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Chapter 14 – The Governor-Generalship of Lord Wellesley

1798–1805

Lord Mornington, afterwards Marquis Wellesley, landed at Madras on his way to Calcutta in April, 1798, on the same day when the ambassadors of Tippu disembarked at Mangalore on their return from the Isle of France, bringing a rather shabby collection of volunteers and an assurance from the French governor that his Republic would soon entertain with pleasure Tippu’s offer of alliance and amity. The instructions which had followed the Governor-General unquestionably warranted him in treating these dealings with the French as an act of war on the part of Mysore. “As a general principle,” wrote Henry Dundas, President of the Board of Commissioners for Indian affairs, in a letter addressed to him, “I have no hesitation in stating that we are entitled under the circumstances of the present time to consider the admission of any French force into Tippu’s army, be it greater or smaller, as direct hostility to us”; and within a few months after reaching Calcutta, Lord Mornington declared that the growth of a French party

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in the councils and armies of the native Indian powers was an alarming evil that demanded extirpation.

When, therefore, it became known that Tippu’s embassy to the Isle of France had brought back not only the promise of an offensive and defensive alliance with the French, “for the express purpose of expelling the British nation from India,” but also some French officers and recruits for the Mysore army, the Governor-General concluded that he had just ground of hostility. His warlike ardour was easily heated, and he was deterred from attacking Tippu at once only by finding himself unprepared. The finances showed a standing deficit, the Company’s credit in the money-market had fallen very low, the Madras army was not fit to take the field; and Lord Mornington was so far from. relying on the co-operation of his allies, the Nizam and the Marathas, that he recognized the impossibility of calling them in.

The fruits of the non-interference policy had now shown themselves in the weakness and disaffection of the Nizam, in the ominous preparations of Tippu, and in the spreading power of the Marathas. The six years of English neutrality – from 1792 to 1798 – had been employed by the two last-mentioned states in augmenting their war-resources and extending their territory at the expense of weaker neighbours. The defeat and capitulation of the Nizam at Kurdla had reduced him from the condition of a great and leading power in Hindustan to that of a tributary to the Marathas; the corps of fourteen thousand men under

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The Jami Masjid, or great Mosque, at Delhi

French officers was the only support of his authority. Mornington wrote that these trained battalions at Haidarabad were the main root of the Nizam’s disaffection; he believed that if they were brought into the field to take part in a battle against Tippu, they would almost certainly march over at once to Tippu’s side.

At Poona, the Maratha capital, the influence of Daulat Rao Sindhia (Mahadaji’s successor) was now complete; he also held in sovereignty large tracts in Central India; and had extended his territorial annexations north-westward up to Delhi, outflanking Oudh and the English possessions in Bengal. He was, in short, the most considerable prince in Central and Northern India, where he maintained an ambiguous attitude, overawing

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both the Peshwa’s government and the Nizam, and denouncing the impolicy of Marathas assisting the English to destroy Mysore. About this time, moreover, Lord Mornington received a letter from the Afghan king, Zaman Shah, announcing his intention of invading Hindustan, and demanding aid for the purpose of rescuing the Moghul emperor, Shah Alam, from the hands of the Marathas.

In these circumstances the Governor-General determined to temporize with Mysore by confining his first communication to a demand for satisfaction, while he employed himself in strengthening the Triple Alliance – as he very diplomatically termed the precarious relations of the British with the courts of Haidarabad and Poona – in restoring his finances and reinforcing the Madras army. His first step was to conclude a treaty with the Nizam for the disbandment of the French battalions at Haidarabad, which was then carried out with great skill and resolution; the Nizam receiving instead a force commanded by English officers, to be stationed permanently in his country. At Poona, however, where similar proposals were made, the Maratha government was much more distrustful of the British ascendency and much less in need of British assistance. The Peshwa naturally found very little attraction in the suggestion of an arrangement which, under the name of a subsidiary alliance, manifestly placed the state that furnished the money under military subordination to the state that provided the men.

The Nizam and the Peshwa both consented, nevertheless,

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to join the league against Mysore; and the Mysore Sultan was required, in reasonable terms, to disarm and abandon his alliance with the French. As he ignored or evaded these demands, a combined army marched against him early in 1799. After some futile attempts to keep the field against his enemy, Tippu was driven into Seringapatam and besieged there until the fortress was taken by assault in May; when the Sultan’s death (he was killed in a hand-to-hand medley at one of the gates) brought the short Mohammedan dynasty of Mysore to a violent end. Lord Mornington broke up the kingdom by allotting certain shares of territory to the English and their allies; reconstituting the remainder into a state under the old Hindu reigning family whom Hyder Ali had expelled, and by whom Mysore, after a long interval of sequestration, is well and quietly governed at the present day.

