White Mughals (27 page)

It was exactly the sort of imaginative coup against British interests in the East which Raymond had long been waiting for, and which came just three months too late for him. Nevertheless, it immediately changed the complexion of events in Hyderabad, galvanising the sinking spirit of the French in their cantonments, and creating great anxiety for James and the British. In Pune, too, the French mercenaries in Maratha service prepared themselves to aid their motherland; their new republican commander even sent a detailed invasion plan to Bonaparte. As one of the Pune Frenchmen, the former pastrycook Louis Bourquoin, wrote many years later:

Though they would have disputed the Anglophobe invective, the British in Hyderabad were under no illusions as to how easily Bonaparte’s ends could be achieved. Not only was there no effective British naval unit guarding the Malabar ports, the journey down the Red Sea was an easy one. Indeed, as James wrote to his brother William, it was the very route by which William Linnaeus Gardner had come to Hyderabad only a few months earlier: ‘The more I think of this damned Egyptian Expedition of the French the more uneasy it makes me,’ wrote James.

Three days later, on 9 October, the new British troops finally marched into Hyderabad. With them came Captain John Malcolm, who was to be James’s new Assistant, and who joined him that night for dinner at the Residency. Malcolm was one of seventeen children of a Scottish farmer. He had attracted Wellesley’s attention with a political essay he had sent to Calcutta, and which Wellesley had judged ‘very promising’. He got on well with James, but the two had very different political views. Malcolm was an enthusiastic and unrepentant supporter of Wellesley’s new ‘Forward Policy’, that believed in expanding British dominion and influence in India wherever and whenever possible. It was an approach James came to be increasingly uneasy with, and as his political views changed so did his relations with Malcolm.
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News soon arrived of a further mishap which seriously endangered James’s fast-fading hopes of intimidating the French into peacefully laying down their weapons. The British had marched into Hyderabad in two parties, and the first regiment forded the Musi in heavy rain on the evening of the fourteenth. But the following morning when the second regiment came to the river they found that it had risen dramatically overnight. There was no way they could join the first regiment. One was on the Residency bank, the other on that of the city and the French cantonments. At the same time, James learned from his spies that Piron had finally learned the full terms of the treaty, including the clause abolishing his corps.
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If ever he was going to make a pre-emptive move on the British, now would be his moment.

At this vital juncture, when they were at their most vulnerable, the British forces in Hyderabad found themselves split in two.

For the next uneasy week the waters of the Musi remained too high for the artillery to be safely transported across it. Yet still the French—apparently paralysed by indecision—made no attempt to attack the divided British force.

With no sign yet emerging from the palace that the Nizam was ever going to issue the order instructing the French to disarm, James decided to take the initiative and wrote to Aristu Jah, formally asking him to fulfil the terms of the treaty. For several days no reply was received, and no action was taken beyond the Nizam opting to leave Hyderabad and take shelter within the more defensible walls of his fortress of Golconda. On the sixteenth James wrote to his brother: ‘I wait impatiently for an answer to my last letter to the Minister, which I think you will allow is as strong as it could be. If it fails of the success I look for from it, I shall make a point of seeing him immediately, and of not leaving him until I have gained my point.’ By the nineteenth there was still no reply, and James had become convinced that the inaction was deliberate, that the news of Bonaparte’s triumphs in Egypt was leading the Nizam seriously to reconsider his decision to sign the treaty with the Company.

Knowing that any hesitation could now be fatal, James finally went in person to Golconda on the evening of the nineteenth and gave an ultimatum to an anxious-looking Aristu Jah: if the Nizam hesitated any longer he would have no option but to order an attack on the French cantonments. He also set his spies to work, telling William in cipher: ‘I am employing every engine both to prevent the possibility of stubborn resistance and to render it ineffectual even in case of its being attempted. ’
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To this end he arranged for a small mutiny to take place in the French lines on the morning of the twenty-first, calculating that the chaos it caused would disrupt any attempt at resistance. He had other plans for subterfuge too, writing to William that ‘I shall take good care the night preceding this business that the [French] party be unable either to move one way or the other with its guns as I have provided for the bullock traces [harnesses] being all cut to pieces.’
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The threat of violence had the effect James calculated it would have. On the following night, 20 October, at about ten o’clock, the Nizam finally issued a formal order to the troops of the French corps that he had dismissed their European officers, and that the troops had thus been released from their obedience to their superiors. If they continued to obey them, wrote the Nizam, they would be shot as traitors.

What James had not calculated on was the speed with which Piron decided to make terms. That same evening he sent two French officers to the Residency to tell Kirkpatrick that he was ready to surrender, ‘well knowing that, though the general policy might dictate their removal from the Deccan, they [hoped they] would be individually considered to every justice and indulgence that could with propriety be extended to them’.
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With this single proviso, they meekly asked for a British officer to go to the French lines the following morning to take charge of their property. It was at this point that things began to go badly wrong.

