White Mughals (56 page)

The days when James could rely on a friendly and sympathetic figure on the throne of Hyderabad were clearly over.

At the same time as the Nizam’s dominions were experiencing a moment of unexpected tranquillity, the Marathas territories to the north and west of Hyderabad were given over to a war of quite extraordinary violence.

Wellesley’s intricate manoeuvres to divide and subjugate the Marathas—the last great military force in India really able to take on the British—were now reaching their head. With the death of the great Minister Nana Phadnavis, as General Palmer put it, ‘all the wisdom and moderation of the Mahratta government departed’, and Wellesley could sit back in Calcutta and watch as the great Confederacy unravelled.
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In Nana’s absence, rival warlords conspired and intrigued against each other in a welter of mutual distrust.

The young Peshwa, Baji Rao II, had proved wholly unequal to the challenge of holding together the different factions that made up his power base. In particular he had alienated the powerful Holkar clan, watching with glee as one of the senior males of the family was trampled to death on his orders by an elephant. The dead man’s brother, Jaswant Rao Holkar, duly attacked Pune, and took the city by surprise.
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Jaswant Rao fired the town and ravaged the vicinity so as to leave ‘not a stick standing at a distance of 150 miles’ from Pune.
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Fleeing the violence, the Peshwa was driven into exile in British territory at Bassein, a former Portuguese city a little to the north of Bombay, full of crumbling Jesuit churches and Dominican convents.

There Wellesley succeeded where General Palmer had failed, and forced the now powerless Peshwa to sign a humiliating Subsidiary Treaty. This document, known as the Treaty of Bassein, was ratified on 31 December 1802. With it, Wellesley believed he had at last succeeded in turning the Marathas into dependants of the British, with a huge British garrison installed, according to the terms of the treaty, to overlook the Peshwa’s palace in Pune, into which British arms would now reinstall him.

As soon as he heard the details of the treaty, James knew that this was never going to work, and he had the courage to speak out and say so. In an official despatch in March 1803 he warned that not one of the Maratha warlords—the real powers in the Peshwa’s dominions—would sit back and allow the English to control Baji Rao as their puppet and in this way attempt to subvert and undermine the Maratha Empire. Moreover he predicted that Wellesley’s actions would only succeed in uniting the Marathas where Baji Rao had failed, and that together the Maratha armies would mass in a great ‘hostile confederacy’ to fight the Company.

Wellesley was predictably furious at what he regarded as James’s impertinence, and wrote his most intemperate despatch yet to Hyderabad, saying that any sort of united Maratha resistance was now ‘categorically impossible’ and that Kirkpatrick was guilty of ‘ignorance, folly, and treachery’ in suggesting otherwise. But James held his ground, replying that his sources of intelligence indicated that ‘such a confederacy was highly probable’, that Jaswant Rao was even now on his way to reoccupy Pune, and that one of the leading Maratha chieftains, the Rajah of Berar, was planning to join him there. He also defended his action in sending notice of his intelligence to Arthur Wellesley and Colonel Close, arguing that it was his clear duty to ‘prepare men’s minds for an event which by coming unexpectedly might be apt to excite temporary alarm and inconvenience’. He concluded the letter by challenging Wellesley to sack him if he was wrong:

