Wellington: The Iron Duke. Richard Holmes

with civil authority who is not under my orders’. Lieutenant Colonel Barry Close, who he regarded as ‘the ablest man in the Company’s army’ was sent down as Resident, an arrangement which worked well. A five-year-old boy, the closest surviving descendent of the line of Hindu rajahs which had been overthrown by Hyder Ali, was appointed ruler of Mysore, with Purneah, an able man who had served Hyder Ali with distinction, as his chief minister.

      Arthur Wellesley had played a principal part in winning a significant victory and had gone on to wield exceptional power for a thirty-year-old colonel. He had also been paid £4,000 of the prize money distributed when the proceeds of the victory were divided up, the shares varying with rank: Harris received £150,000, a British soldier £7, and a sepoy £5. Although Arthur had still not received the allowances to cover his campaign expenses, he immediately offered to repay Mornington ‘the money which you advanced to pay my lieutenant-colonelcy, and that which was borrowed from Captain Stapleton on our joint bond’.¹⁸ Richard generously replied that: ‘I am not in want of money and probably never shall be: when I am, it will be time enough to call upon you.’¹⁹ But the governor-general was not at his best. Although his hoped-for marquessate had arrived at last, he was Marquess Wellesley of Norragh – in the peerage of Ireland. It was, as he called it, a ‘double-gilt potato’. ‘As I felt confident there had been nothing Irish or pinchbeck in my conduct or its results,’ he wrote, ‘I felt an equal confidence that there should be nothing Irish or pinchbeck in its rewards.’²⁰

      Arthur dealt with the myriad of military and political issues that crossed his writing-desk in Tipoo’s cool and spacious summer palace, whose wonderful murals – some of which depicted the British being roundly beaten by Hyder Ali and his French allies – were restored on his orders. He denied a request from a French priest to have 200 Christian women who had been carried off by Tipoo ‘in the most indecent and tyrannical manner’ returned to their homes. This refusal was, he admitted, unjust, but they were currently living with Tipoo’s family, and as the Company had undertaken to protect the family, sending the women home would have been a breach of faith. He pondered the composition of courts, civil and military, though the demonstrative nature of justice was never far from his mind: ‘the criminals shall be executed after the facts have been clearly ascertained by an examination of witnesses …’²¹ He dealt sternly with officers who stole or accepted bribes, and although they sometimes had reason to complain of the slowness of the rajah’s government, ‘they had none to ill-use any man’. One senior officer whose conduct towards the Indians had caused complaint was warned that ‘he must either act as he ought, or he shall be removed from his command’.²² Yet Wellesley was moved to pity by the case of one of the Company’s lieutenant colonels, convicted of ‘very serious crimes’ before a general court-martial and stripped of his commission. Wellesley observed that when he had repaid the Company the money he owed it, he would be entirely destitute. Wellesley begged the governor of Madras ‘to give him some small pension to enable him to support himself, or … recommend him for some small provision … on account of his long services and his present reduced situation’.²³

      His chief concern, though, was with the assortment of freebooters – ‘polygars, nairs, and moplahs’ – in arms around the state. His most obdurate opponent was Dhoondiah Waugh, a tough mercenary who had escaped from Tipoo’s custody just before Seringapatam fell, recruited a substantial following from amongst Tipoo’s former soldiers and other malcontents, and proclaimed himself ‘King of the Two Worlds’. He was beaten in 1799 and escaped northwards into Maratha territory, but was back again the following year. In May 1800, Wellesley himself mounted a full-scale campaign against Dhoondiah, his well-organised transport system enabling him to move across a desolate area. Even so there were difficult moments. On 30 June, he told Barry Close that he was a day later than planned in crossing the River Toombnuddra, and its sudden rise delayed him on the south bank for ten days. As no supplies could be brought in, the army ate much of the corn it had with it, and was now held up. ‘How true it is,’ he mused, ‘that in military operations, time is everything.’²⁴ He systematically took Dhoondiah’s fortresses and finally caught up with him at Conaghull, right up on the borders of Hyderabad, on 10 September.

      Although Wellesley, pursuing with two regiments of British cavalry and two of Indian, was badly outnumbered, he formed up his little army in a single line and led a charge that routed Dhoondiah’s army. Wellesley reported to the adjutant-general in Madras that: ‘Many, amongst others, Dhoondiah, were killed; and the whole body dispersed, and were scattered in small parties over the face of the country.’²⁵ He could be magnanimous in victory. Dhoondiah’s young son, Salabut Khan, was found amongst the baggage. Wellesley looked after him, and when he departed from India, he left money for the boy’s upkeep with the collector of Seringapatam. Salabut, ‘a fine, handsome, intelligent youth’, eventually entered the rajah’s service and died of cholera in 1822.

      In May 1800, Arthur had been offered command of a force to be sent to capture Batavia in the East Indies from the Dutch, but he told his brother that although he would welcome the appointment, it would not be in the public interest for him to leave Mysore until ‘its tranquillity is assured’. With Dhoondiah beaten, however, he was able to accept the command and, after assembling a staff, he departed for Ceylon, where he arrived on 28 December. Arthur soon heard that the expedition was to go to Egypt instead, and he duly ordered it to concentrate in Bombay. He was on the way there himself when he heard that his brother, who had anticipated ‘great jealousy from the general officers in consequence of my employing you’, had been pressed to supersede him with Major General Baird. This was not as unreasonable a decision as Arthur maintained. He was still only a colonel, albeit a senior one, and the governor-general told him privately that ‘you must know that I could not employ you in the chief command of so large a force as is now to proceed in Egypt without violating every rule in the service …’ There were limits to how far Richard could go on his behalf. Baird had been infuriated by his supercession by the governor-general’s brother at Seringapatam, and made this very clear in three interviews with Richard Wellesley. In her sympathetic anecdotal biography of Arthur, Muriel Wellesley suggests that Richard had no alternative but to act as he did: ‘He must either sacrifice his brother, or lose the confidence of those he governed, which he inevitably would do once the stigma of favouritism and partiality were to become attached to him.’ There were times when Arthur, like Achilles, was capable of sulking in his tent, and this was one of them.

      Right or wrong, he was deeply hurt, and now began his letters to the governor-general not as ‘My dear Mornington’, but as the coldly official ‘My Lord’. He was franker in a letter to their brother Henry:

      I have not been guilty of robbery or murder, and he has certainly changed his mind … I did not look, and did not wish, for the appointment which was given me; and I say that it would probably have been more proper to give it to somebody else; but when it was given to me, and a circular written to the governments upon the subject, it would have been fair to allow me to hold it till I did something to deserve to lose it.²⁶

      Although he was appointed Baird’s second-in-command, Wellesley remained in Bombay when the expedition set sail. Although he assured Henry that Baird’s conduct towards him was ‘perfectly satisfactory’, he first suffered from fever, followed by an attack of ‘Malabar itch’, which obliged him to undergo a regimen of nitrous baths. He knew that the episode would not redound to his credit, and when he felt well enough, he returned to Mysore. Captain George Elers observed that he had begun to grey at the temples and did not laugh as explosively as before. Responsibility followed by disappointment had marked him: ‘He may already have forgotten how to play.’²⁷

      But even now, in the depths of his disappointment, he recovered