9

The Corpse of India

On 17 May 1798, two days before Napoleon’s fleet slipped out of Toulon and sailed swiftly across the Mediterranean towards Alexandria, a single tall-masted ship, this time a sleek East Indiaman, was tacking into the River Hooghly after seven months at sea. On board was a man who would change the history of India as much as Napoleon would change that of France; indeed, though his name is largely forgotten today, in the next seven years he would conquer more territory in India, and more quickly, than Napoleon conquered in Europe.

When Robert Clive had turned into the same river in December 1756, noting in his letters the point where the waters of the Bay of Bengal took on the distinctive colour of Ganges silt, the only Company men left in Bengal had been the beaten and malaria-stricken refugees from Calcutta, dying in droves amid the Sunderban mangrove swamps at Fulta. Calcutta itself was a ruin. Now, only forty-two years later, Calcutta was one of the largest cities in Asia, the Company completely dominated eastern and southern India and had successfully encircled the entire peninsula. As the passenger looked out from his berth in the roundhouse, he was conscious that he was being sent east specifically to bring this work of corporate conquest and consolidation to its climax.

This was his first glimpse of Bengal and he was excited by what he saw: ‘Nothing could equal the magnificence of my approach,’ he wrote to his wife on his arrival. ‘For nearly three miles the river, which is as large as the Thames at London, is bordered by lovely, well-built country houses with porticoes and colonnades. The town is a mass of superb palaces in the same style, with the finest fortress in the world. The green of the lawns surpasses anything you have ever seen … an extraordinary effect in so hot a country. The trees are more beautiful, their foliage more luxuriant, than in any European country … Arthur met us a few miles from the town, and on arrival at the fort I was saluted with a salvo of artillery.’¹

The passenger was the new Governor General, Richard, Marquess Wellesley;² ‘Arthur’ was his younger brother, who had also recently been posted to India, and who would, in time, eclipse Richard and be ennobled as the Duke of Wellington. Between them, the two would transform both India and Europe.

There was nothing inevitable about this. The brothers were neither great noblemen nor distinguished politicians and they possessed no great fortune. They came from minor, provincial Anglo-Irish Protestant stock; their main assets were their steely self-confidence, quick brains and extraordinary chutzpah. Like Clive before them, they were both aggressive and autocratic pragmatists who believed that offence was the best form of defence; like him they seemed to lack self-doubt and managed to remain undaunted by odds which would terrify more anxious, or sensitive, men.

At this stage in their lives, it was Richard, not Arthur, who was the star of the family. He had entered the House of Commons at twenty-four, was soon made a Lord of the Treasury and became close friends with the Prime Minister, William Pitt. Now, at the age of thirty-seven, when he stepped ashore at Calcutta to succeed Lord Cornwallis as Governor General of the Company’s possessions in India, Richard Wellesley was an unusually self-possessed young man with a high forehead, thick, dark eyebrows and a prominent Roman nose. He had deep-set, compelling blue eyes and a firm chin, the prominence of which was emphasised by his three-quarter-length sideburns. There was a purposeful set to his small mouth and an owlish gleam in his expression that hinted at his brilliance, and perhaps also at his ruthlessness. But there was also a look of suspicion, and even a paranoia there, too, apparent in all his portraits. It was a flaw that he increasingly came to disguise with a mask of extreme arrogance.

Where Wellesley differed quite markedly from his predecessors as Governor General was in his attitude to the Company he was expected to serve. For just as Calcutta was now quite different from the small, battered town familiar to Clive, so the Company was a very different beast from that which Clive had served. In India it might be immeasurably more powerful, with an army now roughly twenty times the size of that commanded by Clive; but in London, Parliament had been steadily chiselling away at its powers and independence, first with Lord North’s Regulating Act of 1773 and then with Pitt’s India Act of 1784. Between them, the two bills had done much to take control of political and military affairs of British India out of the hands of the Company directors in Leadenhall Street and into those of the Board of Control, the government body set up in 1784 to oversee the Company, across town in Whitehall.

Wellesley was, unrepentantly, a government man, and unlike his predecessors made no secret of his ‘utter contempt’ for the opinions of ‘the most loathsome den of the India House’.³ Though he would win the directors a vast empire, he came within a whisker of bankrupting their Company to do so, and it was clear from the beginning that he had set his sights on far more ambitious goals than maintaining the profit margins of the Company he was supposed to serve, but whose mercantile spirit he actually abhorred.

Unknown to the Company’s directors, Wellesley had come out east with two very clear goals in his mind. He was determined to secure India for British rule and was equally determined to oust the French from their last footholds on the subcontinent. In this he was following the bidding of Henry Dundas, the Board of Control’s president, whose Francophobia was transmitted to a receptive Wellesley at a series of lengthy briefings before the new Governor General embarked for India.

In particular Dundas had instructed Wellesley to ‘cleanse’ those pockets of Indian princely power that had been ‘contaminated’ by French influence – namely the courts of Tipu Sultan of Mysore, Nizam Ali Khan of Hyderabad and those of that network of rival chiefs that ruled the great Maratha Confederacy – all of whom had raised sepoy armies trained by French mercenaries and renegades, and all of which could, potentially, be used against the British and in favour of the French. At a time of national crisis, when Britain was at war not only with France but also with Holland and Spain; when its last ally – Austria – had just laid down her arms; when a naval mutiny had broken out in the Channel Fleet; and when Napoleon was drawing up plans for seaborne invasions of both Ireland, then on the verge of rebellion, and the English south coast, this was not something the British government was prepared to tolerate.⁴

Wellesley’s ideas about the renewed French threat to the Company in India came into much closer focus when, halfway through his outward voyage, his ship docked on the Cape to refit. There, at the end of January 1798, he had met a senior Company diplomat who was taking the waters at the Cape mineral baths to treat his gout and attempt to recover his shattered health. Major William Kirkpatrick was as much a Francophobe as Wellesley, but unlike the new Governor General knew India intimately, having spent all his adult life there, latterly serving as Company Resident in both Delhi and Hyderabad. There he had come into direct contact with the French mercenaries Wellesley was determined to defeat and expel.

Wellesley had initially asked Major Kirkpatrick to provide written answers to a range of questions about the French troops employed by the Nizam of Hyderabad, notably a battalion ‘commanded by a Frenchman by the name of Raymond’ and officered by ‘Frenchmen of the most virulent and notorious principles of Jacobinism … an armed French party of great zeal, diligence and activity … The basis of a permanent French faction in India.’⁵ The answers he received so impressed him, that he not only forwarded them, unedited, to Dundas, he also begged Kirkpatrick to abandon the plans he had been making to return to England, and to take up a job at his side in Calcutta, as his Military Secretary.

Over the course of Wellesley’s days in the Cape, the two remained cloistered as Kirkpatrick briefed his new boss on his perceptions of the French threat, and what steps the new Governor General could take to contain it. He told him of the well-equipped French-commanded Maratha sepoy battalions which had been trained up for Scindia by the brilliant Savoyard general Benoît de Boigne. De Boigne had now retired to Europe and handed over his battalions to a far less formidable commander named General Pierre Perron, but Kirkpatrick had witnessed the skills of the army he had created, and particularly its ruthlessly efficient artillery divisions. Three years earlier, in March 1795, he had been present when the Nizam of Hyderabad’s army had disintegrated under their fire at the Battle of Khardla. Kirkpatrick was under no illusions about the formidable nature of Scindia’s new army, which was now almost indistinguishable from that of the Company in uniform, drill, weaponry and even in its sepoys’ ethnic and caste backgrounds.

Wellesley was especially alarmed to hear about the degree to which the army of Tipu Sultan, the Company’s most implacable and relentless enemy, had fallen into the hands of a body of 500 Revolutionary French mercenaries, advisers, technicians and officers. Kirkpatrick told him how, in May 1797, Tipu’s French troops had gone as far as establishing a Revolutionary Jacobin club in Srirangapatnam: ‘The National Flag [the Tricolour] was hoisted to the sound of artillery and musketry of the camp’, while symbols of the pre-Revolutionary Bourbon monarchy were burned. Republican hymns were sung during the subsequent planting of ‘the Liberty Tree’ – a sort of Jacobin maypole – and while the tree was crowned with a ‘Cap of Equality’, the assembly ‘swore hatred of all Kings, except Tipoo Sultan, the Victorious, the Ally of the Republic of France, to make war on tyrants and to love towards the motherland as well as the land of Citizen Prince Tipoo’. Finally, they took a solemn oath to support the Republican constitution, ‘or die at arms … to live free or die!’⁶

At the end of the ceremony, the French corps marched to the Srirangapatnam parade ground, where the Citizen Prince awaited them. As they approached, Tipu ordered a salute from 2,300 cannon, 500 rockets and all the musketry his troops could muster. ‘Behold,’ announced Citizen Tipu, ‘my acknowledgement of the Standard of your country, which is dear to me and to which I am allied; it shall always be carried aloft in my country, as it has been in our sister Republic! Go, conclude your festival!’⁷

Wellesley’s greatest fear was that the different French mercenary units could unite to challenge the Company if war broke out again with Tipu. He wrote to London how

in the present weak state of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s Government, the French corps in his service would openly join with Tipu Sultan, and by a sudden blow, endeavour to seize the Nizam’s territories, and to secure them to the dominion of France, under an alliance with Tipu Sultan. The interest and inclination of Scindia, who also entertains a large army in his service under the command of a French officer, would lead him to engage with Tipu Sultan and the French. The junction which might thus be effected between the French officers, with their several corps in the respective services of the Nizam, Scindia and Tipu, might establish the power of France upon the ruin of the states of Pune and of the Deccan.⁸

As soon as he arrived in Calcutta, Wellesley began drawing up plans to send troops south to take on this threat. But his plans greatly accelerated when, on 8 June, he read in a Calcutta newspaper of a declaration, issued in Mauritius by the island’s French Governor General, M. Malartic. This publicised the intention of Tipu to conclude an offensive and defensive alliance with the French and ‘that he only waits for the moment when the French shall come to his assistance to declare war on the English, whom he ardently wishes to expel from India’.⁹

From that moment, Tipu’s fate was sealed. Wellesley’s priority was now to eradicate all traces of French influence before any French military expedition could arrive. In June he wrote to General Harris, the Commander-in-Chief at Madras, who was a veteran of Cornwallis’s campaign against Tipu, announcing his decision to ‘call upon our allies without delay and assemble the army on the coast with all possible expedition’, with a view to ‘striking a sudden blow against Tippoo before he can receive foreign aid’.¹⁰

By early August, Wellesley had completed his war plan. This he transmitted to Dundas in London, outlining ‘measures … most advisable for the purpose of frustrating the united efforts of Tippoo Sultan and of France’.¹¹ As far he was concerned, Tipu was now a proven enemy and predator and must be immediately crushed: ‘The evidence of meditated hostility is complete,’ he wrote. ‘While professing the most amicable disposition, bound by subsisting treaties of peace and friendship, and unprovoked by an offence on our part, Tipu Sultan has manifested a design to effect our total destruction.’¹²

First, however, Wellesley decided to deal with Raymond’s French Revolutionary force in Hyderabad.

Although many of Wellesley’s writings at this period have an air of Francophobe paranoia to them, the new Governor General was in fact quite correct about the potential threat posed to the Company by Raymond. As a recently discovered cache of papers has shown, Raymond was indeed in correspondence both with the French officers of de Boigne’s corps in Scindia’s service and those working for Tipu at Srirangapatnam, where Raymond had himself been employed before entering the Nizam’s service.

Raymond’s ambitions are revealed in the series of passionately patriotic letters he wrote in the early 1790s to the French headquarters at Pondicherry, pledging his loyalty to France and the Revolution: ‘I am ready to sacrifice all,’ he wrote to the Governor of Pondicherry, ‘if I am so fortunate that circumstances may ever put it in my power to prove the zeal for my country which animates me.’ To the Governor of Mauritius, he was even more explicit about his intentions: ‘I shall always follow as my first duty whatever [orders] you wish to give me … If ever I can be useful to France I am ready to pour my blood once more for her. I labour only to discharge this duty and gain your good opinion.’¹³

James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the new British Resident in Hyderabad, upon whom the job of ousting the French corps devolved, was the younger brother of Wellesley’s new Military Secretary. His task was far from easy. Raymond’s personal income was vast – his estates on their own yielded Rs500,000 a year^a – and in the early months of 1798 Raymond had persuaded the Nizam again to increase the size of his force, this time to over 14,000 men, with their own bespoke gun foundry and a complete train of artillery, drawn by a force of 5,000 of its own bullocks. The corps manufactured its own swords, muskets and pistols, besides its excellent artillery; there was even a small cavalry group numbering 600. To make matters worse Raymond was personally very popular with the Hyderabad court. The heir apparent, Sikander Jah, was so taken with the Frenchman that he went as far as swearing ‘by the head of Raymond’.¹⁴

Then, on the morning of 25 March 1798, Raymond was found dead, aged only forty-three; there was gossip that the cause may have been poison, possibly administered by the pro-Company faction in the durbar. Whatever the truth, the sudden death of Raymond gave Kirkpatrick his chance. It helped that one of the Nizam’s ministers, Mir Alam, had recently visited Calcutta and been astonished by the size and scale of the Company’s barracks and arms factories, and that other senior officials in the Hyderabad durbar were equally convinced that the Company was the rising power in India. They argued that an alliance was essential for the safety of Hyderabad, surrounded as it was by two much more powerful neighbours, Tipu’s Mysore to the south and the Marathas in Pune, immediately to the west.

Six months later, after weeks of hard negotiation, a secret treaty was signed, bringing Hyderabad and the Company into a close military alliance: 6,000 Company troops were to be resident in Hyderabad and available for the Nizam’s protection. In return the Nizam was to pay the Company an annual subsidy of £41,710,^b and to dismiss the French corps. Exactly how or when this was to be done, however, was not made clear in the Treaty.

