Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

A few weeks after Colonel Wellesley landed in Calcutta, his brilliant brother, the Earl of Mornington took his seat on the Viceregal throne. No happier combination could well have been possible. The elder brother was a scholar, a statesman, and a broad-minded man of affairs. The younger was, even then, the same man who won Vittoria, Talavera, and Waterloo.

The two acted in perfect unison. There was none of that bungling timidity and incompetency in high places which confused the counsels and crippled the activity of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, and the result was, as might have been expected, a succession of triumphs won, be it noted, not only by consummate generalship, but also by incessant vigilance and hard work resulting in perfect organisation.

These triumphs culminated, as every one knows, in the crushing of the Mahratta power—the last serious obstacle to the universality of British rule in India—on the memorial field of Assaye.

It was a magnificent combination of courage, calculation, and generalship. With a force of five thousand men and eighteen guns and with only two thousand European troops in his army, Wellesley defeated and utterly cut up an army of over forty thousand men and an artillery force of a hundred guns, and these, too, were the finest native fighting troops in the Peninsula. In less than three hours after the first assault the five thousand had conquered the forty thousand and captured a hundred and two guns and all the stores and ammunition, and it should always be remembered that Assaye was a very different business to Plassey. It was a battle, not a rout, a tragedy rather than a farce. Of the two thousand Europeans over four hundred were killed and wounded, and of the three thousand natives, who fought magnificently as they have ever since done in company with British troops, there were no less than sixteen hundred killed and wounded.

As for Wellesley himself, he was wherever he was wanted, and that was usually in the thick of the fight. But there is another fact which gives us a glimpse of the great general who was the master spirit of the Peninsular Campaign. His men fought the battle of Assaye at the end of a twenty-four mile march, and no military force that is not commanded by a military genius could do that.

There were other actions after Assaye, but it was there that the final blow was really struck. Holkar, it is true, had seemed to turn the tide for the time, but in the December of 1804 General Lake finally crumpled him up. In March, 1805, the Colonel of the 33rd, now Sir Arthur Wellesley, sailed from Madras in the frigate Tridant. We may pause to note that in the following July he wrote from the Island of St. Helena to tell his brother that his health, which had been very bad, was now restored.

He said: “I was wasting away daily, and latterly when at Madras, I found my strength failed which had before held out.” If his strength really had failed, it is quite probable that St. Helena would never have known its most distinguished resident.

A short time after, Wellington returned to England—he was known just then as the “Sepoy General”—William Pitt remarked that he was at a loss which most to admire—his modesty or his talents, and he added that “he had never met with any military officer with whom it was so satisfactory to converse.” This was a saying both accurate and just, and it must be admitted that there is a very considerable difference between the dispatches which Nelson wrote and those which Wellington sent home after his greatest victories.

It was during this brief stay at home that the one little romance of Wellington’s life had a happy “finis” written to it. In the days before he had given any public sign of the great genius that was in him, he had wooed Lady Catherine Pakenham, a daughter of Lord Longford. Not possibly without apparent reason, Lord and Lady Longford came to the conclusion that he was an altogether ineligible person, and refused their consent, and Arthur Wesley sailed away to the East, disconsolate but not despairing.

It is pleasant to be able to look over his shoulder just before he returned, and read a letter in which Lady Catherine tells him that such beauty as she had has been ravaged by small-pox. It is pleasanter still to know that this information by no means cooled his ardour to get home, and that when he did come back a Major-General, the victor in many fights, and Sir Arthur Wellesley, my Lord and my Lady had reversed their decision, and the course of true love was allowed to run with perfectly satisfactory smoothness.