James was unable to get word to his spies in the French camp about the offer to surrender, so that when Malcolm turned up as arranged on the following morning, the twenty-first, expecting to oversee the collection of French arms, he found instead that the mutiny which James had arranged had indeed taken place—but in a form very different to that which James had planned. The sepoys had arrested and imprisoned their superiors just as they were about to leave the camp to surrender, and were now making attempts to defend the cantonments. Worse still, Malcolm was seized by the rebellious sepoys and taken into custody along with Piron and all the other French officers.

For the rest of that day, James waited to see whether the sepoys would release their captives and surrender. By nightfall there was no sign that they were planning to do so. He came to a decision: the only remaining hope of a peaceful surrender would be for him to seize the initiative and frighten the sepoys into laying down their arms. This decision was confirmed when John Malcolm, accompanied by Piron and several other French officers, turned up at the Residency at midnight, having been sprung from their confinement by a small group of the sepoys, deserters from British regiments who had once, by pure good fortune, served under Malcolm and had remained fond of their former officer.

Before first light on the twenty-second, the half of the British force on the French side of the Musi surrounded the French cantonments, arranging their guns on the ridge above the French lines, not far from Raymond’s tomb. The other half of the British force, that on the Residency side, brought up their guns to what Malcolm described as ‘a strong post, about four hundred yards in the rear of Monsieur Piron’s camp, between which and him there was the River Moussy, which could only be forded by infantry; the guns could however play from the bank of the river with excellent effect, on the principal [French] magazine, and right of the camp’.
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When dawn broke, the French corps woke up to find themselves completely surrounded. At nine o’clock James offered the mutineers payment of all money owing to them, and employment in Finglas’s corps if they would now surrender. They had ‘one quarter of an hour to stack their arms and march off to a cowle or protection flag, which was pitched by one of the Nizam’s principal officers, about half a mile to the right of the camp. If they did not comply with the terms of the summons, they were immediately to be attacked.’
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For thirty minutes the sepoys remained undecided. Two thousand cavalry massed under Malcolm on the right flank; five hundred more waited on the right. In the centre were four thousand infantry. There was complete silence. Then, just after 9.30, to James’s great relief, the sepoys finally sent out word that they accepted the terms.

The British cavalry rode in quickly and took possession of the magazine, storehouses, powder mills, gun foundries and cannon, while the French sepoys fled to the flag under which they were to surrender themselves: ‘at once a glorious and piteous sight’, thought James.
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Within a few hours, the largest French force in India, more than sixteen thousand men strong, was disarmed by a force of less than a third that number. Not a single shot had been fired, or a single life lost.

James watched the soldiers laying down their arms all afternoon by telescope from the roof of the Residency. That evening, in a state of mixed exhaustion and elation, he wrote to William that ‘I am too much fagged to write you a long letter … ’, but he wanted William to know that the ‘turning adrift of thousands of Raymond’s troops, all of which I saw this evening from the roof of my house with my spy glasses as plain as if I had been on the spot, was the
finest sight
I ever saw in my life’.

In a postscript written two hours later, there came even better news: had William heard yet the report that had just arrived from Bombay, ‘of Admiral Nelson’s glorious naval action’? In the Battle of the Nile, Nelson had sunk almost the entire French fleet in Aboukir Bay, wrecking Napoleon’s hopes of using Egypt as a secure base from which to attack India. It was a quite amazing turn of events. For two weeks it had suddenly looked quite possible that India was going to become a French colony. Now, equally suddenly, that threat was extinguished. As James wrote to Calcutta, it was extraordinary to think that ‘only three days ago things wore a very dismal appearance’.
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In the weeks that followed, Wellesley wrote to congratulate James, formally appointing him Resident in his brother’s place, and recommending him to London for a ‘mark of Royal Favour’, in other words a baronetcy. Wellesley was delighted—as well he should have been, as the Company granted him £500 a year for twenty years as a reward for what James had done: ‘I am happy to express my entire approbation of the judgement, firmness and discretion you have manifested,’ he wrote to James. In the meantime Wellesley made James an honorary ADC, then an almost unique honour.

The news of this arrived on Christmas Day 1798, and James wrote back to William, ‘pray make my most grateful acknowledgement to my Noble Patron and Master [Wellesley] for this new mark of approbation he has been pleased to confer on me, and which I assure you I am not a little proud of’.
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It was about this time, sometime in December 1798, that something of even greater significance to James took place, an event that would in due course utterly change the course of his life, as well as completely undermine his newly forged relationship with Wellesley.