His appeal was unsuccessful, which was as well, for the flank companies from Ireland went off to die of yellow fever in Martinique. Mornington lent him more money, and with it he purchased a lieutenant colonelcy in the 33rd that September. He went off to command his regiment, immersing himself in the minutiae of its accounts and preparing standing orders that became a model of their kind.
An expedition to the coast of Normandy under Lord Moira was mooted, and the 33rd seemed likely to take part. Wesley resigned his parliamentary seat, found an affluent linen-draper who was prepared to deal with his Dublin debts, but then heard that his regiment was not to go after all. Then came good news: Lord Moira’s force would indeed include the 33rd, and would be sent to reinforce the Duke of York’s little army in Flanders. It was accompanied, as good news so often is, by bad. Lord Longford wrote to say that he was firmly resolved that a match with Kitty was impossible. Wesley, however, could not accept the decision as final for, as it was based on ‘prudential motives’, a change in his own circumstances might yet win him Kitty. He wrote and told her that if her brother ever relented, ‘my mind will still remain the same’.27
Wesley sailed from Cork in early June 1794 and arrived at Ostend on the 25th to join a campaign which had started with a flicker of promise but was already turning sour. The British government, trying hard to repair the damage done to its army by peacetime parsimony, had enlisted men as quickly as it could for the war against revolutionary France. The historian Sir John Fortescue reckoned that at least 30,000 men were enlisted into the regular army between November 1793 and March 1794.28 Amongst them was a corps of waggoners, the army’s first military transport unit, known from the colour of its uniform and the supposed origin of its members as ‘The Newgate Blues’. ‘A greater set of scoundrels never disgraced an army,’ complained an officer on the Duke of York’s staff.
The consequences of this rapid expansion were little short of disastrous. There were too few muskets: the 31st Regiment was composed chiefly of recruits, 240 of whom were unarmed. Many soldiers had not been issued with proper uniforms, but went to war in their ‘slop-clothing’, the barrack dress of linen jacket and trousers they received when they arrived at their depots. A high proportion of officers and men were poorly trained. Private William Surtees of the 56th Regiment was delighted to be posted to his battalion’s light company ‘as I considered it … an honour to be made a light-bob’, but was given no specialist training, and when he met properly trained French light infantry, he discovered that they ‘had greatly the advantage over us in point of shooting …’29 Fortescue complained that too many officers had attained their rank through exactly that mixture of patronage and purchase that had enabled Wesley to command a battalion at the age of 24 without any formal training:
The commanders of the new army, who had been juggled into seniority by the Government and the army-brokers, were not fit to command a company, much less a brigade. Some of them were boys of twenty-one who knew nothing of their simplest duties. Though they went cheerfully into action, they looked upon the whole campaign as an elaborate picnic … Thrust into the army to satisfy the claims of dependants, constituents, importunate creditors, and discarded concubines, many of these young men were at once a disgrace and an encumbrance to the force.30
The Duke of York’s Anglo-Hanoverian force was fighting alongside an Austrian army under the Prince of Coburg, and the future major general, John Gaspard Le Marchant (his birth in the Channel Islands accounting for his Gallic name), reckoned that the Austrians were ‘as superior to us as we are to the train-bands in the city’.31 The allies took Valenciennes in 1793 but then spent a terrible winter, worsened for the British by the government’s diversion of resources to the West Indies and the Mediterranean. By the time Wesley arrived, the French had launched a counter-offensive. Wesley, temporarily commanding a brigade containing the 8th and 44th in addition to his own regiment, was left to check the French at Ostend while Moira took the rest of the force on to join the Duke of York. With Moira safely away, Wesley deftly re-embarked his brigade and had it moved by sea to Antwerp, whence he joined the Duke of York before the rest of Moira’s force marched in. The episode demonstrated to him the enormous advantage conferred by seapower, especially when confronting an enemy who seemed supreme on land.