The success of these military and political exploits was largely due to the presence in this campaign of Colonel Arthur Wellesley, who now made his first appearance among scenes where he was destined to attain a most brilliant reputation as a soldier and a statesman. Although he held only subordinate military command, his clear and commanding intellect, and his energy and skill in action, were displayed in the advice which he constantly gave to Lord Mornington, in his able reorganization of all the army departments, and in the rapidly decisive operations with which he terminated the war. The Governor-General was rewarded by the thanks voted to him in the House of Commons in October,

Parsi Feminine Types at Bombay

The Parsis, or Zoroastrians, were originally natives of Persia, as is shown by their name; but they were driven from Iran by the Mohammedan conquest and took refuge in India, particularly in the Bombay Presidency, where they form a prosperous community of nearly a hundred thousand souls. Their progressive spirit is shown by the educational facilities and freedom enjoyed by the Parsi women. Some idea of the Parsi feminine type in Bombay may be gathered from this picture of six sisters.

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1799, “for counteracting with equal promptitude and ability the dangerous intrigues and projects of the French, particularly by destroying their power and influence in the Deccan,” whereby, said the resolution, “he has established on a basis of permanent security the tranquillity and prosperity of the British Empire in India.” The imperial note here sounded – probably for the first time in a public document – contrasts remarkably with the hesitating, almost apologetic tone in which our position and the growth of our responsibilities had been discussed in Parliament twenty years earlier.

It may truly be said that the stars in their courses fought against Tippu – a fierce, fanatic, and ignorant Mohammedan, who was, nevertheless, sufficiently endowed with some of the sterner qualities required for Asiatic rulership to have made himself a name among the Indian princes of his time. But he had no political ability of the higher sort; still less had he any touch of that instinct which has occasionally warned the ablest and strongest Asiatic chiefs to avoid collision with Europeans. He was swept away by a flood that was overwhelming far greater states than Mysore, that had taken its rise in a distant part of the world, out of events beyond his comprehension and totally beyond his control, and that was now running full in the channel which carried the English, by a natural determination of converging consequences, to supreme ascendency in India.

He had thrown in his lot with the French just at

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the moment when they were at bitter, irreconcilable enmity with the English, and were actually proclaiming their intention of striking, if possible, at the British possessions in the East. He received the plainest warning that the English would wrest the sword out of any hand that showed the slightest intention of drawing it against them in such a quarrel; and he might have reflected that while his friends were far distant, the English, backed by the native powers whom he had alarmed, were close on his frontier. But he knew that submission to the English. demands meant subordination to their power, disarmament, the loss of his independence, and reduction to the rank of a prince, whose foreign relations and military establishments would be regulated strictly by English policy; and his fierce intractable temper drove him into a hopeless struggle.

The same situation has frequently recurred since, though not with the same intensity; the same option has been offered to other states and rulers. And the present form and constitution of the British Empire in India, with its vast provinces and numerous feudatories, represents historically the gradual incorporation under one dominion of states that have submitted and states that have been forcibly subdued. As the old Moghul Empire had been built up by a very similar process of gradual conquest, so, when that great edifice fell to pieces, it was certain that the fragments would soon gravitate again toward the attraction of some central rulership, whose protection would be sought by all the weaker chiefships, and whose superiority the

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stronger rivals must inevitably be compelled, by fair means or forcible, to acknowledge.

When the acquisition of Bengal had given the English power a focus and a firm centralization, this assimilating process began steadily with a slow movement against stiff obstacles, but by the end of the century it had acquired great impetus and velocity. For the English viceroys were now supported by the direct strength and resolution of the nation in securing their Indian possessions; and the temper of those stormy times coloured all their proceedings. What in Hastings would have been reckoned an act of rank iniquity was in Lord Mornington (now Marquis Wellesley) no more than an energetic measure of public necessity. The views and policy of these two statesmen were essentially identical; but Hastings was striving painfully, with slender resources, on the defensive, while Wellesley, backed by a war ministry at home, boldly assumed the offensive on a magnificent scale of operations.

The dissolution of Mysore set the British dominion forward by two important steps. It finally removed an inveterate enemy, whose position had endangered the English possessions in South India for thirty years; it also gave the British complete command over the seacoast of the lower peninsula, and thus greatly diminished any risk of molestation by the French. It led, moreover, directly to the virtual extinction of that power for the control of which the English and French had fought so sharply in the days of Dupleix and Clive, the Nawabship of the Karnatic. From the time when

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that contest had been decided in favour of the English, the Nawab had gradually descended, through the stages of a protected ally and a subordinate ruler, to the situation of a prince with nominal authority, and with a revenue heavily mortgaged for the payment of the subsidy that was the price of his protection by the Company. In this unhappy condition he naturally kept up a secret correspondence with the Mysore Sultan, his creditor’s enemy, and when Mysore was taken, the Nawab’s letters were discovered. Thereupon Lord Wellesley found himself amply justified, upon the double ground of political intrigue and internal misgovernment, in bringing the Karnatic wholly under British administration. The system of divided authority was, he observed, a serious calamity to the country, and for the same incontestable reason he annexed Tanjore and Surat.

