by Tom Anderson
Yet what at first seemed like a footnote of history was taking place at the same time. Michael Weston’s fever worsened as the Dauntless rounded the Horn. This was at a time when the Meridians feared the British might press a claim to Tierra del Fuego as well as Falkland’s Islands. Then, suddenly, during a storm, the fever broke. The naturalist rose from his bed, went out onto the deck as the raging rain battered at him, and only the quick intervention of Morton and a passing sailor managed to restrain the man from hurling himself into the water. Weston let out an angry cry: “Why do you stop me? I know now! I know where we all must go! To the ends of the earth! The ends of the earth! I have seen it – foolish – waiting for the return of the Messiah – when it happened so long ago – innocence – must be – preserved…”
Or so Morton recorded it in his diary, dismissing the whole business as a fever dream. Though while Weston rapidly recovered, he did not forget what he had uttered. And the controversial sect known variously as the One True and Holy Church of the Contemporaneous Apostles, and the Moronites, was born…
Chapter #87: Maintain Your Raj
“India has saved European civilisation by her riches, and will, I trust, save her own civilisation by her restraint.”
- John Pitt, Governor-General of the Honourable British East India Company
*
From: “From Discord to Accord: Colonial policy in India after the Jacobin Wars” by P. W. de Lyons (1959, English translation 1962)—
During the period of the Jacobin Wars, India had been a theatre often overlooked by the governments of the European powers, yet in an odd way perhaps the most decisive of them all. It is true to say that the only actual conflict in the region that can be considered a direct part of the Jacobin Wars was the War of the Travancorean Succession (also called Tippoo Sultan’s War, the War of the Ferengi Alliance, and the Jacobin Incident) between 1799 and 1801. Yet the influence of that conflict can scarcely be overstated. The war was marked by the Pitt-Rochambeau Accord of 1800, which arguably set the scene for Franco-British foreign relations in their nations’ respective colonies for the remainder of the Jacobin Wars.
It was here that it was formally laid down that, while it might seem a good policy in the short run for British forces to try to take French colonies to expand the Kingdom’s trade, this would eliminate any chance of Great Britain being able to align with Royal France; indeed it would probably eliminate the idea of a viable Royal France altogether. With no ideological ally to threaten Jacobin France, this would reduce the Jacobin Wars to an endless, bitter quiet war[148] fought at sea with no prospects for peace in sight. Of course, in the case of India in particular there was another argument which did not apply so much to, say, French Louisiana – perhaps accounting for the anger of some in the Empire of North America towards this accommodatory policy when it was accepted in London as a global stance. This factor was simply that the French East India Company had always been neglected by Paris, even at the height of the Wars of Supremacy, and France had never sent as many of her own soldiers to fight for the Company and her allies as Britain had. The fact that the FEIC had nonetheless emerged from the wars as an equal to the BEIC suggested that any attempt by the BEIC to sweep down and quickly conquer FEIC possessions would not be so trivial a task as proponents of a confrontational approach suggested.
Nonetheless, the Travancorean War had presented an opportunity for this strategy to succeed, as the FEIC had been stricken by the betrayal of their chief ally the Kingdom of Mysore. Tippoo Sultan had formally sided with Robespierre’s Republic and used this as an excuse to break away and expand his own empire. There would never be a better time to hit the FEIC and try and absorb its lands, but Governor-General Pitt had rejected the opportunity. His reasons were diverse, and primary among them was the belief that the primary objective of any trading company was to ensure stability. In his view a Company should try to quash wars between natives rather than trying to profiteer off them. He believed any gain from such conflicts was more than outweighed by the losses in trade incurred due to the ensuing chaos. Pitt craved a predictable system, like one of Mr Watt’s steam engines, a great trade machine clicking away and delivering a reliable, steady, slowly increasing stream of gold to Britain’s coffers.
