Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company

by John Keay

  Thus removed from the ambit of Bombay’s faint-hearted counsels, Goddard attempted to dictate new terms to Poona. The negotiations dragged on throughout 1779 to no purpose. Both sides used the lull for a diplomatic offensive, with the Marathas pursuing a triple alliance with the Nizam and Hyder Ali – of which more later – while the British explored Maratha dissensions. By January 1780 the Gaikwar of Baroda had come over and Goddard moved north into Gujarat. Retracing Keating’s footsteps he took Dabhoi, rolled back the Poona forces and successfully stormed Ahmadabad.

  Meanwhile Hastings had dispatched a second Bengal detachment under Captain William Popham to make common cause with one of Scindia’s disaffected neighbours in the country south of Agra. This modest diversionary tactic had the most unexpected results. With no guns and only 2000 men, nearly all sepoys, Popham invaded Scindia’s territory, took the fort of Lahar, and then moved presumptuously against Gwalior, the capital. A new front had been opened. Hastings urgently ordered more troops to reinforce Popham. It was over this order that Philip Francis broke his recent compact with the Governor-General not to interfere with the conduct of the war. Hastings accused him of bad faith; Francis issued his challenge. Thus it was that just before dawn on 17 August, in the midst of one of the Company’s most critical wars – and to the intense surprise of a small crowd of curious Indian villagers – the Governor-General and his leading councillor stood back to back, took fourteen paces, and emptied their pistols in one another’s direction. Francis fell. Although only wounded he accepted defeat and soon after sailed from Calcutta to seek revenge in England.

  A week later the news from Popham at Gwalior should have made Hastings’s cup of joy overflow. Gwalior, a classic table-top fortress elevated several hundred feet above the surrounding plain, and with its scarps of sheer rock crowned by battlements, was probably the strongest natural fortress in all India. It appeared impregnable; yet such was its strategic importance astride the main roads leading south from Delhi and Agra that no government claiming dominion over both the north and the peninsula had ever been able to ignore it. Hastings acknowledged that it was ‘the key to Hindustan’; but having no territorial ambition, he seems never to have entertained designs on it. News, therefore, that Popham and his men, without artillery but evidently with plenty of rope, had somehow scaled its cliffs, surprised its garrison, and were now in proud possession of the place caused a sensation. Comparisons were drawn with Wolfe at Quebec; Hastings likened its psychological impact to Plassey. Now at last the Marathas would surely listen to peace overtures.

  They did no such thing; and any euphoria that Hastings allowed himself was extremely short-lived. For, within a month, Popham’s triumph, indeed the whole Maratha war, was overshadowed by a disaster of the first magnitude. Madras, hitherto unaffected by the war and in fact able to supply Bombay with troops, had contrived its own Wargaum – only rather worse. Its entire army had been virtually annihilated.

  iv

  Since the end of the Seven Years War Madras had ceased to loom large in the Company’s thinking. Compared to Bengal, its political and commercial consequence had declined while its strategic importance was only really relevant at a time of war with France. Then proximity to Pondicherry and command of the sea lanes in the Bay of Bengal could be crucial to Calcutta’s security. Otherwise it was something of a liability, dependent on Bengal for provisions but somewhat careless of Bengal’s ever delicate relations with its neighbours. Although happy to remind Calcutta that it was the Madras army and the Madras government in the person of Robert Clive who had made Bengal what it was, ‘the gentlemen of the Coast’, instead of king-making and government, had remained true to their vocation – namely, making money.

  Private trade with Aceh, Manila and Canton played its part but a new and surer source of wealth had been discovered nearer home in the ever obliging person of Mohammed Ali. Now known as the Nawab Walajah, Mohammed Ali continued to rule the Carnatic without, like Mir Jafar and Mir Kasim, incurring the Company’s displeasure. This he managed by cheerfully accepting his role as a British puppet, gratefully incurring the considerable cost of maintaining Company troops, and happily dividing his entourage, which included eight European doctors, between no fewer than twenty sumptuous Madras residences. Of course, it was expensive and his indebtedness to the Company, heavy enough after the French wars, grew ever heavier. Here was a Nawab from whom six-figure ‘presents’ were not to be expected.

