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Chapter 13 – The Administration of Lord Cornwallis

1786–1839

But the essence of the new governing constitution conferred upon British India did not only lie in the vigour which it infused into the executive by placing power and responsibility upon a plain incontestable basis; it also strengthened the Governor-General immensely by bringing him into close political relations with the ministry at home. Lord Cornwallis, the first of the new dynasty of Parliamentary Governors-General, went to India with a high reputation as a soldier and a diplomatist, sure of the support of the strongest ministry that had ever governed England, and invested with well-defined supreme authority, military as well as civil, under a full statutory title. He was Governor-General over all three Presidencies, and he was also appointed Commander-in-Chief.

Such a concentration of power in one man, his rank, his reputation, his intimacy with Pitt and Dundas, all combined to sweep away the obstacles that had blocked the path of Hastings, and for the first time to clothe the representative of England in India with the attributes

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of genuine rulership. In the exercise of these ample powers he was materially aided by the political situation in Europe and Asia. The unfortunate and misconducted wars of Lord North’s government had ceased; they had been succeeded, in the East and in the West, by a period of peace for England; it was the interval of cloudy stillness before the explosion of the great revolutionary cyclone in Europe, which was not felt in India until 1793.

Such a breathing-time and interval of calm was well suited for carrying out wide internal reforms in India, for consolidating England’s position by a stroke at her foremost and most intractable Indian antagonist in Mysore, and for inaugurating a scheme of peaceful affiances with the other native princes, which lasted with the fair weather, but collapsed as soon as the storm-wave of European commotions reached the shores of India.

In the year 1786, therefore, we find the English sovereignty openly established in India under a Governor-General entrusted with plenary authority by the representatives of the English nation. The transformation of the chief governorship of a chartered commercial company into a senatorial proconsulship was now virtually accomplished; and with the accession of Cornwallis there sets in a new era of accelerated advance. It was Hastings who first set in order the chaos of Bengal misrule, and who drew the ground-plan of regular systematic procedure in almost all departments of executive government. But the administration of

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Hastings had been constantly interrupted by quarrels at home and wars abroad.

Henceforward internal organization goes on continuously; laws are passed, abuses are firmly repressed, and the settlement of the land revenue of Bengal is the administrative achievement by which the name of Lord Cornwallis is now chiefly remembered in India. In fixing forever the land-tax of the districts then included within the regular jurisdiction of the Presidency, he followed the natural bent of a statesman familiar only with the property tenures of England, where a Parliament of landlords was just about to make their own land-tax a perpetual charge at a fixed. rate of valuation. And although the measure has cut off the Indian treasury from all share in the increase of rents and the immense spread of cultivation, although it has prevented the equitable raising of the land revenue in proportion with the fall in value of the currency in which it is paid, yet it has undoubtedly maintained Bengal as the wealthiest province of the empire.

From this time forward, also, political insecurity within British territory gradually gives way to a sense of stable and enduring dominion, and to that feeling of confidence in a government which is the mainspring of industry. While the people begin to adjust themselves at home to these novel conditions of Western sovereignty, abroad the British frontier is rarely threatened and hardly ever crossed by a serious enemy. The British government has now taken undisguised rank among the first-class powers of India. There is as yet,

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Tippu's tomb at Seringapatam

however, no formal assertion of superiority; the native states still make war and peace with England on equal terms; they receive special missions, negotiate alliances, and with their internal affairs we pretend to no concern.

When Lord Cornwallis assumed office, there was peace between the English and the native powers; although the Marathas had joined the Nizam of Haidarabad in an attack on Tippu of Mysore, whose fanaticism and arrogance had alarmed and alienated all his neighbours. In this attack Cornwallis refused to join, but he set about bringing his army up to a war-footing; and Tippu, who was clear-sighted enough to foresee danger from the English, spared no pains on his side to strengthen himself against them. The Mysore ruler,

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who had witnessed the last appearance of the French, as his allies, on the coast, who still had access to the seaboard and was in touch with the French settlements, had by no means abandoned his father’s policy of endeavouring to check the growth of English predominance by calling in the assistance of other European nations.

