by Tom Anderson
After more than a month’s worth of bitter siege warfare, the Allies took the bait and battered down the weak outer wall with the guns of Haidarabad. The attack, which would be a joint Anglo-French operation, was staged on 21st January 1801. The Tippoo waited near his trap, desiring to light the long fuse himself.
The attack went in at night, silently, with no preceding artillery barrage to give it away. The first Forlorn Hope was made up of the Scots from the 78th, the second by French soldiers of the FEIC. The space between the walls rapidly filled up with confused soldiers and sepoys, throwing burning carcasses around to light up the area, uncertain when confronted by the second wall before them. The Tippoo lit the fuse…and nothing happened.
Historians have mused on the question as to whether the Tippoo ever knew that he had been betrayed by his minister Mir Sadiq, who had made a deal with the French in exchange for a powerful position in postwar Mysore. Mir Sadiq had sabotaged the trap by secretly having an underground channel dug from Seringapatam’s moat into the dead space between the walls, soaking the gunpowder and fuses with water. Only a few rockets went off, triggered by the burning carcasses rather than the Tippoo. Though slowed down by the second wall, the British and French brought it down with sappers and then clambered over a second breach. After that, it was hand-to-hand urban fighting with all the bitter struggle that evokes in any era.
Tippoo Sultan went down with a rifle in one hand and a sabre in the other, finally killed by French sepoy Ali Sayyid with a pistol after slaying many of his foes. His heroic last stand was immortalised in the poem Le Tigre by Besson, and was generally praised even by his enemies, who were more used to Indian rulers fleeing and switching sides in the noxious and uncertain political climate of the time. His general Yaar Mohammed, consumed by guilt at his failure to protect his sovereign, fled north and eventually entered the court of the Durrani Mughal Emperor, incidentally bringing news of both the fall of Mysore and new European innovations to the north of India. Mir Sadiq was indeed rewarded with the chief ministry of (a much reduced) Kingdom of Mysore, and the French restored the former Hindoo Wodeyar dynasty to the throne – whose members the Tippoo had kept unharmed, though imprisoned, to avoid antagonising his own Hindoo populace. Leclerc, facing capture by the Royalists, turned his pistol on himself rather be humiliated by Rochambeau again.
What to do with the rest of the Mysorean empire, as Tippoo had predicted, antagonised the temporary Franco-British alliance following the victory. The French were unquestionably in the weaker position in India for the first time in fifty years, but were not so weak that they could be ignored or forced into a humiliating position. The situation was perhaps helped by the death of Rochambeau of natural causes in March 1801, not long after hearing of the victory at Seringapatam. As no new Governor-General could be appointed due to the hectic situation back in Europe, Champard took the position by default. He was assisted by Du Tourd and by Henri d’Auvergne, who had been freed from the Tippoo’s dungeons with his remaining men – weakened but alive. Champard was a vigorous negotiator capable of keeping up with Britain’s Pitt, and between them the two hashed out a treaty which was, if not truly equitable, at least stopped the two old enemies from decaying back into open warfare.
Based on this treaty, France’s sphere of influence now took in Baba Mahal, Dindigool, Cochin and Travancore. As the latter two kingdoms had no royal claimants left, they were formally annexed to the dominions of the Nawab of Arcot, who by this point was merely a French client. D’Auvergne was appointed resident in both Cochin and Travancore, while Du Tourd was made resident of Mysore. Britain, in addition to having effective control over Guntoor as noted before, was awarded Coorg, Malabar and Mangalore. Parts of Malabar were taken over by the Dutch East India Company operating out of Calicut as Mysorean power collapsed, and this was not seriously contested by the British. The idea behind Pitt’s strategy was to concede French control of southern India, but ultimately block off their direct overland access to the north of India, allowing its untapped treasures to be the property of the BEIC alone.
One immediate impact from the War of the Ferengi Alliance was a new perception in Indian thought, that the French were pro-Hindoo and the British were pro-Muslim. This was derived from the fact that the French had restored the Wodeyars, while the British worked closely with Haidarabad. Although little based in fact, it proved increasingly influential, and ultimately undermined the carefully confessionally neutral position that the two Companies had spent so long trying to protect (unlike their Portuguese counterpart with its active missionary activity). This went on to have interesting consequences with respect to European relations with the two major warring powers of northern India, the Durrani Neo-Mughal Empire and the Maratha Confederacy…
Chapter 45: Silver and Fire
From:“That Brief Interlude: Novamund[254] between the wars” by Felipe de Herrera (English translation)—
When several former Spanish colonies won their independence in 1785 (not to become the United Provinces of South America until the Convention of Córdoba five years later), most experienced commentators considered their situation to be unstable. The Spanish defeat had caused as many problems for Córdoba as it had for Madrid. The postwar United Provinces did not merely include those colonies which had risen in rebellion against Spain in the first place – the Plate, Chile and Upper Peru – but also occupied Lower Peru, whose population was mostly strongly loyalist in character. Lima in particular, having been the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, resented being effectively turned into a frontier backwater by the upstart Córdoba. The United Provinces helped maintain order by their alliances with the successful Indian states which had risen from the earlier phase of the rebellion: Tupac Amaru II’s Tahuantinsuyo, ruled from Cusco, and Tomas Katari’s Aymara, ruled from Chuqiyapu (La Paz). Three uprisings in Lima, mostly led by the Peninsular elite, were crushed between 1785 and 1805 by Meridian and Indian soldiers, only increasing the local resentment every time, of course.