Following the signing, an uneasy month passed as the new Company force of four battalions, along with a train of artillery, made its way slowly up the 150 miles from the coast near Guntur. This was the nearest Company-controlled town, where Wellesley had ordered them to collect two months earlier, in readiness to march on Hyderabad.¹⁵

Before first light on 22 October, the EIC troops quietly encircled the French cantonments, arranging their guns on the ridge above the French lines, not far from where a classical Greek temple and obelisk had just been raised as a memorial for Raymond. They achieved complete surprise. When dawn broke, the French corps woke up to find itself surrounded. At nine o’clock Kirkpatrick offered the mutineers payment of all salaries owing if they would surrender. They had ‘one quarter of an hour to stack their arms and march off to a protection flag, which was pitched about half a mile to the right of the camp. If they did not comply, they were immediately to be attacked.’¹⁶

For thirty minutes the French corps remained undecided. Two thousand Company cavalry massed on the right flank of the French camp; 500 more waited on the right. In the centre were 4,000 East India Company infantry. There was complete silence. Then, just after 9.30 a.m., to Kirkpatrick’s great relief, the sepoys finally sent out word that they accepted the terms.

The Company cavalry rode in and quickly took possession of the French magazine, store houses, powder mills, gun foundries and cannon, while the French sepoys fled to the flag under which they were to surrender themselves: ‘at once a glorious and piteous sight’, thought Kirkpatrick.¹⁷ Within a few hours, the largest French corps in India, more than 14,000-strong, was disarmed by a force of less than a third that number. Not a single shot had been fired, not a single life lost.

Kirkpatrick watched the soldiers laying down their arms all afternoon from the roof of the British Residency. That evening, in a state of mixed exhaustion and elation, he wrote to his brother William that the ‘turning adrift of thousands of Raymond’s troops, all of which I saw this evening from the roof of my house with my spy glasses as plain as if it had been on the spot, was the finest sight I ever saw in my life.’

In a postscript written two hours later, there came even better news: had William heard yet the news, which had just arrived post-haste from Bombay, ‘of Admiral Nelson’s glorious naval action’? In the Battle of the Nile on 1 August, Nelson had sunk almost the entire French fleet in Aboukir Bay, wrecking Napoleon’s hopes of using Egypt as a secure base from which to attack India. It was an amazing turn of events. Ever since news had arrived of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, it had looked quite possible that India would be next and might even become a French colony. Now that threat was greatly diminished.¹⁸

The operation had been carried out with great skill and Wellesley was delighted. ‘You will enjoy my gentle conquest of an army of 14,000 men under the command of French officers in the service of the Nizam,’ he wrote to Dundas later that month. ‘My despatches do not mention a curious fact, that the standard of this army was the Tricolour flag: the first of that description erected on the Continent of India. This standard has fallen into my hands; and I shall send it home as the best comment upon the whole policy of making an effort to crush the French influence in India.’¹⁹

Now with Hyderabad secured, Wellesley was ready to move directly against his principal adversary, Tipu Sultan.

On 4 November 1798, Wellesley wrote a sarcastic letter to Tipu, telling him of the cataclysmic defeat of his French allies at the Battle of the Nile: ‘Confident that from the union and attachment subsisting between us that this intelligence will afford you sincere satisfaction, I could not deny myself the pleasure of communicating it.’²⁰ Tipu replied in kind, penning an apparently friendly but equally disingenuous letter back, telling Lord Wellesley: ‘I am resident at home, at times taking the air, and at times amusing myself with hunting at a spot which is used as a pleasure ground.’²¹

When Wellesley next wrote, the Company’s alliance with Hyderabad had been secured and the French corps rounded up, and the Governor General was now much more confident of the strength of his position. This time his tone was very different: ‘It is impossible that you should suppose me ignorant of the intercourse between you and the French, whom you know to be inveterate enemies of the Company,’ he wrote. ‘Nor does it appear necessary or proper that I should any longer conceal from you the surprise and concern with which I perceived you disposed to involve yourself in all the ruinous consequences of a connection which threatens to subvert the foundations of friendship between you and the Company, and to introduce into your kingdom the principles of anarchy and confusion and … to destroy the religion which you revere.’²² But Tipu refused to be drawn: ‘Being frequently disposed to make excursions and hunt,’ he wrote back, ‘I am accordingly proceeding on another hunting expedition … Always continue to gratify me by friendly letters, notifying your welfare.’²³

Wellesley was now busy putting the final touches to his invasion plans. The finances to fight the war were now secure and, having won the support of the Marwari bankers of Bengal, Wellesley sent to Bombay and Madras the vast sum of Rs10 million (£1 million, £130 million today), which he had managed to raise on the Calcutta money market.²⁴ More money came in a timely injection of treasure from Europe.²⁵

He wrote to the Resident in Pune, William Palmer, that he must at all costs get the Marathas to break off relations with Mysore and join the war against Tipu, in accordance with the Triple Alliance signed by Cornwallis. In due course a reluctant Peshwa promised Palmer that the Marathas would honour their commitments and send the Company 25,000 troops – though after much foot-dragging in Pune, these failed to arrive in time for action.²⁶ A message was also sent to the Nizam to call up his troops to assist his new British allies, as had been agreed in the Treaty he and Kirkpatrick had signed five months earlier

In a process of vilification familiar from more recent Western confrontations with assertive Muslim leaders, Wellesley now stepped up his propaganda against Tipu, who he depicted as ‘a cruel and relentless enemy’, ‘a beast of the jungle’, an ‘intolerant bigot’ with ‘a rooted hatred of Europeans’ who had ‘perpetually on his tongue the projects of Jihad’. This tyrant was also deemed to be an ‘oppressive and unjust ruler … [a]; sanguinary tyrant, a perfidious negociator’, and, above all, a ‘furious fanatic’.²⁷

At the same time he wrote to reassure the Court of Directors that he was not engaged in some vainglorious adventure at their expense: ‘Although I have deemed it my duty to call your armies into the field in every part of India,’ he wrote, ‘my views and expectations are all directed to the preservation of the peace, which in the present crisis cannot otherwise be secured than by a state of forward preparations for war.’²⁸

This letter was as insincere as anything he had ever written to Tipu. For Wellesley had, in reality, absolutely no intention whatsoever of keeping the peace. Instead, he was hugely enjoying the prospect of using the directors’ private army to wage his entirely avoidable war against the French-led forces in India.

On Christmas Day, 25 December 1798, Lord Wellesley embarked from Calcutta for Madras, so that he could better control affairs from his southern base. He arrived on the last day of 1798, to be greeted by the new Governor of Madras. This was Edward, Lord Clive, the slightly slow-witted son of Robert Clive, whose victory at Plassey thirty-five years earlier had begun the East India Company’s transformation from a trading company to a privately owned imperial power with a standing army and territorial possessions far larger than that of its parent country. After their first meeting, Wellesley wrote that the younger Clive was ‘a worthy, zealous, obedient & gentlemanlike man of excellent temper; but neither of talents, knowledge, habits of business, or firmness equal to his present situation. How the devil did he get here?’²⁹ Henceforth Wellesley more or less ignored his host and busied himself with managing the detail of his onslaught against Tipu without involving Edward Clive in any way.

By this stage, General Harris’s heavy siege train, with its battering rams and mining gear, had already reached Vellore, the last British-held fort before the Mysore frontier. There 20,000 East India Company sepoys, 1,400 elite British grenadiers under Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, and a battalion of kilted Scottish Highlanders engaged in training exercises, while Harris waited for his orders to advance.³⁰

Tipu had an extremely efficient network of spies and knew exactly what was happening beyond his borders: ‘It has lately come to my ears from report,’ he wrote, ‘that, in consequence of the talk of interested persons, military preparations are on foot.’³¹ While Lord Wellesley finessed his military plans, Tipu tried, with equal energy, to raise support from the last indigenous armies capable of taking on the Company, warning them that whatever differences they may have had in the past, this was their chance to unite and defeat the British.

On 8 January, James Kirkpatrick reported from Hyderabad that Tipu had written to the Nizam begging forgiveness if he had infringed any treaty and asking for an alliance, claiming that the English ‘intended extirpating all Mussulmans and establishing hat-wearers in their place’.³² Two days later, on 10 January, despatches from Pune reached Wellesley announcing the intelligence that a delegation of Tipu’s ambassadors had also presented themselves at the Maratha court, seeking military assistance.³³

Wellesley’s spies reported that Tipu Sultan had even written to Ahmad Shah Durrani’s grandson, Zaman Shah, the ruler of Afghanistan. ‘It ought to be the duty of faithful chiefs to extirpate the infidels by uniting together,’ wrote Tipu, before proposing that, ‘after deposing the pathetic King [Shah Alam,] who has reduced the faith to such a state of feebleness’, they should divide India between them.³⁴ But it was all too late.

Wellesley was now ready and there would be no time for Tipu to create the alliances he needed to protect himself.³⁵ When he was dying, Tipu’s father, Haidar Ali, had advised his son always to make sure he took on the Company in alliance with other Indian rulers; only that way could he be sure of victory. Ambitious and self-confident, Tipu had ignored that advice. Now, when he most needed that assistance, he would fight alone.

Tipu must have known how slim the odds now were of success: his dream book records one about the last-minute arrival of a rescue force ‘of 10,000 Franks [Frenchmen]’, while on 20 December the Sultan was awoken by a nightmare of a vast army of regiments of English Christians with the heads of pigs marching on his capital.³⁶ But he had no intention of backing down. As he is alleged to have said when he heard the news that Wellesley’s invasion of his kingdom had begun, ‘I would rather live a day as a lion than a lifetime as a sheep … Better to die like a soldier, than to live a miserable dependant on the infidels, in their list of pensioned rajas and nabobs.’³⁷

On 3 February 1799, General Harris was ordered to mobilise his troops and ‘with as little delay as possible … enter the territory of Mysore and proceed to the siege of Seringapatam’. The Governor General sent characteristically detailed instructions on how to proceed and ordered that, whatever the circumstances, there were to be no negotiations until the army was standing in front of the walls of Srirangapatnam.³⁸

On 19 February, the four East India Company battalions in Hyderabad under Colonel James Dalrymple, along with the four further battalions of Hyderabadi sepoys and more than 10,000 Hyderabadi cavalry, joined up with General Harris’s Company army. On 5 March, with some 30,000 sheep, huge stocks of grain and 100,000 carriage bullocks trailing behind them, the two armies crossed the frontier into Mysore.³⁹ There followed at least 100,000 camp followers, who outnumbered the combatants by at least four to one. Wellesley believed his army to be ‘the finest which ever took the field in India’; but it was a huge and unwieldy force, and it trundled towards Srirangapatnam at the agonisingly slow place of five miles a day, stripping the country bare ‘of every article of subsistence the country can afford’ like some vast cloud of locusts.⁴⁰

Having surrendered half his kingdom in 1792, Tipu’s resources were much more limited than they had been during Cornwallis’s campaign, and he realised that his best chance of success lay in concentrating all his troops on his island fortress-capital. He made only two brief sorties, one against a small British force from Bombay as it passed through the mountains from Coorg, and another against Harris’s main force near Bangalore, where Tipu personally led a spirited cavalry charge. Then he retired behind the great walls of Srirangapatnam to begin strengthening the defences and preparing for the siege.

With only 37,000 troops, he was slightly outnumbered by the allies, but remained a formidable opponent. No one forgot that, in the three previous Anglo-Mysore Wars, Tipu’s forces had frequently defeated the Company. Indeed, two of the most prominent Company commanders in the campaign, Sir David Baird and his cousin James Dalrymple, had both been prisoners of Tipu, having been captured and imprisoned for forty-four long months after the disastrous British defeat at Pollilur in 1780, ‘the most grievous disaster which has yet befallen British arms in India’.⁴¹

By 14 March, Harris’s force had passed Bangalore and taken several key forts in the surrounding hills. Three weeks later, on 5 April, the army finally came within sight of Srirangapatnam. On 6 April, Arthur Wellesley led a failed night attack on some of the outer defences; a party of thirteen Company sepoys was captured by Tipu’s forces and then tortured to death. On the 7th, the siege began.⁴²

With his characteristic ingenuity and tenacity, Tipu showed every sign of resisting. As one British soldier wrote, he ‘gave us gun for gun … [and night-time skirmishes were] made with desperate exertion … Soon the scenes became tremendously grand; shells and rockets of uncommon weight were incessantly poured upon us from the SW side, and fourteen pounders and grape from the North face of the Fort continued their havoc in the trenches; while the blaze of our batteries, which frequently caught fire … was the signal for the Tiger sepoys [Tipu’s elite forces dressed in tiger-striped uniforms] to advance, and pour in galling vollies of musketry.’ In all, around 120 Frenchmen were taken prisoner, including twenty officers.⁴³

The small French corps, around 450-strong, all wearing Republican cockades and sprigs of laurel, also ‘behaved with great spirit’, sallying out on 22 April to the British positions on the north bank of the island: ‘some of them fell within the entrenchment upon our bayonets, and others were killed close to it.’⁴⁴

Tipu put up a brave and skilful defence and for some time it appeared that the Company troops were making little headway: ‘the enemy continued during the night to repair their dismantled parapets,’ wrote one officer, ‘and in the morning surprised us with the production of several guns in a new work, embracing the N.W cavalier … Something akin to despondence was now beginning to steal upon the mind; and unless this aspect of affairs soon changed our calculations went to determine that this truly formidable place, manfully defended as it was, would not change masters without extensive blood-shedding.’⁴⁵

But Wellesley’s army was equipped with unprecedented quantities of heavy artillery, and deployed forty 18-pounders for breaching the walls and seven 8-inch and 5.5-inch howitzers for plunging fire inside the fort’s walls. In addition, there were fifty-seven 6-pounders for fire support for the besieging army against Tipu’s infantry.⁴⁶ By the end of April, most of Tipu’s guns on the northern and western end of the island had been disabled. By 3 May, the artillery of the Hyderabad contingent felt secure enough to move forward to within 350 yards of the weakest corner of the walls, and by evening a substantial breach was made. Harris set the following day for the assault.⁴⁷

That morning, after inspecting the breach and bathing, Tipu consulted his Brahmin astrologers. They warned the Sultan of particularly bad omens. Tipu gave them ‘three elephants, two buffaloes, a bullock and a she-goat’, as well as an iron pot full of oil, used for divination, asking them to ‘pray for the prosperity of the Empire’. He now suspected himself doomed.⁴⁸

At 1 p.m., in the heat of the day, most of Tipu’s sepoys went off to rest for the afternoon. In the Company trenches, David Baird roused himself and gave his troops ‘a cheering dram and a biscuit, and drew his sword saying, “Men are you ready?” “Yes,” was the reply. “Then forward my lads!”’⁴⁹ He then jumped out of the trench and led a storming party 4,000-strong into the River Kaveri and across the shallows into the breach. His two columns scrambled over the glacis and into the city, swinging right and left along the ramparts, amid fierce hand-to-hand fighting.