Tippu’s ignorance of the real condition of European affairs, however, led him to make plans that were entirely futile, and that only accelerated his own destruction. In 1787 he sent to Constantinople an embassy which, though it effected nothing at all, obtained from the Sultan so ostentatious a reception that it probably encouraged the unfortunate ruler of Mysore in miscalculating his own power and the intrinsic value of such politic courtesies. In the same year his ambassadors were civilly welcomed at Paris by Louis XVI, at a moment when the relations between France and England were decidedly strained. These most unsubstantial diplomatic amenities seem to have deluded him into a very false reckoning of his situation; while they confirmed the English in their attitude of vigilant suspicion and in their determination to cut off such dangerous communications at the first opportunity.

In such an environment of reciprocal distrust the futility of attempting to arrest the natural current of affairs in India by Acts of Parliament, or to resist the converging pressure of circumstances, was soon demonstrated. It had been declared by Pitt’s act that as the pursuit of schemes of conquest was repugnant to the

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wish, to the honour, and to the policy of the British nation, the Governor-General must not declare hostilities or enter into any treaty for making war against a native state, or for guaranteeing it against an enemy, except for the defence of British territory or of allies from imminent attack. But Cornwallis had scarcely landed when his protection against Tippu was claimed by the Nizam.

There being no immediate menace of war, the Governor-General held himself precluded by the act from according the Nizam a defensive alliance which might have checked Tippu’s machinations. What he did, however, was to give the Nizam’s envoy a written promise that he would furnish the Nizam, under an old treaty, with an auxiliary force whenever he should need it, making the reservation that it must not be employed against powers in alliance with the Company. These powers were specifically named; and as Mysore was not among them, the engagement tended rather to promote than prevent hostilities, since Tippu not unreasonably treated it as a preliminary to some direct movement against himself.

All these jealousies and mutual preparations were evidently making for war between the British and the Mysore Sultan, who soon relieved Lord Cornwallis from all further doubt in regard to the act’s interpretation. In defiance of formal warnings he proceeded to make an utterly unjustifiable and unsuccessful attack upon the Raja of Travancore, a state under English protection. Lord Cornwallis thereupon formed a league against

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An action at Seringapatam

him with the Marathas and the Nizam of Haidarabad, and the allied armies marched into the Mysore country. Very little was effected by the first season’s operations, and in 1791, when Lord Cornwallis took command in person, the advance upon Seringapatam failed.

But in the following year’s campaign Tippu was overpowered, besieged in his capital, and compelled to sign a treaty in 1792 which crippled his resources and stripped him of half his territory, including Coorg and the Malabar district along the western seacoast.

From that time forward he was constantly seeking ways and means of revenge; and he clung desperately to the vain hope of foreign alliances that might strengthen his hands against the English. He negotiated with the Marathas, with Zaman Shah, the Afghan

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king, and with the French, who entertained his overtures and made a show of helping him up to a point just sufficient to annoy and irritate the English. The only serious consequence of Tippu’s dealings with France was that when, in 1793, the French Revolution produced a violent rupture between the two nations in Europe, Mysore was soon left exposed to the full force of England’s hostility.

In the meantime the Maratha chief Mahadaji Sindhia, on whom the Moghul emperor had been induced to confer the title of vicegerent of the empire, who had made large conquests in the north, and had defeated his rival, Holkar, in a desperate fight, was becoming all-powerful in Upper India. His political aim was to maintain his own independence of the Maratha confederation without dissolving it. And as he was sagacious enough to perceive that the English were fast rising to superiority in India, he had been exceedingly distrustful of any alliance with them for the purpose of aiding them to crush a rival, even though that rival should be the Mohammedan ruler of Mysore.

Now that Tippu (with whom Sindhia was corresponding) had been humbled, it was becoming manifest that the Marathas were the only military power, from the Sutlaj River to the sea, from which the English had any opposition to apprehend. They were masters of immense territory, and their leaders were at the head of numerous well-equipped armies, which easily overcame the weak incoherent resistance of the Rajput clans, and would have certainly routed with

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small difficulty the mercenary troops of the two principal Mohammedan states, Oudh and Haidarabad. But the natural tendency of the commanders of separate armies to carve independent domains for themselves out of the provinces they had occupied, and to turn their camps into separate capitals, inevitably created great mutual jealousy and constantly embarrassed the common action of the confederation.