The United Provinces itself developed as a conservative republic on Dutch lines, quite naturally as the Constitution drawn up at the Convention of Córdoba had been partly inspired by the previous revolt of the Dutch United Provinces from Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In place of a Stadtholder, the Meridian Constitution created the office of a President-General. Like the Dutch Stadtholder, the Meridian President-General was initially elected for life, but the UPSA had a more democratic means of election which was not limited to a few powerful long-standing families.[255] This was arguably half because the UPSA was frontier country rather than a European state and more used to such ‘ramshackle’ means of governance, and some have suggested that democratic ideology arose more from this everyday practice rather than idealism. Also, in the colonial period the would-be United Provinces had been politically dominated by Peninsulares, those born in Spain, and thus the new nativist, Criollo-dominated regime installed by the revolution frowned upon recruiting from the former important families – though of course they could not afford to disenfranchise them altogether.
In any case many Peninsulare families fled the United Provinces of their own accord, particularly those whose businesses or political contacts were strongly tied to Spain and the Spanish Crown. Among them was Ambrosio O’Higgins, an Irish exile who had remained loyal to Spain in his capacity as commanding general of the force fighting against the Mapuche Indians in southern Chile. When his lieutenants approached him in 1783 and declared that the army would return to Santiago to fight against the Spaniards, whether O’Higgins wanted it or not, he swiftly made his escape. O’Higgins hid out in Valdivia for the remainder of the war, and then took ship under an assumed name after the Peace of London. He rejoined the Spanish Imperial Service in Monterey (capital of the Captaincy-General of California) and served in various capacities before being reassigned as field-marshal of the army of New Granada in 1792. O’Higgins’ background was in military engineering, which he combined with his experience fightin
g the Mapuche in unconventional combat, recognising that European-style warfare was of limited use in New Granada’s difficult terrain. To O’Higgins, only one enemy was possible, of course – the United Provinces who had set back his career and humiliated him by forcing him to hide in Valdivia for two years.
Based on these assumptions, he remodelled the army and militia of New Granada. Although many of the more traditionalist officers under his command were aghast at O’Higgins’ unconventional style, the Viceroy of New Granada, Antonio Caballero y Góngora, approved. Caballero had become Viceroy himself for his service in the 1780s when New Granada, like the Plate, had threatened to rise up in rebellion. The rebels, calling themselves Comuneros after the sixteenth-century Spanish people’s revolt, had been motivated by less dramatic circumstances than the Platineans – primarily it was a revolt by Criollos in response to increased taxation – but it had nonetheless threatened to result in the loss of all the Spanish colonies in South America. Caballero had successfully defused the situation with diplomacy, in a tried-and-tested method that had been used by many leaders throughout history to put down such mass revolts, such as the English Kings Richard II and Henry VIII. He persuaded the Audiencia to agree to all the rebels’ demands, waited for them to disperse and return to their homes, and then simply repudiated the agreement. Such a strategy worked because the Comuneros were by now too dispersed and confused to rise again effectively, and the loyalist forces were able to capture and execute the rebel ringleaders.
For this success, Caballero had eventually been elevated to Viceroy. He now suspected the United Provinces of fanning the remaining embers of Comunero sympathy in New Granada. The United Provinces had yet to develop formalised political parties, but there was a de facto divison in the Cortes Nacionales between those who believed that the UPSA had reached its natural borders – perhaps even exceeded them – and that they should focus in building a new national identity and developing the country, lest it fragment from being too diverse and unconnected; and those who, on the contrary, thought that the United Provinces’ liberty should be spread to all the Spanish-speaking peoples of the Americas, and perhaps even beyond. This spread of liberty would, naturally, be accomplished by the conquest and annexation of the remaining ‘unfree’ lands into the UPSA. The two unofficial groupings would eventually be the genesis of the Partido Amarillo and the Partido Colorado (the Yellow and Red Parties) respectively.
For now, the division between the future parties was held in abeyance by the President-General, Simón Riquelme de la Barrera Goycochea. Riquelme was a Chilean, descended from a family that had moved to Chile in the sixteenth century, and thus was arguably a perfect candidate to balance Meridian interests – the political culture at the time was dominated by Platineans, making a Chilean a neutral arbiter, and his provable ancestry meant that he suited the nativist sensibilities of the post-revolutionary United Provinces.[256] But Riquelme was in his seventies, and his death in 1794 – the year of the French Revolution – prompted a dramatic reshuffling of interests.