  On the other hand, here was a Nawab whose rule was underwritten by the Company and whose financial embarrassment had a certain attraction to the investor. Loans to the Nawab were gilt-edged; it was like buying government stock except that the rates of interest (twenty to twenty-five per cent) were infinitely higher. So ‘the gentlemen of The Coast’ invested secretly but heavily, and the Nawab borrowed discreetly but excessively. Each benefited. The revenues of the Carnatic found their way into English pockets without all the hassle and recrimination that went with Bengal-style peculation; and the Nawab, with his political masters also his financial dependants, enjoyed an improbable degree of security and even indulgence.

  To what extent the Nawab actually influenced policy must remain a matter of conjecture. Intrigue and rumour successfully concealed the full extent of both his financial and political connections. But his creditors certainly included more than one president of Madras plus a succession of councillors, while his political agents were active not only in the courts of India but also in that of St James. In 1770, much to the fury of the directors whose then plight made them especially sensitive to any government moves behind their backs, the Nawab received and greatly impressed Sir John Lindsay who, as well as commanding a visiting squadron of the Royal Navy, was accredited as a royal plenipotentiary to investigate the Nawab’s grievances against the Company.

  Soon after, the Nawab secured Madras’s support for an unprovoked invasion and annexation of neighbouring Tanjore; its revenues were deemed a necessary security for yet more loans. In 1775 Pigot was reappointed to Madras specifically to rectify this abuse of power and oversee the restoration of Tanjore to its rightful Raja. But the Nawab and his creditors (the so-called ‘Arcot Interest’) were not to be deprived of their gains so easily. Pigot was arrested by a majority of his own councillors and promptly died in captivity; some said it was from hard usage, others from ‘exposing himself to the sun while gardening’. The facts remain obscure in spite of subsequent convictions; but there can be no doubting the Nawab’s complicity. (This tangled affair is also notable for the brief reappearance of Henry Brooke, once of Negrais and Manila, who was one of the leading conspirators, and of Alexander Dalrymple, who had returned to Madras to lend support to Pigot, his erstwhile patron in the Balambangan project. Suspended from the Council at the time of Pigot’s arrest, Dalrymple returned to London with another noble cause to publicize.)

  Unlike Tanjore, the Nawab’s other neighbours – Hyder Ali in Mysore and the Nizam in Hyderabad – posed more of a threat than a temptation. As the Nawab had impressed on Lindsay, the ideal guarantee of his own security and that of his Madras allies-cum-creditors would have been a counterbalancing alliance with the Marathas against Mysore and Hyderabad. But the problem here was Bombay whose difficulties with the Marathas commended a rather similar counterbalancing alliance but with Hyder Ali and the Nizam. In short, the diplomatic requirements of Madras and those of Bombay were directly opposed. Thus when Hyder Ali successfully overran the coastal principalities of what is now Kerala, Bombay applauded while Madras winced.

  Similarly with the Nizam. To Hastings it was self-evident that while the Company was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the Marathas, its alliance with the Nizam must at all costs be maintained. Yet Madras seemed to be going out of its way to antagonize Hyderabad, first by detaching (and then leasing to Mohammed Ali as a further security for loans) a chunk of the Northern Circars and then by interfering with the financial terms of the existing alliance. A possible explanation may be that, from past experience, M
adras was far more concerned about the recently declared war (of American Independence) with France than it was about that with the Marathas. As soon as news of France’s entry into the war reached India, the Madras army had marched once again against Pondicherry and quickly reduced it (1778). The justification for interfering in Hyderabad was the presence there of a corps of French mercenaries. And similarly it was to eliminate the French outpost of Mahé that in 1779 an expedition from Madras infuriated Hyder Ali by barging into Kerala, which he now claimed as being under his protection.

  Suddenly the danger of that unthinkable triple alliance between the Marathas, Hyder Ali, and the Nizam looked a distinct possibility. Should the French also choose this moment to unleash one of their troop-carrying armadas into Indian waters, the Company must be done for. To Hastings, as to posterity, it beggared understanding that the subsidiary presidencies could have behaved so blindly, so selfishly, and so incompetently in this hour of crisis. What was the use of the Governor-General’s supervisory powers if they could be so blatantly flaunted?