More important than such ideological concerns, however, was the fact that to hit the FEIC would be to implicitly support Tippoo Sultan, and both Pitt and many of the BEIC’s Board of Directors were extremely wary of committing such an act. Tippoo Sultan had painted himself as a native champion, conveniently ignoring the fact that his own dynasty was Persian, and his father Haidar Ali had been a Muslim usurping a traditionally Hindu state. The BEIC had no desire to support the rise of a second Siraj ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal who had betrayed the Company and killed its soldiers in the Black Hole of Calcutta. The ensuing revenge, the sack of Bengal and its direct annexation had cost the Company victory in the Third War of Supremacy and left the French in undisputed control of the Carnatic. The BEIC’s beliefs towards the relative merits of the FEIC and a rogue, unrestrained Mysore being in control of the south of India were famously summarised by BEIC director James Pulteney Howlett as “better the frog you know than the tiger you don’t”.
Therefore it had been with BEIC and Haidarabad support that the FEIC had held against Tippoo Sultan, driven him back to Mysore-city and Seringapatam, and destroyed him. The aftermath of the war was dictated by the Pitt-Rochambeau Accord. The FEIC had to pay the BEIC for the use of its soldiers, and Haidarabad regained the lands that Mysore had taken from her in the last two Mysore-Haidarabad Wars in the 1780s and 90s. However, the rump Mysore, now once more under its Hindu Wodeyar dynasty, returned to French influence. Indeed, FEIC control increased, with the Wodeyar heir being a boy king and doing nothing without the consent of the French resident at his court in Mysore-city.
One unintended aftereffect of this settlement was that, in public opinion across India, the French became perceived as being pro-Hindu and the British as pro-Muslim. In reality both Companies had tried hard not to seem religiously partisan, even attempting to stop Christian missionaries from their home countries from entering their lands lest their trade missions become seen as crusades. However, the French had saved Travancore (a state that, while it tolerated Muslims and Christians, was largely Hindu and ruled by Hindus) from the ravages of the Muslim conqueror Tippoo Sultan, and then had returned Mysore to its rightful Hindu king. The British, on the other hand, were strongly aligned with the Muslim Nizam of Haidarabad, and their seat of power was in Calcutta in majority Muslim Bengal. This perceived partisanship began to hamper both Companies’ attempts to expand trade deeper into the interior after the end of the Travancorean War, and set the scene for the Maratha War.
At the same time, the Portuguese East India Company had been revived by Peter IV as part of his policy of expanding colonial trade to pay for the reconstruction of Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake. The PEIC was quietly making its own overtures to the Indian interior. Based in Goa, the Company had made its first decisive move with its intervention into the Maratha civil war of 1794 to 1796, backing the exiled Peshwa Madhavarao Narayan against the rebel claimant Raosaheb, who was supported by the Nizam of Haidarabad and, implicitly, the BEIC. With both those backers distracted by the Travancorean War, the much smaller Portuguese presence under General Parreiras succeeded in driving Raosaheb to the old Maratha fortress of Gawhilghoor and there defeated him. Now deprived of his able chief minister Fadnavis, whose assassination had triggered the civil war, Madhavarao was reduced to a Portuguese puppet. While the Peshwa of the Marathas now realistically ruled only the land of Konkan from his capital of Poona, he nonetheless commanded some diminished influence among the scattered remnants of the old Maratha Confederacy, their unity long since shattered by the Afghan armies of Ahmed Shah Durrani at the Battle of Panipat. The Portuguese had snapped up a rare prize. Ironically, their genuine tendency to act as agents of Catholic Christianity in India now worked for them, as at least they e
scaped being painted with as much of a local sectarian label as the British and French had.
The Maratha War had many causes, most of them (as Pitt later observed) native and beyond the control of any of the European powers. For a long time the fractious Maratha princes, primarily of the two great rival houses of Scindia and of Holkar, were forced to remain loosely aligned simply thanks to the threat of the Neo-Mogul Empire growing in power to their north. However, in 1809 the Padishah Nadir Shah Durrani died and chaos returned to the realm. Though Nadir had left an heir, Mohammed, a succession war nonetheless broke out. Relations between the two Durrani successor states had been cooling since the death of Timur Shah Durrani of the western, Afghan empire in 1803, and his headstrong son Ayub openly claimed that Mohammed had become Indianised and soft, forgetting his mountain origins and being an unworthy heir to Ahmad Shah Durrani.
