II

When he stepped ashore at the Cape of Good Hope on a January day in 1798, Richard Wellesley was a short, self-possessed and ambitious young man of thirty-seven with a high forehead, thick, dark eyebrows and a straight Roman nose. He had compelling blue eyes and a firm chin, the prominence of which was emphasised by his three-quarter-length side-burns. There was a purposeful set to his small mouth and an owlish gleam in his expression that hinted at brilliance, and perhaps also at ruthlessness. But there was also a vulnerability and even a paranoia there too, apparent in all his portraits. It was a weakness that he increasingly came to disguise with a mask of arrogance.

Wellesley’s perceptive host, Andrew Barnard, the Commander of the Cape garrison, spotted this flaw immediately and predicted to his wife Anne that there were ‘inconsistencies in his character, as he is clever but weak [and] proud … he will get thro’ the task of what is entrusted to him to the satisfaction of his employers, but that in doing it he will get himself more looked up to than beloved’.¹ It was an accurate prophecy. Wellesley made no intimate friends in India, and his colleagues, including his younger brother Arthur, frequently found him impossible to deal with; but few ever doubted his genius or his abilities.

Barnard was however wrong about one thing: Wellesley did not satisfy his nominal employers, the Directors of the East India Company. Indeed he did not even attempt to do so, and his private letters to the President of the Board of Control, the government body set up in 1784 to oversee the Company, make little secret of his ‘utter contempt’ for the opinions of ‘the most loathsome den of the India House’.² Though he won the Directors an empire, Wellesley came within a whisker of bankrupting the Company to do so, and it was clear from the beginning that he had set his sights on far more ambitious goals than maintaining the profit margins of the Company he was supposed to serve, but whose mercantile spirit he actually abhorred.

Unknown to the Company Directors, Richard Wellesley had come out East with two very clear goals in his mind. He was determined to secure India for British rule, and equally determined to oust the French from their last foothold on the subcontinent. In this he was following the bidding of Henry Dundas, the Board of Control’s President, whose Francophobe ideas were transmitted to a receptive Wellesley at a series of lengthy briefings before the new Governor General embarked for India. In particular Dundas had instructed Wellesley to ‘cleanse’ those pockets of Indian power that had been ‘contaminated’ by French influence: namely the courts of Tipu Sultan of Mysore, Nizam Ali Khan of Hyderabad, and those of that network of rival Hindu chiefs who ruled the great Maratha Confederacy—all of whom had raised sepoy armies trained by Francophone mercenaries and renegades, and all of whom could, potentially, be used against the British and in favour of the French.

As his ship was being refitted and its sails remodelled—HM’s frigate La Virginie had ‘become dangerously overmasted before they were cut lower’³—Wellesley used his enforced leisure at the Cape to recover from the dreadful passage from England and to learn what he could about India. Every day began with a ‘Bengal levée’ of jaundiced old India hands, many of whom had come to the Cape to try to recover their health: Anne Barnard called them the ‘yellow generals’. They limped in one by one and competed with each other ‘to pour the riches of their knowledge and experience’ on the new Governor General. There were others passing through the Cape, too, who could bring Wellesley up to speed with the latest developments in Bengal. According to Anne Barnard’s Journal, as well as the yellow generals there were also ‘Captains from India with despatches to the Government [who] stop here and finding his Excellency at the Cape deliver up their official papers which he opens, peruses, and by such means will arrive instructed on the present position of affairs there, and will appear a prodigy of ability in being Master of all so soon after his arrival’.

After these meetings and briefings were over, the evenings were occupied with a series of heavy dinners given in Wellesley’s honour by the local Dutch community. Their culinary abilities left much to be desired: ‘They begin their dinners piano, piano with stewed cows heel,’ wrote Barnard,

a favourite dish [of theirs, eaten with] Tripe and Macaroni … But they increase the size and number of their dishes with every course, ending at last with enormous Joints … [One family] received us all with open countenances of gladness and hospitality … but the most resolute grin was born by a Calf’s head as large as that of an ox, which was boiled entire and served up with ears whole and a pair of gallant young horns … the teeth were more perfect than any dentist ever made … [The meal concluded with] a Tureen of Bird’s Nest Soup … a mess of the most aromatic nastiness I ever tasted.

