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Chapter 15 – The Stationary Period

1806–1814

But Lord Wellesley’s career of military triumphs and magnificent annexations had alarmed the Court of Directors, who protested against the increase of debt and demurred to the increase of dominion. The Governor-General professed utter contempt for their opinion, and wrote to Lord Castlereagh that no additional outrage or insult “from the most loathsome den of the India House” should accelerate his departure so long as the public safety required his aid. Nevertheless, he discovered, after Monson’s disaster, that even the Ministers found reason to apprehend that he was going too fast and too far, that Lord Castlereagh was remonstrating, and that the nation at large was startled by his grandiose reports of Indian wars, conquests, and prodigious accessions of territory. Toward the close of his term of office his measures became much more moderate. In 1805 the return of Lord Cornwallis

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The Kali Ghat, Calcutta

to India brought about a change of policy which checked and altered the whole movement; for although his second Governor-Generalship was very short, he had time to lay down the pacific principles that were acted upon by his successors.

When Lord Cornwallis reached Calcutta, he found an empty treasury, an increasing debt, the export trade of the Company arrested by the demand of specie for the military chest, and the British ascendency openly proclaimed and in process of enforcement by ways and means that evidently involved us in a rapidly expanding circle of fresh political liabilities. His own ideas, and the instructions that he had brought out, pointed in a contrary direction. He thought that the subsidiary treaties only entangled us in responsibility for defending and laboriously propping up impotent or unruly

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princes, impairing their independence and retarding the natural development of stronger organizations. Nor did’ our interests seem to him to require that we should undertake the preservation of the smaller chiefships adjacent to our frontiers from absorption by the larger predatory states. It seems, on the contrary, to have been his view that the English protectorate should not extend beyond the actual limits of British possessions – a rule of political fortification that has never been practised in India; for England has always found it necessary to throw forward a kind of glacis in advance of her administrative border-line, so as to interpose a belt of protected states or tribes between British territory proper and the country of some turbulent or formidable neighbour.

Lord Cornwallis lost no time in declaring his intention of removing the “unfavourable and dangerous impression” that the British government contemplated establishing its control and authority over every state in India. He died, however, on October 5, 1805, within three months after his arrival, before he could do more than indicate this change of policy. But his views – which represented the reaction in England against Lord Wellesley’s costly and masterful operations – so far prevailed that for the next ten years following his decease the experiment of isolation was fairly tried by the British government in India. Sir George Barlow, whom the death of Cornwallis made Governor-General for a time, laid down the principle that a certain extent of dominion, local power, and revenue would be cheaply

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sacrificed for tranquillity and security within a contracted circle; and he withdrew from every kind of relation with the native states to which the English were not specifically pledged by treaty. It will be found that whenever the Governor-Generalship has been held by an Anglo-Indian official, annexations have been exceedingly rare and the expanding movement has slackened; but Sir George Barlow even took a step backward. The subsidiary alliance with Sindhia, projected by Lord Wellesley, was abandoned; the minor principalities adjacent to or intermixed with the Maratha possessions were left to their fate; the English proclaimed an intention of living apart from broils, of dissociating themselves from the general concerns of India at large, and of improving their own property without taking part in the quarrels or grievances of their neighbours.

If, indeed, Sir George Barlow had adopted to their full extent the views that were pressed upon him by the authorities in England at this period, he would have disconnected the British government from the subsidiary treaties which invested it with paramount influence in the affairs of the two great Maratha and Mohammedan states, ruled by the Peshwa at Poona and by the Nizam at Haidarabad. But the result would have been to undo the work of Lord Wellesley, to abdicate the ascendency that the British had attained, and to throw open again the field of Central India to the Marathas, who would at once have reoccupied all the ground that the English should have abandoned.

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The Hugli River at Calcutta

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It was, indeed, so manifest to those actually watching the situation in India that the consequence would be a reversion to political confusion and would discredit England’s public faith and encourage her enemies, that the Governor-General insisted on maintaining the treaties, and even found himself obliged, against the logical tenor of his principles, to interpose vigorously in support of British diplomatic authority at Haidarabad. In 1807 Sir George Barlow was succeeded in the Governor-Generalship by Lord Minto.

In the meanwhile, although the French had at last been effectively barred out from approaching India by sea, and although every native state accessible to hostile intrigues by the seacoast had been bound over under heavy recognizances to the English alliance, yet signs and warnings of danger now began to reappear in a different quarter of the stormy political horizon.