In mid-September 1794 Wesley had his baptism of fire just east of Breda. On the 14th, the French attacked the Duke of York’s advanced post at Boxtel on the River Dommel, and captured it and two battalions of German troops. The duke sent Major General Sir Ralph Abercromby with ten battalions of infantry and ten squadrons of cavalry to recover the place next day, but Abercromby almost collided with the main French force, slipping past eastwards, and was lucky to escape with the loss of ninety men, most of them prisoners. The 33rd helped check the attack, waiting quietly in line until their young colonel gave the order to fire on an approaching column. He had already learnt a valuable lesson about sea-power, and now he learnt another, about the merits of steady lines facing exuberant columns. Both were to prove invaluable.
Abercromby, whose bushy eyebrows gave him the air of a benevolent lion, called on Wesley a few days later to convey ‘the Duke of York’s thanks and his to the Thirty-third for their good conduct on the 15th’.32 The army retreated in terrible weather, and Wesley, commanding a brigade once more, found himself defending the line of the River Waal, whence he wrote to Mornington to say that he doubted if even the French army could keep the field in such conditions, and if the army went into winter quarters, he would be back in Ireland to deal with some problems on the family’s much-reduced estates. But winter quarters were a reflection of a more measured age, and the French kept up the pressure. ‘We turn out once, sometimes twice every night; the officers and men are harassed to death …’ wrote Wesley. ‘I have not had the clothes off my back for a long time, and generally spend the greater part of the night upon the bank of the river.’33 It was small wonder that he was plagued by a return of an old illness, an ‘aguish complaint from fatigue, damp etc’ which his doctor treated with pills containing ‘three grains of Calomel combined with three grains of the Cathartic Extract’. He was on the Waal from October 1794 to January 1795, and was only once visited by a general from headquarters. And when he rode over to headquarters, thirty miles away, he found it ‘a scene of jollifications’. A dispatch arrived while the port was circulating, and was airily waved away by a general who declared that it would keep till tomorrow. Wesley concluded that it was the leaders who were at fault, not their wretched and half-starved men. ‘Many of the regiments were excellent,’ he recalled, but:
no one knew anything of the management of an army … We had letters from England, and I declare that those letters told us more of what was passing at headquarters than we learned from the headquarters themselves … The real reason why I succeeded in my own campaigns is because I was always on the spot – I saw everything, and did everything myself.34
The army fell back to Bremen, whence it was to be evacuated by the navy, in appalling circumstances.
Far as the eye could reach over the whitened plain were scattered gun-limbers, wagons full of baggage, of stores, of sick men, sutlers’ carts and private carriages. Beside them lay the horses, dead; around them scores and hundreds of soldiers, dead; here a straggler who had staggered onto the bivouac and dropped to sleep in the arms of the frost; there a group of British and Germans around an empty rum-cask; here forty English Guardsmen huddled together around a plundered wagon; there a pack-horse with a woman lying alongside it, and a baby, swathed in rags, peeping out of the pack, with its mother’s milk turned to ice upon its lips – one and all stark, frozen, dead.35
Wesley sailed for England in March 1795, with his regiment close behind. The campaign marked the nadir of British fortunes. It embodied the characteristics often seen in the British army at the beginning of long conflicts: all the strains caused by rapid expansion, and commanders who failed to appreciate that the nature of war had changed. That dre
adful winter in Holland taught Wesley much about war. It may not have told him what to do, but, as he observed later, he had ‘learnt what not to do, and that is always something’.
It was less than clear what the returning hero should do with himself, for pay as lieutenant colonel and aide-de-camp brought in only £500 a year and creditors abounded. Leaving his regiment encamped in Essex, he set off for Dublin in search of money and preferment. Trim dutifully returned him as its MP once more, and he laid siege to the new lord-lieutenant, Lord Camden, with supporting fire provided by his brother Mornington. He first hoped to be made secretary at war in the Irish government, which would have tripled his income at a stroke, but was soon forced to admit to Camden that: ‘I see the manner in which the Military Offices are filled and I don’t wish to ask for that which I know you can’t give me.’ This being the case, he changed his line of attack, now aiming for a civil office in the Treasury or Revenue boards, with the hand-wringing assurance that ‘nothing but the circumstances under which I labour would induce me to trouble Your Excellency’s Government’.36 When this assault also failed, Mornington proposed him as surveyor-general of the ordnance, an unhelpful shot as the post was already held by Kitty’s uncle, Captain Thomas Pakenham. Camden actually offered Wesley the post, and although he felt obliged to turn it down, the Pakenhams were not best pleased.