When he heard the news that the assault had finally been launched, Tipu left his lunch in the palace and rode straight to the breach, accompanied by a bodyguard from his elite Lion of God battalion. But by the time he arrived, the Company troops were already well within the walls. There was nothing for him to do but to climb on the battlements and fight for his life. Outnumbered, bravely taking on the overwhelming incoming rush of Company sepoys, he quickly received two bayonet wounds and a glancing musket shot in the left shoulder. His attendants called on him to surrender, but he replied, ‘Are you mad? Be silent.’

Here, between the water gate and the inner ramparts of the fort, Tipu stood to make what even his most hostile British opponents acknowledged was ‘his gallant last stand’.⁵⁰ A party of redcoats had forced their way between the gates, and one grenadier, seeing a gold buckle sparkling on the waist of the wounded man, tried to grab at it, and received a last fatal sword slash from the Sultan in return. Seconds later, one of his companions shot Tipu at point-blank range, through the temple. After four wars against the Company, over a period of thirty-two years, the Tiger of Mysore finally fell, sword in hand, among the heaps of dead and dying men.⁵¹

Within a few hours, the city was in Company hands. That evening, after sunset, Baird was taken to Tipu’s body by one of his courtiers, Raja Khan. ‘The scene was altogether shocking,’ wrote an eyewitness. ‘The numbers of bodies so great, and the place so dark, that it was impossible to distinguish one person from another.’ They had to roll the bodies off the pile, one at a time, checking each face by the flickering light of a lamp. Eventually Baird found Tipu; as chance would have it, his body was only 300 yards from the gate of the prison where Baird had spent his captivity.⁵²

The Sultan’s body lay at the bottom of a heap of dead and wounded, stripped of its jewels. Tipu’s eyes were open and the body was so warm that for a few moments, in the lamplight, Baird wondered whether the Sultan was still alive; but feeling his pulse, he declared him dead: ‘His countenance was in no ways distorted, but had an expression of stern composure,’ wrote Baird.⁵³ ‘His dress consisted of jackets of fine white linen,’ remembered another eyewitness. Below, he wore ‘loose drawers of flowered silk, with a crimson cloth of silk and cotton round his waist; a handsome pouch with a red and green silk belt hung over his shoulder; his head was uncovered, his turban being lost in the confusion of the fall; he had an amulet on his arm, but no ornament whatsoever.’^c The corpse was placed in a palanquin and taken to the palace. There its identity was confirmed by Tipu’s captured family.⁵⁴

Already, the Mysore casualties hugely outnumbered those of the allies: some 10,000 of Tipu’s troops were dead as opposed to around 350 of the Company and Hyderabadi sepoys: ‘It would be scarcely possible,’ wrote one British observer, ‘to describe, in adequate terms, the objects of horror, the ghastly spectacle, presented to the senses by the bodies of the slain, in every attitude, and in every direction; lying in the verandas and along the principal street.’⁵⁵ But the horrors had barely begun.

That night the city of Srirangapatnam, home to 100,000 people, was given over to an unrestrained orgy of rape, looting and killing. Arthur Wellesley told his mother, ‘Scarcely a house in the town was left unplundered, and I understand that in camp jewels of the greatest value, bars of gold etc etc have been offered for sale in the bazaars of the army by our soldiers, sepoys and followers. I came in to take command of the army of the morning of the 5th and with the greatest exertion, by hanging, flogging etc etc, in the course of that day I restored order …’⁵⁶

At 4.30 that afternoon, the Sultan’s funeral procession wound its way slowly and silently through crowds of weeping survivors. People lined the streets, ‘many of whom prostrated themselves before the body, and expressed their grief by loud lamentations’.⁵⁷ Eventually the cortège reached the white, onion-domed tomb of Haidar Ali in the Lal Bagh garden.

Here Tipu was laid to rest next to his father, ‘immediately consecrated by his Mahomedan followers as a Shahid, or Martyr of the Faith … with the full military honours due to his exalted rank’.⁵⁸ The British, all of whom had during the campaign been force-fed on Wellesley’s propaganda that Tipu was a brutal tyrant, were surprised to discover how much his people, both Hindu and Muslim, clearly loved him, just as they had been surprised to see how prosperous his kingdom was – ‘well-cultivated, populous with industrious inhabitants, cities newly founded and commerce extending’ – and how popular he was with his personal staff: ‘numbers of his confidential Hindoo servants who during the war fell into our hands, acknowledged him to be a lenient and indulgent master.’⁵⁹

Meanwhile, the Prize Committee, whose job it was to distribute the booty, began to amass what was left of Tipu’s possessions and the contents of his treasury. They were astonished by what they found: ‘The wealth of the palace, which was sufficiently dazzling to the eyes of many who were much more habituated to the sight of hoarded treasure than we were, seemed, at that moment, in specie, and jewels, and bullion, and bales of costly stuff, to surpass all estimate.’⁶⁰

In all, around £2 million^d of gold plate, jewellery, palanquins, arms and armour, silks and shawls were accumulated: ‘everything that power could command, or money could purchase.’⁶¹ The most magnificent object of all was Tipu’s gold throne, inlaid with precious stones and with bejewelled tiger head finials ‘superbly decorated … [It took the form of a] howdah supported on the back of a Tyger, the solid parts made of black wood, and entirely covered by a sheet of purest gold, about as thick as a guinea, fastened on with silver nails, and wrought in tiger stripes, curiously indented, and most beautifully and highly polished.’⁶²

Unable to decide who to award it to, the Prize Agents cut it up into small pieces, so destroying one of the great wonders of eighteenth-century India. Arthur Wellesley was the first to lament its loss, writing to the directors that ‘it would have given me pleasure to have been able to send the whole throne entire to England but the indiscreet zeal of the prize agents of the army had broken that proud monument of the Sultan’s arrogance into fragments before I had been appraised even of the existence of such a trophy.’⁶³

Such was the notoriety of the bloody looting of Srirangapatnam that it later inspired Wilkie Collins’ pioneering detective novel, The Moonstone. This opens at the fall of the city when the narrator’s cousin, John Herncastle, seizes ‘the Yellow Diamond … a famous gem in the native annals of India [once] set in the forehead of the four-handed Indian God who typifies the Moon’. To do this Herncastle, ‘a torch in one hand, and a dagger dripping with blood in the other’, murders the Moonstone’s three guardians, the last of whom tells him as he dies that the diamond’s curse will follow Herncastle to his grave: ‘The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!’ In the course of the novel, the diamond brings death and bad luck to almost everyone who comes into contact with the gem, before being seized back by the stone’s mysterious Hindu guardians – something that has yet to happen with the real loot of Srirangapatnam.⁶⁴

For the cream of Tipu’s treasures were later collected by Clive’s daughter-in-law, Henrietta, Countess of Powis, when she made a pleasure trip through southern India the following year. She was bored by the company of her husband, Edward Clive, the dim new Governor of Madras, and she left him to his new job at Governors House while she toured Tipu’s former lands of Mysore. Whenever she came to a Company cantonment, she found herself surrounded by infantrymen longing to swap their share of the jewelled loot of Srirangapatnam for cash. She was happy to oblige. In this way, with very little outlay, she casually accumulated one of Europe’s most impressive collections of Indo-Islamic art. In due course it made its way back to the Clive seat of Powis, where it was put on display beside the loot collected, forty years earlier, from the Murshidabad palace of Siraj ud-Daula. There it remains.

In the political settlement that followed, Tipu’s sons were despatched to exile in the fort of Vellore and most of the best lands of the state of Mysore were divided between the Company and the Nizam of Hyderabad. The rump was returned to the Hindu Wadyar dynasty whose throne Haidar and Tipu had usurped. A five-year-old child from the dynasty was found living ‘in a state of misery … in kind of stable with sheds attached to it’.⁶⁵ The boy was informed he was now Raja, and, after a brief ceremony, was given charge of a reduced Mysore state, carefully watched over by a British Resident. The Wadyars in due course moved their capital back to Mysore and Srirangapatnam was left a ruin. It never recovered.

Today a small village squats beside the foundations of Tipu’s former palace, and goats graze in his once magnificent pleasure grounds. Other than the majestic French-designed fortifications, the best-preserved building in Tipu’s former capital is, ironically, the ancient Hindu Sri Ranganatha temple, after which Tipu’s capital was named, and which was not just protected by Tipu but loaded with the valuable gifts which are still on display today, as are all its beautiful Vijayanagara-era images. Not one of these has suffered from the iconoclast’s chisel, despite standing in the middle of the capital of a ruler denounced by his British enemies as a fanatical ‘intolerant bigot’.

Today most of Tipu’s capital is grazing land, and very little remains as witness of the former splendour of the kingdom of the Tiger of Mysore, the single Indian ruler who did more than any other to resist the onslaught of the Company.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Lord Wellesley, raising a glass, when the news of Tipu’s death was brought to him, ‘I drink to the corpse of India.’⁶⁶

In less than two years, Wellesley had managed to disarm the largest French force in India, and to defeat and destroy the second largest. Now only the French-commanded corps of the Marathas stood between him and complete mastery of peninsular India. Further conflict was, sooner or later, inevitable.

The Marathas still controlled great swathes of western, central and southern India – very much more of the country than was then held by the Company. Had they been able to form a united front they could yet have re-emerged as the pre-eminent power in India; but their forces were now more hopelessly divided than ever, and this was something Wellesley took the greatest pleasure in exploiting.

The final act of the great Maratha Confederacy opened with the death, on 13 March 1800, of its veteran Prime Minister, the brilliant Nana Phadnavis, who had controlled Maratha diplomacy and administration for a quarter of a century.⁶⁷ Nana, ‘the Maratha Machiavelli’, had been one of the first to realise the existential threat posed by the Company to all independent Indian rulers and it was he who in the 1780s had stitched together the first Triple Alliance with a view to expelling the Company from India.

He had worked equally hard to keep the different parts of the Confederacy together. Tragically for the Marathas, he was the last of the talented generation that came to prominence after the catastrophic Maratha defeat at the Battle of Panipat in 1761, and his death came at the end of a five-year period, 1795–1800, which had also seen the loss of the Peshwa and the senior members of the houses of Scindia and Holkar. ‘With the death of the great Minister Nana Phadnavis,’ wrote the British Resident at Pune, General Palmer, ‘all the wisdom and moderation of the Maratha government departed.’⁶⁸ Wellesley needed to do very little: he could just sit back in Calcutta and watch as the great Confederacy fell apart.

In Nana’s absence, the three ambitious but quarrelsome and inexperienced teenagers who had between them inherited the leadership of Confederacy – the new Peshwa, Baji Rao II; the new head of the house of Scindia, Daulat Rao; and the new chief of the house of Holkar, Jaswant Rao – were now free to conspire and intrigue against each other unchecked. Just as Wellesley was beginning to move the troops of the increasingly well-armed, well-financed and aggressively militaristic Company with great subtlety around the subcontinental chessboard, the Marathas found themselves hopelessly stuck deep in a swamp of internal conflict. They could only hope to win against the Company if they stood united. With every passing day, however, that unity was becoming more and more elusive.⁶⁹

The politics of north India had long been dominated by the old, hereditary feud between the Scindia and Holkar dynasties; now it passed down a generation, growing in bitterness and violence as it did so. When Mahadji Scindia had died in 1794, his successor, Daulat Rao, was only fifteen. The boy inherited the magnificent army that Benoît de Boigne had trained up for his predecessor, but he showed little vision or talent in its deployment. General Palmer, who was the Company’s most experienced observer of Maratha politics, had greatly admired Mahadji Scindia; but he was not impressed by his successor. He described him as a ‘profligate young man … weak [and] totally destitute of decency or principle’.

His revenues have declined rapidly, while his army has been unnecessarily augmented & he is now more than a crore [10 million rupees, £130 million today] in arrears to his troops, though he has received five crores by the most shameless oppression and robbery since he came to the musnud [throne]. The fidelity of his European officers & their corps have so far prevented his deposal, but they cannot save him much longer … He is totally ignorant of his own affairs & incapable of understanding his own true interests, has not the smallest regard to honour or character, nor the least benevolence of mind. His servants take every advantage of these defects, and his government is a scene of confusion, fraud & rapine.⁷⁰

It did not help that the new Peshwa, Baji Rao II, was equally young and inexperienced: his character, thought Palmer, ‘is not better than Scindia’s, but he wants the power to do as much mischief. In his private demeanour, however, he is decent while Scindia is quite abandoned. I have had a very troublesome and mortifying part to act here [in Pune] with two young men who neither understand their own good, nor the rights of others.’⁷¹

Baji Rao, a slight, timid, unconfident-looking boy of twenty-one with a weak chin and a downy upper lip, quickly showed himself comprehensively unequal to the challenge of holding together the different factions that made up his power base. Moreover, both he and Scindia were on irreconcilably hostile terms with the third principal Maratha power broker, Jaswant Rao Holkar, the one-eyed ‘Bastard of Indore’.