Mahadaji Sindhia, whose independence had been recognized in 1786, had since increased rapidly his possessions and his military armaments, and he now occupied the country round Delhi with a large and well-appointed army. The expediency of placing some check on Sindhia’s aggrandizement, before it should bring him into collision with the British, had been pressed upon the Governor-General by his political agents. But in this case, as in others, Pitt’s act, which strictly bound down. the British government to non-interference unless war should be imminent, had the effect of holding the English in a position of enforced immobility that often encouraged a rash and ambitious prince to push forward to the point at which hostilities became inevitable. Sindhia’s policy was now manifestly aiming at combinations against the English as against a foreign power which threatened the subjugation of all India. But his predominance alarmed the Maratha chiefs quite as much as the British government, so that the Peshwa was in no haste to follow his lead or to fall in with his projects.

In 1794, however, Mahadaji Sindhia died suddenly;

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Tomb of the Sindhias, at Lashkar

a man of great ambition, political capacity, and talent for war, who had carried out on a larger scale than any other Indian prince the new system of raising disciplined battalions under European officers, supported by effective artillery. But it had already been seen and said by the more far-sighted leaders among the Marathas themselves that this system, which rendered them irresistible to all other native antagonists, to the loose

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feudatory militia of Rajputana, and to the raw levies of the Mohammedan princes, was more likely to harm than to help them whenever they should be matched against their only serious opponents. These men saw that it was an attempt to play the game of war by European methods and to beat the English by their own weapons. The regular troops and the cannon hampered those rapid daring marches and manoeuvres of light-armed cavalry – their dashing charges and dexterous retreats – which for a hundred years had won for the Marathas their victories over the unwieldy Moghul armies and had on various occasions perplexed and discomfited the English commanders.

In the days of Dupleix and Clive the employment of disciplined troops was equivalent to the introduction of a new military weapon of great efficacy, known to no one except the French and English; and unexpected superiority of this kind always secures a triumph, at first, to the side that possesses it. But the armament and tactics of civilized nations imply high proficiency in the art of war, abundant supplies of costly material, and a strong reserve of well-trained officers; they can-not be hurriedly adopted by an Asiatic chief whose people are “totally unaccustomed to such inventions. All military history, up to the latest time, has shown that for a rough uncivilized people, destitute of experience and resources, but strong in numbers, by far the best chance of successfully resisting a small well-trained force lies in irregular evasive warfare. The severest reverses suffered by disciplined English troops in America,

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Asia, and Africa – from Braddock’s defeat on the Ohio to the recent disasters in Afghanistan and the Transvaal – have always been in fighting against active irregulars, who used their own arms and methods.

Moreover, in proportion as the Marathas adopted the armament and tactics of European warfare, they lost the advantage that comes out of unanimity of national, religious, or tribal sentiment, out of the bond of a common country or tradition. The new system required professional soldiers, who must be enlisted wherever they could be found; and especially it needed foreign officers. In this manner the foreign or alien element grew rapidly, until the later Maratha armies became principally a miscellaneous collection of mercenaries, enlisted from all parts of India, with trained infantry and artillery commanded by adventurers of different races and countries.

From this time forward, indeed, it is a marked characteristic of the British battles with the Marathas, as afterwards with the Sikhs, that although they were always sharply contested and often gained at a heavy cost, yet the victories were decisive; the blows were crushing because they were delivered at close quarters upon compact and organized bodies of troops which, when they were once dispersed or destroyed, could not be replaced.

And inasmuch as all the Indian states and dynasties with whom we fought depended for their existence on success in war, an overthrow placed them entirely at our mercy. For in almost every case their territorial

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title was derived only from recent occupation, and their possession was cemented by little or no national sympathies; so that, unless the conqueror thought fit to set up again the fallen ruler, the people merely underwent a change of masters.

The whole attempt of the native powers to imitate the military methods of Europe proved a delusion and a snare. It led them to suppose that they could put themselves on an equality with the English by a system that really placed them at a disadvantage, and to maintain, upon a false estimate of their strength, large military establishments under foreign officers, which it soon became the chief object of the English government to disband or destroy. Nothing was easier for the English, with their command of money and war material, than to increase their own disciplined army in India up to whatever point might be necessary for maintaining superiority. Nothing, on the other hand, was more difficult than for an Indian prince to repair his losses of cannon and trained soldiers.