The declared object of the Governor-General was now to establish the ascendency of the English power over all other states in India by a system of subsidiary treaties, so framed, as he himself stated in one of his despatches, as “to deprive them of the means of prosecuting any measure or of forming any confederacy hazardous to the security of the British Empire, and to enable us to preserve the tranquillity of India by exercising a general control over the restless spirit of ambition and violence which is characteristic of every Asiatic government.” This general control he desired to impose “through the medium of alliances contracted with those states on the basis of the security and protection

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The Atal tower at Amritsar

of their respective rights.” In plain words, Lord Wellesley, to whom restless ambition was a thing intolerable in Asiatics, had already resolved to extend the British Protectorate over all the rulerships with which the English government then had any connection, by insisting that each ruler should reduce his army, and

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should rely for external defence and internal security mainly upon the paramount military strength of the British sovereignty.

The system of subsidiary treaties is worth some brief explanation, for it has played a very important part in the expansion of British dominion. It has been seen that English participation in Indian wars began when we lent the aid of a military contingent to assist some native potentate. The next stage came when we took the field on our own account, usually assisted by the levies of some prince who made common cause with us, and whose soldiery were undisciplined, untrustworthy, and very clumsily handled. The English commander often found it necessary to look behind as well as before him on the field of battle; his allies showed unseasonable impartiality by holding aloof at critical moments and reappearing to plunder in both camps indiscriminately, giving preference to the defeated side. What was needed was a body of men that could be relied upon for some kind of tactical precision and steadiness under fire; but for this purpose it was of little use even to place sepoys under European officers unless they could be regularly paid and taught to obey one master.

The system, therefore, soon reached the stage where the native ally was required to supply not men but money, and the English undertook to raise, train, and pay a fixed number of troops on receiving a subsidy equivalent to their cost. The subsidiary treaties made in India differed, accordingly, from those made by England

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with European states in this respect, that whereas Austria or Russia raised armies on funds provided by England, Oudh or Haidarabad provided funds on which the British government raised armies. Large sums had hitherto been spent by the native princes in maintaining ill-managed and insubordinate bodies of troops, and in constant wars against each other; they might economize their revenues, be rid of a mutinous soldiery, and sit much more quietly at home by entering into con-tracts with a skilful and solvent administration that would undertake all serious military business for a fixed subsidy.

But as punctuality in money matters has never been a princely quality, this subsidy was apt to be paid very irregularly; so the next stage was to revive the long-standing practice of Asiatic governments, the assignment of lands for the payment of troops. There were now in India (excluding the Panjab, with which England had had no dealings as yet) only three states whose size or strength could give the English government any concern. One of these, the Maratha federation, was still strong and solvent, but the two Mohammedan states of Oudh and Haidarabad were in no condition to resist the proposals of Lord Wellesley, nor is it likely that either of them could have long maintained itself without British protection. The Nizam of Haidarabad had been very liberally treated in the partition of Mysore, and Tippu’s destruction had relieved him of an inveterate foe. In 1800 he transferred consider-able districts in perpetuity to the British government,

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“for the regular payment of the expenses of the augmented subsidiary force.”

The position of the Vizir of Oudh was much more important. We have seen that Clive and Hastings maintained this prince for the safety of the north-west frontier of the British, which was still covered by his dominions. But the Afghan king, Zaman Shah, was now making his last inroad into the Panjab, and the Maratha chief Sindhia was in possession of Delhi; while the Oudh vizir was a weak ruler whose country was in confusion, whose troops were mutinous, and whose finances were disordered by the heavy strain of the English subsidy. In these circumstances Lord Wellesley required the vizir to disband his disorderly forces, in order that more British troops might be subsidized for the effective defence of his dominions. The vizir, under pressure of many perplexities, declared that he would abdicate, but afterwards retracted, and the Governor-General, who would willingly have had a free hand in Oudh, received the retractation with “astonishment, regret, and indignation.”

It must be admitted that Lord Wellesley subordinated the feelings and interests of his ally to paramount considerations of British policy in a manner that showed very little patience, forbearance, or generosity. Nevertheless, it was really most necessary to set in order the affairs of Oudh, and the result of Lord Wellesley’s somewhat dictatorial negotiations was that the vizir ceded all his frontier provinces, including Rohilkhand, to the Company; the revenue of the territory

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thus transferred being taken as an equivalent to the subsidy payable for troops. This arrangement finally superseded the barrier policy of Hastings, which had effectually served its purpose for thirty years. Instead of placing Oudh in charge of the districts exposed to attack from the Marathas and invaders from the north-west, Lord Wellesley now obtained by cession the whole belt of exterior territory; and Oudh was thenceforward enveloped by the English dominion.