The Peshwa’s traditional role was to act as mediator between the different Maratha warlords and to bring them together. But in April 1802, Baji Rao managed instead, quite unnecessarily, to initiate a new blood feud with the Holkars. When Jaswant Rao’s elder brother Vitoji was unexpectedly captured by the Peshwa’s troops, the gleeful Baji Rao hung him in chains and sentenced him to suffer a flogging of 200 strokes, followed by a lingering death, tied to the foot of an elephant. In this manner, Vitoji was dragged screaming around the palace, while Baji Rao looked on, giggling, from a palace terrace.⁷² Shortly afterwards Baji Rao invited Nana Phadnavis’s former allies and supporters to the palace and there charged them with conspiracy and had them all arrested.⁷³

As the epithet suggests, Jaswant Rao was the illegitimate son of Tukoji Holkar by a concubine. On the accession of his legitimate half-brother, Jaswant Rao had become a fugitive and set off into the jungle with a band of similarly desperate armed outlaws, living hard and moving fast in the badlands surrounding Indore. Following Vitoji’s murder, having invoked the assistance of the family deity at Jejuri, and buoyed by his reputation as a courageous and resourceful leader, with the help of a tribe of 200 loyal Bhil warriors, Jaswant marched on his brother’s fortress of Maheshwar, and had himself crowned as his successor.

There, on 31 May, Jaswant Rao Holkar vowed vengeance on those he held responsible for his brother’s murderers. He first turned his attention to Scindia, setting off almost immediately to raid his enemy’s territory and plunder and burn down his palaces. The two rivals spent much of 1801 fighting each other to a standstill across the hills and battlefields of central India as their armies marched and counter-marched between Ujjain and Burhanpur, haemorrhaging men with every inconclusive engagement. According to the chronicler Munna Lal, ‘The other commanders of the Deccan, who could see things as they really were, strove to make peace with Jaswant Rao, saying that mutual hatred between us Marathas is a disgrace: prosperity arises from unity, while discord will bring about our ruin. But as the times were not favourable, their good advice made no impact. Day by day, the flames of discord burned ever more violently.’⁷⁴

Finally, Jaswant Rao crossed the Godavari, marched south and headed for Pune with his army. The Peshwa, desperate for allies, turned to the only force still in play after the death of Tipu. He summoned the British Resident and asked for an alliance.

This was Wellesley’s chance further to divide the Maratha Confederacy and to paralyse its war machine. He offered Baji Rao the same terms he had just offered the Nizam: a defensive alliance and a permanent garrison of Company sepoys to be stationed for his protection in Pune, in return for a large annual cash payment. The Peshwa accepted the terms; but before any Company troops could arrive to protect him, he and Scindia had to face Holkar’s army, which was now rapidly advancing on Pune.

On Sunday 25 October 1802, the feast of Diwali, the two armies faced each other across a wide wooded valley at Hadaspur, a few miles from the Maratha capital. The battle began at half past nine in the morning with a prolonged artillery duel. It continued indecisively until, soon after one o’clock, Jaswant Rao personally led a massed cavalry charge on Scindia’s guns, ‘like a tiger on a herd of deer’. He was seriously wounded in the charge, but won a decisive victory.⁷⁵ Long before the battle was finally lost, and 5,000 of his men were killed, the frightened and bewildered Baji Rao had fled.

For a month, the young Peshwa moved with his bodyguard from one hillfort to another, avoiding Jaswant Rao’s patrols. For a while he hid in the fortress of Sinhagarh, south of Pune, before making his way to the spectacular and craggily inaccessible hilltop fort of Raigad, where the first great Maratha, Shivaji, had been crowned and from where he had defied the Mughal armies of Aurangzeb. All the while, Baji Rao kept in close touch with his new Company allies, who soon put into action a rescue operation.

From Raigad, the Peshwa was instructed to make his way towards the sea coast, where he took shelter in the old pirate stronghold of Suvarnadurg. Shortly afterwards, he was picked up by the HMS Herculean, commanded by Wellesley’s emissary, Captain Kennedy. Baji Rao and his men were fed and entertained, and two lakh rupees^e in gold provided for their personal use. A fortnight later, on 16 December, the sloop docked, to artillery salutes, at Bassein – modern Vassai – the former Portuguese trading post a little to the north of Bombay: an extraordinary crumbling city full of decaying Jesuit churches and overgrown Dominican convents, all slowly beginning to return to the jungle, with mighty banyan trees corkscrewing through the broken baroque pediments and collapsing cloisters.

Here Baji Rao signed a treaty of alliance with the Company, which he now acknowledged to be the Marathas’ overlord. A large British garrison would be installed in a new barracks to overlook the Peshwa’s palace in Pune, where British arms would now reinstall him.

The document, known as the Treaty of Bassein, was ratified on the last day of the year, 31 December 1802. When Holkar learned the details of the terms, he declared, simply: ‘Baji Rao has destroyed the Maratha state. Now the British will deal the same blow to it that they did to Tipu Sultan.’⁷⁶

With the Treaty of Bassein, Wellesley believed he had succeeded, bloodlessly, in turning the Marathas into dependants of the Company, just as he had the Nizam. Other more experienced observers were less sure. As soon as he heard the details of the treaty, the Resident in Hyderabad, James Kirkpatrick, wrote an official despatch from Hyderabad warning that not one of the Maratha warlords – the real powers in the Peshwa’s dominions – would sit back and allow the English to control Baji Rao as their puppet. He predicted that Wellesley’s actions, instead of bringing peace, would succeed in uniting the Marathas where Baji Rao himself had failed, and that together the Maratha armies would now mass in a ‘hostile confederacy’ to fight the Company.

Wellesley was predictably furious at what he regarded as Kirkpatrick’s impertinence. He wrote an intemperate reply to Hyderabad, saying that any sort of united Maratha resistance was now ‘categorically impossible’ and that the Resident was guilty of ‘ignorance, folly, and treachery’ in suggesting otherwise. But Kirkpatrick held his ground, replying that his sources of intelligence indicated that ‘such a confederacy was highly probable’, that Holkar was even now on his way to occupy Pune, and that another of the leading Maratha chieftains, Raghuji Bhosle, the Raja of Berar, was planning to join him there.

Kirkpatrick was correct. Within months, the Company would once again be at war, and this time against the largest, best armed and most tightly trained forces they had ever faced.

The last survivor of the older generation of rulers was the Emperor Shah Alam. Now seventy-five, the old, blind king still sat on the gilt replica of the Peacock Throne amid his ruined palace, the sightless ruler of a largely illusory empire.

The Emperor had outlived all his enemies – Nader Shah, Imad ul-Mulk, Clive, Carnac, Shuja ud-Daula, Ghulam Qadir – but this was really his only victory. In old age, he was at least realistic about his failures, telling his heir apparent, Akbar Shah, that from the day that he arrived back in Delhi he was a ruler in name only. He was merely a high-class prisoner, he said, and his sons should not consider themselves more than that.⁷⁷

Mahadji Scindia, who had at least showed an intermittent interest in the welfare of the Emperor, had died in 1794 and his successor, Daulat Rao, was completely indifferent to his nominal position as Mughal Vakil-i-Mutlaq, or Vizier. He had still less interest in maintaining the Mughal court which lay in the far north of his dominions, and which he never visited after ascending the musnud. So while the Emperor remained under nominal Maratha protection, with a Maratha garrison resident within the Red Fort, the imperial family lived in poverty, neglected by their keepers.

These were a group of French officers led by Louis Guillaume François Drugeon, a Savoyard aristocrat who was given charge of the Emperor’s person and command of the Emperor’s bodyguard, and Louis Bourquien, a French mercenary of humble origins, who one historian of the Marathas has described as a ‘pastry cook, pyrotechnic and poltroon’. Overall command lay with Scindia’s Commander-in-Chief, General Pierre Perron, the son of a Provençal weaver, who lived with his troops a hundred miles to the south-east in the great fortress of Aligarh.⁷⁸

Several volumes of the palace diary from the period, the Roznamcha-i-Shah Alam, survive in the British Library and they reveal as no other source the degree to which Mughal court life had been diminished by sheer lack of resources. We hear how one prince was caught stripping out pieces of marble and inlaid semi-precious stones from the floor of the Asad Burj tower ‘for the purpose of sale. He was summoned by His Majesty and warned against committing such malicious activities.’ A princess got into a dispute with the king over the interest on some jewels she had been forced to mortgage. A concubine was accused of stealing the ornaments of Nawab Mubarak Mahal. The royal children complained their salaries had not been paid; the more distant royal cousins made a bid to escape from the Salatin Cage, claiming they were not receiving adequate food and were near starvation. The king replied that ‘due to the infirm state of the Empire, it was necessary for the Princes to be contented with whatever the Masters of Pune [the Marathas] provide for expenditure’.

On one especially telling occasion, the blind king had to reprimand the royal servants when a visiting Maratha chief threw a handful of coins on the floor of the audience hall, and all the attendants, abandoning court decorum, scrambled to grab them, some even breaking into fist fights within the Diwan-i-Am. Meanwhile, petitioners from the city complained about raids by Gujjars within the walls, and by the Sikhs on the outer suburbs.⁷⁹

Shah Alam was also alarmed by the reports he heard of the violence and instability generated by the Maratha civil war, and blamed Daulat Rao: ‘His Majesty expressed deep regret at these developments,’ reported his biographer, Munna Lal, ‘saying “this ill-omened one now strives to sow disunity among his companions. With such ugly and inappropriate behaviour, he saws off the branch he’s sitting on. It will all end in scandal and disaster.”’⁸⁰

Frustrated by the ways of this world, the Emperor looked more and more to the world of the spirit. When a celebrated dervish arrived from Lahore, the imperial princes were sent out to the gates of the city to welcome him. On one occasion, it was reported that a concubine ‘saw in a dream that if His Majesty paid a visit to Qadam Sharif and ordered a red cow to be released to wander free, the situation in the Empire would improve’. The Emperor gave orders that both should be done.⁸¹

Shah Alam’s one remaining pleasure was his literary work. He spent much of his free time in his seventies editing his lifetime’s poetic composition, from which he produced a single volume of his favourite verses, and the Nadirat-i-Shahi, Diwan-i-Aftab. He also dictated what scholars hold to be the first full-length novel in Delhi Urdu, a massive and ambitious 4,000-page work called the Ajaib ul-Qasas. This dastan (story) is a meditation on kingship and tells the story of a prince and princess tossed back and forth by powers beyond their control, from India to Constantinople via various magical islands and fairy and demonic realms. While the prince’s sense of helplessness in the hands of fate reflects Shah Alam’s experience, the lavish courtly settings of the dastan contrast with the impoverished reality of Shah Alam’s daily life under the neglectful regime of the younger Scindia.

Daulat Rao may not have realised the value of controlling the elderly Mughal Emperor, but Lord Wellesley certainly did. He understood the vital distinction that, while Shah Alam may not have commanded any significant military power, he still held substantial symbolic authority, and that his decisions instantly conferred legality. ‘Notwithstanding His Majesty’s total deprivation of real power, dominion, and authority,’ he wrote, ‘almost every state and every class of people in India continue to acknowledge his nominal sovereignty. The current coin of every established power is struck in the name of Shah Alam …’⁸²

As it became clear by the end of June 1803 that Scindia was not going to accept the Treaty of Bassein, and that war was now unavoidable, Wellesley began drawing up detailed plans to invade Hindustan and seize both its ancient Mughal capital and its emperor. Having brought about ‘the destruction of M. Perron’s force’, he would, he wrote, ‘invade Scindia’s possessions and make alliances with the Rajputs’.⁸³ ‘I will seize Agra and Delhi,’ he told his brother Arthur, and thus ‘take the person of the Mogul into British protection … at the earliest practical moment.’⁸⁴ This would be the moment when the Company finally, both symbolically and in substance, came to replace the Mughals and the Marathas as the paramount rulers of India.

The British had long used Shah Alam’s confidant, Sayyid Reza Khan, as a discreet channel of communication with the Emperor, and now Wellesley decided to send a secret letter to Shah Alam, offering him asylum and opening negotiations to take the Mughals back under Company care for the first time since the Emperor had left Allahabad thirty years earlier, in 1772: ‘Your Majesty is fully apprised of the sentiments of respect and attachment which the British Government has invariably entertained towards your Royal Person and Family,’ he began in his usual style, mixing flattery, sarcasm and half-truths. ‘The injuries and indignities to which your Majesty and your illustrious family have been exposed since the time when your Majesty unhappily transferred the Protection of your person to the Power of the Maratha State, have been a subject of unceasing concern to the Honourable Company.’

I have deeply regretted that the Circumstances of the times have hitherto not been conducive to the interposition of British Power for the purpose of affording your Majesty effectual relief from injustice, rapacity and inhumanity. In the present Crisis of Affairs, it is probable that your Majesty may have the opportunity of again placing yourself under the Protection of the British Government, and I shall avail myself of any event which may enable me to obey the Dictates of my Sincere respect and Attachment to your Royal House.⁸⁵

Wellesley’s Commander-in-Chief, Lord Lake, was instructed to ‘show His Majesty every demonstration of reverence, respect and attention and every degree of regard for the comfort of His Majesty and the Royal Family’, and to assure him ‘that adequate Provision will be made for the support of your Majesty and of your family and Household’. It sounded generous, although the following paragraph hinted at Wellesley’s actual intentions, when he suggested that the Emperor might prefer to leave the Red Fort and reside closer to Calcutta, at the modestly provincial fort of Monghyr near Patna.⁸⁶ But the chivalrous Lord Lake, misunderstanding Wellesley’s meaning, went beyond his superior’s intentions and assumed the tone of a subject rather than that of a friendly protector: ‘I am cordially disposed to render your Majesty every demonstration of my loyalty and attachment,’ he wrote, ‘and I consider it to be a distinguished honour, as it is a peculiar privilege, to execute your Majesty’s commands.’

The subtle difference in tone was not lost on the Emperor.

