White Mughals (14 page)

Wellesley’s perceptive host, Andrew Barnard, the Commander of the Cape garrison, spotted this flaw immediately and predicted to his wife Anne that there were ‘inconsistencies in his character, as he is clever but weak [and] proud … he will get thro’ the task of what is entrusted to him to the satisfaction of his employers, but that in doing it he will get himself more looked up to than beloved’.
¹
It was an accurate prophecy. Wellesley made no intimate friends in India, and his colleagues, including his younger brother Arthur, frequently found him impossible to deal with; but few ever doubted his genius or his abilities.

Barnard was however wrong about one thing: Wellesley did not satisfy his nominal employers, the Directors of the East India Company. Indeed he did not even attempt to do so, and his private letters to the President of the Board of Control, the government body set up in 1784 to oversee the Company, make little secret of his ‘utter contempt’ for the opinions of ‘the most loathsome den of the India House’.
²
Though he won the Directors an empire, Wellesley came within a whisker of bankrupting the Company to do so, and it was clear from the beginning that he had set his sights on far more ambitious goals than maintaining the profit margins of the Company he was supposed to serve, but whose mercantile spirit he actually abhorred.

Unknown to the Company Directors, Richard Wellesley had come out East with two very clear goals in his mind. He was determined to secure India for British rule, and equally determined to oust the French from their last foothold on the subcontinent. In this he was following the bidding of Henry Dundas, the Board of Control’s President, whose Francophobe ideas were transmitted to a receptive Wellesley at a series of lengthy briefings before the new Governor General embarked for India. In particular Dundas had instructed Wellesley to ‘cleanse’ those pockets of Indian power that had been ‘contaminated’ by French influence: namely the courts of Tipu Sultan of Mysore, Nizam Ali Khan of Hyderabad, and those of that network of rival Hindu chiefs who ruled the great Maratha Confederacy—all of whom had raised sepoy armies trained by Francophone mercenaries and renegades, and all of whom could, potentially, be used against the British and in favour of the French.

As his ship was being refitted and its sails remodelled—HM’s frigate
La Virginie
had ‘become dangerously overmasted before they were cut lower’
³
—Wellesley used his enforced leisure at the Cape to recover from the dreadful passage from England and to learn what he could about India. Every day began with a ‘Bengal levée’ of jaundiced old India hands, many of whom had come to the Cape to try to recover their health: Anne Barnard called them the ‘yellow generals’. They limped in one by one and competed with each other ‘to pour the riches of their knowledge and experience’ on the new Governor General. There were others passing through the Cape, too, who could bring Wellesley up to speed with the latest developments in Bengal. According to Anne Barnard’s
Journal
, as well as the yellow generals there were also ‘Captains from India with despatches to the Government [who] stop here and finding his Excellency at the Cape deliver up their official papers which he opens, peruses, and by such means will arrive instructed on the present position of affairs there, and will appear a prodigy of ability in being Master of all so soon after his arrival’.

After these meetings and briefings were over, the evenings were occupied with a series of heavy dinners given in Wellesley’s honour by the local Dutch community. Their culinary abilities left much to be desired: ‘They begin their dinners
piano, piano
with stewed cows heel,’ wrote Barnard,

On his return to the Barnards after this ordeal, Wellesley diplomatically avoided commenting on the fare beyond venturing that ‘I would not have missed the sight of my worthy friend with the white teeth for twenty pounds.’
⁴

In her diaries and letters, Anne Barnard gives a detailed record of the entertainments and diversions she organised for her distinguished guest. She names the various admirals, judges and governors who were called to dine with Lord Wellesley, the Dutch burghers who invited them to supper, even ‘His Excellency the Governor of Mosambique, a stately well-stuffed Portuguese … [attended by] a black dwarf 34 high’, who tried to bribe Wellesley with a gold-tipped cane. But a figure she never mentions is the one who undoubtedly had the most influence on Wellesley of all the people he met at the Cape: Major William Kirkpatrick.

By 1798 William Kirkpatrick, elder brother of James Achilles, looked much older than his forty-four years. Disappointments in his career, marital difficulties and years of painful illness all showed on his features. Two fine paintings of him by Thomas Hickey survive. In the first, painted in 1787, he looks an awkward if determined figure, holding in one hand the deeds of the orphanage he had just set up in Calcutta. There is a searching, slightly uncertain and quizzical expression on his features, as if he is trying to size up the viewer; he also looks a little impatient, as if he has much better things to do than sit around having his portrait painted. Only twelve years separate this from the second portrait,
⁵
painted in 1799, a year after Kirkpatrick met Wellesley at the Cape; but from the transformation that has taken place in the sitter you might guess it was thirty years. The tangle of unruly hair in the first portrait has retreated far from the forehead; there are bags under Kirkpatrick’s eyes; and he has lost a great deal of weight. He looks weary and perhaps a little disillusioned; only the upturned nose, the determined set of the lips and the slightly impatient expression echo the earlier figure.

