All the King’s Men, page 40
Wellesley had intended to outflank the Marathas’ line by marching his right wing past Assaye. But the enemy’s well-drilled change of front – made possible by years of French-supervised training – made him alter his point of attack away from Assaye, which was well defended and bristling with cannon, to his left wing near the River Kaitna. He knew, he wrote later, ‘that the village of Assaye must fall when the right should be beat’. So he instructed Lieutenant-Colonel William Orrock, commanding the picquets on the right, not to stray too close to the village. But for some reason Orrock ignored the order and attacked Assaye with his picquets and the supports from the 74th Foot. ‘There was a large break in our line,’ recalled Wellesley, ‘between these corps and those on our left. They were exposed to a most terrible cannonade from Assaye, and were charged by the [enemy] cavalry; consequently, in the picquets and the 74th regiment we sustained the greatest part of our loss.’38
For a time, thanks to Orrock’s incompetence, the battle hung in the balance. If the main attack on the left had also been repulsed, Wellesley and his small army would have been doomed. But, though the Marathas in that sector fought well and inflicted many casualties, they could not hold their line. ‘I cannot write in too strong terms of the conduct of the troops,’ wrote Wellesley to the governor-general a day later. ‘They advanced in the best order, and with the greatest steadiness, under a most destructive fire, against a body of infantry far superior in number, who appeared determined to contend with them to the last, and who were driven from the guns only with the bayonet; and notwithstanding the numbers of the enemy’s cavalry, and the repeated demonstrations they made of an intention to charge, they were kept at a distance by our infantry.’39
On the right, too, the position was stabilized when Wellesley sent the 19th Light Dragoons and the 4th Native Cavalry to support the battered 74th. Their charge took them ‘through the enemy’s left like a torrent that had burst its banks, bearing along the broken and scattered materials which had opposed it’. The Maratha centre, meanwhile, had reformed a little further back on the Juah, from where they repulsed a second charge by the British cavalry, killing the colonel of the 19th Light Dragoons in the process. But already the Maratha horse had left the field and, with the 78th Highlanders moving up to attack, the infantry fled across the Juah, leaving the ‘whole country strewn with killed and wounded, both European and natives, ours as well as the enemy’s’.40 Among the weapons abandoned by the Marathas were more than 90 cannon.
Appalled by the carnage, and no doubt shocked by how close he had come to disaster, Wellesley sank to the ground and sat with his head between his knees. His small army of 7,000 had suffered a crippling 1,584 casualties, 650 of them British; the enemy dead and wounded were more than 6,000. ‘I should not like to see again such loss as I sustained on the 23rd September,’ he wrote to Stevenson a month later, ‘even if attended by such a gain.’41
That night he would have a recurring nightmare that all his men had been killed. When asked, years later, what was the ‘best thing’ he ever did in the way of fighting, he replied with one word: ‘Assaye.’42 He knew he had taken a fearful risk and only narrowly come through it. During the fighting, one charger was killed under him and another piked. Yet, when faced with each new setback, he had refused to panic. ‘I never saw a man so cool and collected as he was,’ wrote Colin Campbell of the 78th, ‘though I can assure you, till our troops got the orders to advance the fate of the day seemed doubtful.’43
In the flush of victory, and no doubt mindful of his own frailties that day, Wellesley could afford to be generous to Colonel Orrock, who, incredibly, had survived his attack on Assaye. ‘I lament the consequences of his mistake,’ he wrote, ‘but I must acknowledge that it was not possible for a man to lead a body into a hotter fire than he did the picquets on that day.’44
After Assaye, Wellesley was hopeful that Scindia would sue for peace. But preliminary talks foundered in mid-November – on Scindia’s refusal to move his troops away from the Deccan Plateau south of the Narmada River – and by the end of the month Wellesley was once again in the field, wearing a uniform that would become familiar throughout Europe: white pantaloons tucked into Hessian boots, scarlet tunic, black cocked hat and a curved Indian sword, or tulwar, hanging from his waist.