  Luckily, though, the French would arrive on the scene a year too late; and luckily Hastings, by repudiating Madras’s negotiations with the Nizam, was able to limit the damage done in Hyderabad. That left Mysore as the only power disposed to threaten Madras and so deflect Hastings from the war with the Marathas. It was well known that Hyder Ali held Mohammed Ali in profound contempt and regarded the Madras Council as perfidy incarnate. It was also well known that he was concerting his plans with the French and that his own army included both artillery and officers of French origin, including de Lally’s son. In the first Mysore War of 1767-9 he had easily out-marched the British forces and had successfully surprised Madras itself. (This was the action which precipitated the collapse of the Company’s stock in London and the dispatch of the three Commissioners in the ill-fated Aurora.) Undoubtedly Hyder Ali was the ablest commander of his day; and in his son, Tipu, he had a no less daring and charismatic lieutenant.

  Nevertheless the Madras Councillors refused to take the Mysore threat seriously. Mohammed Ali warned them of Hyder’s intentions and so did their own agents. Yet as late as April 1780 the outgoing President of Fort St George was able to assure his countrymen that ‘there is the greatest prospect that this part of India will remain quiet’. Pondicherry had been taken, a Royal squadron under Sir Edward Hughes had arrived on The Coast, and a King’s regiment, the 73rd Highlanders, had just been disembarked at Madras. It would be madness for Hyder Ali to invade. Panic-mongers might urge a concentration of the Company’s forces, the requisitioning of stores and transport, the strengthening of outlying garrisons; but as Captain Munro of the Highlanders put it, ‘advice at this time was deemed an insult to judgement’.

  Three months later, with the new President also pooh-poohing the idea of war, Hyder struck. In the space of a month he overran the entire Carnatic save for a few obstinate forts. The Nawab’s capital of Arcot was heavily invested and Hyder’s dreaded cavalry galloped past the paralysed British forces and entered the suburbs of Madras, ‘surrounding many of the English gentlemen in their country houses, who narrowly escaped being taken’. The air blackened with smuts as the enemy scorched the earth in a wide arc round the city.

  With the idea of relieving Arcot, the Madras army of some 4000 men under Sir Hector Munro eventually moved inland. At Conjeeveram (Kanchipuram) they halted to await the arrival of Colonel Baillie with a further 3000 men from the Northern Circars. By 6 September Baillie was within ten miles of the main army; but Tipu was opposing his progress, so Munro sent a detachment of 1000 to his aid. This combined force, now representing half Munro’s troops, was surrounded by Hyder’s entire army during the night of the 9th near a village called Polilur. Next day it was systematically destroyed in a savage encounter ‘such as cannot be paralleled since the English had possessions in India’. Sixty out of eighty-six British officers plus about 2000 British and Indian troops perished; about 1000 more were taken prisoner and eventually led away to Hyder’s capital of Srirangapatnam; there more died and still more would have preferred death, such were the privations they suffered.

  Polilur stands apart from other battles in the Company’s history. The carnage is explained by the fact that there was no possibility of retreat but what rankled even more was the shame of knowing that it could so easily have been avoided. Munro could actually hear the battle going on. But so unreliable were his spies and informants, so hopeless his maps, and so cumbersome his forces that he failed to appreciate the gravity of the situation, could not locate the battlefield, and anyway was too encumbered to reach it. To make matters worse, his precipitate retreat to Madras involved further heavy casualties and resulted in the jettisoning of all his baggage and most of his guns. It is not an exaggeration to say that Polilur meant the virtual annihilation of the Madras army.

  From Mysore’s point of view it was, of course, a glorious victory and in Tipu’s summer palace a series of magnificent murals was painted to commemorate the event. There they were duly noted by General Baird when nineteen years later he led the final assault on Srirangapatnam that ended the Mysore Wars; he recognized them because he was one of those who had been wounded at Polilur and then incarcerated at Srirangapatnam for four years.