This most important augmentation of territory transferred to the British government some of the richest and most populous districts in the heart of India, lying along the Ganges and its tributaries above Benares up to the foot of the Himalayan range. It consolidated English power on a broader foundation, brought us a very large increase of revenue, and confronted us with the Maratha chief Sindhia along the whole line of his possessions in upper India. These very trenchant strokes of policy were severely criticized by the Directors of the East India Company and cordially approved by his Majesty’s ministers.

The evacuation of Egypt by the French and the Peace of Amiens necessarily dislocated the mainspring of Lord Wellesley’s martial activity. Hitherto he had been able to describe his policy as purely self-defensive and pacific, to explain that he was compelled to extend the dominion of England by the need of counteracting the design of France, and to declare that he had insisted on reducing the armies of the native princes in order to preserve them against a nation who, as he wrote Tippu

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Sultan in 1799, “considered all the thrones of the world as the sport and prey of their boundless ambition and insatiable rapine.” But Mysore, Haidarabad, and Oudh had now been placed beyond danger of the French contagion; and Lord Wellesley was able to record that “the only native powers of importance now remaining in India independent of British protection are the confederate Maratha states.”

It could only be through a perverse contrariety of spirit that, notwithstanding his solemn warnings against the machinations of France, the European power which the Marathas persisted in regarding with uneasiness was England. Their restless character, the advantages presented by their local position to the future Intrigues of France, and the number of French officers in the service of Sindhia, convinced the Governor-General that it was a matter of indispensable precaution to acquire an ascendency in the councils of the Maratha Empire, and to frame a system of political connection that should preserve a powerful barrier against them. This barrier had now been erected by the subsidiary treaties with the Mohammedan states; and as the three leading Maratha chiefs – Sindhia, Holkar, and the Raja of Nagpur – were contending in arms among themselves for supremacy, the time was opportune for interposing with an offer of protection to the nominal chief of their confederacy at Poona, where the government was threatened by three predatory armies, subsisting at large on the country. If the chiefs of these armies combined to upset the Peshwa, they might seize command of the

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whole Maratha Empire; and, what was still more important, their next step would probably be a combination against the English.

The Peshwa, Baji Rao, had hitherto evaded all overtures from the English for a subsidiary treaty; but there was bitter feud between him and Holkar, whose brother he had cruelly executed, and who was now marching upon his capital. When Sindhia came to the Peshwa’s assistance, there was a great battle, in which Holkar was nearly defeated, until he charged the enemy at the head of his cavalry with such desperate energy that the allied army was driven off the field with the loss of all their guns and baggage. The Peshwa fled to a fortress, whence he despatched a messenger to solicit help from the English; and soon afterward he took refuge in Bassein, close to Bombay, where, in December, 1802, he signed a treaty of general defensive alliance with the British government, under which he ceded districts yielding a revenue equivalent to the cost of a strong subsidiary force to be stationed permanently within his territory, while all his foreign relations were to be subordinated to the policy of England.

The treaty of Bassein also accomplished another leading object of Lord Wellesley’s policy, for by admit-ting the British government to mediate in all the exorbitant claims that the Marathas were pressing against the Nizam, it placed the Haidarabad state definitely under the protection of the English, to whom all such demands were to be referred in future. No time was lost in acting upon this important engagement. The

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The residency at Lucknow

Peshwa was escorted back to Poona by a British force under General Arthur Wellesley; and it was signified to the contending Maratha chiefs that their central government had been taken under British protection. This masterful proceeding alarmed even Lord Castlereagh, who wrote to the Governor-General some remonstrances against a step which “tended to involve us in the endless and complicated distractions of the turbulent Maratha Empire.”

He replied that the influence of the French in the Maratha camp was still to be feared, an argument that easily prevailed over an English ministry who were just bracing up the national strength, after a short breathing time, for a second and still closer wrestle with Buonaparte.

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Lord Wellesley’s political system was now reaching its climax. His subsidiary troops were encamped at the capitals of the four great Indian powers which had been his political rivals, at Mysore, Haidarabad, Luck-now, and Poona; all disputes among these states were to be submitted to his arbitration; and the interference of all other European nations was to be rigidly excluded. Upon these pillars he was firmly building up the inevitable preponderance of a steady, civilized, orderly administration over the jarring, incoherent rulerships by which it was surrounded. But it was not to be expected that the Treaty of Bassein would be otherwise than unpalatable to the Maratha chiefs, who saw that a blow had been struck at the root of their confederacy, and that the establishment of paramount British influence at Poona not only checkmated their movement against the capital, but was a sure step toward the subversion of their own independence. The maintenance of the head of the Maratha Empire in a condition of dependent relation to the British government would naturally, in the course of time, tend to reduce the other Maratha powers into a similar condition of subordination, which was precisely what they feared and were determined to resist. They withheld acknowledgment of the treaty, questioned the Peshwa’s right to conclude it without their consent, suspended their internal feuds, and seemed inclined to combine against the common danger.

