, and had precisely that impatient contempt of local experience and provincial soldiering that has so often led second-rate military commanders to disaster in colonial and Asiatic warfare. In order to get money, he made a fruitless raid upon Tanjore, which only plunged him deeper into unpopularity and financial embarrassment.

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The English ships of war had now arrived, and several sharp though indecisive encounters with the French squadron had so damaged the French ships and discouraged their admiral, that in September, 1758, D’Aché withdrew, like Labourdonnais before him, to the Isle of France. Neither entreaties nor protests, nor the fury of Lally, could induce him to remain. We have seen that Lally, who saw and said plainly that the French could take no firm hold of the country until the English were beaten out of it, had summoned Bussy to join him from Haidarabad; but with Bussy’s departure vanished all the French ascendency at the Nizam’s court, where it was immediately supplanted by English influence and was never again restored. Bussy had now arrived, and strove by arguments of every sort, including something like bribery, to persuade Lally to permit him to return, with no better result than a rancorous quarrel, in which Bussy lost patience, became estranged, and made no effort whatever to avert the discomfiture of the unlucky general.

Surrounded by obstacles, almost destitute of means, abhorred by the civil functionaries, and distrusted by the army, Lally marched desperately upon Madras, hoping to reduce it before the English fleet, which had withdrawn during the stormy season, should return to the coast. But the place had been strengthened and well victualled, while Lally was in great straits for men and money, with no hope of reinforcements: his troops were discouraged, and at Pondicherri he was much more hated than helped. A letter from a high Pondicherri

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official to M. Conflans, dated September 4, 1758, and intercepted by the English, gives some notion of the depression then prevailing at headquarters. Lally furiously accused Bussy of disloyalty in evading his demands for money and active co-operation; nor can it be denied that Bussy, although far superior to Lally in military skill and in the knack of managing Orientals, much preferred remaining at Haidarabad, where he was wealthy and independent, to serving against the English under Lally, who was suspicious, intractable, and manifestly predestined to ruin.

In the course of the next twelve months, Lally’s situation grew rapidly worse. A letter written by him from his camp before Madras to the governor of Pondicherri betrays the unhappy general’s impotent rage and misery. His cash and gunpowder were both running out, and the country round could furnish no more provisions. He proposed to storm the place by the open breach, but his officers refused to risk the assault, and there was a serious mutiny among his European soldiery; yet he persevered until in February, 1759, the arrival of the English fleet struck such dismay into his army that the siege was hastily raised, to the great damage of the French reputation among the native princes, who were all watching the contest. Admiral D’Aché returned with his ships from Mauritius, threw some insignificant supplies into Pondicherri, and then disappeared finally, leaving French India to its fate. The English forces could now take the field against the French outposts, and they carried by assault the important

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fort of Vandewash. Clive’s letter to Pitt in January, 1759, before the siege of Madras had been raised, shows that he had confidently foreseen that the English power at sea, and their possession of the resources of Bengal, must inevitably bring about Lally’s complete discomfiture; and before the year’s end this prediction was fulfilled.

The two armies manoeuvred against each other in the Karnatic for some months; but Lally, disregarding Bussy’s advice, insisted on attempting to recover Vandewash; whereupon he was attacked by Coote, who saw that since the siege chained the French down to one spot, he could choose his own time and tactics for fighting them, whereas, to meet him, Lally would be compelled to divide his force, having to leave a part in the entrenchments. The battle that followed was gallantly contested between the European troops, who were about two thousand strong on each side, by push of bayonet, musketry at close quarters, and artillery. Coote’s and Draper’s regiments met the battalions of Lorraine and Lally; there was resolute charging and counter-charging, until the French fell into some disorder, when the plunging fire of the English cannon, the explosion of a tumbril, the fine handling of their men by Coote and Draper, and the capture of Bussy determined the defeat of the French. The sepoys on both sides were kept back by their commanders and took little share in the action; the Marathas in the French pay hovered uselessly on the outskirts. Lally vainly attempted, with his usual intrepidity, to lead in

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Militart practice at Old Fort Jhansi

person a charge of the French cavalry – they could not face the superior artillery of the English; so he rallied his broken lines behind the intrenchments and made good his retreat to Pondicherri in January, 1760.

It was nevertheless a fatal reverse. The French could no longer keep the open field; they lost all their strong places; the districts from which they drew their supplies were gradually occupied by the enemy. The French fleet never returned to the coast, for D’Aché flatly refused to bring back his ships; the English squadron held the sea in great strength, and fresh detachments of English troops were arriving. In this hopeless condition Lally was exposed to the ignoble reproaches and resentment of the civil officials within Pondicherri, which was quite unprovided with magazines

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or a sufficient garrison, and was now at last blockaded by land and water. The French could make but a feeble resistance, and were completely surrounded and half-starved until they were compelled to surrender at discretion in January, 1761.