On his return to the Barnards after this ordeal, Wellesley diplomatically avoided commenting on the fare beyond venturing that ‘I would not have missed the sight of my worthy friend with the white teeth for twenty pounds.’⁴

In her diaries and letters, Anne Barnard gives a detailed record of the entertainments and diversions she organised for her distinguished guest. She names the various admirals, judges and governors who were called to dine with Lord Wellesley, the Dutch burghers who invited them to supper, even ‘His Excellency the Governor of Mosambique, a stately well-stuffed Portuguese … [attended by] a black dwarf 34 high’, who tried to bribe Wellesley with a gold-tipped cane. But a figure she never mentions is the one who undoubtedly had the most influence on Wellesley of all the people he met at the Cape: Major William Kirkpatrick.

By 1798 William Kirkpatrick, elder brother of James Achilles, looked much older than his forty-four years. Disappointments in his career, marital difficulties and years of painful illness all showed on his features. Two fine paintings of him by Thomas Hickey survive. In the first, painted in 1787, he looks an awkward if determined figure, holding in one hand the deeds of the orphanage he had just set up in Calcutta. There is a searching, slightly uncertain and quizzical expression on his features, as if he is trying to size up the viewer; he also looks a little impatient, as if he has much better things to do than sit around having his portrait painted. Only twelve years separate this from the second portrait, ⁵ painted in 1799, a year after Kirkpatrick met Wellesley at the Cape; but from the transformation that has taken place in the sitter you might guess it was thirty years. The tangle of unruly hair in the first portrait has retreated far from the forehead; there are bags under Kirkpatrick’s eyes; and he has lost a great deal of weight. He looks weary and perhaps a little disillusioned; only the upturned nose, the determined set of the lips and the slightly impatient expression echo the earlier figure.

Wellesley’s first letter to Dundas in London, written three weeks after his arrival at the Cape, is almost entirely concerned with William Kirkpatrick; indeed his conversations with Kirkpatrick take up not only the entire thirty-page despatch, but also a further forty pages of enclosures. The letter details a matter that was to be a central concern not just of Wellesley and Dundas, but of both Kirkpatrick brothers in the months ahead: the growing French influence in the courts of India.

‘Among the subjects you recommended to my early consideration upon my arrival in India,’ wrote Wellesley,

you particularly urged the necessity of my attending with the utmost degree of vigilance to the system, now persued almost universally by the native princes, of retaining in their service numbers of European or American officers, under whom the native troops are trained and disciplined in imitation of the corps of seypoys in the British service.

By accident I found at this place, on account of his health, Major Kirkpatrick, lately Resident at the Court of Hyderabad, and formerly at that of Scindia, and I have endeavoured during the period of my detention here to collect from him whatever information he could furnish respecting the European or American officers and the corps commanded by them in the service of the Nizam.⁶

Wellesley had asked William Kirkpatrick to provide written answers to a range of questions about the French mercenary forces employed by the Nizam, notably ‘one commanded by a Frenchman by the name of Raymond’ and officered by ‘Frenchmen of the most virulent and notorious principles of Jacobinism … an armed French party of great zeal, diligence and activity’. The answers he received so impressed him that he not only forwarded them, unedited, to Dundas, he also begged Kirkpatrick to abandon the plans he had been making to return to England, and to take up a job at his side in Calcutta, as his Military Secretary.

William had serious health problems which had developed in India—he was suffering in particular from a severe and very painful combination of gout and rheumatism—but when Wellesley made him the offer he promised to consider it, subject to the success of a cure at ‘the hot mineral baths about 70 miles from here’.⁷ His ultimate acceptance of Wellesley’s largesse changed the course not only of his career, but also that of the man he had left as Acting Resident at Hyderabad: his younger brother James.

Several years later, after William had retired to England, Wellesley looked back to that meeting at the Cape and wrote that he ‘had no hesitation in declaring that to [William Kirkpatrick] I am indebted for the seasonable information’ which enabled the Governor General to pull off the remarkable successes of his first two years in office. He went on:

Kirkpatrick’s skill in Oriental languages, his acquaintance with the manners, customs and laws of India are not equalled by any person whom I have met in this country. His perfect knowledge of all the native courts, of their policy, prejudices and interests, as well as of all the leading political characters among the inhabitants of India, is unrivalled in the Company’s Civil or Military service … These qualifications recommended him to my particular confidence. He possessed no other recommendation, or introduction to my notice.⁸

Kirkpatrick, Wellesley emphasises, rose on his merits, not on the influence of his birth or his patrons. Yet even Wellesley probably did not know quite how far William had come in his life, nor from what inauspicious beginnings. For William Kirkpatrick was not in fact James Achilles’ full brother, but an illegitimate half-brother,^ad born in Ireland to a Mrs Booth, ‘the sister of Mr C—the well known anarchist’, with whom William’s father had had a brief affair. Throughout their entire childhood, William’s legitimate half-brothers, George and James Achilles, were totally unaware of his existence.