The Maratha chief of Nagpur (commonly called the Raja of Berar), who had great influence over all the

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other leaders, succeeded in organizing a league against the British; but Holkar, although he agreed to a truce with Sindhia, refused to join, and the Gaikwar of Baroda kept apart. Sindhia, however, effected his junction with the Nagpur raja, whereupon both chiefs evaded the demand of the British envoy for a direct explanation of their intentions and marched up to the frontier of Haidarabad. It was in the interest of the Marathas to gain time, for they hoped that Holkar might be persuaded to enter the league; for the same reason it was important to the British that the two chiefs should be forced to decide speedily between peace or war. The Governor-General was now in his element again, for in Europe a renewal of the French war was evidently at hand; the English ministers had warned him that a French squadron was preparing at Brest for the East Indies; they had authorized him to retain. possession of the French settlements that were to be restored under the Amiens Treaty; and they had desired him to keep his forces on a war-footing. At the same time, some observations, which appeared to the Governor-General particularly inopportune, were conveyed to him upon the increase of his military expenditure and the diversion of funds on which the Company relied for their trade.

Lord Wellesley, who had offered to resign, requested the ministers to “consider the alarm and anger of the Court of Directors on this latter subject with the indulgence which true wisdom extends to the infirmities of prejudice, ignorance, and passion “; while he prepared

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with alacrity to attack the Maratha confederates simultaneously in various quarters, and to open the impending war on the largest possible scale. The rupture with France intensified, as usual, his sense of the emergent necessity of bringing all the military powers of India under the supreme control of the British. For although there was little real danger, as Arthur Wellesley pointed out, of the French being able to join forces with the Marathas – since their troops, even if they could land, would be destitute of equipments and would be cut off from their base of supply – yet undoubtedly a great European war must always add risks to the English position in India.

Lord Wellesley also saw clearly enough that the security of the dominion that he was establishing on land depended essentially upon the British maintaining a commanding superiority at sea. He urged upon the ministry at home that so long as the Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius were in French hands (for the Dutch were entirely under French influence), the coasts of India could be molested, or the inland enemies of the English might be encouraged by expectations of aid from France. He spared, in short, no pains or preparations that might enable him so to use this opportunity of renewed hostilities in Asia and Europe as to accomplish “the complete consolidation of the British Empire in India and the future tranquillity of Hindustan.” Whatever may be thought of the methods occasionally used by Lord Wellesley to compass these ends, it is impossible to withhold our admiration from

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so large a conception and from so clear and far-ranging a survey of the political horizon.

With these views and intentions the Governor-General issued his orders to General Wellesley, who was facing Sindhia in Western India, and to General Lake, who was moving upon Sindhia’s possessions in the north-west. The main objective was to be either the entire reduction of Sindhia’s power, or a peace that should transfer to the British government so much of his territory as should be sufficient to isolate him in Central India, to cut him off from the western seacoast, to expel him from Delhi (where he was still Vicegerent of the Empire), and to throw him back into Central India by interposing a barrier between his provinces in that region and in the north country. At Delhi Monsieur Perron, one of Sindhia’s ablest French officers, commanded a large body of regular troops, with which he held the fortress, kept the Emperor Shah Alam in custody, and exercised authority in his name. It was one of Lord Wellesley’s principal objects to disband this formidable standing army, which was well officered. by Frenchmen; and his anxiety to cross swords with Sindhia was intensified by his knowledge of constant intrigues and correspondence between the Marathas and the agents of France.

Under the leadership of the two very able generals who led the English armies, and who were also invested with full diplomatic authority, the war which now began was brilliantly successful, and its objects were completely fulfilled. In July, 1803, General Wellesley signified

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to Sindhia and the Nagpur raja that they must withdraw their army from its station upon the Nizam’s frontier or abide his attack. They, replied by desiring him first to retire; but as this would have exposed the territory which their movements were threatening, the English army advanced, and war was formally declared. The scene of the campaign that followed was in that part of Central India where the northern frontiers of the Haidarabad state adjoined the possessions of the two Maratha chiefs. At Assaye, where the collision took place in September, 1803, Sindhia’s troops fought well and fiercely; the veteran battalions of De Boigne made a resolute stand; the artillery inflicted heavy loss on the English infantry, and died, stubbornly fighting, at their guns; but Wellesley’s victory was decisive. Marching onward into Berar, he inflicted a severe defeat upon the troops of the Nagpur raja at Argaum in November of the same year; he then took by storm the hill fort of Gawilgarh; and before the year’s end peace had been concluded with both the Maratha belligerents on terms dictated by the British commander.