Two Company armies, one in the north, the other in the south, were now actively preparing for the coming conflict. In the north, Lake was drilling his men at his forward post, ‘the vast ruins of the ancient city of Kannauj’. This lay close to the Company’s western border with the Marathas, ‘amidst lofty grass, covering the remains of splendid edifices and the tombs of princes, concealing a variety of game, such as wolves, jackals and tigers’.⁸⁷

At the age of only seventeen, Lake had served close to Frederick the Great, and from him had learned the effectiveness of fast, light, horse-drawn artillery, or, as he called them, ‘galloper guns’. Now he brought this military novelty to India: ‘Two of these guns, six-pounders, were attached to each regiment of horse,’ wrote Major William Thorn, ‘and nothing could exceed the speed and exactness of the manoeuvres made with them at full speed by this large body of cavalry, whose combined movements were conducted with the most perfect order’, something which would soon provoke ‘terror among the Maratha horse’.⁸⁸ Lake worked his troops hard, but also charmed his army with his lavish evening hospitality. Once war broke out, he would soon need all these reserves of trust and popularity to persuade his troops to face down the magnificent Maratha artillery.

In the south, Lord Wellesley’s younger brother, the newly promoted Major General Arthur Wellesley, was also deep in preparations for the forthcoming war: busy gathering in troops, rice and other provisions at Tipu’s old capital of Srirangapatnam. Here he had earlier absorbed some of Tipu’s troops, artillery and, most important of all, his vast transport machine – 32,000 bullocks and 250,000 strong white Mysore cattle – into his army.⁸⁹ Like Lake, he put his men through a rigorous training programme, practising crossing fast-flowing rivers with coracles, while in the hills round about he ‘manoeuvred his future army, and taught us that uniformity of movement, which afterwards would enable him to conquer foes twenty times as numerous’.⁹⁰

In early March 1803 Arthur Wellesley set off to march Peshwa Baji Rao II back into Pune and return him to his throne, now under British protection and the Wellesleys’ own firm control. This he achieved in early April, without firing a shot, as Holkar cautiously withdrew his army north-east, across the Deccan to Aurangabad. Baji Rao resumed his palace life, now less as a Maratha leader than a British puppet, but apparently ‘happy with his routine of baths and prayers, eating, drinking and making merry, having no bother of any outside concern … Sumptuous dinners with profuse decorations for plates are arranged daily. Hot discussion takes place on the selection of dishes …’⁹¹

The ease with which Arthur Wellesley achieved this success later led him to underestimate the bravery and skill of the Marathas, laughing at the former Resident, Lieutenant Colonel John Ulrich Collins, who warned him that ‘their infantry and guns will astonish you’. This was a serious mistake; it would not be long before the Maratha armies proved themselves by far the most formidable enemy ever tackled by the Company. One of the major general’s officers, who later remembered Collins’ warning, wrote in his memoirs how ‘riding home afterwards we amused ourselves, the General among the rest, in cutting jokes at the expense of “little King Collins.” We little thought how true his words would soon prove.’⁹²

While his generals were busy with drilling and training their troops, the Governor General himself was in Calcutta, engaged in finalising the financial and diplomatic support for his forthcoming war.

The Company’s army had expanded very quickly under Wellesley’s rule and within a few years its muster roll had gone up by nearly half from 115,000 to 155,000 men; in the next decade its numbers would rise again to 195,000, making it one of the largest standing European-style armies in the world, and around twice the size of the British army. It had also belatedly recruited an impressive new cavalry arm, mounted on strong European and South African horses. Their job it was to protect the slow-moving and cumbersome infantry and artillery columns from flanking attacks by irregular Indian light horse, as had happened with fatal consequences at Talegaon and Pollilur. This was a form of warfare in which the Marathas were especially skilled.⁹³

Unlike the perennially cash-strapped Warren Hastings, Wellesley had no problem paying for this vastly increased military establishment. After the rural upheavals of Cornwallis’s land reforms had settled down, the Company in Bengal found it had a considerable annual revenue surplus of Rs25 million. In contrast, Scindia was able to realise only Rs1.2 million^f from his poorly irrigated home base in Malwa. This dependable surplus in turn allowed the Company easy access to credit from the Bengal money market, so much so that under Wellesley, between 1798 and 1806, the Company’s debt in India more than tripled.

The Company was also able efficiently to redistribute these financial resources around India. The bankers of Benares and the west coast house of Gopaldas-Manohardas, both of whom were given the protection of the Company’s army, now began to send representatives to travel with it, supplying cash as required both to the troops themselves and their army paymasters. Indeed, bankers from across India began to compete among themselves to supply the Company army with finance. Two Benares banking houses, Mannu Lal and Beniparshad, went as far as asking for assurances that the Company ‘would honour them with a preference on being permitted to furnish supplies of cash that may be required for the use of the army’.⁹⁴

Ultimately the East India Company succeeded in war precisely because it had found a way to provide a secure financial base for its powerful mercenary army, and always found it easier than any of its rivals to persuade Indian seths, sahukaras and shroffs quickly to realise the cash needed to pay the army’s salaries and feed its hungry troops. In contrast, as the young Arthur Wellesley noted, ‘there is not a Maratha in the whole country, from the Peshwa down to lowest horseman, who has a shilling’. This was hardly surprising as, by 1801, Arthur had noted that after the devastations of the Maratha civil war, there was ‘not a tree or an ear of corn standing for 150 miles around Pune’.⁹⁵

Things were just as bad at the Mughal court where a Maratha envoy reported that ‘money is nowhere to be seen’.⁹⁶ As a result Scindia and Holkar, both enormously in arrears to their troops and with their sahukaras often refusing further loans, found themselves in the same position as an earlier Maratha Peshwa who described himself as having ‘fallen into that hell of being beset by creditors … I am falling at their feet till I have rubbed the skin from my forehead.’⁹⁷

But Richard Wellesley was far too cunning and ruthless an adversary to rely merely on brute military force or indeed the power of the Company’s money alone. His greatest pleasure always lay in moving his pieces on the chessboard in such a way as to frustrate or hopelessly entrap his enemies.

Messages were sent out to seduce, corrupt and buy the frequently unpaid mercenaries in Maratha service; the Commander-in-Chief of Scindia’s northern forces, General Pierre Perron, who had already invested his life savings of £280,000^g in Company stock, was one of the first to show an interest in coming to a mutually beneficial financial arrangement.⁹⁸ Lake was given authority ‘to conclude any arrangement with M. Perron for the security of his personal interests and property accompanied by any reasonable renumeration which shall induce him to deliver up the whole of his military resources and power into your hands’.⁹⁹

The gnarled old warrior ascetic Anupgiri Gossain, now known as Himmat Bahadur, was also persuaded to come to terms with his former adversaries and ally his Bundelkhand-based Naga warriors with the Company. This happened despite warnings from one of Wellesley’s intelligence men that ‘Himmat Bahadur is not to be trusted … A native speaking of him said he was like a man who in crossing a river kept a foot in two boats, ready to abandon the one that was sinking.’¹⁰⁰

Wellesley also worked hard to keep the warring Maratha armies from patching up their differences. In particular, adopting the old Roman maxim divide et impera, divide and rule, Wellesley did all he could to keep Scindia and Holkar from reconciling. In this he was especially successful.

By the end of June 1803, Holkar had gathered his entire army near Aurangabad but still equivocated about joining the coalition with his brother’s murderers to fight the Company. Here Wellesley’s masterstroke was to send Holkar a captured letter from Scindia in which the latter plotted with Peshwa Baji Rao to overthrow Holkar after the war was over: ‘Let us make a show of satisfying his demands,’ wrote Daulat Rao. ‘After the war is over, we shall both wreak our full vengeance upon him.’¹⁰¹

After receiving this, Holkar, who had just made the first two days’ march towards Scindia, turned back, and firmly declined to join the coalition. Shortly afterwards, he recrossed the Narmada and set off back towards his central Indian base at Maheshwar.¹⁰² This allowed Wellesley first to pick off Scindia and his ally Raghuji Bhosle, Raja of Berar, and only later to move his forces against Holkar. This, perhaps more than any other factor, gave the Company its most overwhelming advantage against its still militarily powerful but politically fractured Maratha adversaries.

Behind all these manoeuvres, Wellesley was developing an aggressive new conception of British Empire in India, not as a corporate but as a state enterprise; and it was a vision that was markedly more nationalist and nakedly expansionist than anything his Company predecessors could have dreamed of. On 8 July Sir George Barlow first articulated it in an official memorandum: ‘It is absolutely necessary,’ he wrote, ‘that no Native State should be left to exist in India which is not upheld by the British power, or the political conduct of which is not under its absolute control.’¹⁰³ It was from this idea of total British government control over the entire Indian peninsula that would grow the British Raj – and with it a future in which Mughal, Maratha and finally even the Company itself would all, in time, give way to the control of the British Crown.

As usual, Wellesley neglected to tell his nominal employers, the Company directors, what he was planning. Already there was growing nervousness in Leadenhall Street about Wellesley’s grandiose style of ruling. When the traveller Lord Valentia arrived in Calcutta he applauded Wellesley’s imperial style, writing that it was better that ‘India be ruled from a palace than a counting house’; but it was Wellesley’s increasingly wasteful and spendthrift use of Company funds that was steadily eroding his support among the directors, and provoking the first discussions about his eventual recall.¹⁰⁴ Already the directors were sending shots across Wellesley’s bow, making it quite clear that ‘It by no means appears to us essential to the well-being of our Government in India that pomp, magnificence and ostentation of the Native Governments should be adopted by the former; the expense that such a system would naturally lead must prove highly injurious to our commercial interests.’¹⁰⁵

In his usual spirit of dissimulation to his employers, well into 1803 Lord Wellesley was still promising the directors a ‘speedy and hasty conclusion of the late arrangements with His Highness the Peshwa, and of the amicable adjustment of the differences existing among the Maratha chieftains, through the mediation and influence of the British power’.¹⁰⁶ Maybe that spring Wellesley really did still hope that Scindia could be intimidated into recognising the Treaty of Bassein, and, like the Nizam and the Peshwa Baji Rao before him, be bullied into accepting the protection of the Company. But as spring gave way to the summer of 1803, such dreams quickly faded, as the increasingly gloomy despatches from his envoy Colonel John Collins confirmed. In July, Wellesley sent Scindia an ultimatum to withdraw north of the Narmada or to face the consequences.

In the end, Daulat Rao Scindia did not back down; instead, like Tipu, he began making preparations for hostilities. On 1 August 1803, he gave Collins a formal declaration of war and dismissed him from his camp.

It took a week for express couriers to carry the news to Calcutta; but only a few hours for Lord Wellesley to give the order for his carefully laid war plans to be immediately put into action on no less than four fronts – with minor thrusts along the coasts of Orissa and Gujarat as well as the two main assaults which were designed to take control of the entire Deccan and all of Hindustan.¹⁰⁷

To Scindia and Bhosle, the Governor General wrote a brief note: ‘While we have no desire to open war against you, you two chiefs have given a clear indication of your intention to attack us, since you have collected large forces on the Nizam’s frontiers and you have refused to move away from your positions. You have rejected the hand of friendship I have offered you, and I am now starting hostilities without further parleys. The responsibility is entirely yours.’¹⁰⁸

Major General Arthur Wellesley heard the news of Scindia’s declaration of war on 4 August. On the 6th he broke camp and with 40,000 troops headed off north towards the mighty fortress of Ahmadnagar which he captured on the 11th after a brief bombardment and the payment of a large bribe to the French and Arab mercenaries holding the fort for Scindia. Inside was found large amounts of gunpowder, part of Scindia’s remaining treasure and ample food supplies. Arthur Wellesley garrisoned the fort as his base while he sent scouts out to search for the main Maratha army.

Scindia and Bhosle, meanwhile, had succeeded in bringing their forces together; they then marched their confederated army south to plunder the Nizam’s territories around Aurangabad and draw Wellesley out of the safety of his fortifications. In this they succeeded. Leaving a large garrison behind to guard Ahmadnagar, Wellesley moved eastwards to defend his allies’ territory and stop the Maratha advance. The two armies finally came within sight of one another in the dusty alluvial plain to the north of the Ajanta Pass, in the early morning of 23 September, after Wellesley’s troops had just marched eighteen miles through the night.

The major general had broken his force in two the day before to avoid the delay that would have taken place in sending his whole army through the narrow Ajanta defile; half he had sent off to the west under his deputy, Colonel Stevenson. He therefore had less than 5,000 men – half of them Madrasi sepoys, the other half kilted Highlanders – when he heard from his scouts that Scindia’s camp was only five miles away and that the Marathas were about to move off. His small army was exhausted from their night march. But, worried that his quarry might escape if he waited, Wellesley made an immediate decision to head straight into the attack, without giving his troops time to rest or waiting for the other half of his force.

Reaching the crest of a low hill, the major general saw the two Maratha armies spread out before him, next to the fortified village of Assaye. Their tents and qanats (tented enclosures) extended for as much as six miles along the banks of the shallow Khelna River to near where it reached a confluence with another smaller stream, the Juah. He calculated that there were around 10,000 infantry and around five times that number of irregular cavalry. They were clearly not expecting an attack and their artillery bullocks were out grazing along the riverbank.

Leaving his baggage and stores behind him under guard, Wellesley marched straight forward, as if to make an immediate frontal attack over the river. Then at the last moment he turned eastwards to cross the meandering Khelna at an unguarded ford whose position he had guessed at due to the proximity of two small villages just before it. His guess was a lucky one: the water was between knee and waist high, and Wellesley just managed to get all his troops across without them getting their powder wet. Even so, his artillery had trouble crossing, and several guns got stuck in the mud, leaving his infantry to form up and face the opening salvos of the Maratha bombardment without the protection of artillery cover.

Arthur Wellesley had hoped that the speed and surprise of his movement would leave the Marathas in disarray and allow him to attack their unguarded right flank; but to his surprise he found that Scindia’s troops had managed not only to get themselves into full battle formation but had also skilfully wheeled around to the left in order to face his new direction of attack, all the while maintaining perfect order. This was a difficult manoeuvre that he presumed they would be incapable of, but which they instantly effected with parade-ground precision.