The father of the Kirkpatrick brothers was Colonel James Kirkpatrick of the Madras Cavalry, known universally as ‘the Handsome Colonel’. This name was apparently a reference not only to his good looks and ‘very dark brown eyes’, but also to his rackety love-life. The Bloomsbury matriarch Jane Maria Strachey, mother of Lytton, was married to William Kirkpatrick’s grandson, and spent many months researching the Handsome Colonel’s roots as part of her obsessive mapping of the Stracheys’ genealogy. A pious Victorian lady much given to displays of public devotion,^ae she was not entirely pleased by what she discovered. The Handsome Colonel, it turned out, was born in 1730 on a plantation in Charlestown, South Carolina, to which his family had fled from Dumfriesshire after being implicated in the failed 1715 Jacobite uprising. More alarming still to Lady Strachey was the discovery that the Colonel’s mother was ‘probably a Creole’. Sometime around the middle of the eighteenth century the family returned to Britain,^‡ where the Handsome Colonel embarked on what Strachey described as ‘an adventurous and irregular life’ more distinguished for its amorous conquests than its military ones.⁹

William Kirkpatrick was born when his father was a bachelor of twenty-four; he was raised at boarding school in Ireland, supported but publicly unacknowledged by the Colonel. When William was only four, the Colonel set off for India where he joined the Company’s Madras Cavalry as an ensign. In due course, when William was old enough, the Handsome Colonel purchased his illegitimate son a military cadetship in the Company; but they never met in India, for the Colonel’s career there lasted only eight years, and by the time William arrived in 1771 the Colonel had long since left.

Before returning to England, the Handsome Colonel had married in Madras Katherine Munro, the eldest daughter of Dr Andrew Munro, the founder of the new Madras hospital. Dr Munro was a controversial figure in the Madras Presidency. He had, by all accounts, great belief in the efficacy of his ‘Hysterick drafts’, but was renowned for his short temper and violent dislike of anything he thought might approach hypochondria. At one point ‘nineteen covenanted [Company] servants’ took out a formal complaint against him for his conduct; in particular they noted that when one of them wanted a powder to cure him of a severe case of scurvy in the teeth, Munro had written to his deputy, ‘Sir, pray give that impudence what he wants and let me not be plagued with his nonsense.’¹⁰

A contemporary account of Dr Munro’s hospital shows that the doctors’ attitude to hospital management reflected his no-nonsense approach: ‘I never heard of such irregularities as at present exist in the Presidency hospital,’ wrote a visiting surgeon.

I have frequently, during my short attendance, found in visiting the sick two or three of them lying in a state of intoxication, and I have heard of others who were not under my charge being in a similar condition. It is not an uncommon practice of the patients to form parties, often with the sergeant of the guard, to go into the Black Town [the Indian quarter of Madras] where they generally remain during the greater part of the night, committing every kind of enormity. The hospital in consequence becomes a scene of riot and confusion during the night, and the shade and other unoccupied parts of the hospital are places of resort for gaming and boxing during the day.¹¹

For all this, the marriage between the Handsome Colonel and Munro’s beautiful daughter was apparently a passionate one, and within two years Katherine had given the Colonel two sons, George, born on 15 July 1763, and James Achilles, born thirteen months later, on 22 August 1764. Both were baptised in St Mary’s Church in the Fort of Madras, where Katherine and the Colonel had been married. But when James Achilles was eighteen months old, his mother died of a sudden fever aged only twenty-two, despite—or perhaps partly because of—the ministrations of her father. James and George must presumably have been brought up by Indian ayahs until their father returned home to England three years later. Never one to miss an amorous opportunity, the Handsome Colonel fathered yet another illegitimate child—this time a daughter—on the boat home in a brief affair with a Mrs Perrein,^af the wife of a Portuguese Jewish mercenary in the service of the Nawabs of the Arcot.¹²

