Thus far Tipoo’s position had been marked by occasional puffs of white smoke as the cannon fired, but now a large force of infantry, 2–3,000 strong, came down the hill, making straight for the 33rd. What followed was a repeat of what had happened at Boxtel in 1794, and was the precursor of what was to occur in dozens of future encounters. Wellesley ordered the 33rd to halt, and then gave the order to fire. Although the Mysore troops ‘behaved better than they have ever been known to behave’, the measured volleys were too much for them, and although they ‘almost stood the charge of bayonets of the 33rd’, they took to their heels. On the other side of the road, Tipoo’s cavalry charged Baird’s brigade, but this was only to gain time so that the rest of his army could retreat, and it slipped away before Harris’s jaws could close around it.
Harris continued his advance on 28 March, swinging south to cross the broad River Cauvery not far from Sirsoli and then turning north to approach Seringapatam, neatly outflanking Tipoo’s field army as he did so. Tipoo, his confidence already shaken by defeats at Sedaseer and Malavelly, withdrew into the fortress. Seringapatam lies on an island in the Cauvery. At that time of year the river was almost dry, and both of its branches, the North and South Cauvery, could be crossed on foot with little difficulty. But things were very different in the rainy season, when the water was too deep for fording but too fast-flowing for boats to be used easily. With the change of seasons approaching, Harris needed to take the place by the end of May.
I first saw Seringapatam from across the South Cauvery just east of the main river’s fork, and it looks hugely impressive despite the passage of two centuries. White granite walls, their tops pierced with splayed brick-lined embrasures, rise thirty feet from a broad, wet ditch, invisible until an attacker is right on top of it. An inner belt of fortifications would have given the garrison some respite against an attacker who had penetrated the outer defences, and the main gates – the Bangalore gate to the east, the Mysore gate to the south, and the Water gate fronting the North Cauvery-are still entered through wide tunnels between layered defences. The tower of the Hindu temple and the twin towers of the mosque rise above the defences, and a scattering of palm trees lends an exotic air to the place.
Although the design of Seringapatam shows some Western influence, we cannot expect Tipoo’s French military advisers to have been hugely enthusiastic about it. Whereas European engineers, following the precepts of the great Vauban, strove to conceal most of their masonry behind a gently sloping earth glacis so that the attacker’s guns would have little to shoot at, the long, high walls of Seringapatam offered a vulnerable target. And though some of the fortress guns were mounted on high works jutting out from the front of the main line of the wall, these were not well developed enough to be bastions – the great arrowhead-shaped defences that were the essence of European artillery fortification. The former offered only a poor prospect of bringing flanking fire to bear on an attacker assaulting the main line of the wall.
On 5 April 1799, the British completed their march, having taken thirty-one days in all to cover what they had measured as 153.5 miles from the Madras frontier. Harris proceeded to encamp south of the Cauvery, two miles west of Seringapatam. His army was too small to surround the place and mount a formal siege, and, with time of the essence, he planned to breach the fortress’s south-west face rather than attempt to secure a footing on the island further east. That day Wellesley wrote optimistically to the governor-general that ‘we are now here with a strong, a healthy and a brave army, with plenty of stores, guns, &c, &c, and we shall be masters of this place before much more time passes over our heads’. He added that the fatigue, heat and bad water had given him a bowel complaint, ‘which did not confine me, but teased me much’.13
He was teased a good deal more that night. On the afternoon of the 5th, Harris ordered him to carry out a night attack on the village of Sultanpettah and a nearby grove known as Sultanpettah Tope, using his own 33rd and two Madras battalions, while Lieutenant Colonel Shawe of HM’s 12th and two other Madras battalions launched a similar attack further north. The two features stood astride an aqueduct, slightly south of the army’s route to Seringapatam, and would have to be cleared before the main attack could begin. The ground as it stands today gives little real clue to the operation. The village and the grove have gone, and the aqueduct (Wellesley called it a nullah) is now a full-blown drainage canal, steeply banked, with lush paddy-fields below it. Even then the ground was confusing, and Wellesley, on horseback amongst the outposts when the message to attack arrived, asked Harris to meet him in front of the lines to clarify the order, suggesting that ‘when you have the nullah you have the tope’. Harris did not come forward – in fairness, he had much else to do – and at sundown Wellesley attacked a position he had not been able to reconnoitre with troops who had also not seen the ground.