This was only the first in a whole series of surprises in a battle that Arthur Wellesley would later remember as one of the hardest he had ever fought, and altogether tougher than his later confrontation with Napoleon at Waterloo. ‘Their infantry is the best I have ever seen in India, excepting our own,’ he wrote afterwards to his friend John Malcolm. ‘I assure you that their fire was so heavy that I doubted at one time if I should be able to induce our troops to advance. All agree that the battle was the fiercest that has ever been seen in India. Our troops behaved admirably; the sepoys astonished me.’¹⁰⁹

A particular shock was Scindia’s heavy field guns which proved just as deadly as Collins had warned: ‘The fire of the enemy’s artillery became most dreadful,’ remembered Major John Blakiston. ‘In the space of less than a mile, 100 guns worked with skill and rapidity, vomited forth death into our feeble ranks. It cannot then be a matter of surprise if our sepoys should have taken advantage of any irregularities in the ground to shelter themselves from the deadly shower, or that even, in some few instances, not all the endeavours of the officers could persuade them to move forward.’¹¹⁰ Major Thorn concurred: ‘It was acknowledged by all the officers present, who had witnessed the power of the French artillery in the wars of Europe, that the enemy’s guns at the Battle of Assaye were equally well-served.’¹¹¹

The major general himself had two horses shot under him and had several of his immediate staff killed around him by the clouds of grape the Maratha gunners sent in his direction. One large round shot just missed Wellesley as he was crossing the Khelna but decapitated his dragoon orderly as he paused midstream. The horrifying sight of the headless horseman features in many accounts of the battle, ‘the body being kept in its seat by the valise, holsters, and other appendages of a cavalry saddle, and it was some time before the terrified horse could rid himself of the ghastly burden’.¹¹²

The Madras infantry sepoys in the centre and the Highlanders on the right wing of Wellesley’s front line were targeted with particular violence, as the Maratha gunners tried to blow away the core of Wellesley’s formation with large canisters of anti-personnel chain and grapeshot, fired at short range and at close quarters: whirring through the air with a terrifying screeching noise, ‘it knocked down men, horses and bullocks, every shot’.¹¹³

Nevertheless, Wellesley’s infantry continued to advance at a steady pace, through the smoke. They fired a single volley, then charged the Maratha guns with bayonets, killing the gunners as they stood at the gun muzzles ‘and none quitted their posts until the bayonets were at their breasts … nothing could surpass the skill or bravery displayed by their golumdauze [gunners]’.¹¹⁴

A final surprise awaited the British as they marched forward to drive Scindia’s men from their fallback position. Once the British infantry lines had safely passed by, many of the Maratha ‘dead’ around the cannons ‘suddenly arose, seized the cannon which had been left behind by the army, and began to reopen a fierce fire upon the rear of our troops, who, inattentive to what they were doing, were eagerly bent upon the pursuit of the flying enemy before them’. The British lines were raked with yet more canister shot until the major general personally led a desperate cavalry charge ‘against the resuscitated foe’, during which he had his second horse shot beneath him.¹¹⁵

Two hours later, after a final stand in the village fort, Scindia’s Marathas were driven from the field and back over the Juah, leaving ninety-eight of their guns in British hands; but the casualties on both sides were appalling. The Marathas lost around 6,000 men. Wellesley lost fewer, but as the smoke cleared the major general found he had just left fully one-third of his army dead on the battlefield: 1,584 out of 4,500 of his troops were later burned or buried on the plains of Assaye.¹¹⁶ Indeed, so battered were his forces that Wellesley declared pursuit of Scindia and his fleeing men impossible, writing to his elder brother, ‘Scindia’s French[-trained] infantry were far better than Tipu’s, his artillery excellent, and his ordnance so good, and so well equipped, that it answers for our service. We never could use Tipu’s. Our loss is great, but the action, I believe, was the most severe that ever was fought in this country.’¹¹⁷ As one of Wellesley’s senior officers wrote to the major general soon afterwards: ‘I hope you will not have occasion to purchase any more victories at such a high price.’¹¹⁸

Because of Arthur Wellesley’s later celebrity after Waterloo, Assaye has long come to be regarded as the crucial victory of the Maratha War; but at the time, most eyes were actually on the north, where, long before Assaye, the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Lake, was already advancing rapidly on the Mughal capital, in what was seen at the time as the final chapter of the Company’s conquest of what had once been the Mughal Empire.

As Richard Wellesley wrote unequivocally to Lake: ‘The defeat of Perron is certainly the first object of the campaign.’ Lake, he stressed, must understand the crucial ‘importance of securing the person and nominal authority of the Mogul against the designs of France, and the increase in reputation to the British name which would result from offering an honourable asylum to the person and family of that injured and unfortunate monarch’.¹¹⁹

Lord Lake, who liked to claim descent from the Arthurian hero Lancelot of the Lake, was not a man who admired diplomacy or who liked being told what to do: ‘Damn your writing,’ he is alleged to have cried at an army book-keeper. ‘Mind your fighting!’ The phrase became his maxim. Although sixty years old, and a veteran of the Seven Years War and, more recently, the American War of Independence, where he fought against Washington at Yorktown, he was still famous for his boyish charm and immense energy, often rising at 2 a.m. to be ready to lead the march, blue eyes flashing.¹²⁰

Determined to take the offensive, Lake left Kanpur on 7 August, a day after he heard about the declaration of war, even though it was in the middle of the monsoon and the roads were awash with mud. He headed due west towards Perron’s fortress at Aligarh. Intent on fighting a fast-moving campaign, Lake brought with him a small but highly trained Grand Army of 10,000 men, including a cavalry division armed with his light galloper guns; but he deliberately brought little heavy artillery and no siege equipment.

His intention to lead a small and mobile force was, however, somewhat challenged by Indian reality. By the early nineteenth century, East India Company armies had accumulated a huge establishment of attendants and assistants and support staff. In the end, the total body heading west amounted to more than 100,000 people, including mahouts and coolies, grass-cutters and horse-keepers, tent lascars and bullock-men, Banjarrah grain-collectors and money-changers, ‘female quacks, jugglers, groups of dancing girls, and votaries of pleasure’. These numbers did not, of course, include the thousands of elephants, camels, horses, poultry and flocks of goats and sheep which followed close on their heels: ‘The march of our army had the appearance of a moving town or citadel,’ remembered Major Thorn, ‘in the form of an oblong square, whose sides were defended by ramparts of glittering swords and bayonets.’¹²¹

After three weeks of difficult marching through heavy rain, wading through mud and badly flooded roads with carefully sealed ammunition boxes carried aloft on men’s heads, on 29 August Lake’s army crossed into Maratha territory and advanced swiftly on the mighty polygonal fortress of Aligarh, with its massive French-designed walls, reinforced corner towers and deep moat.

Aligarh was regarded as one of the strongest and best-provisioned forts in Hindustan; a siege could have taken months. Throughout the march, however, Lake had been in negotiations with General Perron over what he would charge to deliver the fortress into the hands of the British.¹²² Through intermediaries, the two commanders had eventually come to an understanding, and when Lake’s army advanced on his headquarters, Perron obediently withdrew, along with his bodyguard, after only the briefest of skirmishes with Lake and a few salvoes from his galloper guns.

Perron told his men he was off to gather reinforcements from Agra and Delhi, and to his deputy, Colonel Pedron, ‘a stout, elderly man with a green jacket with gold lace and epaulettes’, he sent a remarkably disingenuous letter: ‘Remember you are a Frenchman,’ he wrote, ‘and let no action of yours tarnish the character of your nation. I hope in a few days to send back the English general as fast, or faster, than he came. Make yourself perfectly easy on the subject. Either the Emperor’s army or General Lake shall find a grave before Allyghur. Do your duty, and defend the fort while one stone remains upon another. Once more remember your nation. The eyes of millions are fixed upon you!’¹²³

These brave words were belied by the last conversation he had before fleeing up the Delhi road. One of his junior cavalry officers, of mixed Scottish and Rajput blood, attempted to ride with him, but was waved away, ‘Ah, no, no! It is all over!’ Perron shouted over his shoulder, ‘in confusion and without his hat’, at the young James Skinner. ‘These fellows [the cavalry] have behaved ill: do not ruin yourself, go over to the British; it is all up with us!’¹²⁴

Distrusted by the French, all the Anglo-Indians among the Maratha forces, including Skinner himself, crossed the battle lines at this point: ‘We went to General Lake and were kindly received,’ wrote Skinner later.¹²⁵ Pedron and many of Perron’s French mercenary colleagues were equally happy to surrender if they were assured of a safe passage home with their lifetimes’ savings intact. But Lake had not reckoned with the honour of Scindia’s Rajput and Maratha officers, who stoutly refused all inducements to drop their weapons and quickly withdrew behind the walls to begin their defence. There they deposed and imprisoned Pedron, elected a Maratha commander of their own, and prepared to fight to the death.

For three days Lake continued to negotiate, making the men a variety of extravagant promises, but the defenders remained firm. ‘I tried every method to prevail upon these people to give up the fort,’ wrote Lake, ‘and offered a very large sum of money, but they were determined to hold out, which they did most obstinately, and, I may say, most gallantly.’¹²⁶

Lake was daunted by the challenge now lying in front of him: ‘The strength of the place cannot be described,’ he wrote to Wellesley. ‘A Seventy-Four [gun ship] might sail in the ditch.’¹²⁷ But ever the hyperactive sexagenarian, Lake was temperamentally incapable of conducting a patient siege, and anyway had left his siege equipment in Kanpur. So, on 4 September he opted for the only alternative: a frontal assault on the main gate of a fortress long considered impregnable. An Irish deserter from Scindia’s garrison, Lieutenant Lucan, offered to lead the storming party, under the supervision of Lake’s deputy, Colonel Monson.

Two hours before dawn, the storming party set off and shortly after that had their first stroke of luck. Had the Marathas withdrawn behind the moat and destroyed the bridge, there was very little Lake could have done. But the defenders had stationed a piquet of fifty men with a 6-pounder gun behind a breastwork in front of the fort, leaving the bridge undamaged and the wicket gate open. Lucan and his storming party edged up in the dark and found the men smoking at their post. ‘They ran at them like lions,’ wrote Skinner, and slit the throats of as many as stood their ground. The rest ‘ran away to the wicket, and got in. The assaulting party attempted to get in along with them, but were shut out.’

Instead, however, of retreating, these brave fellows stood upon the goonjus [bridge] under one of the heaviest fires of musketry and great guns I have seen … [attempting to scale the walls.] Only at sunrise did they fall back about one hundred yards … and in going back they carried with them the [abandoned] Maratha gun.¹²⁸

They fired the gun twice, then a third time, but failed to blow open the heavily reinforced gate. While waiting for a new and larger cannon to be hauled up, the attackers continued their attempts to mount the walls with scaling ladders. As before, they were driven down by the Marathas on the battlements, who had long pikes waiting for them. A heavy 12-pounder cannon was finally wheeled forward to the gate, but just before it could be fired its weight broke through a mine gallery that the defenders had skilfully tunnelled under the area in front of the wicket gate, leaving the gun half in, half out of the tunnel beneath.

As Monson and Lucan tried to lever the cannon out, the attackers were raked with musketry from above and exposed to the fire from two heavy mortars filled with grape that the defenders had prepared and positioned for just this moment. To add to the chaos, the defenders then began to climb down the scaling ladders that the British troops had left propped against the walls. One of them wounded Monson in the thigh with a thrust of his pike; four of his officers were also killed.¹²⁹ ‘This misfortune detained us considerably, and at this time it was that we lost so many of our officers and men. Never did I witness such a scene. The sortie became a perfect slaughter house, and it was with the greatest difficulty that we dragged the gun over our killed and wounded.’¹³⁰

In the Company camp, Lake was on the verge of blowing the bugle to call off the attack. But at the last minute the cannon was righted, pressed against the wood of the gate and fired. It was a muzzle-blast containing no shot, but the pressure from the powder charge at close quarters finally buckled one of the great doors open.¹³¹ ‘I was close to Lord Lake,’ wrote Skinner, ‘and saw and heard everything that passed.’

The God of Heaven certainly looked down upon those noble fellows … for they blew open half the gate, and giving three shouts, they rushed in. The Rajputs stood their ground, like brave soldiers, and from the first to the second gate the fight was desperately maintained on both sides, and the carnage was very great … Then spurring his horse [Lake] galloped to the gate. When he saw his heroes lying thick there, tears came to his eyes. ‘It is the fate of good soldiers!’ he said; and turning round, he galloped back to the camp, and gave up the fort to plunder.¹³²

In the hours that followed, the garrison of 2,000 was massacred. No quarter was asked for and none was given. ‘Many of the enemy were killed in attempting to escape by swimming the ditch after we got in, and I remarked an artilleryman to snap his piece at a man who at the same instance dived to save himself,’ wrote John Pester, Lake’s quartermaster. ‘The soldier coolly waited his coming up and shot him through the head.’

As the heat of the business was over, I remonstrated with him on putting them to death at that time, but the man declared he had lost some of his oldest comrades that morning, and that he wished to be revenged, reminding me also that we had received orders to spare none … Guards were disposed over the different magazines, and at each gate as soon as we had possession, and the enemy were all disposed of; scarcely a man of them escaped for those who swam the ditch were cut up by the troopers on the plain, and all we found in the place were bayonetted.¹³³

At midnight on the night of 1 September, the Qu’tb Minar, built in the twelfth century as a symbol of the establishment of Islamic rule in India, was hit by a massive earthquake and its top storey collapsed to the ground: ‘In Delhi and all around many buildings were toppled from their foundations,’ wrote Shah Alam’s biographer, Munna Lal. ‘In several places the earth cracked wide open. Had it lasted a moment longer, it would have ushered in the Day of Resurrection. The wise interpreted it as a bad omen, signifying that disasters would appear in these times.’¹³⁴

Shah Alam, always sensitive to omens and premonitions, was alarmed. He was, after all, in a difficult position. For much of his adult life he had had no option but to choose between the protection of the Marathas and that of the Company. Both had used him for their own ends, and both had, at crucial junctures in his life, let him badly down. But when the news arrived that Perron had finally surrendered himself to Lord Lake, and been given safe passage to Calcutta with his family, his diamonds and his fortune, the Emperor took the view that the Company was now clearly in the ascendant, and it was time to reopen negotiations.