Firmly rebuffed, Wesley returned to his regiment, now at Southampton under orders to sail for the West Indies. He was pursued by a well-meaning letter from Lord Camden, who would be sorry to lose him but:
approve of your determination to accompany your reg’t to the West Indies, as I am convinced that a profession once embraced should not be given up. I shall be very glad if I can make some satisfactory arrangement for you against your come back, but if a vacancy should happen in the Revenue Board I fear the Speaker’s son must have the first.37
The 33rd embarked for the West Indies but a providential storm drove the fleet back to port after seven unpleasant weeks. Wesley was first quartered in Poole, but then went to convalesce in Dublin as his old agues returned. In the meantime, in the spring of 1796 with one of those sudden changes for which Whitehall is not unknown, the 33rd was sent, not to the West Indies, but to India.
Wesley, promoted colonel by seniority with effect from 3 May 1796, was determined to follow it, but there were arrangements to be made first. He resigned his seat and left advice on its management for his successor; received an assurance from Dublin Castle that it ‘should be very happy to relieve his mind from the embarrassment it feels on account of some pecuniary arrangements which he was obliged to leave unsettled’; but was pressed by his agent to ensure that Lord Mornington would deal with the £955 4s 8d of outstanding bills if something unpleasant happened. His future adversary Napoleon, now a général de division and just appointed to command the army of Italy, always rated luck as a great military virtue, and there is no doubt that Wesley was lucky that spring. He had escaped a voyage to the West Indies and an unhappy destiny in a yellow fever cemetery, and fortunate in leaving Ireland when he did. For, even in 1796, there was rebellion in the air: Grattan felt it ‘creeping in like a mist at the heels of the countryman’. The rebellion of 1798 was to be, as Thomas Pakenham has written, ‘the most violent and tragic event in Irish history between the Jacobite wars and the Great Famine’.38 The ‘Year of Liberty’ cost perhaps 30,000 men and women their lives, and in its aftermath Britain imposed on Ireland a union whose troubled legacy still persists. It was a good time to leave.
TWO
SEPOY GENERAL
THE INDIA for which Colonel Wesley set sail from Portsmouth in June 1796 was not yet a British possession, though his efforts were to help make it one. In 1600, Elizabeth I had given a royal charter to ‘The Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’, and eight years later some of its merchants established a trading post at Surat, 150 miles north of modern Bombay. Over the next century the Company’s fortunes ebbed and flowed, with occasional conflict with the Dutch, Portuguese and French, who had their own mercantile interests in the subcontinent. It continued to jockey for favour with the Moghul emperor in his capital, first in Agra and then in Delhi, as well as with local rulers whose dependence on the emperor was often little more than nominal.
Madras was settled by the Company in 1639; in 1687 Bombay superseded Surat as the Company’s headquarters in western India; and in 1690 one of its agents founded the future city of Calcutta. These three great trading bases, termed presidencies, were run by a governor and council answerable to the Company’s court of directors in London, backed by locally recruited soldiers stiffened with British redcoats. It was a short step from defending trading bases to extending British power into the hinterland, and in 1757 Robert Clive defeated the ruler of Bengal at Plassey, a battle in which the deft bribery of opponents was at least as important as firepower. After Plassey the East India Company was a major political power in India, and in 1773 the Regulating Act acknowledged the fact by instituting a governing council in Calcutta, with three of its five members nominated by the British government. The council was presided over by a governor-general, who enjoyed ill-defined authority in both Madras and Bombay. It was indicative of the vast riches to be gained in India that the first governor-general, Warren Hastings, amassed a personal fortune of perhaps £200,000 at a time when a prosperous merchant in England might house and feed his family and servants for £350 a year.1