Nor is it hard to understand how, in these conditions of military and political inequality, every successive campaign in India for the last hundred years has resulted in an increase of the English territory. In fact the whole country has thus passed gradually under the dominion of the government which excelled all the other leading states in the art of disciplined fighting, and whose stability did not in any event depend upon the life or luck of a single ruler or general or upon the issue of a single battle, because its resources were

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A street-corner in Bhopal

drawn from an immense reserve of civilized wealth and energy beyond the sea.

After his campaign against Mysore, the chief object of Lord Cornwallis had been to provide for the peace of South India by inducing the Marathas and the Nizam of Haidarabad to join him in a treaty guaranteeing against Tippu the territories that each of them possessed at the close of the war.

To this proposition the Nizam readily agreed, being much afraid of the Marathas; but the Marathas declined it because they meditated plundering the Nizam. The two great Mohammedan States of Oudh and Haidarabad were remarkably weak in proportion to their territory and revenue; they

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carried little weight in the political balance; and the chief concern of the British government was to prevent their premature dissolution. By this time Oudh had fallen entirely under the British protectorate; a system which, while it upholds the native dynasty, is necessarily incompatible with the independent sovereignty of the prince; for the military defence of the country is undertaken by the protecting power, and the ruler binds himself by a subsidiary treaty to defray the expenses of an army which he does not command.

Moreover, no Asiatic dynasty can endure which does not produce a succession of able men, tried and selected by proof of individual capacity to rule. But the system of protectorates, which maintains hereditary right and does not permit an incapable heir to be set aside by energetic usurpers, cannot fail to seat on the throne, sooner or later, a prince who has no natural right to be there. The decline of governing ability was already visible in Oudh, which was falling into internal confusion and financial straits. Security from internal revolt and foreign attack bred indolence and irresponsibility; mismanagement of the revenue increased the burden of the subsidy; and the maladministration that was partly the consequence of the protective system became a reason for continuing it. Similar symptoms showed themselves later in Haidarabad, when that state also passed under the British protectorate.

The history of these complicated transactions serves mainly to illustrate the extraordinary and ever-recurring difficulties which have beset the British government

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in India, where the policy of neutrality and non-interference only ripened the seeds of eventual discord, compelling the English to step in at last for the cure of evils that might have been prevented. No other considerable power in the country was interested in the preservation of order; the stronger preyed, as a matter of course, upon the weaker; and there was always the danger, almost the certainty, that any military chief who should succeed in trampling down his rivals would before long tuna his accumulated force against British territory.

We may remember that the British Islands had never been able to abstain from taking part in any great war, during the eighteenth century, among the neighbouring nations of the European continent, where England owned no land except Gibraltar. There is little cause, then, for surprise that the English in India, with possessions scattered, isolated, remote from each other, intermixed with foreign territory, and exposed to easy attack on every side, except from the sea – in a country where, as Arthur Wellesley later said, no such thing as a frontier really existed – were invariably, though often reluctantly, drawn into participation with the quarrels and scrambling for dominion which in those days were continually upsetting the balance of power and the tranquillity of the country.

Thus the acts and results of Lord Cornwallis’s administration show how difficult it had become for the English to stand still, or to look on indifferently at the conflicts that broke out all round them in India.

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It had been a general charge in England against the Company’s governors that they plunged into unjust or unnecessary wars, and were troubled by an insatiable appetite for their neighbours’ provinces. But it was understood to be one unquestionable advantage of the regime inaugurated in 1786 that temperance, political self-denial, the renunciation of all ambitious enterprises, and the preservation of peace would have been secured by placing the conduct of affairs under direct ministerial control.

No Governor-General ever set out for India under more earnest injunctions to be moderate, and above all things pacific, than Lord Cornwallis; and these general orders were ratified by a specific Act of Parliament, framed with the express purpose of restraining warlike ardour or projects for the extension of dominion. Pitt’s act of 1784 was emphatic in this sense, and in 1793 another act declared that: “Forasmuch as to pursue schemes of conquest and extension of dominion in India are measures repugnant to the wish, the honour, and the policy of this nation, it shall not be lawful for the Governor-General in Council to declare war, or to enter into any treaty for making war, or for guaranteeing the possessions of any country princes or states (except where hostilities against the British nation in India have been actually commenced or prepared), without express command and authority from the home government.”