There is a gap in the archives concerning the period James and George spent in England as boys. While their father set off East again, this time to command Fort Marlborough in Sumatra, all that is known is that the two brothers were briefly sent to Eton, where they must have been younger contemporaries of Richard Wellesley, and that their schooling was finished off in ‘various seminaries’ in France.^ag In between terms, they spent the holidays with their Kirkpatrick grandfather at Hollydale near Bromley in Kent. Their grandfather had by now sold his Carolina plantations, abandoned his Jacobite sympathies, and belatedly—and somewhat unsuccessfully—embarked on the life of an author: his political works were judged ‘very dull’,¹³ and his most notable production was a slim volume of medical research entitled Putrifaction. In March 1779, at the age of fifteen, after just eleven years in Europe, James returned to India, the land of his birth. As he had done with James’s elder half-brother, the Handsome Colonel had obtained for him an East India Company cadetship, based in Madras.

It was inevitable now that William and James would meet. Lady Strachey had in her possession the Handsome Colonel’s diaries and letter books, all now lost, which gave an indication of the manner in which it happened. She reported her discovery in a letter to a relation:

When James Achilles had gone to India & was about to go to the same part in which William was, their father wrote to desire him to form the acquaintance of a young gentleman of the same name who he cannot do better than model himself upon; shortly after this he is writing to J.A. of William as ‘your brother’. In a subsequent letter in which he reproves J.A. of negligence towards a natural [i.e. illegitimate] son of his own, he enters somewhat at large into the question; he says in his opinion there is no difference in the duty a parent owes to his legitimate and illegitimate children; & that he thinks James will agree with him that they both know an instance in which the natural son was superior in capacity & attainments to the legitimate. ¹⁴

Despite the ten-year gap in their ages and the strangeness of their meeting, which seems to have taken place in 1784 or 1785, the two half-brothers immediately became close. Judging from the tenor of their often moving and heartfelt letters, the relationship seems to have given a much-needed emotional prop to both men. Of the two, William was the senior, but he seems also to have been the more vulnerable and insecure; hardly surprising perhaps when the loveless and institutionalised nature of his childhood is taken into account.

A strong impression of William at the beginning of his career—a lonely and melancholy teenager washed up in India without money, backers or patrons—survives in the letters he wrote throughout the 1770s and eighties to his great friend John Kennaway.¹⁵Kennaway was a grammar-school boy, the son of an Exeter merchant who came out to India in 1772 with his brother after being presented with a cadetship each by their East India Company cousin, Richard Palk. The brothers had nearly died on arrival when their ship was wrecked in the mouth of the Ganges, and they ‘presented themselves to Governor Hastings with nothing but the clothes on their backs’.¹⁶ Despite this inauspicious beginning, the Kennaways were well-connected, and John quickly overtook William Kirkpatrick—who was a year his senior—in the race for preferment. This did not get in the way of their friendship, however, and letters William wrote to Kennaway are surprisingly deeply felt.

In the first, dated 18 January 1774, Kirkpatrick writes warmly that he is ‘pleased with the proof you have given me of your affection … and I do assure you I regretted your absence as much as my amiable friend did mine’. A year later, the tone is more emotional: ‘You know yourself and (I hope) me too well to doubt the sincerity of my affection for you,’ he writes. By 1777, the tone has become close to the romantic: ‘I am dull, stupid and melancholy,’ writes an anguished Kirkpatrick. ‘In a word I am low spirited … [and] I have been low spirited ever since I left you: I am still low spirited: and low spirited shall I continue.’ He talks of ‘all I have suffered since my separation from you’, and how ‘my promised bliss’ has been snatched from him by Kennaway’s departure.

Kirkpatrick finally declares himself to Kennaway in a letter of the period which is dated only ‘12 Dec’. The two boys have had a tiff, and Kirkpatrick sits up late writing to his friend attempting to explain his feelings:

My dear Jack,

You had not been gone last night two minutes when I wished to see you again. I thought I had a hundred things to tell you, which had not occurred to me while you were with me. To say the truth you left me but half happy: for though our mutual and renewed assurances of invariable friendship were productive of the greatest pleasure I ever felt—yet it was damp’d considerably by your hasty departure. Ah my dear friend! Had you known my nature you would not have doom’d me to suffer a whole nights uneasiness without having been thoroughly convinced of the capaciousness of my disposition.

I have a heart which though it is capable of the most tender attachment, cannot silently brook the least appearance of slight or indifference in its master—you my dear Jack are its master, and while you govern it like a sincere and affectionate friend, it will be in all situations obedient to your pleasure.