A new election in the Cortes Nacionales to appoint a new President-General provoked a more vicious and partisan contest than before: previously the Spanish had been a sufficient bogeyman to force all Meridian politicians to work together regardless of their disagreements. This was no longer the case. In the end, the Cortes narrowly declared for Miguel de Azcuénaga, a young hero of the never-ending battles with the Mapuche like Ambrosio O’Higgins before him. Unlike O’Higgins, Azcuénaga was a fervent Meridian patriot, but he was politically cautious and did not support expansionism, for two reasons. Firstly, his experiences with the Mapuche and the Llano had persuaded him that the United Provinces needed to put their own house in order before adopting a foreign policy of any kind, never mind some hare-brained war of liberation to the north. Secondly, he argued that the United Provinces was presently in a very good position with respect to foreign relations. The UPSA enjoyed full free trade rights with both the Portuguese Empire and the British American possessions, and this trade – particularly the renewed interest in Peruvian quinine provoked by Britain’s expansion into Guinea – supported an economic boom.
In his inaugural speech, Azcuénaga dismissed those who would throw away such a potential golden age for more resentful far-flung territories. “Have any of those deputies [who favour expansion] even visited Lima?” he asked rhetorically in a 1796 speech. “Imagine two, three, ten more Limas, scattered across northern provinces which suck in men and money like a drain, spitting out only trouble in return. That is what they would have – assuming of course we did not lose, stabbed in the back by restless natives, our fair ports bombarded once more, our precious and hard-won independence lost. We would throw away our liberty and consign our children to lick the Spanish bootheel once again. Madness. Nothing less.” But he was increasingly a voice in the wilderness. As more news of the French Revolution filtered down with the trade from Europe, Azcuénaga’s enemies grew restless. Even Azcuénaga’s supporters trumpeted the birth of liberty in one politically stagnant Catholic nation, with the obvious hope that Spain would soon follow. Some of the reactionaries had schemes in mind just as crazy as their expansionist counterparts, imagining a huge commonwealth of Spanish-speaking republics in which Spain herself would be equal to the UPSA or what was presently the loyalist colonies. Of course, one day such a dream would no longer seem so implausible, though its final form none could have foreseen.
The United Provinces also had a relatively large French-speaking population, originating from the troops of the Duc de Noailles from the Second Platinean War who had deserted in favour of building a better life in the UPSA. Among them was the Duc de Noailles’ own son Jean-Louis-Paul-François Denoailles, who became a fervent believer in Platinean liberty. He gave up his own noble title – the dukedom passing to his younger brother Antoine in France, who would meet the phlogisticateur in 1799. Although initially serving as a soldier in the Fuerzas Armadas de los Provincias Unidas (the Meridian army), he swiftly turned back to his first love – chemistry – and worked alongside Joseph Priestley when he fled to the UPSA in 1796, condemned at home for supporting the French Revolution. Between them, they both put the UPSA on the map of science by making discoveries comparable with those of Davy in Britain. (Republican France did not make many chemical discoveries in the 1790s, partly due to Lisieux’s focus on those sciences that at the time seemed most useful in war, partly because they kept executing their existing chemists of noble blood). Priestley and Denoailles also developed immense personal fortunes from Priestley’s invention of carbonated water – the secret remained safe for twenty years, at the end of which the the Priestley Aereated Water Company had a secure position as the largest supplier. Noailles’ son Henri (Enrique) hit upon the idea of adding quinine to make a health tonic. This sold millions of bottles both in South America itself, and in the British, Dutch and Portuguese possessions in Africa and India. The quinine dependence of those lands also meant that the UPSA remained the sole supplier of this product even after the secret of carbonated water got out.
More importantly from a political point of view, there was Jean-Charles Pichegru, who had started out as a captain in the Duc de Noailles’ army. Like Noailles’ son, he had joined the Fuerzas Armadas after defecting, but unlike Noailles’ son he decided to stay there. He rose through the ranks until by 1798 he was the commanding general against the Mapuche, like Azcuénaga before him. Pichegru, like many of the French in the UPSA, supported the French Revolution and by extension argued for military action to spread liberty further around the world, just as France was doing in the Germanies and Italy. Pichegru’s similar age and background to Azcuénaga gave him a certain authority, undermining Azcuénaga’s position when Pichegru opposed the conclusions Azcuénaga had drawn from the same service against the Indians. Pichegru became a deputy in 1799 without leaving the army. In the Cortes he supported Juan José Castelli, possibly the greatest orator in the Cortes and leader of the nascent radical revolutionary exp
ansionist party—usually called the Partido Solidaridad (Party of Solidarity, solidarity with France and other Revolutionary governments). Castelli argued that now was the time to strike, while the forces of reaction were on the back foot all over the world.
1801 came and the United Provinces held a general election. The French Revolution had caught the imagination of the population, both the liberal intellectuals drawn from Criollo and Peninsulare backgrounds, and the poor from what used to be the lower castas. Even those who could not vote directly often influenced those who could, a village headman sometimes casting a vote for all his citizens. The electorate returned a Cortes dominated by pro-revolutionary and expansionist deputies, many of whom looked to the Partido Solidaridad for leadership. However, this was insufficient to reach the position that Castelli wanted. By the original Constitution of Córdobn, only the President-General had the power to declare war, and Presidents-General were elected for life. Azcuénaga was still a young man and there was no way to legally impeach him (though such a provision would eventually be added to the Constitution by an amendment).