Wellesley’s first letter to Dundas in London, written three weeks after his arrival at the Cape, is almost entirely concerned with William Kirkpatrick; indeed his conversations with Kirkpatrick take up not only the entire thirty-page despatch, but also a further forty pages of enclosures. The letter details a matter that was to be a central concern not just of Wellesley and Dundas, but of both Kirkpatrick brothers in the months ahead: the growing French influence in the courts of India.

‘Among the subjects you recommended to my early consideration upon my arrival in India,’ wrote Wellesley,

Wellesley had asked William Kirkpatrick to provide written answers to a range of questions about the French mercenary forces employed by the Nizam, notably ‘one commanded by a Frenchman by the name of Raymond’ and officered by ‘Frenchmen of the most virulent and notorious principles of Jacobinism … an armed French party of great zeal, diligence and activity’. The answers he received so impressed him that he not only forwarded them, unedited, to Dundas, he also begged Kirkpatrick to abandon the plans he had been making to return to England, and to take up a job at his side in Calcutta, as his Military Secretary.

William had serious health problems which had developed in India—he was suffering in particular from a severe and very painful combination of gout and rheumatism—but when Wellesley made him the offer he promised to consider it, subject to the success of a cure at ‘the hot mineral baths about 70 miles from here’.
⁷
His ultimate acceptance of Wellesley’s largesse changed the course not only of his career, but also that of the man he had left as Acting Resident at Hyderabad: his younger brother James.

Several years later, after William had retired to England, Wellesley looked back to that meeting at the Cape and wrote that he ‘had no hesitation in declaring that to [William Kirkpatrick] I am indebted for the seasonable information’ which enabled the Governor General to pull off the remarkable successes of his first two years in office. He went on:

Kirkpatrick, Wellesley emphasises, rose on his merits, not on the influence of his birth or his patrons. Yet even Wellesley probably did not know quite how far William had come in his life, nor from what inauspicious beginnings. For William Kirkpatrick was not in fact James Achilles’ full brother, but an illegitimate half-brother,
^ad
born in Ireland to a Mrs Booth, ‘the sister of Mr C—the well known anarchist’, with whom William’s father had had a brief affair. Throughout their entire childhood, William’s legitimate half-brothers, George and James Achilles, were totally unaware of his existence.

The father of the Kirkpatrick brothers was Colonel James Kirkpatrick of the Madras Cavalry, known universally as ‘the Handsome Colonel’. This name was apparently a reference not only to his good looks and ‘very dark brown eyes’, but also to his rackety love-life. The Bloomsbury matriarch Jane Maria Strachey, mother of Lytton, was married to William Kirkpatrick’s grandson, and spent many months researching the Handsome Colonel’s roots as part of her obsessive mapping of the Stracheys’ genealogy. A pious Victorian lady much given to displays of public devotion,
^ae
she was not entirely pleased by what she discovered. The Handsome Colonel, it turned out, was born in 1730 on a plantation in Charlestown, South Carolina, to which his family had fled from Dumfriesshire after being implicated in the failed 1715 Jacobite uprising. More alarming still to Lady Strachey was the discovery that the Colonel’s mother was ‘probably a Creole’. Sometime around the middle of the eighteenth century the family returned to Britain,
^‡
where the Handsome Colonel embarked on what Strachey described as ‘an adventurous and irregular life’ more distinguished for its amorous conquests than its military ones.
⁹

William Kirkpatrick was born when his father was a bachelor of twenty-four; he was raised at boarding school in Ireland, supported but publicly unacknowledged by the Colonel. When William was only four, the Colonel set off for India where he joined the Company’s Madras Cavalry as an ensign. In due course, when William was old enough, the Handsome Colonel purchased his illegitimate son a military cadetship in the Company; but they never met in India, for the Colonel’s career there lasted only eight years, and by the time William arrived in 1771 the Colonel had long since left.

Before returning to England, the Handsome Colonel had married in Madras Katherine Munro, the eldest daughter of Dr Andrew Munro, the founder of the new Madras hospital. Dr Munro was a controversial figure in the Madras Presidency. He had, by all accounts, great belief in the efficacy of his ‘Hysterick drafts’, but was renowned for his short temper and violent dislike of anything he thought might approach hypochondria. At one point ‘nineteen covenanted [Company] servants’ took out a formal complaint against him for his conduct; in particular they noted that when one of them wanted a powder to cure him of a severe case of scurvy in the teeth, Munro had written to his deputy, ‘Sir, pray give that impudence what he wants and let me not be plagued with his nonsense.’
¹⁰

A contemporary account of Dr Munro’s hospital shows that the doctors’ attitude to hospital management reflected his no-nonsense approach: ‘I never heard of such irregularities as at present exist in the Presidency hospital,’ wrote a visiting surgeon.