Yet Lord Cornwallis, whose moderation and judgment have never been doubted, found himself obliged

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to prepare for hostilities almost immediately after his arrival at Calcutta; and he soon discovered that the restraining statutes operated to promote the very evils they were intended to prevent. Under their restrictions the English Governor-General was obliged to look on with tied hands at violent aggressions and dangerous combinations among the native states, and was held back from interposing until matters had reached a pitch at which the security of his own. territory was actually and unmistakably threatened. The Mysore war, and a considerable extension of dominion, followed in spite of all injunctions and honest efforts to the contrary. Yet such was the confidence in the good intentions of Cornwallis that, when he left India in 1793, there was a general impression in England that he had merely taken the necessary steps for inaugurating a pacific and stationary policy; whereas in fact the British were on the threshold of an era of wide-ranging hostilities and immense annexations.

Nothing, indeed, is more remarkable, as illustrating the persistence of the natural forces that propelled the onward movement of English dominion, than the fact that the immediate consequence of bringing India under direct Parliamentary control was to stimulate, not to slacken, the expansion of British territories. Mr. Spencer Walpole has declared in his “History of England” that every prominent statesman of the time disliked and forbade further additions to the Company’s territories; and we have seen that frequent laws were passed to check the unfortunate propensity for fighting

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that was supposed to have marred the administration of the Company. Nevertheless, it is historically certain that a period of unprecedented war and conquest began when the Crown superseded the Company in the supreme direction of Indian affairs.

The beginning of our Indian wars on a large scale dates from 1789; and the period between. 1786 and 1805, during which British India was ruled (with a brief interval) by the first two Parliamentary Governors-General, Cornwallis and Wellesley – by Governors-General, that is, who were appointed by ministers responsible to Parliament, and for party reasons – comprises some of the longest wars and largest acquisitions by conquest or cession. It stands on record that the greatest development of British dominion in India (up to the time of Lord Dalhousie) coincides precisely with these two Governor-Generalships. The foundations of the Indian empire were marked out in haphazard piece-work fashion by merchants, the corner-stone was laid by Clive in Bengal, and the earlier stages were consolidated by Hastings; but the lofty superstructure was raised entirely by a distinguished line of Parliamentary proconsuls and generals. For the last hundred years every important annexation in India has been made under the sanction and the deliberate orders of the national government in England.

The closer connection of India with England, and the importance of the English stake in the country, had now brought our Asiatic dependency so much more within the current of European politics that the rising

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The attack on the Sialkot Mutineers by Gen. Nicholson’s Irregular Cavalry, July 12, 1857

tide of hostilities between France and England dashed over it, and swept forward the course of events. In 1793 began the long war with revolutionary France, which soon affected the temper of English politics in Asia.

A few years afterwards Buonaparte was marching toward military despotism in the spirit of an Asiatic conqueror, upsetting thrones and uprooting landmarks, overriding national traditions and hereditary rights, carving out new kingdoms by his sword, and laying out

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their boundaries as one might divide an estate into convenient farms or properties. His delight in this pastime attracted him instinctively toward Asia, where he saw that a genius for interminable war and autocratic administration would find illimitable scope in knocking down the old-fashioned rickety governments and rebuilding them symmetrically at leisure. His inclinations tallied, moreover, with his interests, since he could combine a taste for Asiatic adventure with an ardent desire to strike a blow at the English. somewhere on the land, as he could make nothing of them at sea.

The project of an expedition against British India was constantly in his mind; but his first and last attempt at Asiatic conquest was the abortive occupation of Egypt and the march into Syria in 1798, with the declared object, among others, of “hunting the English out of all their Eastern possessions and cutting the Isthmus of Suez.” The menace only served, as usual, to hasten English annexations in India. For on one side it accentuated the alarm and resentment with which the English were watching the intrigues of the French with the Marathas and the Sultan of Mysore, and the recruitment of French officers for the armies of those states. On the other side, the rapidly increasing predominance of the English and the overtures of the French misled the native princes into venturing for their self-protection upon the very steps that helped to precipitate their downfall. Now that England had completely recognized the immense value of her Asiatic

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possessions, her traditional jealousy of interference by the only European nation that had repeatedly challenged her ascendency in India naturally reached its acutest stage during a desperate war with France.

