Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [112]
mercenary named Perron, the rank of general in the French army. Meanwhile, having set out from Europe prior to the outbreak of hostilities with Britain, a small French fleet suddenly appeared off Pondicherry with a fresh garrison for this old French colonial possession. Finding the British in occupation of Pondicherry, the French withdrew to Mauritius, but there was clearly a need for action. To put an end to the growing threat, Wellesley immediately offered Holkar a subsidiary treaty, but the Maharajah was simply too powerful to be interested in surrendering his independence. Not surprisingly, then, Wellesley signed a treaty with the rightful Peshwa that in effect promised to restore him to power in exchange for the Maratha Confederacy becoming a satellite state. In acting in this fashion, Wellesley was not working as an agent of the British government. Though the Governor General was a political nominee - since the passage of the India Act of 1784, the East India Company had accepted that the decision as to who should hold the post should lie in the hands of the British government - Wellesley had not been sent out with an imperialist agenda. What is more, in going to war against Holkar and his allies, he was acting without the knowledge of London and against the wishes of the Board of Directors of the East India Company, who were only interested in commercial penetration rather than direct political control. After the fact, his successes were initially approved by the British government - ‘Nothing can have made a greater sensation than what they have done’, wrote his brother, Gerald Wellesley30 - but in large part this was simply because Wellesley was a Tory, because much of the fiercest denunciation of his policies came from the Whigs and, finally, because in 1803-4 the priority had to be preventing Napoleon from gaining a foothold in India. When the immediate crisis passed, the government abandoned its support for the Governor General, and made no attempt to sustain him against the revolt of the East India Company’s directors that finally brought him down in 1805. If successive administrations continued to be uninterested in expansion in India thereafter, this can perhaps be put down to wartime conditions: thanks to the gradual modernization of India’s armies, Wellesley’s wars had far outstripped in cost and scale those of earlier eras. Thus, in the First Mysorean War, the British had employed 10,000 men and been able to triumph over odds of some seven to one, whereas in the fourth such conflict - the final struggle against Tippu Tib - victory over a markedly weaker enemy had taken 50,000 men. Still worse, meanwhile, the lion’s share of the fighting now had to be undertaken by British regulars: at Assaye, Wellesley’s 13,500 men included just two regiments of British infantry and one of cavalry - some 2,200 men - and yet they accounted for 650 out of his 1,600 casualties. Given the situation in Europe, gaining fresh territory in India was therefore simply not a British objective. When Wellesley returned from India in 1805 he was given only the most grudging of thanks by parliament, cold-shouldered by many of his erstwhile allies and barely escaped impeachment at the hands of an old enemy who had secured a seat in the Commons.
The ‘making of British India’ for which Wellesley stood was, then, the work of one powerful and vigorous enthusiast, albeit one who had many adherents (most notably, Lord William Bentinck, who became Governor of Madras in 1803). The India Act of 1784 had stated unequivocally that wars of conquest were ‘measures repugnant to the wish, the honour and the policy of this nation’ and expressly prohibited the Governor General from waging military campaigns without the sanction of parliament except in self-defence (a very flimsy justification in the case of the Marathas: setting aside their incipient state of civil war, Holkar had initially shown a strong desire to keep the peace). The basis of this opposition to wars of aggression was reasonable enough: it was believed that the constant Indian warfare