In reality it is more probable that Ayub was concerned about the stability of his own realm. The West Durranis had taken advantage of the Turco-Persian War to try to retake their old possessions of Nishapur and Mashhad. Both had been held by the Durranis for a while, but only Nishapur had been retained at the peace. The Persians had conceded a punishing peace with the Ottomans in order to concentrate on securing their eastern frontier, and even the tolerant Zand government was whipped up into a Shiite fury at the holy city of Mashhad being in the hands of the Afghans, who were both Sunni and barbarian. Ayub’s forces had been driven out, and the consolation prize of Nishapur was mitigated by the fact that Ayub’s vassal the Khan of Kalat had done rather better in the war. Kalatis now openly questioned whether the West Durranis were such a force to be feared after all. Furthermore, the land of Kafiristan, historically and proudly the only non-Muslim land in Afghanistan until it was conquered by Timur, now rose in rebellion and other political forces were shifting closer to Ayub. A war to reunite the Durrani dominions was just what Ayub needed to unite the West Durranis behind him, and so the Afghans came down from their mountains to attack Delhi.
That war would not be as easy as Ayub had naively thought. Mohammed had indeed become Indianised, but the Neo-Mogul Empire had more in common with the old glory days before Aurangzeb than the later wreck that Ahmad Shah Durrani had, at last, conquered. Furthermore, Mohammed still commanded loyalty from his Afghan-descended cavalry, the so-called Pindarees, and overtures from Ayub for them to defect from their ‘effete’ ruler failed. Forces from both Durrani powers clashed in the field, most famously at Ajmir in Rajputana in 1811 (with the Hindus of that state trying to rebel in the middle of the affair). The only ones to gain were the enemies of the Durrani dynasty. The Sikh Confederacy, which had won itself limited autonomy after numerous ruinous wars against the Durranis, now declared itself a full Empire and elected noted general and Khalsa elder Kanwaljit Singh as its Maharajah. Kashmir also broke away from the West Durranis, already being their most westerly and isolated possession, declaring independence with the backing of the expansionist Gorkhas.
The long, ruinous war lasted until 1818, when Ayub and both his sons were poisoned by a Hindu patriot of Rajputana and the already crumbling West Durrani side was shattered. The Afghans returned to their mountains and the unity that Ahmad Shah Abdali had built came crashing down. The Persians took advantage of Afghan division to retake Nishapur in 1820, bringing their frontiers up close to Herat. They also persuaded the Khan of Kalat to switch his allegiance to the Zands and return the port of Jask he had taken in the Turco-Persian War. The Neo-Mogul Empire survived the war, putting down the Hindu rebellions in Rajputana though being forced to concede full independence to the Sikhs, and the rule of Mohammed Shah II was secure. For another generation at least.
The Durrani War, though, was only a sideshow from the point of view of the European powers in India. Its main impact was to distract the Neo-Moguls and therefore temporarily remove them as the main threat in the north of India. The Marathas, deprived of a common foe, therefore lost what unity they still had. Some of the Maratha rulers took direct advantage of the Neo-Moguls’ problems; for example, Syaji Rao Gaekwad, ruler of Gujarat from his capital of Baroda, supported the Hindu rebels to the north in Rajputana – ultimately unsuccessfully, but considerably expanding his own influence and making some small gains in territory. However, most of the Marathas used the opportunity to return to their own squabbles, in particular that between the Scindias and the Holkars. Conflict broke out in 1812 over a fairly meaningless issue, the ownership of disputed lands in Berar – meaningless because that theoretically Maratha land had been under Anglo-Haidarabad administration for years anyway thanks to the weakness of the Confederacy.