The last act of Lord Cornwallis before he left India, in 1793, had been to seize all the French settlements; Ceylon was taken from the Dutch in 1796; and the English now treated any symptom of an understanding with France, or even of a leaning in that direction, as a dangerous spark to be extinguished at once. Sir John Shore (Lord Teignmouth), who held the Governor-Generalship ad interim until Lord Mornington arrived in 1798, was a very cautious and over-prudent politician. Being averse, on principle, to extending British relations or responsibilities, he refused, rather ungenerously, to assist the Nizam when the Marathas attacked him, thereby estranging our principal ally and encouraging our principal rivals. When the Nizam, who was very anxious for a British alliance, proposed a defensive treaty on the basis of mutual territorial guarantee, the English government drew back, not wishing to defend Haidarabad at the risk of offending the Marathas, who might retaliate by a league with Tippu.

The consequences of this half-hearted attitude were serious; for the Marathas invaded the Haidarabad country, dispersed the Nizam’s army, and at Kurdla, in 1795, enforced on him an ignominious surrender to very extortionate terms. This triumph brought the Marathas a considerable increase of strength and reputation, while the Nizam was so deeply incensed at our desertion

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of him that he largely increased his trained battalions and relied more than ever on the French officers who commanded them, and who fomented his alienation from the English. Yet as soon as the Nizam began to augment and reform his regular troops, under Raymond and other French officers, Sir John Shore at once inter-posed to prevent him.

What the Governor-General feared was a combination against him between Mysore and the Marathas; and what he hoped was that these two jealous and mutually suspicious powers would sooner or later fall to blows against each other. But in fighting times the pacific bystander’s attitude rarely suits the interest or dignity of a neighbouring state. In the present in-stance it only stimulated the combative instincts of both rivals, who soon became more aggressive and more formidable to the British. The impolicy of having abandoned the Nizam to the Marathas now began to appear; for the Marathas had gained great augmentation of wealth and predominance, and their audacity increased as their respect for the English diminished.

Moreover, Tippu of Mysore, who nourished wild hopes of revenge and of recovering his losses in the late war, believed the Nizam’s strength to have been so reduced that he might seize all the Haidarabad country if the English could be prevented from opposing him. And for the purpose of counteracting the English power he pursued his futile endeavours to negotiate foreign alliances. He pressed the Afghan Amir, Shah Zaman, to invade India, and he received in reply a

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sympathetic assurance that the Amir would soon come to exterminate all infidels and polytheists. In 1797 Shah Zaman did march through the Panjab and occupy Lahore, to the great alarm of the Anglo-Indian government; for the whole of North India was stirred by his coming, the Mohammedans were preparing to join his standard, the Oudh ruler was totally incapable of making any effective resistance, and if the Afghan had pushed on to Delhi, there would have been an outbreak of anarchy and perilous commotion. Such a formidable diversion would undoubtedly have drawn northward every available English regiment for the protection of the Bengal frontier; but in 1798 Shah Zaman was obliged to return hurriedly to guard his own western provinces from the Persians.

Meanwhile Tippu had sent a secret mission across the Indian Ocean to the Isle of France, as Mauritius was then called, with letters for the Directory in Paris, proposing an offensive and defensive alliance with the French Republic for the purposes of destroying the English in India and dividing the country between himself and France. The governor of the French islands gave his envoys a public reception, and on January 30, 1798, issued a proclamation calling for volunteers to serve under the Mysore flag against the common enemy, England. In 1799 Buonaparte addressed to him a letter, dated Headquarters, Cairo, saying: “You have been already informed of my arrival on the shores of the Red Sea, with an innumerable and invincible army, full of the desire of releasing you from the iron yoke of

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the English,” and asking Tippu to send him an agent. But the French were themselves soon cut off in Egypt; and as the rumours of foreign intervention by sea or land died away, the Mysore Sultan, abandoned to the hostility of the English whom he had seriously alarmed, soon underwent the certain fate of Oriental rulers who venture among the quarrels of European nations.

The kind of vessel called Ghrab

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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