The Persian king, who had suffered heavily from a war with Russia in 1804–1805, appealed for succour to Napoleon in Europe and also sent a similar application to Calcutta. From India, where the policy of retrenchment and retractation prevailed at that moment, no encouragement was forthcoming. The French, however, who were just then in the midst of a desperate war with Russia, readily responded to the advances of ‘Persia by sending an embassy for the conclusion of an offensive alliance against the common foe. Napoleon, who had just fought with heavy loss the drawn battle of Eylau, eagerly welcomed an opportunity of harassing the Russians in Asia and also of resuscitating his

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favourite schemes of Asiatic conquest. His envoy to Teheran was instructed that his chief aim should be to form a triple alliance between France, Turkey, and Persia for the purpose of opening out a road to India. He was also directed to ascertain what co-operation might be expected within the country, particularly from the Marathas, if India could be reached by a French army.

Then came, in 1807, the battle of Friedland, when Napoleon used his victory to convert the Russian Emperor from an enemy into an ally of France. The offensive league with Persia was quietly transformed into an offer of mediation between that kingdom and Russia; and Napoleon set about organizing with Alexander I a fresh and much more formidable confederation against the English in India. Russia was already an Asiatic power, with a distinct inclination and momentum eastward. It is, therefore, no wonder that this ominous conjunction of France, at that moment supreme in Western Europe, with the only European state that could further her designs upon India should have aroused and substantiated the alarms of an invasion by land; alarms that have never since ceased to recur periodically, gaining strength in proportion as their fulfilment has become by degrees less manifestly impracticable.

The inevitable effect of this chronic disquietude has been, from the beginning, to fix the attention of the Anglo-Indian governments more and more, in the course of the present century, upon the north-west angle of

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India. And the concentration of England’s whole foreign policy upon that point undoubtedly accelerated the expansion of her dominion in that direction, because in her anxiety about the only vulnerable side of her land frontier, she naturally pushed forward to secure it. No sooner, in fact, had the spectre of French troopships hovering about her seacoast been finally laid under the waters of Trafalgar, than the apparition of European armies marching from the Caspian to the Oxus began to trouble the prophetic imagination of English statesmen.

From the day when the Emperors of France and Russia exchanged pledges of immutable personal friendship at Tilsit, Napoleon incessantly pressed upon Alexander his grand scheme of a joint expedition through Turkey and Persia against the English in India, with the object of subverting their dominion and destroying the sources of their commercial prosperity. In 1807 the pre-eminence of France on the European Continent had reached its climax. Napoleon had defeated every army that had successively met him in the field; he had dissolved every league that had been made against him; and he had forced every leading state to join in a coalition for the rigid exclusion of English commerce from all their seaports. when, however, it became clear that these roundabout methods of attacking England were futile, and that nothing short of a direct home-thrust would disable his indefatigable enemy, the French emperor naturally turned his eyes toward the only important English possession whose

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frontier was not absolutely inaccessible to invasion from Europe by land. His imagination was fired by the recollection that Asia had more than once been traversed by conquering armies.

That Napoleon should seriously have contemplated marching across Europe and half Asia to invade the territory of an island within twenty miles of the French coast, that he should have thought it on the whole less impracticable to send a force from the Danube or Constantinople to Delhi than to transport his troops from Calais to Dover, is certainly a remarkable illustration of the impregnability of effective naval defence. But his proposals obtained very half-hearted encouragement from the Russians, who had some useful acquaintance with the difficulties of Asiatic campaigning, and a wholesome distrust of the associate in whose company they were invited to set out. They were by no means eager to embark on distant Eastern adventures, or to lock up their troops in the heart of Asia, upon the advice and for the advantage of the restless and powerful autocrat whose armies still hovered about their western frontier. They stipulated for a partition of the Turkish Empire as a preliminary dividend upon the joint-stock enterprise and as a strategic base for any further advance eastward. To this condition, however, Napoleon refused his assent, alleging, reasonably enough, that it would be playing into the hands of England, since if the Russians were to take Constantinople, the English would at once retaliate by seizing Egypt. An imposing French mission was, nevertheless, sent to Persia, and

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Ranjit Singh's Samadh at Lahore

the Anglo-Indian governments were much startled by the activity of the French agents at Teheran and other Asiatic courts.