From the fall of Pondicherri we may date the complete and final termination of the contest between France and England in India. All that remained to the French in that part of the world, says Voltaire, was their regret at having spent, during more than forty years, immense sums to maintain a Company that had been equally maladroit in commerce and in war, that had never made any profits, and that had paid no genuine dividends either to shareholders or to creditors. The association was dissolved in 1770, after it had been proved from official figures by the Abbé Morellet, who was employed to examine the accounts, that between 1725 and 1769 the Company had lost capital to the amount of 169,000,000 francs. He estimated the sum total of the advances that had been made to the Company by successive French ministries, during those forty-four years, at 376,000,000 francs, but it should be remembered that the abbé seems to have been preparing a case for the Company’s dissolution.

The French did indeed recover, at the peace of 1763, the places that had belonged to them before Dupleix entered upon his schemes of territorial extension. Nevertheless, the sinews of their war power were cut by the stipulation against their fortifying these places and against their keeping troops in Bengal, whereby France

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was permanently shut out of North India and confined to some indefensible points on the seaboard. The two primary conditions of success, whether commercial or military, in India were the establishment of strong points d’appui on the coast and the maintenance of a naval force that could keep open communications with Europe; but the English had gained the preponderance at sea, while the French had now lost their footing on land. The real causes of their failure are to be found, not in the ill-luck or incapacity of particular individuals (for that might have been repaired), but rather in the wider combination of circumstances that decided against France her great contest with England at that period.

M. Tibulle Hamont declares that if Lally had thrown into the sea the instructions given him in France, and if he had resumed the policy of Dupleix and followed Bussy’s advice, the imperial diadem of India would not have been worn by the English queen. It is more than doubtful whether Lally would have gained anything by imitating Dupleix or by taking counsel with the astute Bussy, since both these able and gallant Frenchmen relied far too much upon spheres of influence and military protectorates over native rulers as the basis of ascendency in India. Such methods provide powerful leverage for the extension of Asiatic dominion, but not for its foundation, which must always rest upon sure and swift support, in times of need, from the mother country. Without this essential resource, it is quite clear that to drive the English out of India during

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An Indian native ruler

the Seven Years’ War was an exploit far beyond Lally’s power or capacity.

India was not lost by the French because Dupleix was recalled, or because Labourdonnais and D’Aché both left the coast at critical moments, or because Lally was headstrong and intractable. Still less was the loss due to any national inaptitude for distant and perilous enterprises, in which the French have always displayed high qualities. The record of their exploration and adventure in America and Asia during the seventeenth

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and eighteenth centuries fully sustains the reputation of this courageous and energetic people. It was through the short-sighted, ill-managed European policy of Louis XV, misguided by his mistresses and by incompetent ministers, that France lost her Indian settlements in the Seven Years’ War. When it is remembered that before the end of that war France had surrendered her North American colonies, all her African settlements, and some of her finest West Indian islands, that her campaigns had been unfortunate in Germany, and that she had suffered deplorably at sea, there need be little hesitation in acknowledging that better men than Lally must have failed on the Coromandel coast.

To sum up: the immediate local causes of the English triumphs in India were, first, the conquest of Bengal, which furnished the British with the sinews of war and a firm base of operations on the mainland, whereas the French very soon exhausted their treasure-chest, and their only safe base was at Mauritius. Secondly, the English had the good luck to find a commander of military genius, well versed in Indian affairs, while the French general was inexperienced and without the slightest tincture of the capacity for dealing with Orientals which Frenchmen have often displayed.

The essential underlying causes, the primary reasons, why the French could not hold India are to be discovered in the insolvency of their East India Company, the maladministration of their affairs at home and abroad, the continual sacrifice of colonial and mercantile interests to a disastrous war-policy on the Continent,

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and above all in the exhaustion of their naval strength, which left all transmarine possessions of France defenceless against the overwhelming superiority of England. The English nation was deeply and ardently interested in the struggle; the lead and direction was in supremely able hands. The whole unfettered energy of a free and fierce people had been wielded by Pitt, the ablest war-minister that England has ever seen, against the careless incapacity of courtiers and the ill-supported efforts of one or two able but irresponsible officials, under such an autocrat as Louis XV. Nor can it be denied that French writers are mainly right in ascribing the success of England at this period, in India and elsewhere, to this signal inequality between the two governments.