Having sent the despatch off, James sat down to await his removal from office, which he thought could not be far away. His job was, however, narrowly saved yet again when all his predictions about the Marathas proved entirely correct. Within eleven days of accusing James of being an incompetent fool, Wellesley had his secretary write to him again, this time (as James later told William) ‘apprising me, that the Gov Genl had selected me as
peculiarly qualified
for the task [of leading] an immediate Deputation to the Rajah of Berar’s Camp, for the express purpose of preventing if possible the very Confederacy which a few days before his Ldship pronounced to be impracticable, and which I was charged with folly and ignorance or something worse for stating the possibility of’.
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It was however too late now to undo the damage Wellesley’s aggressive policies had done. In August, hostilities were opened, with five British armies converging from different directions on the huge and now united Maratha Confederacy. In a bloody five-month campaign, the Marathas were defeated in a succession of brilliant victories by Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, one of which, the Battle of Assaye, was reckoned by him the finest in his entire military career. But there was a huge cost. At Assaye alone, Arthur Wellesley left a quarter of his army dead on the battlefield; as one of his senior officers wrote to him soon afterwards: ‘I hope you will not have occasion to purchase any more victories at such a high price.’
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James Kirkpatrick, who believed the entire conflict unnecessary and misconceived, was more acerbic: ‘oceans of blood and treasure have been wasted in his [Lord Wellesley’s] pretended plan of general pacification which was [in fact] a mere pretence for the general subjugation [of India … the completion of which] we appear to be as far from as ever, and [which has] roused a restless uneasy spirit of dread and animosity against us’ amongst all the other Indian princes.
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As far as James was concerned this only added to the intense dislike he felt for his master, and he wrote to William (now reunited with his daughters in England and ‘taking the waters’ at Bath), of the ‘contempt and abhorrence’ with which he now regarded the Governor General.
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He added, in a rare show of anger with his beloved elder brother, ‘I am concerned to find that you retain your former sentiments regarding the public principles and conduct of a Certain Person [i.e. Lord Wellesley] as it must occasion a difference of political opinion at least between us, which there seems to be no prospect of reconciling.’
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He also told William of the callous manner in which Lord Wellesley had broken all his most solemn promises to General Palmer. Having eased the old General out of his Residency in Pune with the promise of a generous pension and a prominent position by his side in Calcutta, Wellesley had completely neglected and ignored Palmer since his arrival in Bengal. Not only had he failed to produce the promised job or indeed any sort of financial compensation, he had insulted him by failing to summon him even once for consultation during the course of the Maratha War, despite the fact that there was no Englishman in Calcutta, or indeed anywhere else in India, who knew the mind of the Peshwa or his warlords as Palmer did. As Palmer wrote helplessly to his old patron Warren Hastings, ‘Lord W has totally discontinued his levées, and as he has not invited me to dinner I have no means of access to him.’
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Throughout the course of the Maratha War James’s letters are full of concern for the General’s ‘cruel situation’ and his ‘continued slight and ill treatment, which afflict me much more than they frankly surprise me’.
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For James the sky darkened even further seven months later. For on 9 May 1804, his other great friend and ally in Hyderabad, the Minister Aristu Jah, died, and was buried the same day in his Suroor Nagar garden.

Unlike the Nizam’s death, which had been long expected, Aristu Jah’s end came as a complete surprise. Although he was a direct contemporary of Nizam Ali Khan, the Minister had always seemed far stronger and more active and robust; well into his mid-sixties he would take regular exercise, notably with his daily gallop on the fine Arab stallions whose breeding and maintenance he minutely oversaw. At the end of April he had caught a fever which for a week had looked serious, but after ten days he had appeared to be pulling through. As James reported to Calcutta:

Worse yet for James, while he was still recovering from the shock of the loss of his friend, it became clear within a few days that Nizam Sikander Jah’s preferred candidate to replace Aristu Jah as Minister was none other than James’s bitterest old enemy, Mir Alam. Moreover, it soon became equally apparent that Mir Alam’s candidacy was fully supported by Wellesley from Calcutta.

The person responsible for Wellesley’s decision to support Mir Alam’s return to power was Henry Russell. Russell had been James’s Assistant in Hyderabad since the end of 1801 and, with James’s recommendation, had recently, at the age of only twenty-one, been promoted to the job of the Residency’s Chief Secretary. He had also become James’s main friend and ally among the British in Hyderabad: James wrote to William that ‘young Henry Russell continues as much as ever attached to me’, and was ‘my most valuable young friend’.
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Despite the nineteen-year age gap between them, the two men had much in common, and James found Russell a lively and interesting companion. Moreover, like James, Russell showed every sign of appreciating Hyderabadi culture, and he kept an Indian
bibi
by whom he had had a child of about the same age as Sahib Begum.
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A picture of him at this period by an Indian miniaturist survives in a private collection. It shows an alert, neat, handsome young man with close-cropped hair and elongated muttonchop whiskers of a style very similar to those then being sported by Lord Wellesley. He is dressed in a hybrid uniform of an embroidered black jacket of a vaguely English cut, but below it he wears cool white Indian pyjama bottoms and Hindustani slippers.
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Russell had one major flaw, though James never mentions it, and it is apparent more in his own letters than in the comments others made about him. This was an unusual vanity and conceit about himself, his looks and his intelligence. The eldest of ten children, Russell was regarded as a child prodigy by his adoring father, and he grew up patronising his younger brother Charles, as he would later patronise his staff, his colleagues, his lovers and his wives. His early letters to Charles, written when he was eighteen and had only just arrived in Hyderabad, are very much those of an experienced man of the world (as he clearly saw himself) attempting to help his little brother fathom the mysteries of adult-hood.

In 1802 Charles had recently arrived in Calcutta, and Henry puts pen to paper to advise him: ‘I need not direct your attention to the ladies—follow my footsteps and you will be a favourite; the society of females improves the mind as much as the manners of a gentleman, but avoid becoming that detestable or rather negative, contemptible character “a ladies man”.’ He adds, ‘I passed most of the day in the society of a lovely little female friend for whose name and description I refer you to my late Chowringhee correspondence … Have you brought me nothing from Europe? [Not even] a fashionable article of dress?’