It is from this period that we must date the embarcation of Anglo-Indian diplomacy upon a much wider sphere of action than heretofore. The English ministers soon discovered Napoleon’s plan of an Asiatic campaign, and all his secret negotiations were thoroughly known to them. For the purpose of counteracting the French demonstrations and of throwing up barrier after barrier against the threatened expedition from the Black Sea and the Caspian, the Indian Governor-General, Lord Minto, sent missions to all the rulers of states on and beyond his north-western border – to Ranjit Singh at Lahore, to the Afghan Amir, to

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Mountain Scenery in the Himalayas

Sind, and to the Shah of Persia, who was just then overawed by the combined preponderance of France and Russia.

Now that Napoleon had become Alexander’s intimate friend and ally, the Persian king knew what to expect from French mediation, so he turned for protection to the English. At Teheran a treaty was settled, after much dispute and various misunderstandings (for the English envoy from Calcutta was superseded by another envoy from London), engaging England to subsidize Persia in the event of unprovoked aggression upon her. From Lahore the mission withdrew when, after some negotiations, it was discovered that Ranjit Singh claimed recognition of his sovereignty over territory south of the Sutlaj River. At Peshawar Mountstuart Elphinstone, the envoy to Afghanistan, found the whole country distracted by civil war. The Afghan king, Shah Shuja, was barely holding on to the skirts of his kingdom; the Durrani monarchy, attacked on the west by Persia and hard pushed on the east by the Sikhs, was already breaking up again into separate chiefships. Elphinstone’s negotiations were cut short by the defeat of Shah Shuja, who fled into exile, to be restored thirty years later by an ill-fated expedition that eventually cost the English an army and the king his life.

But all these schemes for establishing close alliances and barrier treaties with Afghanistan, the Panjab, and Sind were dropped or postponed as the tide of events again began to turn westward. The Spanish insurrection

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and the preparations for invading Russia soon provided Napoleon with such ample occupation in Europe that he abandoned his schemes of Asiatic adventure. Russia was now England’s ally in a grand coalition against France; she made peace with Persia, and our apprehensions of danger from that quarter subsided when the long war which ended with Napoleon’s over-throw left us in undisturbed possession of India. The sea-roads were guarded by an irresistible navy; the total collapse of the French Empire, the exhaustion of all the great European states, the manifest decay and immobility that were spreading through Central Asia – all these circumstances united to secure us fourteen years of comparative freedom from movements or demonstrations affecting our immunity from molestation by land, and ending only in 1826, when Russia attacked Persia, thus inaugurating a long stride eastward in 1828, which revived British anxieties.

The sole result of all the missions sent from India was, indirectly, the ratification of a substantial frontier settlement, in 1809, with Ranjit Singh, who, under pres-sure, renounced his pretensions to sovereignty over certain Sikh chiefships south of the Sutlaj. From that time forward his friendly relations with the English on his south-eastern frontier, combined with the civil strife within Afghanistan on the north-west, afforded him the means and opportunity of extending his territory across the Indus, of annexing Kashmir, and of building up the Sikh power with a solidity that kept it standing in alliance with the English for nearly forty years.

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Site of Ranjit Singh’s encampment near Rupur, on the Sutlaj

On the other hand, the eventual consequences of all this premature diplomatic agitation were by no means unimportant or transitory. We have seen how French rivalry accelerated the earlier British conquests; and how at a later time the correspondence of native princes with France and the presence of French officers in the Indian armies aroused English susceptibility. It has been shown how this furnished Lord Wellesley with the necessary leverage for advancing his policy of bringing into subjection or subordinate alliance every Mohammedan or Maratha state that might cross England’s path toward undisputed predominance in the interior of India. In the same manner the intelligence of Napoleon’s projects first diverted Great Britain’s attention from the seaboard to her land frontiers, and first launched the British government upon that much larger expanse of Asiatic war and diplomacy in which

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it has continued to be almost unremittingly engaged ever since.

Up to the end of the eighteenth century the field of Anglo-Indian politics had been circumscribed within the limits of India, being confined to relations with the Indian states over which England was asserting an easy mastery by the natural and necessary growth of her ascendency. Now she entered for the first time upon that range of diplomatic observation in which all the countries of Western Asia, from Kabul to Constantinople, are surveyed as interposing barriers between Europe and the Anglo-Indian possessions. The independence and integrity of these foreign and comparatively distant states are henceforward essential for the balance of Asiatic power and for the security of the frontiers of British India. Before this epoch the jar and collision of European contests had been felt only in England’s dealings with the inland powers of India; she struck down or disarmed every native ruler who attempted to communicate with her European enemies.

