Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [113]
of the mid-eighteenth century had been the fruit of foreign intervention, and that, now the French had been all but ejected from the subcontinent, all the British had to do was to sit back and let the profits of trade flow into their coffers. From the beginning, however, Wellesley rejected this maxim. Indian rulers, he argued, were a militaristic caste, bent on war, from which it followed, first, that foreign intervention did not in itself encourage conflict, and, second, that the stability envisaged by the India Act was a chimera that was unlikely ever to be realized. What was needed instead was British control, for only British control could genuinely deliver the riches of empire. To implement this policy he had a wonderful excuse in the residual French presence, while the relatively easy conquests of the Fourth Mysorean War of 1799 stimulated his ambition for glory, which was, in its way, nearly as great as that exhibited by Napoleon (notoriously vain and self-indulgent, Wellesley was furious when a distinctly unenthusiastic government rewarded him not with an English peerage but with an Irish one). Unlike Napoleon, war was not central to his policy: his favoured device, the so-called ‘subsidiary treaty’ whereby Indian rulers accepted British overlordship in return for a guarantee of British protection, was just as acceptable when achieved by diplomacy as it was when it was achieved by battle. But he would brook no opposition, and adopted a ‘take it or leave it’ approach that was very reminiscent of the First Consul. And he was all too clearly a genuine imperialist and, in consequence, a great embarrassment in Europe. With Wellesley at the helm in India, how could Addington deny that Britain was in an expansionist mode? Nor was Wellesley the only colonial administrator with a penchant for aggression. In Ceylon the Dutch had confined themselves to a chain of ports around the coasts of the island, and left the interior to its own devices under the rule of the Kingdom of Kandy. When the British took over, however, the Governor, Frederick North, took exception to the independent stance affected by the Kandians and in February 1803 embarked on the conquest of the interior.
If expansion in India is difficult to attribute to the Addington government, it does have to bear full responsibility for another aspect of the British war effort that was just as damaging. No sooner had war begun than a French invasion threatened. Such warships as the French had in their own ports were made ready for sea; the squadron that had been sent to assist in the reduction of Toussaint L’Ouverture was summoned home; the programme of naval construction was accelerated; 160,000 men were concentrated on the Channel coast; a start was made on amassing a flotilla of invasion craft; a programme of improvements was begun at Calais and Boulogne; and finally Napoleon himself set out on an ostentatious tour of inspection of the Channel coast. In consequence, home defence was obviously a high priority. Part of the way forward here lay in the construction of coastal fortifications - hence Kent’s Royal Military Canal and the Martello towers that still dot Britain’s southern coasts - but Britain also required large numbers of fresh troops. It is difficult to imagine any British politician ever committing himself to the obvious course of conscription to the regular army. Traditional hostility to standing armies, concern for civil liberty and the sheer unpopularity of military service all rendered anything other than a few meaningless gestures unthinkable, and in consequence the government revived the Volunteer movement of the 1790s. As before, the result was that large numbers of men rushed to enlist in extravagantly uniformed units of cavalry and infantry that for the most part would have been of little use had the French actually crossed the Channel and were in any case available for home defence only. Of rather more use was the decision to expand the county militia by an additional 76,000 men (a move that was politically acceptable despite the fact that it