place before much more time passes over our heads’. He added that the fatigue, heat and bad water had given him a bowel complaint, ‘which did not confine me, but teased me much’.13
He was teased a good deal more that night. On the afternoon of the 5th, Harris ordered him to carry out a night attack on the village of Sultanpettah and a nearby grove known as Sultanpettah Tope, using his own 33rd and two Madras battalions, while Lieutenant Colonel Shawe of HM’s 12th and two other Madras battalions launched a similar attack further north. The two features stood astride an aqueduct, slightly south of the army’s route to Seringapatam, and would have to be cleared before the main attack could begin. The ground as it stands today gives little real clue to the operation. The village and the grove have gone, and the aqueduct (Wellesley called it a nullah) is now a full-blown drainage canal, steeply banked, with lush paddy-fields below it. Even then the ground was confusing, and Wellesley, on horseback amongst the outposts when the message to attack arrived, asked Harris to meet him in front of the lines to clarify the order, suggesting that ‘when you have the nullah you have the tope’. Harris did not come forward – in fairness, he had much else to do – and at sundown Wellesley attacked a position he had not been able to reconnoitre with troops who had also not seen the ground.
He led the 33rd forward in column, with the Madras battalions behind. As they approached the nullah, almost dry at that time of year, they were engaged by Tipoo’s rocket men and by musket fire, but carried the nullah with little difficulty. There Wellesley dismounted, and led the grenadier and light companies of the 33rd forward, while Major Shee brought the rest of the battalion on. The patchwork of paddy-fields, dykes and bamboo clumps at the bottom of the slope, previously screened by the banks of the nullah, would have made no sense to the attackers, while they themselves would have been silhouetted against the sky as they climbed over the bank to begin their descent. If Tipoo’s infantry could not cope with the 33rd in open field, things were different here, and there was fierce hand-to-hand fighting: Lieutenant Fitzgerald, already hit in the arm by a rocket, was bayonetted and mortally wounded, and eight men of the grenadier company were captured. While the two forward companies fought for their lives, Shee took the remaining companies back across the nullah. Such was the confusion that five of Wellesley’s companies eventually joined Shawe to the north, where they helped secure the few gains of another largely unsuccessful attack, while Captain Francis West of the grenadiers emerged further south, where the Hyderabad outposts held the front line.
Wellesley himself got back to the watercourse, where he seems to have remounted and cantered along it, trying to restore order. He was hit on the knee by a spent musket-ball at some stage in the proceedings and, finding that there was little he could do, rode to Harris’s headquarters to report his failure. Harris wrote that he ‘came to my tent in a good deal of agitation to say that he had not carried the tope. It must be particularly unpleasant to him.’ Wellesley, exhausted as much from the expenditure of nervous energy as from the physical effort, lay down on a nearby mess table and went to sleep. The news was far from unpleasant to Wellesley’s critics, who resented his closeness to the governor-general and authority over the Hyderabad contingent. Captain George Elers of the 12th, who had fallen out with Wellesley by the time he wrote his memoirs, declared that: ‘Had Colonel Wellesley been an obscure officer of fortune, he would have been brought to a court-martial and perhaps received such a reprimand for bad management as might have induced him to have resigned His Majesty’s service.’14
Yet even Wellesley’s bitterest opponents could hardly claim that it was a major setback. There were less than twenty-five British casualties, and the following day Wellesley launched a fresh attack with a larger force, and took the whole position without losing a man. However, the whole scrambling affair left its mark. Wellesley resolved ‘never to attack an enemy who is prepared and strongly posted, and whose posts have not been reconnoitred by daylight’.15 He was also well aware of having lost control of his force, and his almost pathological need to remain in control was reinforced by the incident.
Lieutenant General Stuart’s detachment of the Bombay army, which had marched on Seringapatam from the west, arrived on the 14 April, escorted by a force sent out by Harris to meet it. Stuart’s force made camp north of the Cauvery, north-west of Seringapatam. After dark on the 17th, both the Madras and Bombay forces launched preliminary attacks, the former securing the Little Cauvery and the latter taking the ruined village of Agrarum and throwing up a battery which, in the event, was just too far west for effective bombardment of Seringapatam. On the morning of the 21st, the Madras force established a battery on newly captured ground between the Little Cauvery and the South Cauvery. Stuart’s men were also busy, and threw up batteries to engage the western walls. On the morning of the 26th, British guns took on Tipoo’s cannon, and by midday had silenced those facing them. That evening and the next morning, Wellesley, the duty brigade commander, cleared Tipoo’s men from the whole area between the Little Cauvery and the South Cauvery, enabling batteries to be established only 400 yards from the walls. They were ordered to concentrate their fire on an area between the westernmost ‘bastion’ and a pair of towers further south. The gunners’ objective was to cut a cannelure – a long groove – towards the base of the masonry, so that the wall and rampart behind it would slide forward, leaving a rough slope of earth and rubble. A breach was deemed practicable when a man could ascend it with his musket and accoutrements without needing to use his hands.
When a practicable breach was established, Major General Baird, who had volunteered for the task, was to lead an assault delivered by two columns, one from Stuart’s force and the other from the Mysore army. A third column, under Wellesley, would remain in reserve, to be committed only if there was a significant check. The assault was delivered on the afternoon of 4 May 1799, and although the unexpected strength of the inner defences caused a delay, the attackers fanned out once they were through the breach and were soon fighting deep inside Seringapatam against resistance that was fast collapsing. When it seemed clear that the attack had succeeded, Wellesley posted a guard from the reliable Swiss Regiment de Meuron to secure the breach. Other soldiers helped recover wounded from the river-bed and the breach itself, and the remainder were stood down. Wellesley walked up the breach, with its carpet of dead, and from the top he could see chaos as some soldiers dealt with embers of resistance while others set about looting and drinking. Most of the 33rd was drawn up outside Tipoo’s palace, where surrender negotiations were going on. Although it had now been discovered that thirteen British prisoners, including the men of the 33rd captured at Sultanpettah, had been murdered – either by having their necks broken or by having nails driven into their skulls – the occupants of the palace were to be spared, provided that resistance ceased.
Tipoo, however, was not amongst them. Then Wellesley heard that he had been killed in the fighting at the Water gate, and walked the short distance to the northern wall, where he found a long tunnel beneath the ramparts choked with dead. A well-dressed body was dragged out, and Wellesley himself checked the man’s pulse: it was Tipoo, and he was indeed dead. Witnesses had seen a short, fat officer play a conspicuous part in the defence, standing to fire at the attackers while retainers passed him loaded weapons. He had been hit several times, and seemed to have been killed by a close-range musket shot through the temple: some said that a British soldier had fancied the jewel in his turban. The Tiger of Mysore had snarled defiantly to the last.
Leaving the grenadiers of the 33rd to protect the palace, Wellesley went out to his brigade, marched it back to camp, washed – he had been in the same clothes for sixty hours in hot weather, and was always a fastidious man – and went to bed. He must, however, have been able to hear shots, yells, and drunken singing from Seringapatam, and the episode reinforced something he already knew. The British soldier had many virtues, not least cold, almost canine, courage and determination, but if discipline wavered and drink was at hand, brave soldiers could turn into drunken animals. The attackers lost 389 killed or wounded in the assault, and though