Not all young men who took the passage to India hoped to do quite as well as Hastings, but it was easy for a junior clerk to turn a small investment into a huge fortune without much effort and to return home as a nabob, a figure pilloried by playwrights and novelists as vulgar, corrupt and obscenely wealthy. Sir Philip Francis won £20,000 at cards at a single sitting, and a Mr Barwell lost a staggering £40,000. In 1777 William Hickey, an engaging young rake sent to India to make his fortune, complained that no man worked harder than he did, staying at his desk from eight in the morning till one in the afternoon with only half an hour off for breakfast. Although he was not a rich man by Calcutta standards, he maintained sixty-three servants, as well as ‘a handsome phaeton and a beautiful pair of horses, and also two Arabian saddle horses, my whole establishment being of the best and most expensive kind’.2 Charles Danvers died in 1720 after only three years in India at a salary of £5 a year, but left enough money to have a lavish funeral. He modestly asked the governor ‘that I may have as many great guns fired as I am years old, which is now almost twenty-one’ and the rest of his estate was to be spent on rice, distributed daily to the poor at his burial place.3
Although there were financial risks, for a cargo might go to the bottom or be snapped up by pirates, privateers or enemy warships, the climate and disease were infinitely more dangerous. Europeans who survived the sea voyage – followed, at Madras, by a scarcely less hazardous passage through the surf – risked death from cholera, typhoid, dysentery and sunstroke, snakes, tigers, enraged ‘fanaticks’, resentful servants and merciless duellists, and undermined their constitutions by eating and drinking to excess. The walls of Indian churches are heavy with marble plaques and Latin tags lamenting death in its many forms, and cantonment cemeteries, so many of them sinking silently back into jungle, are a chilling reminder of human frailty. William Hickey could not resist making a joke of one tombstone:
Mynheer Gludenstack lies interred here
Who intended to have gone home last year.
The British cemetery at Seringapatam was established in 1805, not long after the British took the place, and now lies forgotten behind the Fort View Hotel. The tombs inside range from enormous obelisks, one commemorating the garrison commander and another the colonel of the Swiss Regiment de Meuron (a long way from his valleys), to more modest slabs. A sergeant’s wife, dead at twenty-two, lies there with her child, and the wife of a private in HM’s 9th Lancers evidently had enough money to bestow on her husband in death a status that had eluded him in life. Some died shortly after their a
rrival in India or, more poignantly still, in the world itself. Others – a retired park-sergeant here and colonel’s widow there – had lived on to a ripe old age. There were indeed fortunes to be made in India, but more than half of the Europeans who went there in the eighteenth century died prematurely.
Colonel Wesley, travelling in a fast frigate, caught up with his regiment at the Cape, and he sailed on in the Indiaman Princess Charlotte, whiling away his time with his extensive library. It was weighted heavily towards Indian themes, and included Orme’s Indostan, Sketches of the Hindoos, Raynal’s Histoire des Indes and Statutes Relative to the East India Company, as well as Persian and Arabic grammars. There was a good deal of military history, including a book on the Flanders campaign, fifteen volumes on Frederick the Great and Major General Lloyd’s formalistic Reflections on the General Principles of War. Chapman’s Venereal Disease might have been a sensible precaution, while nine volumes of Woman of Pleasure and ten of the Aventures du Chevalier du Faublas catered for lighter moments. He landed in Calcutta in February 1797 and called on the governor-general, Sir John Shore, who found in him ‘a union of strong sense and boyish playfulness’, and predicted that he would distinguish himself if the opportunity arose.
Wesley lost no chance to chase the opportunity. Both Holland and Spain had now joined the war against Britain, and in August 1797 he was sent on an expedition to the Philippines. He drew up a list of hygiene precautions to be observed by the men. Hammocks were to be scrubbed at least once a fortnight, men were to wash their legs and feet every morning and if possible to have water thrown over them every day. He had agreed to take the Rev. Mr Blunt as chaplain to the 33rd, but during the voyage that gentleman got ‘abominably drunk, and in that disgraceful condition exposed himself to both soldiers and sailors … talking all sorts of bawdy and ribaldry …’ When Wesley, on another vessel, heard what had happened he tried to console Blunt, explaining that ‘what had passed was not of the least consequence as no one would think the worse of him for little irregularities committed in a moment of forgetfulness’, but Blunt’s depression could not be lifted and ‘he actually fretted himself to death’.4