Thus I have told you my mind with that frankness which ever attends true affection.

Adieu my dear Jack
W Kirkpatrick
Monday night.

It is difficult to know how to interpret these tortured letters, given that at the same time as he was writing them, William was living with an Indian women, Dhoolaury Bibi, by whom he fathered two Anglo-Indian children, and with whom he maintained a relationship until the end of his life, despite being married to an Englishwoman—Maria Pawson—for twelve years in the middle. There is no evidence that Kirkpatrick had any sort of physical relationship with Kennaway, and it is perfectly possible—even probable—that the boys’ romantic friendship was entirely platonic; but equally the possibility must remain that part of William’s melancholy came from suppressing an unresolved and apparently unconsummated bisexuality.^ah

In 1784, after thirteen years in India, William returned to England to consult doctors and recover his health. He brought with him his two Anglo-Indian children, Robert and Cecilia, then aged seven and four, whom he placed in the care of the Handsome Colonel. The Colonel had recently retired from Sumatra to Hollydale, where James and George had been brought up, but which William had apparently never seen. Though his father agreed to take in the children, the meeting between father and son was not a success: ‘I found my father and all my other connections in perfect health,’ William wrote to Kennaway from London, ‘but I was so unhappy as not to find the former in that temper of mind necessary to his own and my felicity. Disappointments and other accidents of fortune not merited by him, have so far formed his disposition that, did nothing else make my speedy return to India proper, that consideration alone would render my continuance in this country exceedingly unpleasant.’

In stark contrast to the pain of visiting his father, William spent a happy month with Kennaway’s family in Exeter, writing to his friend that he would ‘reserve the history of my visit, and my account of the family, for the happy moment when I shall again have the pleasure of embracing my dear Jack. Suffice it for the present to inform you that I passed near a month among them with a satisfaction that nothing but your presence could have increased.’ Nevertheless, the visit to England brought home to William as nothing else the constraints under which he was forced to live. In India his talents and position had gradually brought him status and respect; but in England he was no one, still the unacknowledged and illegitimate son of a rakish nabob. More to the point he was poor. In India the friends he had made were of a different class and a different economic bracket to him. Visiting the Kennaways, he realised suddenly the impossibility of ever returning to England, unless he were first to make his fortune. In a letter to Kennaway he tried to explain to his friend how he felt:

… It is impossible for me to describe how impatient I am to return to India—not that were I in possession of the means, I could not live more to my satisfaction in England: but without those means England instead of being a paradise must be a Hell to every man who returns from India with a grain of feeling or virtuous pride. Here have I a few friends (the only substantial solace or blessing that life affords) whom I love and esteem very heartily: but from whose society I should be obliged to banish myself were I to stay in England another year: for they being men of fortune, how could I approach them, or associate with them when not worth a groat? Which situation therefore is irksome—is painful—beyond expression. I will therefore return to India as early as possible: and there I will live the remainder of my days, unless by acquiring a fortune (which, by the bye, it is hardly possible I ever should) I shall be defended from the cruel necessity of cutting myself off from the society of all those whom I love.¹⁷

William’s letters are invariably written with great grace and beauty, and with numerous classical and Oriental literary allusions: with Kennaway in particular he frequently discusses Persian literature, the rival translations of Hafiz, and the beauties of theShahnama. He worked hard at perfecting his Persian, Bengali and Hindustani; but throughout the entire correspondence, and despite all his Orientalist learning, there is little feeling for India evident in William’s letters.^ai

Indeed, in some quarters William Kirkpatrick had already got a reputation for haughtiness towards Indians. The Indophile General William Palmer, who had been Warren Hastings’ Military Secretary, then Resident in Lucknow, was alarmed when he heard in November 1786 that William Kirkpatrick had been made Resident at the camp of the Maratha leader, Mahadji Scindia. ‘I am suprized that Kirkpatrick should have sought that Station,’ wrote Palmer. ‘His mind is strongly prejudiced against India.’¹⁸