At 3 p.m. on 29 November, having just linked up with Colonel Stevenson’s Hyderabad Contingent (giving him a combined force of 11,000 men) after an exhausting march of nine hours, Wellesley spotted Scindia’s 30,000-strong army 5 miles to the north, on a flat plain to the front of the village of Argaum. It was Assaye all over again – though this time the Marathas’ numerical superiority was slightly less marked – and, though his troops were tired from their long march, Wellesley gave orders for an immediate attack. It began badly, as the fierce Maratha bombardment caused the bullock-drawn guns of Wellesley’s advance guard to flee in panic, taking three battalions of native infantry with them. Wellesley tried to rally them by waving his sword and shouting. When they failed to respond, he followed them to the rear and, once they had regained their composure, led them back to the firing line. He wrote later: ‘What do you think of nearly three entire battalions, who behaved so admirably in the battle of Assaye, being broke and running off, when the cannonade commenced at Argaum, which was not to be compared with that at Assaye? Luckily, I happened to be at no great distance from them, and I was able to rally them and to re-establish the battle. If I had not been there, I am convinced we should have lost the day.’45
It was 4.30 p.m. before Wellesley’s army was ready to attack. ‘I formed the army into two lines,’ he reported, ‘the infantry in the first, the cavalry in the second.’
When formed, the whole advanced in the greatest order … Their whole line retired in disorder before our troops, leaving in our hands thirty-eight pieces of cannon and all their ammunition. The British cavalry then pursued them for several miles, destroyed great numbers, took many elephants and camels and much baggage. The Mogul and Mysore cavalry also pursued the fugitives, and did them great mischief.46
Wellesley added, in a separate letter: ‘If we had had daylight an hour more, not a man would have escaped … The troops were under arms, and I was in the saddle, from six in the morning until twelve at night.’47 He had routed Scindia’s troops a second time at a cost of just 360 casualties, of whom less than half were British.
Further north, Scindia’s European-led forces had suffered three more defeats at the hands of General Gerard Lake at Aligarh Fort (1 September), Delhi (11 September) and Laswari (1 November). Yet still Scindia and his allies refused to submit, so Wellesley pursued the remnant of the Maratha infantry from Argaum to the mountain fortress of Gawilghur, between the headwaters of the Tapti and Purna rivers. A brief siege culminated in the place being taken by assault on 15 December, though in truth the defenders gave up after their outer works were captured. It did not save the Marathas caught on the battlements, fit and wounded, who were hurled to their deaths on the rocks below.
With his military power destroyed, Scindia finally agreed to terms that deprived him of Gujarat in western India, which became part of the Bombay Presidency, and all his lands north of the Jumna River, including Agra, Delhi and Meerut. But that still left Holkar of Indore, the original aggressor, to be dealt with. Wellesley’s orders were to move up from the south while General Lake’s army advanced from the north, but the strategy began to unravel when a famine in the Deccan delayed Wellesley’s departure. Holkar took advantage by falling on and heavily defeating a wing of Lake’s army, under Colonel William Monson, at the Mukandwara Pass in Rajputana in July 1804. Wellesley thought Monson’s defeat a ‘disgrace’ and attributed it to three factors: no attention to supplies, no boats (to aid Monson’s retreat) and a failure to ‘make a good dash at Holkar’.48 He added, in a letter to John Malcolm: ‘Would to God I had come round here in March, and Holkar would have been in the tomb of all the Capulets!’49
Holkar’s forces went on to besiege Delhi in October, and withdrew only when Lake’s relieving army arrived on the 19th. Barely a month later, Holkar was routed by Lake at Farrukhabad, the last major set-piece battle of the war. There were, however, two more sieges of Maratha forts: that of Deeg, which fell to Lake after a month-long operation, in late December; and that of Bharatpur, which resisted four separate attempts by Lake to storm it in January 1805. The war, overall, had been a great success for Generals Wellesley and Lake, and had added great swathes of territory to British India. But it had not been popular with the directors of the East India Company, who resented both Lord Wellesley’s pro-consular style of government and the huge cost of both the Mysore and Maratha wars. The setbacks at Mukandwara and Bharatpur were just the excuse they needed to persuade the government to recall Governor-General Earl Wellesley in late 1805.