  British historians have naturally tended to play down the significance of such a total defeat but, taken along with Wargaum, it may be seen as evidence that India’s native armies were no longer easy prey. Many of the Mysore troops had been trained by British officers in the service of Mohammed Ali or by French officers under Chanda Sahib and the Nizam; the words of command were given in English; native cavalry, instead of making fruitless charges against the British guns, were now cleverly deployed to outflank them. At Wargaum, the British forces had been under a joint command that included General John Carnac who had fought in the war against Mir Kasim. Sir Hector Munro, the dupe of Polilur, was also Sir Hector Munro, the victor of Baksar; and his successor in Madras, Sir Eyre Coote, had been the man responsible for goading Clive into action at Plassey and for hounding the French in the Carnatic during the Seven Years War. Nor were their troops in any way inferior. In Madras the proportion of King’s regiments, mostly Highlanders, to Company regiments was higher than ever. The fact was that reputations easily won in previous decades were now proving hard to sustain against the new generation of opponents. Even Goddard, the hero of the hour in Bombay, only narrowly avoided his own Wargaum when, at the end of the year, he too was bundled back down the Western Ghats after another abortive march on Poona.

  News of Polilur reached Hastings in Calcutta a month after Gwalior and the duel with Francis. Although Bengal’s finances and its military resources were already at breaking point, he recognized that only ‘the most instant, powerful, and hazardous exertions’ could possibly save Madras and so prevent the French from snatching this golden opportunity to re-establish themselves in the peninsula. Requisitioning ships and stopping all investment in trade goods, he despatched by sea Coote, the most inspirational commander in India, along with 4000 troops and 1.5 million rupees. At the same time Colonel Thomas Pearse, his second in the recent duel with Francis and a close friend, was ordered to emulate Goddard’s feat and march overland from Bengal to Madras with a force of 5000. Meanwhile the Maratha war would have to take second place. Goddard was ordered to explore the possibility of an armistice with Poona while Hastings doubled his efforts to ensure the neutrality of the Bhonslas on Bengal’s border. Soon after, he began to put out feelers to a Scindia much impressed by the loss of Gwalior and subsequent reverses.

  ‘Bullocks, money, and faithful spies are the sinews of war in this country’, wrote Captain Innes Munro who seems to have fought in every engagement of the Second Mysore War and later published an account of it that makes happy reading compared to Orme’s wordy narrative of the earlier Carnatic wars. A dearth of all three had been responsible for Polilur plus, perhaps, the lack of a cipher which had resulted in Sir Hector Munro (no immediate relation) and Colonel Ba
illie corresponding, as and when they could locate one another, in Gaelic. Coote brought money, and his enormous reputation improved the chances of securing reliable intelligence. But the problem of bullocks would remain unsolved in this Mysore war and the next. It was not till Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, assembled the largest cattle drove in history – over a quarter of a million bullocks – that the problem looked to be solved and the British at last advanced to that triumph of Baird’s at Srirangapatnam.

  Frequently immobilized by this lack of transport and never able to move far from the coastal shipping which was their only alternative means of supply, Coote’s forces lumbered back and forth between Madras and Pondicherry for three years in a dreary repetition of previous Carnatic campaigns. In August 1781 the gallant Pearse, after a nine-month march ‘little short of that made by the ten thousand under Xenophon’, reached Madras. It was another dramatic pointer to the integration of the subcontinent. But in spite of this and later reinforcements, and in spite of several modest victories, the British proved incapable of pressing home their advantage against the mobile Mysoreans. Arcot fell, and most of the remaining forts were abandoned because of the difficulty of provisioning them.

  Meanwhile, as in previous Carnatic wars, everything depended on the balance of power at sea. When Holland entered the war (of American Independence) as a French ally in 1781, Admiral Hughes duly battered into surrender the Dutch bases of Negapatnam and then Trinconomalee in Sri Lanka. A few months later the latter was recaptured by a large French squadron under Admiral Suffren who then in a long series of seldom decisive but always devastating engagements gradually got the better of Hughes. Coote’s sea-borne supplies were consequently interrupted and his manoeuvres further curtailed. An added distraction was that Suffren had landed 2000 French troops who promptly occupied Cuddalore and sat tight to await reinforcement. In the Madras roads a fleet of supply vessels was dashed to pieces by the inevitable typhoon; to the Presidency’s catalogue of problems was added that of famine.