friend and companion of the Prince of Wales. From having lived so much with His Royal Highness, he had not only suffered in his health, but materially impaired his fortune, and was therefore happy to get out of the way of the Prince’s temptations by visiting Bengal, upon which Establishment he was placed upon His Majesty’s staff.’
As soon as St Leger arrived, Hickey, who had known him in England, invited him to join a party of guests he was to entertain at his house at Chinsurah. Colonel Wesley was also of the party which, Hickey congratulated himself, was a great success.
We rose early every morning making long excursions from which we returned with keen appetite for breakfast. That meal being over we adjourned to the billiard room … When tired of that game [we played] Trick Track [backgammon] … Thus the morning passed. At about half past three we retired to our respective rooms, of which I have seven for bachelors, to dress, and at four precisely sat down to dinner.6
Hickey gave another party at Chinsurah on the King’s birthday, 4 June; and again on that occasion Colonel Wesley was one of the guests. Their host had procured a ‘tolerably fat deer’ and a ‘very fine turtle’ and engaged ‘an eminent French cook from Calcutta to dress the dinner’. He had taken ‘especial care to lay in a quantum sufficit of the best champagne that was procurable’; his ‘claret, hock, and madeira’, he knew, were ‘not to be surpassed in Bengal’. The party accordingly went off with the ‘utmost hilarity and good humour’. ‘We had several choice songs … followed by delightful catches and glees … and General St Leger in the course of the evening sang “The British Grenadiers” with high spirit.’ The party did not break up until between two and three o’clock in the morning; and nearly all the guests woke up with dreadful hangovers.
Freely as the claret was pushed about at Chinsurah, however, the drinking there was moderate when compared with that in the officers’ mess of the 33rd Foot, over which Colonel Wesley presided, and in the house of Wesley’s second-in-command, Lieutenant-Colonel John Sherbrooke, at Alypore, three miles from Calcutta. Here the drinking of the 33rd’s officers was astonishing. One of the 33rd’s parties, so Hickey wrote, consisted of eight as strong-headed fellows as could be found in Hindustan, including Colonel Wesley.
During dinner we drank as usual, that is, the whole company each with the other at least twice over. The cloth being removed, the first half-dozen toasts proved irresistible, and I gulped them down without hesitation. At the seventh … I only half filled my glass whereupon our host said, ‘I should not have suspected you, Hickey, of shirking such a toast as the Navy,’ and my next neighbour immediately observing, ‘it must have been a mistake,’ having the bottle in his hand at the time, he filled my glass up to the brim. The next round I made a similar attempt, with no better success, and then gave up the thoughts of saving myself. After drinking two-and-twenty bumpers in glasses of considerable magnitude, the [Colonel] said, everyone might then fill according to his own discretion, and so discreet were all of the company that we continued to follow the Colonel’s example of drinking nothing short of bumpers until two o’clock in the morning, at which hour each person staggered to his carriage or his palankeen, and was conveyed to town. The next day I was incapable of leaving my bed, from an excruciating headache, which I did not get rid of for eight-and-forty hours; indeed a more severe debauch I never was engaged in in any part of the world.7
For Colonel Wesley these days in Calcutta were a pleasant interlude; but he had not studied McKenzie’s War in Mysore and General Dirom’s Narrative of the Campaign in India to sit drinking bumpers of claret at camphor-wood dinner tables under gently swishing punkahs and passing the mouthpiece of hookahs to the wives of Company officials on lamplit verandas. There was talk of an attack on the Pacific colonies of Spain which had recently come into the war on the side of France, or upon the Dutch, now also England’s enemies, in Java, and Wesley hoped that if such an assault were to be mounted, he might be given a command in it, perhaps the chief command. Yet, as a recent arrival in India, he did not want to appear too importunate. So, when it was suggested he might command such an expedition, he demurred, proposing the name of another more senior officer, with the proviso that if anything should prevent that officer taking it, he would be prepared to accept the command himself, ‘taking chance,’ as he told his brother Richard, ‘that the known pusillanimity of the Enemy’ and his own exertions would ‘compensate in some degree’ for his lack of experience. ‘I hope,’ he added, not troubling to hide his low opinion of them, ‘to be at least as successful as the people to whom Hobart [Lord Hobart, Governor of the Presidency of Madras] wishes to give command … Of course, the Chief Command of this expedition would make my fortune; going upon it at all will enable me to free myself from debt, therefore you may easily conceive that I am not very anxious for the conclusion of a peace at this moment.’8 As though to confirm his qualifications as commander, he sent Sir John Shore a résumé of what was known of the places which were to come under attack and information he had gleaned about the harbours where the expeditionary force might be put ashore.
His hopes, however, were not to be realized; he was not given the chief command but went instead as commanding officer of the 33rd with orders to land them at Manila in the Philippines, and then launch an attack across the Sulu and Celebes Seas and through the Straits of Makassar upon the Dutch garrison in Java. But the expedition was as inconclusive as the 33rd’s attempted crossing of the Atlantic in 1795.
It got off to an unfortunate start: a young clergyman, the nephew of a friend of William Hickey, appointed by Colonel Wesley at Hickey’s request as chaplain of the 33rd, turned out to be ‘of very eccentric and peculiarly odd manners’. A day or two out of Calcutta he got ‘abominably drunk’ and ‘gave a public exhibition of extreme impropriety, exposing himself to both soldiers and sailors, running out of his cabin stark naked into the midst of them, talking all sorts of bawdy and ribaldry, and singing scraps of the most blackguard and indecent songs’. Overcome with remorse when sober, he took to his bunk and, though kindly assured by Colonel Wesley that his behaviour was ‘not of the least consequence’, that no one would think the worse of him for ‘little irregularities committed in a moment of forgetfulness’, ‘that the most correct and cautious men were liable to be led astray by convivial society’, and that ‘no blame ought to attach to a cursory debauch’, the poor young clergyman remained inconsolably penitent, refused to eat and ‘actually fretted himself to death’.9
A week or so later the entire expeditionary force was recalled. There were reports of spreading unrest in British India, while Napoleon Bonaparte, appointed to the command of the French Army of Italy, was triumphantly justifying the trust the Directory in Paris had reposed in him. There had, besides, been mutinies in the British Navy at Spithead and the Nore which were so serious in the eyes of the First Lord of the Admiralty that the Channel Fleet was now ‘lost to the country as much as if it was at the bottom of the sea’. It had consequently been decided in Calcutta that the British forces in the East must be concentrated, and the 33rd brought home forthwith across the Indian Ocean. So it was that before long Colonel Wesley – who had planned his regiment’s part in the expedition with characteristic care and attention to detail – was once more back in India in the company of William Hickey.
But, having been denied the opportunity of distinguishing himself, he felt even less inclined to fritter his afternoons and evenings away at dinner tables or to be satisfied with the undemanding routine of regimental life. He found time to study his books on Indian affairs and even produced a long and detailed refutation of a work that had recently appeared entitled Remarks upon the Present State of the Husbandry and Commerce of Bengal. He also became a familiar figure in the corridors of both Fort St George, where Lord Hobart exercised his authority as Governor of the Presidency of Madras, and Fort William, the headquarters of the Governor-General of India.