It was natural that, after such mishaps and disappointments, the benefit to be derived from distant colonies or Asiatic conquests should be sharply questioned in France. The imposing authority of Montesquieu had been pronounced, a few years earlier, against emigration beyond sea, on the ground that it had a tendency to drain the population at home; although he saw the great advantages of commerce and navigation. The anti-colonial party was now headed by Voltaire, who declared the loss of Canada to be France’s gain, mocked at the folly of fighting for a few snow-covered acres more or less, and deplored the shedding of blood to procure coffee, snuff, or spices for the citizens of Paris and London.

In the latter part of this same century, when the

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mind of French statesmen and writers had become still more impressed by political idealism, Rousseau followed in a like vein with his discourses on the corrupting effects of luxury and modern civilization. And although these writers varied widely in their points of view, they united in attacking with caustic irony or sombre reprobation the sinister influences of priestly ambition and unscrupulous propagandism. The subordination of civil to ecclesiastical interests had too often hampered the authority of French governors in Canada, where the religious orders were much too strong; nor should we forget that in India the intrigues of the Jesuit Lavaur were held to have fatally accelerated the disgrace and condemnation of the unfortunate Lally.

But while in France the new spirit of humanitarian philosophy was consoling the nation for the loss of foreign trade and distant colonies, in England the tolerant and progressive ideas of the eighteenth century operated favourably rather than otherwise toward the spread of Asiatic dominion. As commerce has invariably bred freethinking in religion and politics all the world over, so rationalism and liberal principles in their turn helped commerce, by saving Englishmen from the mistakes and prejudices that had hampered the commercial enterprise of Spain, Portugal, and, partly, of France. England’s conquests in India began at the period, about the middle of the eighteenth century, when, according to Lecky, “a latent skepticism and a wide-spread indifference might be everywhere traced among the cultivated classes.”

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The habit of treating their own religious differences with equanimity undoubtedly indisposes men to trouble themselves about the conversion of others, and leaves no room for the confusion of temporal with spiritual interests in dealing with heathen folk. No more suitable mental outfit could have been provided for Europeans in the religious climate of India; nor indeed could the charge of subordination to clerical influence, or of impolitic proselytism, ever have been brought home to the East India Company by their bitterest enemy. On the whole, therefore, the calm and open temper of the English mind at this period may be numbered among the moral conditions that were advantageous to the English East India Company in contending for superiority in India.

We have thus seen that, of the three collisions between the French and English upon Indian soil, both parties found themselves after the first, at the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, very much in the same condition as at the beginning of hostilities, with a slight advantage, if any, to the English. On the second occasion, when Dupleix launched his grand political schemes, the French closed the unofficial war in 1754 on terms at least equal; they probably had some local superiority of influence and position. The third war, which was international, finished in 1761 decisively and irremediably against them, as was proved twenty years afterwards. when the French made their last descent upon an India coast in 1781, the long odds were for the moment against England on the sea, for she was

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The Sacred Bull at Mysore

fighting single-handed against all the maritime nations; against France, Spain, Holland, and her own American colonies. She was also entangled within India in a very intricate desultory war against Hyder Ali of Mysore and the Marathas; two powers which both held strips of the Indian seaboard and were both corresponding with the enemy.

The French fleet was under Suffren, the best admiral ever possessed by France, and the military force in the expedition was commanded by Bussy. Suffren was far superior as a naval tactician to the English commander, but the French admiral found on the Indian coast, as Captain Mahan justly observes, “no friendly port or roadstead, no base of supplies or repair.” The French settlements had all fallen by 1779; and the invaluable harbour of Trincomali, in Ceylon, had been taken by the English from the Dutch just a month before. It

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was retaken by Suffren in 1782, but not until after England had made peace with the Marathas. In any event, the English power was by that time too firmly consolidated in India by the acquisition of Bengal, with the rich districts north-westward up to Allahabad, to be shaken by the landing on the southeast coast of a small force, which could hardly have produced more than local damage and temporary political confusion in the peninsula. Suffren’s real object must have been no more than to create a diversion by harassing our Eastern possessions while our forces were employed against the colonial revolt in America, and in 1783 his operations were interrupted by news of the Peace of Versailles.

We are therefore entitled to fix on the Peace of Paris in 1763 as the true date after which the maritime powers of Europe finally withdrew from all serious rivalry, either in commerce or conquest, with England in India. The epoch is one of pre-eminent importance in the history of the rise of British dominion in the great Asiatic peninsula, for thenceforward the contest for ascendency was between the English and the native powers only – a contest of which the issue was in reality so far from being doubtful, invisible, or amazing, that it could be and was already foreseen and deliberately foretold.

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