He led the 33rd forward in column, with the Madras battalions behind. As they approached the nullah, almost dry at that time of year, they were engaged by Tipoo’s rocket men and by musket fire, but carried the nullah with little difficulty. There Wellesley dismounted, and led the grenadier and light companies of the 33rd forward, while Major Shee brought the rest of the battalion on. The patchwork of paddy-fields, dykes and bamboo clumps at the bottom of the slope, previously screened by the banks of the nullah, would have made no sense to the attackers, while they themselves would have been silhouetted against the sky as they climbed over the bank to begin their descent. If Tipoo’s infantry could not cope with the 33rd in open field, things were different here, and there was fierce hand-to-hand fighting: Lieutenant Fitzgerald, already hit in the arm by a rocket, was bayonetted and mortally wounded, and eight men of the grenadier company were captured. While the two forward companies fought for their lives, Shee took the remaining companies back across the nullah. Such was the confusion that five of Wellesley’s companies eventually joined Shawe to the north, where they helped secure the few gains of another largely unsuccessful attack, while Captain Francis West of the grenadiers emerged further south, where the Hyderabad outposts held the front line.
Wellesley himself got back to the watercourse, where he seems to have remounted and cantered along it, trying to restore order. He was hit on the knee by a spent musket-ball at some stage in the proceedings and, finding that there was little he could do, rode to Harris’s headquarters to report his failure. Harris wrote that he ‘came to my tent in a good deal of agitation to say that he had not carried the tope. It must be particularly unpleasant to him.’ Wellesley, exhausted as much from the expenditure of nervous energy as from the physical effort, lay down on a nearby mess table and went to sleep. The news was far from unpleasant to Wellesley’s critics, who resented his closeness to the governor-general and authority over the Hyderabad contingent. Captain George Elers of the 12th, who had fallen out with Wellesley by the time he wrote his memoirs, declared that: ‘Had Colonel Wellesley been an obscure officer of fortune, he would have been brought to a court-martial and perhaps received such a reprimand for bad management as might have induced him to have resigned His Majesty’s service.’14
Yet even Wellesley’s bitterest opponents could hardly claim that it was a major setback. There were less than twenty-five British casualties, and the following day Wellesley launched a fresh attack with a larger force, and took the whole position without losing a man. However, the whole scrambling affair left its mark. Wellesley resolved ‘never to attack an enemy who is prepared and strongly posted, and whose posts have not been reconnoitred by daylight’.15 He was also well aware of having lost control of his force, and his almost pathological need to remain in control was reinforced by the incident.
Lieutenant General Stuart’s detachment of the Bombay army, which had marched on Seringapatam from the west, arrived on the 14 April, escorted by a force sent out by Harris to meet it. Stuart’s force made camp north of the Cauvery, north-west of Seringapatam. After dark on the 17th, both the Madras and Bombay forces launched preliminary attacks, the
former securing the Little Cauvery and the latter taking the ruined village of Agrarum and throwing up a battery which, in the event, was just too far west for effective bombardment of Seringapatam. On the morning of the 21st, the Madras force established a battery on newly captured ground between the Little Cauvery and the South Cauvery. Stuart’s men were also busy, and threw up batteries to engage the western walls. On the morning of the 26th, British guns took on Tipoo’s cannon, and by midday had silenced those facing them. That evening and the next morning, Wellesley, the duty brigade commander, cleared Tipoo’s men from the whole area between the Little Cauvery and the South Cauvery, enabling batteries to be established only 400 yards from the walls. They were ordered to concentrate their fire on an area between the westernmost ‘bastion’ and a pair of towers further south. The gunners’ objective was to cut a cannelure – a long groove – towards the base of the masonry, so that the wall and rampart behind it would slide forward, leaving a rough slope of earth and rubble. A breach was deemed practicable when a man could ascend it with his musket and accoutrements without needing to use his hands.
When a practicable breach was established, Major General Baird, who had volunteered for the task, was to lead an assault delivered by two columns, one from Stuart’s force and the other from the Mysore army. A third column, under Wellesley, would remain in reserve, to be committed only if there was a significant check. The assault was delivered on the afternoon of 4 May 1799, and although the unexpected strength of the inner defences caused a delay, the attackers fanned out once they were through the breach and were soon fighting deep inside Seringapatam against resistance that was fast collapsing. When it seemed clear that the attack had succeeded, Wellesley posted a guard from the reliable Swiss Regiment de Meuron to secure the breach. Other soldiers helped recover wounded from the river-bed and the breach itself, and the remainder were stood down. Wellesley walked up the breach, with its carpet of dead, and from the top he could see chaos as some soldiers dealt with embers of resistance while others set about looting and drinking. Most of the 33rd was drawn up outside Tipoo’s palace, where surrender negotiations were going on. Although it had now been discovered that thirteen British prisoners, including the men of the 33rd captured at Sultanpettah, had been murdered – either by having their necks broken or by having nails driven into their skulls – the occupants of the palace were to be spared, provided that resistance ceased.