Even then the war might have remained a local issue, were it not for a shift in the governance of the FEIC. When Rochambeau had died in 1801, he had been succeeded by his deputy Julien Champard – unofficially, as the state of affairs in Royal France meant that no orders were coming down from on high and the FEIC would probably have ignored them anyway, fighting for its survival. Champard had governed French India competently enough for almost a decade, sticking to the Pitt-Rochambeau Accord, attempting to manage the difficult balancing act of interests, and trying (without much success) to disassociate France from the champion-of-oppressed-Hindus image she had dangerously acquired. In 1810, however, King Louis XVII’s chief of colonial affairs, the former Lisieux deputy Georges Galois, suggested that the kingdom should appoint a new governor-general to emphasise its return to the world stage. Accordingly, Champard was recalled and kicked upstairs to join Galois on a new oversight commission, while Louis XVII appointed Thierry de Missirien in his place.
Missirien was a minor Breton noble, a strong supporter of the King through all the difficult years, and had spent several years with the FEIC trading in the Carnatic before returning home to take up domestic affairs upon the death of his uncle while the heir was a minor. Nonetheless he was viewed as something of an outsider by the FEIC directors in Madras (which had displaced Pondicherry as the effective capital of French India, being larger and a more important port). Like Leo Bone, Missirien viewed the late Republic with an air of contemptuous dismissal: “the murderous, drunken rampages of insane neo-barbarians have contributed to harm the cause of civilisation even here, so far from home, even when the civilisation is oriental and alien. Now it is the task for men of sense and culture to patiently rebuild all they burned in their addled ravages, like those who must repair the damage after a moronic child is given a volley gun and set amongst the lord of the manor’s prized peacocks”. Missirien’s colourful language immediately made him the most quotable European official in India, if not the most serene.
Champard’s air of caution was replaced with a more dynamic approach. Missirien did not actively reject the Pitt-Rochambeau Accord but believed the time for actual direct cooperation was past. “We stood with other civilised men against a greater threat to all that it is to be humane; now, however, that threat is vanquished and we must turn to the earthier concerns of our pockets. Both France and Great Britain have been ruined by the war, and both need as much as they can grab from their East India trade to finance their rebirth. It is our duty as subjects of His Most Christian Majesty to ensure that we grab the biggest slice of the rare, exotically spiced cake that is this land”.
When the Maratha conflict broke out, Missirien decided to openly support the Scindias in Gwalior over the Holkars in Indore. The Scindia realms bordered British Bengal, and Anglo-Maratha relations had rarely been more than correct at best. Missirien advocated this policy because it would both give the British something to think about close to home, and because it would expand French influence in a part of India far away from their current possessions. Furthermore, the Scindia army had been organised and trained by Benoît Leborgne, a French Savoyard adventurer, and Missirien established relations with Leborgne, appealing to his latent patriotism. On the face of it Leborgne might have been expected to have Revolutionary sympathies, being a humble shopkeeper’s son who had built himself a fortune and court position under
Maharajah Tukajirao II Scindia. However, Leborgne had similar views to Missirien about what Lisieux’s man Leclerc had encouraged Tippoo Sultan to do, causing chaos and destruction across a land he loved, and thus agreed to side with the FEIC.
John Pitt remained Governor-General of the BEIC, but his own neutralist policies were challenged by this new French move, and now more headstrong BEIC directors encouraged him to react by backing the Holkars. After Maharajah Vitthojirao Holkar heavily lost the Battle of Sagar to the French-backed Scindias in June 1813, he agreed to accept British backing, also formally conceding Berar to the BEIC and Haidarabad. This technically removed the whole casus belli for the war, but it had only ever been an excuse for the Scindias and Holkars to struggle for dominance of the Marathas, now that the Peshwa was a simple Portuguese puppet. With British assistance, the Holkars held the Scindias through the winter of 1813 and then won the Battle of Mandla in February 1814, forcing the Scindias to retreat. However, the Holkars had been supported not only by the BEIC and by the Bhonsle Marathas of Nagpore (descended from the former Maratha royal dynasty), but also by Haidarabad forces fighting openly with their famous heavy artillery. This led the French to condemn Haidarabad and, acting on an over-eager French resident, the restored Kingdom of Mysore declared war on Haidarabad in May, eager to regain the territories it had lost thanks to Tippoo Sultan’s defeat. At the same time, the Portuguese held the Peshwa to neutrality; the new Portuguese Governor-General, Agostinho Vale da Silva, waited to see whether an opportunity would arise to enter the war on either side.