Shah Alam calculated that his best chance lay in covertly reaching out to Wellesley, while appearing to obey his French and Maratha masters who still garrisoned his fort and staffed his bodyguard. Thus, while putting his seal to proclamations that he would fight against the Company which had ‘seized of the whole country and laid aside allegiance to the throne’, he authorised Sayyid Reza Khan to enter into renewed correspondence with Lake, explaining that ‘the public letter which the Emperor has written and the announcement of his taking to the field are not voluntary acts but arise from compulsion and are directly contrary to his own wishes … He says, “I shall resist it to the utmost, but as I am in their power, I am helpless.”’¹³⁵

Shah Alam nevertheless could not forget the way that Hastings had unilaterally cut the promised payment of the Diwani revenue from Bengal due to him under the terms of the Treaty of Allahabad, and he asked for written assurances that his allowances would be properly paid before he committed to throwing his lot in with the Company: ‘Conceiving therefore that when the English gain possession of the Country they may prove forgetful of me, it becomes necessary for the General [Lake] to settle this point with the Governor General, that hereafter there be no want of obedience or cause of dissatisfaction to me.’¹³⁶ At the same time the Emperor firmly refused to allow Scindia’s men to take his heir apparent, Akbar Shah, with them into battle.

Since Perron’s defection, military authority in the Red Fort had devolved to Lieutenant Colonel Louis Bourquien, who had once earned his living by making both fireworks and tartlets in Calcutta, ‘his craft in culinary matters being superior to his skill in military ones’.¹³⁷ But wherever his true talents lay, Scindia’s troops remained loyal to him, and were determined to revenge the massacre of their brothers-in-arms in Aligarh.

When news came that Lake was advancing rapidly up from Aligarh and had decided to skirt Agra with a view to capturing Delhi and ‘liberating’ the Emperor as soon as possible, Bourquien ferried his army of 19,000 troops across the Yamuna from the ghats under the Red Fort over to Shahdara. The area was flat and, in places, marshy, but he found a low hill commanding the approach to the city and prepared an ambush near the Hindan River, at a point where two swampy lakes flanked the road. This meant that any force coming towards the city from Aligarh would have to funnel themselves into a narrow causeway between the bogs. He then hid his one hundred heavy guns in a semicircle behind tall fans of elephant grass at the base of the hill and waited for Lake to approach.

On the afternoon of 10 September, Lake had camped his men to the north of Akbar’s Tomb at Sikandra. Towards evening his spies brought news that Scindia’s army had crossed the Yamuna and were preparing to block his crossing; but they brought little specific information about the whereabouts of the army. Word quickly circulated that the final battle for the control of Mughal Delhi would be fought the following day: ‘We drank an extra bottle of claret upon this intelligence,’ wrote Quartermaster Pester, ‘and without much reflection on the fate of a battle enjoyed ourselves until after nine.’¹³⁸

Lake woke his troops at 2 a.m., as was his habit, and the final march towards the Mughal capital began an hour later, at 3 a.m. At 10 a.m., after marching eighteen miles, with the sun beginning to beat down on the column, Lake ordered a halt for breakfast beside a marshy lake on the banks of the Hindan. Tents were erected, boots were removed, fires lit and the sepoys began to cook their parathas. The general sent a dram around his officers.

Quite suddenly there was a series of bright flashes and the thunder crash of heavy artillery, ‘shattering not only the tranquillity of the day but the eardrums of men closest to the guns … The accompanying pressure wave generated by the explosive muzzle-blasts, which flattened the obstructing grass, was immediately followed by other, unnatural and far more eerie auditory sensations that played upon deafened ears. Grape shot tore and chain shot scythed through the grass with a shearing sound which was followed by a metallic clatter or muffled thuds depending on whether the projectiles struck equipment or the flesh of men and horses.’¹³⁹

It was a massacre. Among the many casualties was Pester, who was hit by some of the first volleys: ‘A grapeshot passed through the housing of my pistols, and shattered the stock of one of them, and I felt my horse stagger under me; another grape had grazed his side and lodged under the skin; a third went through him. It entered at his near quarter and passed out at the other. He staggered and fell onto me.’¹⁴⁰

Chaos broke out, but the Marathas remained at their defensive position on the raised ground, failing to advance and scatter the terrified Company sepoys. This gave Lake time to rally his men. Deciding to lure Bourquien off his strong position, Lake gave the order for the infantry to fall back in a feint, and they did so, between two wings of cavalry who lay hidden behind the tall grass. The Marathas took the bait and rushed forward, only to find themselves caught in a pincer movement. The Company infantry then turned and advanced methodically forward with bayonets, supported by the galloper guns. ‘We drove them into the Yamuna,’ wrote the badly bruised Pester, ‘and hundreds of them were destroyed in endeavouring to cross it.’

The Flying Artillery was up, and the river appeared boiling by the fire of grape kept up on those of the enemy who had taken to the river. It was literally, for a time, a stream of blood, and presented such a scene as at another period would freeze a man’s very soul. When this was past, we faced about, and returned to the field of battle to collect our wounded men and officers …

There the scene was truly shocking … About thirty surgeons were absolutely covered in blood, performing operations on the unfortunate soldiers who had had their legs and arms shattered in the action, and death in every shape seemed to preside in this assembly of human misery. Their exclamations were enough to pierce the hardest heart. Numbers were fainting, and even dying under the operation; others bore the pain with as much fortitude as they could … In one corner of the tent stood a pile of legs and arms, from which the boots and clothes of many were not yet stripped off.¹⁴¹

That night, five French commanders gave themselves up, and Lord Lake wrote to tell Wellesley what had passed.¹⁴² He added: ‘Your Lordship will perceive that our loss has been very great … under as heavy a fire as I have ever been witness to …’¹⁴³ Later he expanded on the bravery and skill shown by his Maratha opponents. ‘Their battalions are uncommonly well appointed,’ he wrote, ‘have a most numerous artillery, as well served as they possibly can be.’

All the sepoys of the enemy behaved exceedingly well, the gunners standing to their guns until killed by the bayonet … I was never in so severe a business in my life, and I pray to God I may never be in such a situation again. Their army is better appointed than ours; no expense is spared, and they have three times the number of men to a gun we have. These fellows fought like devils, or rather heroes, and had we not made a disposition for attack in a style that we should have done against the most formidable army we could have been opposed to, I verily believe, from the position they had taken, we might have failed.¹⁴⁴

Terrible as it was, the Battle of Delhi was the last time British troops faced French officers in South Asia, ending more than a century of rivalry which had caused so much bloodshed, mostly of non-Europeans, across the subcontinent. It also brought to a close Hindustan’s unhappy century of being fought over, and plundered, by rival armies. As Khair ud-Din put it shortly afterwards, ‘the country is now flourishing and at peace. The deer lies down with the leopard, the fish with the shark, the pigeon with the hawk, and the sparrow with the eagle.’¹⁴⁵ Khair ud-Din was, of course, writing to flatter his British patrons, but there was a measure of truth in what he wrote: in comparison with the horrors of the last century – ‘the Great Anarchy’ – the next fifty years would be remembered as ‘the Golden Calm’.

Most importantly, the Battle of Delhi decided the future fate of India. The Marathas were the last indigenous Indian power that was militarily capable of defeating the Company and driving it out of South Asia. There were other battles still to be fought against both Scindia and Holkar before they surrendered, but after Assaye and Delhi the outcome of the war was quite clear. The last power who could have ousted the Company had been humbled and was about to be conquered.

Company Bengal, Madras and Bombay were now linked up as a continuous unit, joined with the Deccan and much of Hindustan, so consolidating a land empire that controlled over half a million square miles of territory and which, fifty years later, would become the British Raj.¹⁴⁶ Before long, the Company would conclude treaties with all the Rajput states that had been fiefs of Scindia: Jodhpur, Jaipur, Macheri, Bundi and the Jat Raja of Bharatpur. All the major regimes of peninsular India had now either been annexed or become allies of the Company through a process of conquest, collaboration and co-option. As Arthur Wellesley told his delighted brother: ‘Your policy and our power have reduced all the powers in India to the state of mere cyphers.’¹⁴⁷

Around 600 well-trained Company civil servants, guarded by 155,000 Indian sepoys, were to administer most of peninsular India.¹⁴⁸ Here the Company’s army was now unequivocally the dominant military force, and the Governor General who controlled it the real Emperor. Not only had Lord Wellesley gained many more subjects than Britain had lost a decade earlier in North America – around 50 million – he had also created a cadre of young men committed to his imperial project, and who would carry it forward after he had gone.¹⁴⁹ Wellesley’s ambitious protégés were working for the establishment and spread of an Anglicised colonial state that would provide an efficiently regimented but increasingly remote and alien administrative infrastructure for this new empire. As one of them, the young Company diplomat Charles Metcalfe, wrote, ‘Sovereigns you are, and as such must act.’¹⁵⁰

In London there was surprisingly little awareness as yet of what had been achieved. The country was still obsessed with the struggle with Napoleon, and despite the swathe of territories Lord Wellesley had conquered, there was little interest in what had taken place in India outside those organisations or people directly concerned with it. Even Wellesley’s ultimate boss, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Grenville, declared himself ‘totally unacquainted with every part of this subject’ when Lord Wellesley’s aggressively expansionist Indian policy was briefly discussed in a half-empty House of Lords.¹⁵¹

But within India everyone knew that a major revolution had just taken place. Many Muslims, led by the puritanical Delhi imam Shah Abdul Aziz, saw this as the moment that India had slipped out of their hands for the first time since the twelfth century: ‘From here to Calcutta, the Christians are in complete control,’ wrote Shah Abdul Aziz in an 1803 fatwa of jihad. ‘India is no longer Dar ul-Islam.’¹⁵² Company officials realised it with equal clarity: ‘We are now complete masters of India,’ wrote Thomas Munro, ‘and nothing can shake our power if we take proper measures to confirm it.’¹⁵³

The sinews of British supremacy were now established. With the exception of a few months during the Great Uprising of 1857, for better or worse, India would remain in British hands for another 144 years, finally gaining its freedom only in August 1947.

Shah Alam and the royal family watched the battle anxiously from the roof of the Red Fort. Towards late afternoon they had a grandstand view of the Company lancers chasing fleeing Maratha sepoys immediately opposite their marble pavilions and ‘cutting them up on the banks of the river which runs immediately under the fort of Delhi. The Emperor had sent out instantly to congratulate the Commander-in-Chief on our victory and declared that “he waited to receive the General as his saviour in his arms.”’¹⁵⁴

The following day, 15 September, according to the Shah Alam Nama,

General Lake proceeded to pitch his tents on the far side of the Yamuna and sent Sayyid Reza Khan, who had for a long time been the Company’s representative at the Imperial Court, to humbly request an audience at the Celestial Threshold. He also asked that boats should be provided for crossing the river. The Universal Monarch gave the order to his Commander of the River to send boats without delay. The General crossed the Yamuna and lodged in the vicinity of the old fort, Purana Qila. The next day, Sayyid Reza Khan presented the Governor General’s letter to His Majesty expressing good wishes and loyal friendship. His Majesty honoured the messenger with gifts of robes.¹⁵⁵

On 16 September, the Crown Prince, Akbar Shah, was meant to have presented himself at Lord Lake’s camp in Purana Qila at noon, but with the usual Mughal sense of time-keeping, did not appear until 3 p.m., when the sepoys had been on parade for a full three hours. Major William Thorn was among those standing to attention, sweating in his fustian red coat in the claggy monsoon heat. ‘By the time that the usual ceremonies had been gone through,’ he wrote, ‘his Highness had remounted his elephant, and the cavalcade had formed, it was past four o’clock.’

The distance being four miles, His Excellency [Lake] did not arrive at the palace until sunset. So great, indeed, was the pressure of the crowd through which the procession had to pass, that it was with difficulty that the line could be preserved; for the population of Delhi was in a manner concentrated into a solid mass: and even the courts of the palace were filled with spectators, anxious to witness the revival of the House of Timur, which had so long been under a cloud.¹⁵⁶

Memories of earlier Maratha sieges and lootings were not easily forgotten and Scindia’s troops had always been unpopular in Delhi; no one, it seems, was sad to see them go. As for what might be expected from the Emperor’s new protectors, the people of the Mughal capital kept, for the time being, an open but curious mind:

At length, after a slow progress, amidst this immense assemblage, all eager to behold the deliverer of their sovereign, the Commander-in-Chief reached the palace, and was ushered into an apartment where the eyes of beholders had formerly been dazzled by the splendour of oriental magnificence …

But now, such is the vanity of earthly grandeur, and the uncertainty of mortal power, the descendant of the great Akbar, and the victorious Aurangzeb, was found, an object of pity, blinded and aged, stripped of authority, and reduced to poverty, seated under a small tattered canopy, the fragment of regal state, and the mockery of human pride. Such a scene could not fail to make a deep impression on the minds of those who beheld it.¹⁵⁷

According to the Shah Alam Nama, Lake nevertheless ‘bowed his head at the feet of the imperial throne’, then conversed with the blind Emperor through his deputy, Colonel Sir David Ochterlony. Ochterlony’s father was a Highland Scot who had settled in Massachusetts. When the American Revolution broke out, his loyalist family fled to Canada, and David entered the Company’s army in 1777. He never returned to the New World, and, having made India his home, vowed never to leave it. He had collected a variety of Indian wives, to each of whom he gave an elephant, and through whom he learned to speak fluent Urdu and Persian. This was something that impressed and surprised the chronicler Munna Lal, who noted that Da’ud Akhtar-Luni Bahadur (as he called him) ‘was unrivalled for understanding and penetration and very well-versed in Persian letters. At the Emperor’s request, he was left at Court to advise on political and financial negotiations with His Majesty.’¹⁵⁸

Ochterlony read to Shah Alam the carefully worded letters sent for the occasion by Wellesley, in which the Governor General described himself as ‘the happy instrument of your Majesty’s restoration to a state of dignity and tranquillity, under the power of the British Crown’.¹⁵⁹ In return, wrote Munna Lal, ‘His Majesty, in order to show his appreciation of Kampani Sahib Bahadur, bestowed on the two men rich robes and awarded the title Nawab Samsam al-Daula, Khan Dauran Khan, to General Gerard Lake. The Colonel [Ochterlony] also received a gift of suitably fine robes, and the title Nasir al-Daula, Muzaffar Jang.’^160h Ochterlony, in turn, announced Wellesley’s gift of 600,000 rupees to be made available for Shah Alam’s immediate expenses, and undertook to provide 64,000 rupeesⁱ monthly ‘for the costs of the servants of the Imperial Household, the Princes and the chief courtiers, the Pillars of the State’.¹⁶¹

In the days that followed, Lord Lake held a durbar in Delhi for all the nobles of the Mughal court, and some others ‘who declared themselves to be attached to the English’.¹⁶² These included the Begum Sumru, who had sent a battalion of her troops to fight with the Marathas, and was anxious that this, in addition to her husband’s role in the Patna Massacre, might mean that her estates would now be confiscated. During the dinner that followed the durbar, she however charmed Ochterlony, who would in time become a close friend.