General Lake’s successes in the north-west were of equal importance. He took Aligarh by assault, dispersed Sindhia’s force before Delhi, occupied the town, and assumed charge of the emperor’s person. Agra was besieged and captured; and finally, in November, 1803, the British force met at Laswari seventeen battalions of trained infantry with excellent artillery, the last of Sindhia’s regular army. These troops behaved so gallantly that the event (Lake wrote) would have

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A mosque at Aligarh

been extremely doubtful if they had still been commanded by their French officers; but Perron and the Frenchmen had left the Maratha service. Nevertheless, their vigorous resistance proved the high military spirit which the soldier of Northern India has so often displayed; they held their ground until all their guns were lost, and finally suffered a most honourable defeat.

The result of these well-contested and hardly won victories was to shatter the whole military organization upon which Sindhia’s predominance had been built up, to break down his connection with the Moghul court in the north, and to destroy his influence at Poona as the most formidable member of the Maratha confederacy. At the beginning of the war Sindhia’s regular brigades had amounted to nearly forty thousand disciplined men, with a very large train of artillery, acting entirely under the control of a French commander, and supported by the revenues of the finest provinces in

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India. This army had now ceased to exist; and both Sindhia and the Nagpur raja, finding themselves in imminent danger of losing all their possessions, acquiesced reluctantly in the terms that were dictated to them after the destruction of their armies.

The Treaty of Bassein was formally recognized; they entered into defensive treaties and made large cessions of territory; Sindhia gave up to the British all his northern districts lying along both sides of the Jumna River; he ceded his seaports and his conquests on the west coast; he made over to them the city of Delhi and the custody of the Moghul Emperor; he dismissed all his French officers, and accepted the establishment, at his cost, of a large British force to be stationed near his frontier. The Raja of Nagpur restored Berar to the Nizam, and surrendered to the British government the province of Cuttack, on the Bay of Bengal, which lay interposed between the upper districts of Madras and the south-western districts of Bengal.

But Jaswant Rao Holkar, who had held aloof from the war in the hope of profiting by the discomfiture of Sindhia, his rival and enemy, had been living at free quarters with a large Maratha horde in Rajputana and had put to death the English officers in his service. As he now showed some intention of taking advantage of Sindhia’s defenceless condition, he was summoned by Lord Lake to retire within his own country, and on his refusal was attacked by the British troops. Holkar, who had always adhered to the traditional Maratha

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tactics of rapid cavalry movements, systematic pillaging, and sudden harassing incursions, proved a very active and troublesome enemy. Colonel Monson advanced against him into Central India, and Holkar drew him onward by a simulated retreat, until Monson found himself at a long distance from his base, with only two days’ supplies, and in front of an enemy numerically very superior. Then, when he attempted to retire, Holkar turned on him suddenly and destroyed nearly the whole of the British force as it struggled back toward Agra through some difficult country, intersected by rivers. A few months afterward, in November, 1804, Holkar fought a severe action against the British troops at Dig; and his ally, the Bhartpur raja, repulsed three attempts to carry by assault the strong fortress of Bhartpur, so that Lord Lake was obliged to retire with considerable loss. But Lake’s flying columns pursued Holkar with indefatigable rapidity until his bands were surprised and at last dispersed, when he himself took refuge in the Panjab. He returned only to sign a treaty on terms similar to those on which peace had been made with the other belligerents.

The result of these operations was to establish beyond the possibility of future opposition the political and military superiority of the English throughout India. The campaigns of Wellesley and Lake dissolved the last of the trained armies which had been set on foot, in imitation of the European system, during the past twenty years by the native princes of India; and the weapon upon which the Marathas had been relying

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for resistance in the field. was thus broken in their hands. In the place of the numerous battalions, many thousands strong, that had been maintained under foreign officers by the foremost Mohammedan and Maratha states, Lord Wellesley’s subsidiary treaties now substituted several divisions of Anglo-Indian troops, amounting in all to twenty-two thousand men, cantoned within the jurisdictions or on the borders of these very native states, and paid from their revenues. The employment of foreign officers, unless by permission, was thenceforward prohibited; while the effect of the treaties was to interdict any hostilities between state and state – since all disputes must be referred to British arbitration – to confine their rulers within the territorial limits authorized by the supreme government, to prevent their future combination for any purpose injurious to British interests, and finally to block up all avenues of communication between these states and any foreign power.