His brother Arthur had already left, sailing on HMS Trident in March 1805. He had been awarded a knighthood (KCB) for his victories over the Marathas, and would return home with a fortune of £42,000 – chiefly his share of prize money – that made him ‘independent of all office or employment’.50 Since arriving in India eight years earlier, he had risen in rank to major-general, fought in two successful campaigns and personally won two major battlefield victories at Assaye and Argaum over vastly superior enemy forces. A historian of his generalship wrote:
On both occasions [he] stumbled across the enemy army at the end of a tiring march, made a rapid personal reconnaissance and then determined that an immediate attack was preferable to an overnight delay. On both occasions he brought up his troops in echelons to one flank in a manner very reminiscent of Frederick the Great’s ‘oblique order’ … In both battles – especially Assaye – there was some hard fighting and some errors by subordinate commanders; but in both cases the British bayonet was ultimately triumphant.51
In a tactical sense, therefore, India taught Wellesley that aggression and risk were the keys to winning battles. He would learn soon enough that veteran French troops did not buckle quite as easily as Indian sepoys, and would have to adapt his tactics accordingly. But one area of his Indian experience required no fine-tuning, and that was his expertise in matters of logistics. ‘He was a logistician par excellence, and he repeatedly overturned accepted wisdoms by the speed with which he could bring together a moving bazaar – actually a sort of free-enterprise “rolling magazine” – to keep his forces fed while they operated far from their base. His campaigns were therefore notable for their range and cross-country mobility, even in near-desert conditions.’52
18. Retreat to Corunna
On 12 September 1805, shortly after his return from India, Major-General Sir Arthur Wellesley walked into the anteroom of the Colonial Office in Downing Street to find a diminutive one-armed admiral who, like him, was waiting to see Lord Castlereagh, the newly appointed secretary of state for War and the Colonies. Wellesley instantly recognized the sailor as Admiral Lord Nelson, commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet, whose victory in the Battle of the Nile in 1798 had made him a national hero (a status merely enhanced by his later success at Copenhagen in 1803). Nelson, by contrast, had no idea who the tall, sunburnt general was and proceeded to ‘talk about himself’, recalled Wellesley, ‘in a style so vain and silly as to surprise and almost disgust me’. The soldier added:
I suppose something that I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody, and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the office-keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a different man, both in manner and matter. All that I had thought a charlatan style had vanished, and he talked of the state of this country, and of the aspect and probability of affairs on the Continent with a good sense, and a knowledge of subjects at home and abroad that surprised me … in fact he talked like an officer and a statesman. The Secretary of State kept us long waiting, and certainly, for the last half or three-quarters of an hour, I don’t know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more.1
During their brief conversation, Wellesley was brought fully up to date with the military and political situation in Europe, since Addington’s government, outraged that Napoleon Bonaparte was defying the spirit if not the letter of the Treaty of Amiens,* had ended the brief outbreak of peace by declaring war on France in May 1803. For much of that year, and the next, Britain had fought a largely defensive war, with Nelson’s Mediterranean squadron countering the threat of invasion by blockading the main French fleet in Toulon. All the while the French Grand Army at Boulogne had grown in strength to 160,000, waiting for the Franco-Spanish fleet to escort it across the Channel in transports. The chance seemed to have come in March 1805, when Admiral Villeneuve took advantage of westerly gales to leave Toulon with twenty men-of-war. Initially wrong-footed, Nelson gambled that Villeneuve was bound for Jamaica and set off in pursuit. ‘If they are not gone to the West Indies,’ declared the one-eyed, one-armed admiral (he had lost the sight of his right eye during the siege of Calvi in 1794, and his right limb at Tenerife three years later), ‘I shall be blamed: to be burnt in effigy, or Westminster Abbey is my alternative.’2
