Richard was the older of the two brothers. The Colleys had been in Ireland for many generations when his grandfather changed the name to Wesley on inheriting the Dangan estate from his cousin Garrett Wesley. Richard was born in Dangan Castle in 1760 and would adopt Wellesley as his surname when he was 29, as would his brother Arthur.
After 17 years in the Houses of Commons and Lords, and in Government, Richard was appointed Governor General of India in 1797. After seven months at sea, Richard Colley Wellesley arrived in Calcutta: he “would change the history of India as much as Napoleon would change that of France; indeed, though his name is largely forgotten today, in the next seven years he would conquer more territory in India and more quickly, than Napoleon conquered in Europe.’ The quote (p. 335) is from William Dalrymple’s magnificent page-turner The Anarchy, The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and The Pillage of an Empire. Revealingly, the chapter is called ‘The Corpse of India’.
Richard’s aim was to displace his employers, the East India Company (EIC), with British government control over all of India and to oust the French (p. 337). In achieving this, through divide and conquer, and with a massive investment in the EIC’s private army, Richard laid the foundation for the British Raj. As Dalrymple writes, by the end of his tenure, Richard was the real emperor, with 600 professional civil servants, and a well trained army of 155,000. His king had gained an additional 50 million subjects. London was largely unaware of what Richard had done. Richard had concealed it from his nominal bosses in the EIC. The Government was focused on the threat from Napoleon (whose failed Egyptian campaign ended any French hopes of challenging for control of India), ‘But within India everyone knew that a major revolution had just taken place…The sinews of British supremacy were now established. With the exception of a few months during the Great Uprising of 1857, for better or worse, India would remain in British hands for another 144 years, finally gaining its freedom only in August 1847.’ (p.382)
It had taken cunning and courage to be sure. Richard’s brother Arthur, a major general, faced off against two Maratha armies in August 1803, the dominant power in the western Deccan plateau. The Maratha’s had learned European methods of warfare and had well used French mercenaries like the brilliant general Benoit de Boigne to train their infantry and artillery. In the ferocious battle of Assaye, Arthur had two horses shot from under him, staff officers killed near him as grape shot flew all around. A horse still carried its headless dragoon as Arthur forged the Khelna river. Dalrymple’s thrilling account (pp 369-372) records the bloody outcome of Arthur’s victory, his first ‘close-run thing’: 6,000 dead Marathas and one third of Arthur’s army, 1,584 out of 4,500 troops. General Lake’s conquest of Delhi in September sealed India’s fate: impoverishment as Britain plundered its wealth and shipped its global textile hegemony to Britain.
As I have written here previously, Arthur would reshape Canada in the wake of the US’s failed invasion attempt in the War of 1812. He determined to fortify Canada believing that it was the bulwark of the British Empire, graphically illustrated when Napoleon cut off Baltic timber from the British navy. In 1804, Henry Caldwell, from Fermanagh who had fought with the distinction against the French in Canada, persuaded Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, the Lord of the Admiralty, that Canadian timber could provide for Royal Navy what it had formerly secured in the Baltic. The Canadian lumber industry was born and Caldwell along with his wife’s nephew George Hamilton (from Dunboyne) would make their fortunes as lumber barons in respectively Quebec and the Ottawa Valley. Arthur had a point about Canada: even in the twentieth century Churchill imagined taking the Royal Navy to Halifax should Hitler succeed in conquering England.
The careers of both Richard and Arthur came together over the infamous Koh-i-Noor diamond. I cannot recommend highly enough http://www.empirepod.com by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple. The four podcast episodes about the diamond combine as enthralling story-telling. The massive diamond was swiped from India and given to Queen Victoria. Uncut, it was a major disappointment to the crowds that came to see it at the Great Exhibition in 1851. Though warned that a flaw would split it, Prince Albert decided to have it cut and polished using a bespoke steam-powered grindstone. The honor of the first pass went to Arthur, the hero of Waterloo, Duke of Wellington. The process split the diamond in half, though the final product was still the size of a duck egg. Queen Victoria often wore it as a broach. It is today part of the crown of Elizabeth the Queen Mother. India, along with Pakistan and even the Taliban, demand its return.
Eamonn
Ottawa
eamonncmckee 