The French General had been losing favour on account of his increasing unpopularity among the native chiefs of the army; and had been so contumeliously treated by Daulat Rao Sindhia at Ujain, in the beginning of the year 1803, that he had resigned the service. But hardly was the treaty of Bassein communicated to Sindhia, when Perron consented to remain at his post, and even, it is believed, drew up a plan for hostilities against the British, although the latter had shown as yet no intention of declaring war, but, on the contrary, still maintained a minister in Sindhia's camp. These facts, together with the statistics that follow, are chiefly derived from the memoirs of an Anglo-Indian officer of Perron's, the late Colonel James Skinner, which have been edited by Mr. Baillie Fraser. "Sindhia and Raghoji together" (Raghoji was the name of the Bhonsla of Nagpur) "had about 100,000 men, of whom 50,000 were Mahratta horse, generally good, 30,000 regular infantry and artillery, commanded by Europeans; the rest half-disciplined troops. Sindhia is understood to have had more than 300 pieces of cannon. The army of Hindustan, under Perron, consisted of 16,000 to 17,000 regular infantry, and from 15,000 to 20,000 horse, with not less than twenty pieces of artillery." It may be added, on the authority of Major Thorn, that his army was commanded by about three hundred European officers, of whom all but forty were French. In this estimate must be included the forces of the Begam Sumroo.
The French plans, as far as they can now be learned, were as follows: The blind and aged Shah Alam was to be continued upon the Imperial throne, under the protection of the French Republic. "This great question being decided," proceeds the memorial from which I am extracting, "it remains to consider whether it is not possible that the branches of that unfortunate family may find protectors who shall assert their sacred rights and break their ignominious chains. It will then follow that mutual alliance and a judicious union of powers will secure the permanent sovereignty of the Emperor, to render his subjects happy in the enjoyment of personal security and of that wealth which springs from peace, agriculture, and free trade. The English Company, by its ignominious treatment of the great Moghul, has forfeited its rights as Deewan of the Empire." ("Memoir of Lieutenant Lefebre," 6th August, 1803.)
Lord Wellesley himself records this document, which was found in Pondicherry, it does not appear exactly how or when; he may have had an inkling of the policy previously, but the date is sufficient to show that he had not seen it before going to war with Sindhia. Lord Wellesley refers, about the same time, to the magnitude of the establishment sent out to take possession of the settlements which the French were to recover in India by the Peace of Amiens, an establishment obviously too large for the mere management of Pondicherry and Chandarnagar.
Perhaps the memoir in question (which was drawn up by an officer of the staff sent out on that occasion) may have expressed correctly the intentions which the First Consul held at the time; for nobody appears to have been very sincere or much in earnest on either side at the Peace of Amiens. And it is not impossible that the paper expresses intentions which might have been more thoroughly carried out had not the terrible explosion in St. Domingo subsequently diverted the attention of the French Government to another hemisphere. At all events it is a thinly-veiled pretext of aggression; and the accusations against the English are scandalously false, as will be clear to those who may have perused the preceding pages. Considering that it was Perron's own employer who kept the Imperial House in penury and durance, it was the extreme of impudence for one of Perron's compatriots to retort the charge upon the English, to whom Shah Alam was indebted for such brief gleams of good fortune as he had ever enjoyed, and whose only offence against him had been a fruitless attempt to withhold him from that premature return to Dehli, which had been the beginning of his worst misfortunes. It was, moreover, a gross exaggeration to call the British the Diwans of the empire now, whatever may have once been their titular position in Bengal. On the 6th of July Lord Wellesley received from the ministry in England a hint that war with France would be likely to be soon renewed; and on the 8th of the same month he addressed to his commander-in-chief a short private letter, of which the following extract shows the purport: "I wish you to understand, my dear Sir, that I consider the reduction of Sindhia's power on the north-west frontier of Hindustan to be an important object in proportion to the probability of a war with France. M. de Boigne (Sindhia's late general) is now the chief confident of Bonaparte; he is constantly at St. Cloud. I leave you to judge why and wherefore." (Desp. III. 182.)
The Governor-General here shows his own views, although his sagacity probably overleaped itself in the imputation against de Boigne, for which I have found no other authority. Ten days later he sends Lake more detailed instructions, closing his covering letter with a sentence especially worthy of the reader's attention: "I consider an active effort against Scindhia and Berar to be the best possible preparation for the renewal of the war with France." There is little doubt of this being the key-note of the policy that led the British to the conquest of Hindustan. Vide App. E.
On the 31st July, General Wellesley wrote to the Resident at the court of Sindhia (Colonel Collins) stating that the reasons assigned by the confederates for not withdrawing their troops were illusory, and ordering Collins to leave their camp at once. On the 15th August Lord Wellesley received a packet, which the collector of Moradabad had transmitted nearly a month before, containing translation of a letter from the Nawab of Najibabad, Bhanbu Khan, brother of the late Gholam Kadir, covering copy of a circular letter in which Sindhia was attempting to stir him and the other chiefs against the English as "that unprincipled race"; and begging them to co-operate with General Perron. War, however, had already been declared, and a letter addressed by the Governor-General to Shah Alam.