Up to this time the acquisitions of the Maratha chiefs in Central India, which had been wrested bit by bit from different owners at various times, had been so intermixed with the lands of the Nizam, of the Peshwa, and of the Rajput princes as to produce an entanglement of territorial and revenue rights that furnished, as it was intended to furnish, ample pretexts for further quarrel and encroachment. Lord Wellesley’s policy was, in the first place, to rearrange the political map in this part of India so as to circumscribe each Maratha chief ship within distinct boundaries. His

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secondary objects were to interrupt the chain of their confederate possessions by interposing the lands of some non-Maratha state, and to raise a barrier between Maratha and British territory in Northern India by maintaining under British guarantee the independence of the petty states along their frontier. Lastly, he desired so to rearrange the map of Southern India as to link the important British possessions in Madras with the central dominion in Bengal.

This work of consolidation and connection was pushed still further by Lord Hastings twelve years later, and was finally consummated by Lord Dalhousie; but Lord Wellesley’s settlement laid out the territorial distribution of all India (excepting the Panjab and Sind) on the general plan which was followed for the next forty years, and which survives in its main outlines to this day. By occupying the imperial cities of Agra and Delhi, with the contiguous tracts on both sides of the Jumna, and by annexing the whole country between the Ganges and the Jumna Rivers, he advanced British territory from Bengal north-westward to the mountains, with a frontier resting on the upper course of the Jumna. By his acquisition of the Cuttack province he secured the continuity of British territory south-eastward along the seacoast, joined the two Presidencies of Bengal and Madras, and established sure communication between them. The English dominions were thus prolonged in a broad unbroken belt from the Himalayas downward to the Bay of Bengal and the southernmost district of Madras; while the cessions obtained

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on the west coast went far toward completing British command of the whole Indian littoral.

Above all, when Lord Wellesley expelled the Marathas from Delhi and assumed charge of the person and family of the Moghul Emperor, he inaugurated a significant change of policy. For at least forty years the imperial sign manual had been at the disposal of any adventurer or usurper who could occupy the capital, overawe the powerless court, and dictate his own investiture with some lofty office or with a grant of the provinces that he had appropriated. At an earlier period the European trading companies, English and French, had been careful to obtain title-deeds from the Great Moghul. It was known that when Pondicherri was restored to the French at the Peace of Amiens, Buonaparte used the opportunity to send out to the French settlements in India a considerable military staff, whose mission was to communicate with the Emperor of Delhi through the French officers in Sindhia’s service. And it was part of a wild project submitted to Buonaparte in 1803 that an expedition should be sent overland to India with the ostensible mission of rescuing the imperial house from its enemies and oppressors.

Lord Wellesley was at any rate quite satisfied that he was threatened by “the aggrandizement of the French power in India to a degree that compelled him to lose no time in placing the person, family, and nominal authority of his Majesty Shah Alam under the protection of the British Government.” He formally

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Gen. Havelock's attack on Nana Sahib at Fathpur

renounced any intention of using the royal prerogative as a pretext for asserting English claims to ascendency over feudatories or to the exercise of rulership. With the avowed object of abolishing a titular sovereignty that hardly retained the shadow of its former substance, and whose representative had been rescued by British arms from a state of extreme degradation and distress, he relegated Shah Alam to the position of a state pensioner, with royal rank and an ample income assured him. The arrangement lasted fifty years until it was suddenly extinguished in 1857, when the storm raised by the Sepoy Mutiny swept away the last relics of the Moghul throne and dynasty.

The political outcome of Lord Wellesley’s Governor-Generalship

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is well summarized in the final paragraph of the long despatch of July, 1804, in which he reported to the Court of Directors, in the lofty language of a triumphant proconsul, the general result of the wars and treaties that he had made for the consolidation of our Eastern empire and the pacification of all India – “A general bond of connection is now established between the British government and the principal states of India, on principles which render it the interest of every state to maintain its alliance with the British Government, which preclude the inordinate aggrandizement of any one of those states by usurpation of the rights and possessions of others, and which secure to every state the unmolested exercise of its separate authority within the limits of its established dominion, under the general protection of the British power.”

It is indeed from this period, and from the great augmentations of territory obtained by Lord Wellesley’s high-handed and clear-headed policy, that we may date the substantial formation of the three Indian Presidencies. Up to 1792 the Madras Presidency administered in full jurisdiction no more than a few districts on the coast. But between 1799 and 1804 the partition of Mysore, the lapse of Tanjore, the cessions from Haidarabad, and the transfer of the whole Karnatic to the Company, brought large and fertile tracts within the administrative circle of Madras and constituted it the headquarters of a large government in South India, which has received no very important subsequent accretions.

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In Western India the Bombay Presidency, which had hitherto been almost entirely confined to the seaboard, and whose principal importance had been derived from its harbour and trading-mart, now acquired valuable districts in Gujarat; and the influence of its government rose to undisputed predominance throughout the adjoining native states, especially at the Maratha capitals of Poona and Baroda.

