Marquess Wellesley and the Nizam.
7. "The hero of a hundred fights" won his first great victory at Assaye, in the Nizam's dominions, which the Mahrattas had invaded. With a force of 5000 men he defeated the enemy, numbering, it is said, eight to one. The English general took advantage of the junction of two rivers, near Assaye, to place his little army in the angle between them, so as to be open to attack only in front. But to get into this position it was necessary to cross one of the rivers, and his guide assured him there was no ford by which the passage could be made.
8. Going forward to see for himself, General Wellesley observed that two villages stood facing each other on opposite banks of the river. "I immediately said to myself," he tells us, "that men could not have built two villages facing one another on opposite sides of a stream without some means of passing from one to the other. And I was right. I found a passage, crossed my army over. And there I fought and won the battle, the bloodiest for the numbers that I ever saw."
"This is England's greatest son,
He that gained a hundred fights,
Nor ever lost an English gun;
This is he that far away
Against the myriads of Assaye
Clash'd with his fiery few and won."
9. Meanwhile, General Lake was equally successful at the other end of the Mahratta's dominions. After a great but costly victory, he entered Delhi in triumph, and delivered the old emperor from his long captivity. Wellesley nominally restored him to the throne and set apart £150,000 a year for his maintenance; but from this time the Emperor of India was merely a pensioner in the pay of the British and under British control, forbidden even to go beyond the walls of Delhi, where the "Great Moguls" formerly gave the law to the whole of India. The real masters of India, from this time, were the British.
10. Marquess Wellesley's work in India was now done. He had attained every object he proposed to himself. The last of the French officers in native employ had disappeared from India; there was no corner of the coast left on which a Frenchman could land. He not only made Britain from this time the supreme power, but by his system of protected states—separated from each other, and fenced round by British territory—he did much to place that power on a firm and lasting basis.
1. In the great war with Napoleon, as our fleets were led to victory by Nelson, so were our armies by Wellington. The scene of his battles and sieges were, with one exception, the peninsula of Spain and Portugal, and on this account the war in which he was engaged, between 1808 and 1814, is called the Peninsular War. When Wellington began his Peninsular campaigns, Napoleon was practically the master of Europe. Some of the nations he had crushed, others he had overawed or won over to his side, all were either his humble servants or his forced allies.
2. Napoleon had already been crowned Emperor of France, and his amazing successes on the continent caused him to dream of Europe as an empire, with Napoleon as its emperor, and Paris as its capital. But there was one nation near his own doors that stood in his way, and whom he would fain have struck to the ground, had his arm been long enough to reach across "the silver streak." England might, perhaps, after the victory at Trafalgar, have held aloof from the strife which turned all Europe into a battle-field; she might, perhaps, have lived in ease and security in her island-home, and left the less-favoured nations on the continent to be trampled under the heel of the conqueror; but she nobly chose to stand forth and take the lion's share in the war against the tyrant.