She also introduced herself to Lord Lake. This proved more problematic. Lake was deep in his cups, and clearly surprised to be approached by a woman once celebrated as one of Delhi’s most beautiful courtesans; ‘instead of some well-bearded chief, and,’ wrote Skinner, ‘being a little elevated by the wine which had just been drunk, he gallantly advanced, and, to the utter dismay of her attendants, took her in his arms and kissed her’. This broke every rule of Mughal etiquette and a ghastly silence descended on the dinner. ‘The mistake might have been awkward, but the lady’s presence of mind put all right. Receiving courteously the proffered attention, she turned calmly round to her astonished attendants – “It is,” said she, “the salute [of forgiveness and reconciliation] of a padre to his daughter.” The Begum professed Christianity, and thus the explanation was perfectly in character, though more experienced spectators might have smiled at the appearance of the jolly red-coated clergyman, exhibited in the person of his Lordship.’¹⁶³

Shortly afterwards, Lake set off to Agra to capture the fort, mop up remaining Maratha resistance and win his final great victory over Scindia at Laswari. Ochterlony, who had just been appointed the new Company Resident, took up residence in the ruins of an old Mughal building which had once been the library of the Sufi prince Dara Shukoh, eldest son of Shah Jahan, and more recently the house from which the young prince Shah Alam had escaped Imad ul-Mulk nearly fifty years earlier.¹⁶⁴ Meanwhile, a hospital and accommodation for the cavalry and artillery were set up near the Kashmiri Gate, while Qamar al-Din’s haveli near the Ajmeri Gate became the new Custom House. Several other old mansions were taken over for official use by the new Company administration, and a twin Anglo-Mughal court system was set up.¹⁶⁵ A new joint Anglo-Mughal administration quickly fell into place.

The Company conquest of Delhi was, by any standards, a hugely significant moment. For the sightless and powerless Shah Alam, described by the poet Azad as ‘only a chessboard king’, it represented a final resolution to the conundrum that had been haunting him all his life: how to rule the Empire of his Timurid ancestors, from where, and under whose protection.¹⁶⁶ He was now in his seventy-seventh year. As a boy he had seen Nader Shah ride into Delhi, and leave carrying away the Peacock Throne, into which was embedded the great Koh-i-Noor diamond. He had escaped Imad ul-Mulk’s attempt to assassinate him and survived repeated battles with Clive. He had fought the Company at Patna and Buxar, awarded the Diwani to Clive at Allahabad and defied the Company with his cross-country trek back to Delhi. There, with Mirza Najaf Khan, against all the odds he had nearly succeeded in rebuilding the empire of his ancestors; only to see it vanish like a mirage after the premature death of the last great Mughal general. Finally, at his lowest point, the Emperor had been assaulted and blinded by his psychotic former favourite, Ghulam Qadir. Now under the wings of Wellesley’s protection, and with a Company pension, he could at least spend his last years on the throne of his ancestors, in his beloved Red Fort, in comfort and safety, and with some measure of dignity.

Three years later, on 1 April 1806, Ochterlony’s deputy, the newly arrived William Fraser, one of the first graduates of Lord Wellesley’s new Fort William College, wrote home to his father in Inverness about his impressions of the old Emperor and his court: ‘On one of the late Mussulman festivals,’ he wrote, ‘I accompanied the King to the Mosque, and was much struck by the dignity and humility with which the whole court offered their prayers to the Almighty.’

At this time, I was constantly by the side of the King; and could not but admire the extreme of nobility in his gait, aspect and mien. The loss of his eyes does not at all disfigure his countenance; but the history of their loss and his misfortune exalts to the highest our pity and veneration. On his death, and not till then, we may say, the Line of Timour is extinct as a Dynasty; beginning with the lame, and ending with the blind.¹⁶⁷

It had hardly been a glorious reign, but his was, nonetheless, a life marked by kindness, decency, integrity and learning at a time when all such qualities were in short supply. Above all, Shah Alam showed an extraordinary determination through successive horrific trials. Throughout his life, he had suffered a long series of repeated reverses; but he never gave up, and only briefly – after the rape of his family and his blinding by the Rohillas – did he allow himself to give way to despair. In the most adverse circumstances imaginable, that of the Great Anarchy, he had ruled over a court of high culture, and as well as writing fine verse himself he had been a generous patron to poets, scholars and artists.

Moreover, he had guided his dynasty through its lowest moments and managed to keep the Mughal flame alive through the worst of the Great Anarchy. He also succeeded in creating a new model of Mughal rule, where the absence of real power lay well disguised beneath the aura of divinely appointed kingship and the gilt screen of high culture and courtly manners, both of which were derived from his Timurid ancestors. It was a vision that was still sufficiently inspiring, some half a century later, for the court of his grandson to become the centre of the greatest anti-colonial revolt in history. This uprising very nearly ended British rule and might well have initiated a new phase of Mughal rule.¹⁶⁸

For the Company, too, this was an historic occasion, the final denouement of its long struggle to defeat the Marathas and seize from them control of the erstwhile Mughal Empire. At the same time, it also represented the final act in the gradual penetration by the Company of the Mughal system, in which a joint stock company from the City of London slowly appropriated the power of the mighty Mughal Empire, and to some extent, under Wellesley, also took on the trappings of Mughal grandeur.

In the end, the Company established its paramountcy by imposing itself on the Mughal Emperor as Regent, so finding a measure of legitimacy for itself in the eyes of India under the Mughal umbrella. As late as 1831, the Bengali reformer Raja Rammohan Roy dwelt ‘on the greater stability to the power of the British government attained by securing the grateful friendship of a monarch, who though without territorial possession, was still regarded by the nations of Hindustan as the only legitimate foundation of either honour or dominion’.¹⁶⁹ The Company understood the importance of infiltrating the Mughal system rather than simply blowing it apart or abolishing it.

Wellesley would protest to the directors that he ‘recoiled from the thought of it being suspected in England’ that he wished to ‘place the East India Company, substantially or vicariously, on the throne of the Mughals’.¹⁷⁰ But this, of course, was exactly what he had done. In less than fifty years, a multinational corporation had seized control of almost all of what had once been Mughal India. It had also, by this stage, created a sophisticated administration and civil service, built much of London’s docklands and come close to generating half of Britain’s trade. Its annual spending within Britain alone – around £8.5 million^j – equalled about a quarter of total British government annual expenditure.¹⁷¹ No wonder the Company now referred to itself as ‘the grandest society of merchants in the Universe’. Its armies were larger than those of almost all nation states and its power now encircled the globe; indeed, its shares were by now a kind of global reserve currency. As Burke wrote: ‘The Constitution of the Company began in commerce and ended in Empire;’ or rather, as one of its directors admitted, ‘an empire within an empire’.¹⁷²

Nevertheless, for all its vast resources, to finance his six years of incessant warfare Wellesley had come close to bankrupting the Company, hugely increasing its annual deficits to around £2 million^k a year. The Company’s overall debt, which had stood at £17 million when Wellesley first arrived in India, was now rising towards £31.5 million.^l Between 1800 and 1806, £3.9 million of silver^m had to be shipped from London to Bengal to help begin repaying the enormous debts that Wellesley had run up.¹⁷³ The news of the cost of the palatial new Government House in Calcutta, which Lord Wellesley had begun to build on a truly Mughal scale, was the final straw for the directors. Under Wellesley, the Government of India, they declared, had ‘simply been turned into a despotism’.

On 6 November 1803 the Court of Directors wrote to the government’s Board of Control listing their objections to Wellesley. They accused him of

making various inroads upon the constitution established for the governance of British India, and when they so far expressed their feelings in the hope of his effecting great promised retrenchments in the public expenditure … instead of answering their views he embarked, unnecessarily as they think, those extensive plans of foreign policy inevitably leading to wars which … have, in the opinion of the Court, been productive of many serious evils, have removed further than ever the prospect of reducing the debt and expenses of the country, and have exchanged the secure state and respected character of British power for an uncertain supremacy, and it is to be feared, the disaffection of all the states in India.¹⁷⁴

By the end of 1803, the final decision had been taken: Wellesley, the Empire-building government cuckoo in the Company’s corporate nest, was to be recalled.

In 1803 the directors got their way, but in the end it was the British government that prevailed over the Company. Even as the Company grew daily stronger and more invincible than it had ever been in India, as the first half of the nineteenth century progressed it became ever more closely overseen and restricted by the British state; and the idea that the corporation should be running what had now become the country’s most important colony began to be seen as more and more of an anomaly.

An anonymous writer in the Edinburgh Review, probably James Mill, put it well a few months after Wellesley’s recall: ‘Among all the visionary and extravagant systems of policy that have been suggested,’ he wrote, ‘no one has been absurd enough to maintain that the most advisable way to govern an empire was by committing it to the care of a body of merchants residing at a distance of many thousands of miles.’¹⁷⁵ In 1813, Parliament abolished the Company’s monopoly of trade with the East, allowing other, merchants and agency houses to set up shop in Bombay and Calcutta.¹⁷⁶

By 1825 there was growing opposition in Parliament to the continuing existence of the East India Company at all. One MP remarked that the power and influence of the Company were so great that ‘were it not, indeed, that the locality of its wealth is at so remote a distance, the very existence of such a body would be dangerous, not merely to the liberty of the subject, but to the stability of the state’. Five years later another MP raged against politicians allowing ‘a gigantic power to exist in opposition to the welfare of the kingdom, and over which Parliament has a most feeble and indirect control’.¹⁷⁷ In Parliament, James Silk Buckingham went even further: ‘The idea of consigning over to a joint stock association … the political administration of an Empire peopled with 100 million souls were so preposterous that if it were now for the first time to be proposed it would be deemed not merely an absurdity, but an insult to the meanest understanding of the realm.’¹⁷⁸

In 1833, Parliament finally took action. They passed the East India Company Charter Bill, which removed the East India Company’s right to trade and so turned it into a sort of governing corporation. The Company, which had once presided over a vast empire of business – and which even at this stage was annually making £1 millionⁿ from the tea trade alone – entered its final phase devoted exclusively to the business of Empire.¹⁷⁹

Finally, on 10 May 1857, the EIC’s own private army rose up in revolt against its employer. On crushing the rebellion, after nine uncertain months, the Company distinguished itself for a final time by hanging and murdering many tens of thousands of suspected rebels in the bazaar towns that lined the Ganges, probably the bloodiest episode in the entire history of British colonialism. In the aftermath of the Great Uprising – the Indian Mutiny as it is known in Britain, or the First War of Independence as it is called in India – Parliament finally removed the Company from power altogether.

Enough was enough. The Victorian state, alerted to the dangers posed by corporate greed and incompetence, successfully tamed history’s most voracious corporation. The Company’s navy was disbanded and its army passed to the Crown. In 1859, it was within the walls of Allahabad Fort – the same space where Clive had first turned the Company into an imperial power by signing the Diwani – that the Governor General, Lord Canning, formally announced that the Company’s Indian possessions would be nationalised and pass into the control of the British Crown. Queen Victoria, rather than the directors of the EIC, would henceforth be ruler of India.

The East India Company limped on in its amputated form for another fifteen years when its charter expired, finally quietly shutting down in 1874, ‘with less fanfare,’ noted one commentator, ‘than a regional railway bankruptcy’.

Its brand name is now owned by two brothers from Kerala who use it to sell ‘condiments and fine foods’ from a showroom in London’s West End.

a £6.5 million today.

b £4,379,550 today.

c Some secondary sources erroneously have Tipu’s body being discovered by Arthur Wellesley. That it was Baird who found Tipu is made quite clear in the letter Baird wrote to General Harris; it can be found in Montgomery Martin (ed.), The Despatches, Minutes and Correspondence of Marquis Wellesley, vol. I, 1836, pp. 687–9. Arthur Wellesley’s role in the taking of Seringapatam has in general been exaggerated by some historians who have inflated his importance with the benefit of hindsight and in view of his subsequent European triumphs. Baird and Harris were the two ranking officers who at the time were credited with defeating Tipu.

d £200 million today.

e £2.6 million today.

f The modern equivalences of these sums are: Rs25 million = £325 million; Rs1.2 million = £15.6 million.

g Over £29 million today.

h The Rajasthani town of Nasirabad is, perhaps surprisingly, named after the Scottish Bostonian.

i The modern equivalences of these sums are: 600,000 rupees = almost £8 million; 64,000 rupees = £832,000.

j £890 million today.

k Say, £210 million a year in today’s currency.

l Say, £3.3 billion in today’s currency.

m Over £400 million today.

n Over £100 million today.