Tipoo, however, was not amongst them. Then Wellesley heard that he had been killed in the fighting at the Water gate, and walked the short distance to the northern wall, where he found a long tunnel beneath the ramparts choked with dead. A well-dressed body was dragged out, and Wellesley himself checked the man’s pulse: it was Tipoo, and he was indeed dead. Witnesses had seen a short, fat officer play a conspicuous part in the defence, standing to fire at the attackers while retainers passed him loaded weapons. He had been hit several times, and seemed to have been killed by a close-range musket shot through the temple: some said that a British soldier had fancied the jewel in his turban. The Tiger of Mysore had snarled defiantly to the last.
Leaving the grenadiers of the 33rd to protect the palace, Wellesley went out to his brigade, marched it back to camp, washed – he had been in the same clothes for sixty hours in hot weather, and was always a fastidious man – and went to bed. He must, however, have been able to hear shots, yells, and drunken singing from Seringapatam, and the episode reinforced something he already knew. The British soldier had many virtues, not least cold, almost canine, courage and determination, but if discipline wavered and drink was at hand, brave soldiers could turn into drunken animals. The attackers lost 389 killed or wounded in the assault, and though reports of the number of Mysore dead vary, 8–9,000 were buried. The disparity suggests that the attackers, their mood hardened by the scenes at the breach and the discovery of the murdered prisoners, were not inclined to give quarter. When we later consider Wellesley’s inflexible view of discipline, we must remember the sounds that drifted through that sultry night as the victors remorselessly looted and raped in Seringapatam.
Early the next day, Wellesley was ordered to take command of Seringapatam. Baird had already asked to be relieved because he was physically exhausted – although he later claimed to have cancelled this request – and Wellesley, although not, strictly speaking the next brigade commander for duty, was appointed, probably because Barry Close, Harris’s adjutant-general, had a high opinion of him. Wellesley went straight to Baird’s headquarters in Tipoo’s summer palace, outside the fort, and told Baird that he had been superseded. Baird, breakfasting with his staff, snapped ‘Come, Gentlemen, we have no longer any business here.’ ‘Oh,’ replied Wellesley, ‘pray finish your breakfast.’16 Wellesley later told John Wilson Croker that:
I never inquired the reason for my appointment, or for Baird being laid aside. There were many other candidates besides Baird and myself, all senior to me, some to Baird. But I must say that I was the fit person to be selected. I had commanded the Nizam’s army during the campaign, and had given universal satisfaction. I was liked by the natives.
He added that:
Baird was a gallant, hard-headed, lion-hearted officer, but he had no talent, no tact, had strong prejudices against the natives; and he was peculiarly disqualified from his manners, habits &c., and it was supposed his temper, for the management of them.
Although Baird fiercely resented his supersession, in 1813 he told Sir John Malcolm that he had long since forgiven Wellesley, and: ‘His fame is now to me joy, and I may also say glory, and his kindness to me and mine has all along been most distinguished.’17
As soon as Wellesley was in command, he went into Seringapatam to restore order: four soldiers were hanged and others flogged. He was soon writing to Harris that ‘plunder is stopped, the fires are all extinguished, and the inhabitants are returning to their houses fast’. He asked Harris ‘to order an extra dram and biscuit for the 12th, 33rd and 73rd regiments, who got nothing to eat yesterday, and were wet last night’ and emphasised that the place needed a permanent garrison with its own commander. Harris decided that Wellesley was the man for the job. The governor-general had already declared that when Tipoo was beaten, his policy would be one of conciliation, and Wellesley had made a very good start. A commission with military and civilian members had been appointed at the start of the campaign to run affairs in captured territory, and after the fall of Seringapatam a new commission was set up, its members including Arthur and Henry Wellesley.
Although Arthur’s direct responsibilities were at first confined to Seringapatam island, he was soon not only head of the commission, but, as the main armies withdrew, the senior military officer in the region. When the commission was dissolved he retained power, warning the governor-general that he would not accept ‘any person 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 marquessat
e 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