Fortunately for Britain, Nelson’s gamble paid off and the Channel was not left undefended. Once Villeneuve realized Nelson was in pursuit (he took thirty-four days to cross the Atlantic, to Nelson’s twenty-four), he ignored his instructions to wait until all French naval forces had joined him and returned to Europe. Bound for Brest, he was intercepted off Cape Finisterre by Vice-Admiral Sir Robert Calder’s Atlantic squadron of fifteen ships and, during a confused action in fog on 22 July, lost two of his ships and withdrew to Ferrol. Calder, however, was court-martialled for not pressing home his attack and his command transferred to Nelson, who, following this action, had returned to Britain on leave for the first time in two years. Wellesley referred to the Cape Finisterre battle in his conversation with Nelson, contrasting Calder’s feeble performance with the decisive victories that Nelson had ‘taught the public to expect’. Nelson returned the compliment by expressing a hope that Wellesley would be given command of an expedition to attack the French in Sardinia, a strategy that in his opinion made much more sense than the landing in northern Germany that Pitt – reinstated as prime minister since May 1804 – was actually planning.3
In August 1805 Pitt had finally persuaded Austria to re-enter the fight against France. The final straw for Austria was when Napoleon (emperor of France since May 1804) had himself crowned king of Italy in May. Austria could accept the loss of its influence in Germany or Italy, but not both at the same time. In the interests of self-preservation, therefore, it had joined Britain, Russia and Portugal in what became known as the Third Coalition. Napoleon’s response was to postpone indefinitely the invasion of Britain so that he could march against Austria, and by early September the camps at Boulogne were deserted.
The news that Britain was safe from invasion would take some time to reach London, and meanwhile Nelson’s orders, when he returned to active service the day after his chance meeting with Wellesley, were to destroy the Franco-Spanish fleet (now at Cadiz) by any means at his disposal. On 20 October 1805, in a final throw of the dice, Villeneuve sailed out of Cadiz with thirty-three warships. A day later, Nelson’s fleet of twenty-seven ships attacked him off Cape Trafalgar. Advancing in two divisions, Nelson pierced Villeneuve’s crescent-shaped line in two places so that his vanguard of ten ships took no real part in the action. Superior British tactics, gunnery and seamanship accounted for the rest. Eighteen of Villeneuve’s ships were captured or destroyed, including his flagship Bucentaure, though many of the prizes foundered in the violent storm that followed the battle. French and Spanish casualties were 5,800 killed and wounded, and 20,000 captured (among them Admiral Villeneuve). British losses were just 1,690 – but they included Lord Nelson, who had been shot by a sniper from the mizzen mast of the French ship Redoubtable as he strode the quarterdeck of his flagship, HMS Victory, in the decorations of his four chivalric orders.
As Nelson lay dying in the surgeon’s quarters below deck, Captain Hardy reported a ‘brilliant victory’, adding that at least 14 enemy ships had been taken. ‘That is well,’ replied Nelson, ‘but I bargained for twenty.’ His last words were: ‘Thank God I have done my duty.’4
At 4.30 in the afternoon, three hours after receiving the fatal wound, Nelson died. When the news reached London, The Times remarked: ‘We do not know whether we should mourn or rejoice. The country has gained the most splendid and decisive Victory that has ever graced the naval annals of England; but it has been dearly purchased. The great and gallant NELSON is no more.’5 Brought back to London in a cask of brandy, he was given a state funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral on 9 January 1806.
Two weeks later, the country mourned an even greater loss. Already weak from overwork and worry, Pitt’s frail constitution had been dealt an additional blow by the news that Napoleon had destroyed an Austro-Russian army in arguably his finest battlefield victory at Austerlitz on 2 December 1805, resulting in the collapse of the Third Coalition. On 23 January 1806, at the age of just forty-six, Pitt died in Downing Street.
‘Twenty-three years Minister of this country,’ recorded the Tory MP Charles Abbott in his diary, ‘founder of the only effectual sinking fund for the reduction of the debt; deliverer of this country from the horrors of the French Revolution and accomplisher of the Union with Ireland [in 1800]. His transcendent eloquence and talents gave him a complete and easy victory over all his rivals in Parliament, and a popularity throughout the nation which he never condescended to solicit.’6