In North India the Marathas had lost all power; the important province of Bundelkhand, containing a number of minor chiefships, had been brought entirely under British influence and partly under British rule; the ceded and conquered districts obtained from Oudh and from Sindhia were settling down under regular English administration. The Presidency at Calcutta, which now extended, as has been said, from the Bay of Bengal north-westward to the Himalayas and the Panjab frontier, became henceforward the centre and the chief controlling power of a vast dominion, ruling directly over the richest and most populous region of India, indirectly imposing its presence over every other state or group of chiefships south of the Sutlaj River, drawing them all within its orbit, and enveloping them all within the external bounds of its sovereignty. The only Indian rulerships completely outside the sphere of this paramount influence were those which occupied the Panjab (where the Sikh power was now drawing to a head), the country along the Indus River, and the mountains of Nepal.

The seven years of Lord Wellesley’s Governor-Generalship,

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The Royal Palace at Baroda

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from May, 1798, to July, 1805, constitute the most important and critical stage in the building up of our Indian dominion on the foundations that had been laid by Clive and Hastings. He had reached India at a moment when the British government was halting dubiously between two political ways, before a horizon that was cloudy and unsettled. On the one hand lay the course that had been prescribed by Parliament, of holding aloof from the quarrels of the native powers and of maintaining an attitude of defensive isolation within our own borders. On the other was the course of going forward to meet dangers and disarm rivals, of striking boldly into the medley before disorder or disaffection could gather strength, and of securing the tranquillity of the British possessions by enforcing peace and submission among our neighbours.

Lord Cornwallis and Sir John Shore, his predecessors, had followed, so far as was possible, the former course. But even before arriving in India, Lord Wellesley had discovered (as he wrote long afterward to Lord Ellenborough) “how vain and idle was poor old Cornwallis’s reliance on the good faith of Tippu, and on the strength to be derived from treaties with the Marathas or the Nizam.” With such preconceived notions he immediately adopted, without hesitation, the latter course, and it must be admitted that his choice was rewarded by triumphant success. He crushed the Sultan of Mysore in a single brief campaign; he disarmed and disbanded the formidable corps d’armée of fourteen thousand sepoys under French officers that was

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maintained by the Nizam; he took possession of the Karnatic, annexed half the dominions of the Oudh Vizir, forced all the great military states into subjection or subsidiary alliance, and by completely breaking down the power of the Maratha confederacy he removed the last important obstacle to the accomplishment of England’s undisputed supremacy.

We may regard with just admiration the high qualities shown by the Governor-General in the prosecution of this magnificent career, his rapid apprehension of a complicated political situation, and the vigour and address with which he carried out not only military operations and diplomatic strokes, but also the reforms of internal administration and the organization of government in the ceded or conquered provinces. No man was ever a better subject for panegyric; nor is it worthwhile to scan too closely, at this distance of time, the defects of a great public servant by whose strenuous qualities the nation has profited very largely.

It is essential, however, to lay stress, for historical purposes, on the peculiar combination of circumstances which gave scope and encouragement to Lord Wellesley’s ardent and masterful statesmanship, and which enabled him to treat those who opposed him or criticized him with the supreme contempt that his home correspondence invariably discloses. He had left England and reached India in the darkest hour of the fierce struggle between the French and English nations, when Buonaparte’s star was in the ascendant over Europe, when he was invading Egypt and meditating Asiatic

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conquests, and when a powerful Tory Ministry was governing at home by measures that in these days would be denounced as the most arbitrary coercion.

At such a conjunction there was little time or inclination to look narrowly into Wellesley’s declarations that the intrigues of the French in India and the incapacity or disaffection of the native rulers reduced him to the necessity of dethroning or disarming them, and that for British rule to be secure it must be paramount. As a matter of fact, he was applauded and supported in measures ten times more high-handed and dictatorial than those for which Hastings had been impeached a dozen years earlier. During that interval the temper of the English Parliament had so completely changed that he could afford to ride roughshod over all opposition in India, and to regard the pacific directors of the East India Company as a pack of narrow-minded old women.

The avowed object of Lord Wellesley had been to enforce peace throughout India, and to provide for the permanent security of the British possessions by imposing upon every native state the authoritative superiority of the British government, binding them forcibly or through friendly engagements to subordinate relations with a paramount power, and effectively forestalling any future attempts to challenge England’s exercise of arbitration or control. In short, whereas up to his time the British government had usually dealt with all states in India upon a footing of at least nominal political equality, Lord Wellesley revived and proclaimed

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the imperial principle of political supremacy. All his views and measures pointed toward the reconstruction of another empire in India, which he rightly believed to be the natural outcome of the British position in the country and the only guarantee of its lasting consolidation. It must be acknowledged that Wellesley’s trenchant operations only accelerated the sure and irresistible consequences of establishing a strong civilized government among the native states that had risen upon the ruins of the Moghul Empire; for by swift means or slow, by fair means or forcible, the British dominion was certain to expand, and the armed opposition of its rivals could not fail to be beaten down at each successive collision with a growing European power.

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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