administration of Mysore to the relevant features of its topography.
By the time Colonel Wellesley landed in Trincomalee, the proposal for an assault on French troops in Egypt by way of the Red Sea had been superseded by plans for an attack upon the French island of Mauritius. But differences with the naval Commander-in-Chief in the area led to the abandonment of Mauritius as an object of attack and its replacement by Java. Plans for an attack on the Dutch were, however, also abandoned when definite orders came from England for the implementation of the original operation, a landing on the southern Egyptian coast in the region of Suez and a march from there against the French in Lower Egypt.16
Colonel Wellesley welcomed the opportunity to command such an expedition and was chagrined to learn that the Governor-General had been overborne by the army chiefs who had impressed upon him the impropriety of appointing – indeed the outrage to military tradition which would be occasioned by appointing – so junior an officer to the command over the heads of others so senior to him in rank and so much more seasoned by experience. The command was to be entrusted instead to General Baird.
Wellesley, who was already on his way to Egypt by way of Bombay, was furious on receipt of the new orders which placed him second-in-command and determined that, whatever orders he was subsequently to receive, he would endeavour to interpret them in such a way that they would not deny him this opportunity of advancing his career. The apologetic tone of his brother’s letter breaking the news and offering him the alternative of returning to Seringapatam did nothing to mollify him.17 He wrote to Calcutta to express his indignation, angrily and unreasonably refusing to accept his brother’s reasons for what he took to be his degradation in the eyes of the world. He had not, he wrote, been informed of the possibility that he would be superseded. It was all very well for his brother to plead that he could not now employ him ‘in the chief command of so large a force’ which was now to proceed to Egypt ‘without violating every rule of the service’. How could the Governor-General think that General Baird would ever allow him to be of the smallest service to him? He stood ‘publicly convicted of incapacity’ to do more than equip a force to be led by others.18
At first he decided he would return to Mysore rather than serve under Baird; but then he learned that Sir Ralph Abercromby had landed at Abū Qir Bay with some 15,000 men and had advanced on Alexandria. Wellesley, therefore, determined to leave Bombay immediately for the Red Sea, although General Baird had not yet arrived, since delay would entail the loss of the opportunity of cooperating with Abercromby in a pincer movement which would drive the French from Egypt. As soon as Baird appeared he would, of course, hand over the command to him, although, as he reported to the Governor-General’s office, this would much annoy him as his former letters would surely have shown. However, he had ‘never had much value for the public spirit of any man who does not sacrifice his private views and feelings, when it is necessary’. It was, therefore, his ‘laudable and highly disagreeable intention’ to obey his brother’s instructions.19
As it happened, he was not able to obey them. He was suddenly taken ill and became feverish with a complaint known as Malabar Itch, a kind of ringworm, a ‘breaking out all over [his body] of somewhat of the same kind as venereal blotches’, which entailed an unpleasant treatment of nitric acid baths in Bombay.20 When this drastic remedy, which burned the towels used to dry him, had at least partially cured him, he returned to Mysore, still deeply resentful of his brother’s first giving him an independent command, then removing it from him. The angry resentment continued for months, the few letters he wrote to the Governor-General at this time being formal in the extreme, hints of intimacy being limited to his correspondence with his brother Henry, from whom he was gratified to learn that he was considered ‘still top of the tree for character’, and that Henry had never heard any man ‘so highly spoken of, so generally looked up to’.21 He corresponded also in a friendly manner with David Baird, with whom he had had companionable talks in Bombay before the General’s departure for Egypt, finding the Scotsman more sympathetic and understanding than he had expected, and ready to listen to what the Colonel had to tell him about Egypt, the Nile and the Nubian and Libyan Deserts, being not much of a reader himself. Accordingly he learned of Baird’s subsequent successes in Egypt without the rancour that continued dislike of the man might otherwise have aroused in him.
‘If we are taken prisoner, I shall be hanged as brother to the Governor-General, and you will be hanged for being found in bad company.’
RECOVERED FROM the Malabar Itch, Colonel Wellesley returned to Seringapatam in more cheerful mood than his companions might have expected in so disappointed a man. But he was still not very well, one of them thought; and, although he was no more than thirty-two years old, his closely cropped, wavy, light brown hair, parted in the middle, was already touched with grey.1
He never wore powder [one of his staff recorded], though it was at that time the regulation to do so. I have heard him say he was convinced the wearing of hair powder was very prejudicial to health as impeding the perspiration … His dress at this time consisted of a long coat, the uniform of the 33rd Regiment, a cocked hat, white pantaloons, Hessian boots and spurs, and a large sabre, the handle solid silver.2
Having taken ship south from Bombay he rode towards Mysore ahead of his escort, nonchalantly observing to Captain Elers who accompanied him, ‘If we are taken prisoner, I shall be hanged as brother to the Governor-General, and you will be hanged for being found in bad company.’3
One night the two men were sitting drinking wine after dinner and, as Elers recalled, ‘congratulating ourselves that we had arrived safely … in the country of the Coorga Rajah … when, looking through the tent doors, we saw the forest suddenly illuminated with torches and many men carrying all sorts of game on Bamboos’, including cheetahs, jackals, tigers, foxes, a boa constrictor sixteen feet long, eleven elephants’ tails and three carp.
The next day the Rajah’s green and red striped tents were pitched nearby and from these were sent over to the British officers presents of ‘backgammon boards of the handsomest sort, inlaid with ebony and ivory’ and a chess board with pieces of ‘the finest kind, carved in ivory’. The Rajah himself then appeared wearing Indian pantaloons but ‘the rest of his dress was English including English boots’.
‘In one part of the conversation,’ Elers wrote, ‘I admired Colonel Wellesley’s quickness in detecting [the interpreter] giving an erroneous translation of a speech of his to the Rajah. The Colonel was clever in quickly acquiring languages but spoke none very correctly.’4
The Colonel settled down to his duties in Seringapatam if not with enthusiasm certainly with diligence, restoring order to a regiment which, while in the incapable hands of his second-in-command during his absence, had become notorious for drunkenness and quarrelling. He wrote letters and memoranda on a familiar variety of subjects, dealing with breaches of discipline and occasional criminal conduct, ‘scenes of villainy which would disgrace the Newgate Calendar’,5 involving commissaries – a breed of men, so he once threatened, he would hang at the rate of one a day were he ever to be in a position to do so – and even implicating army officers, one of whom had been selling the East India Company’s supplies of saltpetre, which was used in the manufacture of gunpowder, as well as copper bands stripped from the pillars of the Sultan’s palace, while another had been disposing of new firearms from the weapons store and replacing them with ancient firelocks bought cheaply from native dealers. Also involved in this illicit arms dealing was an elderly lieutenant-colonel of previously good character who had been court-martialled and ruined. Taking pity on him, Colonel Wellesley, in a long and carefully worded letter, offered a plea of mitigation in view
