officials the sums due to them – ‘to support himself on account of his long services and his present reduced situation’.6
Wellesley remained equally sympathetic towards the feelings and interests of the natives, though he still did not entertain a very high opinion of their probity. He came down firmly on soldiers who maltreated them, taking the opportunity presented by the case of an officer who had merely been reprimanded for flogging an Indian for refusing to supply him with free straw for his horse, to remind all ranks that they were ‘placed in this country to protect the inhabitants, not to oppress them’. He made it clear to headquarters, too, that he strongly disapproved of such disgraceful behaviour being so lightly punished. When a lieutenant, who had forced a group of Indians to hand over money by making them stand in the sun with heavy weights on their heads, and who was believed to have flogged one of them to death, was given no more severe a punishment than a reprimand and six months’ suspension of pay, he protested against such leniency, emphasizing the disgrace which would fall upon the whole army were the man not to be discharged from the service.7
Stern as he could be on occasions, he was a friendly and easy companion in the officers’ mess in the Sultan’s palace, tolerant without being over-indulgent of occasional drunkenness, believing a drunken quarrel is very bad, and is always to be lamented, but probably the less it is enquired into the better’.8 He did not drink as much himself as he had done in Calcutta and as officers customarily did in India, where half a bottle of Madeira a day, with a complementary amount of beer and spirits, was considered abstemious. But he drank four or five glasses of wine with his meal and about a pint of claret afterwards. It was noticed, however, that he was quite incapable of distinguishing a fine wine from a vin ordinaire. Nor was he much interested in food, though he had a marked partiality for rice and for roast saddle of mutton with salad.
He was very even in his temper [Captain Elers recalled], laughing and joking with those he liked, speaking in his quick way, and dwelling particularly upon the few (at that time) situations he had been placed in before the enemy, the arrangements he had made, and their fortunate results, all of which were applauded by his staff … This generally formed the topic of conversation after dinner.9
The Colonel, it was also said of him, liked to be in the company of ladies whenever he could; and there was no doubt that they in turn found him attractive. He was not considered to be conventionally handsome; but he was alert and vital, attentive and eager; his body was lithe and strong, and the lingering gaze of those ‘clear blue eyes’ was pleasantly unsettling. He had a ‘very susceptible heart’, a fellow officer thought, ‘particularly towards, I am sorry to say, married ladies’. There was, for example, a Mrs Stephenson, ‘pretty & lively’, who had special apartments assigned to her at headquarters; and Mrs Gordon and Mrs Coggan; and the wife of another officer, Captain J.W. Freese, ‘his pointed attention’ to whom ‘gave offence to, not her husband, but to an aide-de-camp [Captain West] who considered it highly immoral and indecorous, and a coolness took place between him and West and they did not speak all the time I lived with the Colonel. Lady Tuite, then Mrs Goodall, interfered in the same officious way, which the Colonel did not forget; for, in after times, upon meeting him at a large party, when she held out her hand to shake hands with him, he put both his hands behind his back and made a low bow’.* 10
When there were no ladies to entertain at Seringapatam or to talk to with brisk intimacy, Colonel Wellesley would enjoy a game of billiards; but, having steadfastly set his mind against gambling, he still did not play cards for money, nor did he enjoy the idle chat of fellow officers, preferring to talk of the business of soldiering, his own experiences of it, and of the affairs, successes and misdemeanours of the East India Company and its officials. He could not hide his love of gossip, though; and when amused his loud whoops of laughter, ‘easily excited’, would reverberate around the room, ‘like the whoop of a whooping-cough often repeated’†.11 He enjoyed the mess’s amateur theatricals well enough to send for the texts of plays suitable for officers and their ladies to perform.12
From time to time, when his duties permitted, he clambered up into a ‘very handsome howdah, entirely covered with superfine scarlet cloth, hanging within two feet of the ground’, and went hunting antelope with the Sultan’s leopards which, together with their keepers, he maintained at his own expense, since the Government declined to pay for them.13
Often he would go for long, fast rides in the countryside for the peaceful administration of which he was responsible. It was essential to take exercise in India, he thought, just as it was necessary ‘to keep the mind employed’, to eat moderately, drink little wine, and, if possible, to keep in good company with the world. The last is the most difficult,’ he decided, ‘for there is scarcely a good-tempered man in India.’14
He was all the better tempered himself when news reached him that he had been promoted major-general. He had long hoped for this, once telling Captain Elers that to achieve that rank was his ‘highest ambition’,15 and he had been much disappointed on his way back to Seringapatam from Bombay to find, on eagerly looking through the latest Army List, that his own name had not been included in a roll of colonels to be promoted. In April 1802, however, the promotion came through at last, much to the satisfaction of Marquess Wellesley, who had continued to regard his brother’s earlier failure to obtain it as a slight upon his own dignity and who was to consider a decision to reduce Arthur’s allowances as commander of the troops in Mysore, Malabar and Canara as another affront, a ‘most direct, marked and disquieting personal indignity’.
Marquess Wellesley held his dignity in high esteem. He was conscious of having merited the gratitude of both the British government and the Court of Directors of the East India Company. He was, after all, in the process of consolidating the empire of which Lord Clive had laid the foundation; and he much resented criticisms of his autocratic manner and the exercise of his patronage. Certainly he lived in a grand style with a splendidly uniformed bodyguard which he increased from a mere fifty men in his predecessor’s time to four hundred, together with a band. He occupied a magnificent house, ‘the Kedleston of Bengal’; he entertained on a princely scale. But it was all for the glory of the Company and the empire in the East; and it irked him beyond measure to have to listen to guarded complaints from cheeseparing, pettifogging nonentities in the Company’s offices in Leadenhall Street who had no conception of the workings of the oriental mind. He dismissed their rumblings of discontent and, so far as he could, he determined to carry on as he thought best or he would resign. His brother Arthur supported him. ‘I hope you do not propose to stay in India longer than the end of this year,’ he wrote when their relations had been more or less restored to their former amity. ‘Such masters do not deserve your services.’16
‘I never saw a man so cool and collected as he was.’
EARLY IN 1802 the Governor-General authorized an expedition, to be led by his brother, against a troublesome rajah in Bullum, north-west of Seringapatam. The short campaign, which ended with the hanging of the rajah, gave General Wellesley further experience of forest warfare which was to stand him in good stead in the days to come. For the operations had not long been over when he was called upon to take to the field again. This time he was to operate in the territories of the Marathas north of Mysore. Here the Peshwah, the titular chief of the Maratha confederacy who had accepted the position of a prince under British protection, had been driven from Poona by Jaswant Rāo Holkar, an illegitimate son of TukojI Holkar, Maharajah of Indore. General Wellesley’s prescribed task was to restore the Peshwah to his throne in Poona and to defeat or scatter Holkar’s army.
As