But from the beginning of the nineteenth century we have had little or nothing to fear from Indian rivals, and we have gradually taken rank as a first-class Asiatic sovereignty. The vast weight of our Indian interests has ever since weighed decisively in the balance of our relations, not only with all Asia, but with any European state whose views or dispositions might in any degree affect our position in the East. We have thus become intimately concerned in the political vicissitudes of every important state on the Asiatic continent. The

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chronic disquietude which began at this period has been the source of some hazardous military projects and premature diplomatic schemes, of two expeditions into Afghanistan, of a war with Persia, and of a policy that is constantly extending the British protectorate far beyond the natural limits of India.

From the opening of the nineteenth century, then, may be dated the establishment of England’s undisputed ascendency within India. From the same period also may be reckoned the appearance of that susceptibility regarding the possible approach of European rivals by land, which led first to negotiations and treaties, and eventually to wars, between England and the foreign states adjoining or approaching her Indian dominion.

So long as the European conflict lasted, the Anglo-Indian government had continued to survey all Western Asia watchfully, and to stand on its guard against any movement by land that might seem to affect or endanger its position. In the meantime, England’s naval superiority enabled her to sweep all enemies out of the Eastern waters and to occupy any point from which the coasts or commerce of India might be exposed to molestation. The Cape of Good Hope, that important naval station halfway to India, had been finally occupied in 1806; and in 1810 Lord Minto’s expedition ejected the French from Java and Abercrombie captured Mauritius; so that the sea-routes, the ports of shelter and supply, and the harbours were all in British hands.

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At the beginning of the long peace which followed the termination of the great war in 1815 England had secured undisturbed possession of her enormously valuable conquests in the southern seas – of the Cape, of Ceylon, and of Mauritius. All the foreign settlements on the Indian seaboard were disarmed, and not one of the states within India could now measure its strength against her power and resources. Six of the chief principalities were now bound to the English system by subsidiary treaties. In Western and Central India, Baroda, Poona, and Haidarabad, in South India, Mysore and Travancore, and, toward the north-west, Oudh with a large number of minor chieftainships were all under British suzerainty and protection. Beyond the English frontiers were the growing kingdom of Ranjit Singh in the Panjab, and the Gurkha state of Nepal along the southern slopes of the Himalayas. Only in Central India there remained three principalities, surrounded by British territory, that had not yet come formally within the circle of English dominion. They belonged to the three families who still represented the fighting and predatory traditions of the Maratha confederacy, Sindhia at Gwalior, Holkar at Indore, and the Bhonsla at Nagpur. To these may be added, though the status was different, the ruling house of the Gaikwar at Baroda.

From the cessation of the great war that determined in England’s favour the contest with the native states for ascendency in India we may also reckon the introduction of orderly administration within her territories,

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A Temple at Gwalior

and of a systematic policy in regard to her neighbours, the recognition, in fact, of her imperial duties and obligations.

The Mohammedan states of Haidarabad and Oudh were indebted for their survival to British protection; they would have been destroyed, but for England’s intervention, by fiercer and more vigorous rivals in the general scramble for dominion. Nevertheless, it

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must be admitted that at times they had paid heavy salvage to the British for their rescue. In some of England’s earlier transactions with them she had used the rough thoroughgoing methods of a stormy and dissolute period; and on emergencies their lands and revenues had been laid under severe contributions to her military expenditure. The time had now come when the British government, no longer driven to these summary expedients by the struggle for existence, but drawing from an ample and secure revenue, its own possessions, could regulate its dealings in civilized fashion by settled treaties, and could begin to adjust all its dealings with native states on the fair and equitable basis of their subordinate relationship.

So also England now had some leisure for looking into the condition of her domestic administration and bringing the great provinces which had been recently acquired into some kind of order. The investigation of land-tenures, the institution of an elementary police, the first serious attempts to check the brigandage prevailing in English districts, and the arrangement and supervision of the local courts of justice took substantial form at the beginning of the nineteenth century; the roots of that immense system of organized government which has since spread over all India were planted at this season of comparative tranquillity. The first five years of the nineteenth century were occupied with continuous wars, with great territorial changes, with the removal of landmarks, and with the rearrangement of rulerships. But from that time forward the country

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has experienced immunity under British jurisdiction from foreign invasion or serious violation of its frontier, and even (except in 1857) from internal commotions. It may be questioned whether any state in Asia, or even in Europe, has enjoyed such complete political tranquillity during the same period.

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