The General himself was well satisfied with what he had done, with his proven capacity to keep his army well supplied – with him always one of the most essential prerequisites of military success – and to move it with speed – which was ‘everything in military operations’. On one memorable occasion he had moved five regiments sixty miles in thirty hours. Army officers and ‘mercantile gentlemen’ alike congratulated him upon his achievements. Presentations were made to him, dinners given in his honour, speeches were delivered, letters of congratulation received and acknowledged. In Bombay an ‘elegant transparency’ of his coat of arms was displayed in the theatre.
He was not above enjoying the acclaim, referring to himself with satisfied amusement in a letter to Mrs Gordon in Bombay, as now being ‘a great man. To this lady he issued an invitation:
We get on well, but we want you to enliven us. Allow me to prevail upon you. If you’ll come I’ll go and meet you with my Servts. at the top of the Ghaut [mountain pass] so that you will only have 24 miles to travel in palanqueen.
There is excellent galloping ground in the neighbourhood of the camp, & the floor of my Tent is in a fine state for dancing, & the fiddlers of the Dragoons & 78th & Bagpipes of the 74th play delightfully.10
He could also promise good food in his mess, although no epicure himself: accounts showed generous expenditure on York ham and Gloucester cheeses, oysters, pale ale and much Madeira as well as sword belts and saddlery. They also showed expenditure on presents for ladies, on a ‘Brilliant hoop Ring and 2 pearl guards to ditto, 150 R[upee]s’, and on a pearl necklace, bracelets and a silk-worked shawl.11
He was still buying books and several of these revealed a desire to be as well versed in European affairs as he was now in Indian, for in lists of volumes bought – among the 34 volumes of the British Theatre, the 19 of Bell’s edition of Shakespeare and various French novels – were works such as The State of Europe before and after the French Revolution, and Summary Account and Military Character of the Several European Armies that have been engaged during the late War, a work which, incidentally, included the dispiriting observation that ‘an English general, who returns from India, is like an Admiral who has been navigating the Lake of Geneva’.12
Such remarks made him all the more anxious to leave India as soon as he could be spared. He would not hesitate to stay, ‘even for years’, if British India were in danger. But it was not in danger now; and he had, after all, served in the sub-continent ‘as long as any man ought who [could] serve any where else’. ‘I am not very ambitious,’ he wrote disingenuously, ‘and I acknowledge that I have never been very sanguine in my expectation that military services in India would be considered in the scale in which are considered similar services in other parts of the world. But I might have been expected to be placed on the Staff in India.’13
As it was, he had no hand in the direction of such operations as were being conducted, and conducted most incompetently. Colonel William Monson was defeated by Jaswant Rāo Holkar, Maharajah of Indore, who pursued the greatly outnumbered British forces from the banks of the Chumbul to Agra which only a few hundred of them survived to reach; while Lord Lake, Sir Alured Clarke’s successor as Commander-in-Chief, lost nearly 400 men killed and two thousand wounded in an unsuccessful siege of the fortress of Bhurtpore, the stronghold of an ally of Holkar, the Rajah of Bhurtpore.
General Wellesley’s desire to go home was increased by failing health. He had recently undergone another bout of fever; and, having been much annoyed by the lumbago’ in the early months of 1804, was now, at the end of the year, suffering from rheumatism.
At the beginning of 1805 he wrote to Madras to enquire about shipping. He would prefer ‘the starboard side of a quiet ship’, he said, but he was ‘not very particular about accommodation’ and did not ‘care a great deal about the price’ or who the captain was, so long as he could sail soon. ‘I am anxious to a degree which I can’t express,’ he said, ‘to see my friends again.’14
While awaiting notification of a berth, he said his goodbyes, gave portraits of himself to friends,* made arrangements for the welfare of two elephants which had been given to him by a grateful rajah, settled a sum of money on the son of Dhoondiah Waugh whom he had undertaken to look after on his father’s death; and, in the shops of Madras, bought presents to take to England, including ten pairs of ladies’ shoes. He also bought more books to while away the hours of the long voyage, not the instructive volumes with which he sailed out but much lighter reading: The Letters of Madame de Pompadour, for example, and Beauties of the Modern Dramatists as well as a number of novels with such titles as Illicit Love, Lessons for Lovers, Fashionable Involvements, Filial Indiscretion or the Female Chevalier and, in five volumes, Love at First Sight.15
He sailed in March 1805, not too sorry to see the last of India and convinced that, if he had not left when he did, he would have had a ‘serious fit of illness’.16 All the same he was grateful to have had the opportunity of displaying his talents as an officer there and, so he said years later, of learning ‘as much of military matters’ as he had ‘ever done since’. Moreover, it was certainly true that his command at Seringapatam had afforded him ‘opportunities for distinction, and then opened the road to fame’.17
Nor did he go home unrewarded. He had left England impecunious; he was returning with a fortune of between £42,000 and £43,000.18 He was also going home as a Knight Companion of the Order of the Bath, the insignia of which his friend, Sir John Cradock, who had brought it out from England, got a servant to pin to his coat while he was asleep in bed. He was also presented with the thanks of Parliament, a sword of honour given by the people of Calcutta, a service of plate embossed with Assaye from the officers of his division, and an address from the ‘native people of Seringapatam’ who, having lived for ‘five auspicious years’ under his protection, trusted that the ‘God of all castes and all nations’ would ‘deign to hear with favour’ their prayers for his health, glory and happiness.19
What, child! do you think that I have nothing better to do than to make speeches to please ladies?’
MAJOR-GENERAL Sir Arthur Wellesley sailed home in the Trident, walking briskly about the deck in the morning, reading the novels he had bought in Madras in the afternoon, writing papers on farming and famines in India and on the possible uses of Indian troops in the West Indies and of West Indian slaves in India. He went ashore at St Helena where he was much taken with the beauty of the island, its ‘delightful climate’ and much amazed by the Governor, a most eccentric gentleman ‘of a description that must have been extinct for nearly two centuries’. Sir Arthur had never seen ‘anything like his wig or his coat’.1
The Trident reached England in September 1805; and the General listened eagerly to detailed accounts of what had happened in the world in his absence. He heard and read about the Treaty of St Petersburg by which Britain and Russia, later joined by Austria, had agreed to form a European coalition for the liberation of the northern German states; he learned that Napoleon, who had assumed the title of Emperor the year before, had been crowned King of Italy in Milan Cathedral, that the soldiers of the Grande Armée had abandoned their camps around Boulogne and, turning their backs on the English Channel, had marched towards the Danube, and that Lord Nelson had chased a French fleet under Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve across the Atlantic to the West Indies and back again, forcing Villeneuve to seek shelter in Cadiz.
One of his obligations on landing was to settle his debts now that he was in a position to do so, being in possession of what he called ‘a little fortune’. Already in India he had been generous in his unaccustomed wealth, lending over 9,000 rupees to the son