The force with which General Lake was to meet the 35,000 Franco-Mahrattas in Hindustan, consisted of eight regiments of cavalry, of which three were European, one corps of European infantry, and eleven battalions of Sepoys, beside a proper complement of guns, with two hundred British artillerymen, making a total of 10,500, exclusive of the brigade at Anupshahar.
The assembling of this force on the immediate frontier of the dominion occupied by Sindhia and the French, had been facilitated by the treaty of the 10th November, 1801, by which Saadat Ali Khan, whom the British had lately raised to the Viceroyship of Audh, had ceded to them the frontier provinces above named. This cession was made in commutation for the subsidy which the Nawab had been required to pay for the maintenance of the force by which he was supported against his own subjects. The Peshwa had previously ceded a portion of Bundelkand by the treaty of Bassein, and the red colour was thus surely, if slowly, creeping over the map of India. Perron resisted the cession of the new frontier under the treaty of Lucknow. The "Old Resident" makes the following note on the subject: "When the British came to Sasnee, which was ceded by the Nawab Wuzier of Lucknow by a treaty in 1802 to Government, the Pergunnahs of Sasnee, Akberabad, Jellalee, and Secundra came under British rule, but not without much bloodshed in the sieges of Sasnee, Bijey Gurh and Kuchoura fortresses; in all these places we buried the remains of British officers who first shed their blood for their King and country. At Sasnee the masonry graves in a decayed condition are still to be seen. At Bijey Gurh they are in the low 'Duhur' lands apart from the Fort, and at the Kuchoura in Locus Kanugla, lies the tomb of Major Naivve, Commanding the 2nd Cavalry, who was shot whilst leading his men to the assault. A surviving relation of the above officer had a monument built in 1853 at Bhudwas, on the Trunk Road, with the original tablet which was torn off from the tomb by the villagers, and by chance discovered by a European overseer of the roads after a lapse of fifty years."
In Sindhia's armies there were, as we have seen, a number of officers who were not Frenchmen. These were mostly half-castes, or (to use a term subsequently invented) Eurasians, Europeo-Asiatics, or persons of mixed blood; in other words, the offspring of connections which British officers in those days often formed with native females. Nearly all these officers, whether British or half-British, were upon this occasion discharged from the service by Perron, who had probably very good reason to believe that they would not join in fighting against the army of their own sovereign. Carnegie, Stewart, Ferguson, Lucan, two Skinners, Scott, Birch, and Woodville, are the only names recorded, but there may have been others also who were dismissed from the army at Perron's disposal. The prospects of those who were absent on duty in the Deccan, and elsewhere, soon became far more serious. Though not at present dismissed, they were mostly reserved for a still harder fate. Holkar beheaded Colonel Vickers and seven others; Captain Mackenzie and several more were confined, and subsequently massacred, by orders of Sindhia; others perished "in wild Mahratta battle," fighting for money in causes not their own, nor of the smallest importance to the world. General Wellesley complained, after the battle of Assai, of "Sindhia's English officers." He says that his wounded men heard them give orders for their massacre as they lay upon the field, and promises to send up a list of their names after full inquiry (Owen, 311). No such list has ever been heard of; and it appears, from Lewis F. Smith's memoir, that the European officers there present were all French, or Italian, or German. It is barely possible that they used English in conversing, certainly not probable; but the story was very likely prompted by the imagination of the wounded men who saw white faces among the enemy and concluded that they must be their own countrymen. The only European officers known to have been engaged on the Mahratta side are Pohlmann and Dupont (both named by Wellesley) and Saleur of the Begam's service who commanded the baggage-guard; with perhaps, J. B. da Fontaine.
Although the French officers were now without any Christian rivals, it does not appear that their position was a satisfactory one. The reader may refer to Law's remarks on this subject, during the Emperor's unsuccessful attempts to the eastward. The isolation and impossibility of trusting native colleagues, of which that gallant adventurer complained, were still, and always must be, fatal to the free exercise of civilized minds serving an Asiatic ruler. All the accounts that we have of those times combine to show that, whoever was the native master, the condition of the European servant was precarious, and his influence for good weak. On the 24th of June, 1802, Colonel Collins, the British Resident at the Court of Sindhia, had written thus to his Government in regard to Perron whom he had lately visited at Aligarh: "General Perron has been peremptorily directed by Sindhia to give up all the Mahals (estates) in his possession not appertaining to his own jaidad (fief); and I understand that the General is highly displeased with the conduct of Sindhia's ministers on this occasion, insomuch that he entertains serious intentions of relinquishing his present command."