As General Palmer had predicted, William Kirkpatrick’s tenure as Resident at the court of Scindia was not a success, and for exactly the reasons he had foreseen. Kirkpatrick’s childhood made him especially sensitive to anything that might appear a slight. In a letter written by the then Resident, James Anderson, to William when the news of his posting was made public, William was warned that the Maratha’s Hindu peasant manners were very different from those of the courtly Muslim Mughals with whom he had been used to dealing:

in an early period of my residence in this camp I could not help thinking that Scindia was sometimes guilty of petty neglects and inattention towards me, which as experience has since warned me were to be ascribed only to the difference of the Maratha modes and customs from those of the Musalmens to which I had been accustomed … [Scindia] appeared to be deficient in the minutiae of attention, such as in frequent messages and enquiries and other little intercourses of civility which are so rigidly practiced by the politer Mussalmen … ¹⁹

The warning, however, fell on deaf ears. Within a month of his arrival at Delhi, where Scindia was then encamped, William was complaining to the Governor General Lord Cornwallis that Scindia and his court were rude and neglectful: ‘his general object [is to subject] the English Resident at his Durbar [court] to humiliating situations’. Scindia in turn formally complained to Calcutta of William’s arrogance and haughtiness.

Cornwallis was planning a war against Tipu Sultan, and had no wish at that moment to see any sort of hostilities break out between the Company and the Marathas; rather he wished to conclude some sort of defensive alliance with them. So he wrote back to William saying that he was ‘exceedingly sorry to hear of a coldness between you and Scindia’, and instructed him to live ‘on a footing of friendship and good humour’ with the Maratha durbar. At the end of the letter he made his position even more frank: ‘Your good sense will immediately point out to you the substance and the intention of this dispatch. I wish to avoid a public breach with Scindia, and therefore should he, from any motives whatever, continue the slights and inattentions of which you complain … you will treat them as much as possible as matters of personal offence only.’²⁰

The letter could not have been more clearly expressed; but it was already too late. Things had reached a head on 24 January 1787. One of William’s escort had gone to swim in the Jumna, where he met a dhobi (a laundryman) who was cleaning the clothes of Scindia’s son-in-law on the ghats. The sepoy demanded that the washerman—an untouchable—move away while he took his swim. The washerman refused to do so. He was promptly attacked by the sepoy, who beat him over the head with a lathi (truncheon or stick). A troop of Marathas happened to be passing by and joined in on the side of the dhobi, leaving the sepoy badly wounded. The incident escalated, and by the afternoon, after several soldiers on either side had been severely wounded, William was forced to leave his quarters in a crumbling palace in Old Delhi for his own safety. From a temporary camp in the garden of Safdarjung’s tomb, six miles outside the city, he demanded that the offenders should be arrested and that there should be a formal apology. None was forthcoming.

In October, after an impasse lasting ten months, William wrote to Kennaway: ‘Finding it impossible to live on terms of good humour with Scindia without taking certain measures not agreeable to the policy thought necessary by Ld Cornwallis, I have come to the resolution of resigning from my present office.’ He duly did so, in a rather tentative way, and was surprised to find it immediately accepted by the Governor General. His surprise turned to alarm when, once he had left his position and set off towards Calcutta, it became increasingly clear that Cornwallis blamed William, not Scindia, for what he regarded as a wholly unnecessary breach in relations with a powerful neighbour.

A year later, Kirkpatrick still had no new appointment, and the full scale of the disaster that had overtaken his career began to sink in. When Kennaway was appointed Resident at Hyderabad, William wrote to congratulate him, adding: ‘the disgraceful and mortifying situation in which I at present stand must operate to the ruin of both my character and fortunes. ’²¹

From his new appointment in Hyderabad, Kennaway replied sympathetically. To his brother William, however, he confided that he thought Kirkpatrick’s behaviour honourable, but suicidal: ‘Kirk’s prospects in this country are now very unpromising,’ he wrote in December 1788.

In quitting a similar rather more lucrative situation than that which I at present hold and sacrificing his interest to the rigidity of his principles, he gave up a certainty of a handsome independency [i.e. sufficient capital to allow him to retire to England on the interest] in the course of four or five years … In a single and unencumbered state I certainly should not have acted in the same manner. Perhaps I should have been wrong in not doing so, but I think I could have preserved my virtue without sacrificing my interest.²²

What made matters worse was that William Kirkpatrick was now very far from ‘single and unencumbered’. Three years earlier, on 26 September 1785, only a few months after his return from England and after a very brief courtship, he had married Maria Pawson, whom Lady Strachey describes as ‘being of the Yorkshire gentry’. A portrait of Maria by Romney shows a pretty, sensual woman with full lips, long reddish hair and an intelligent, knowing expression. She and Kirkpatrick quickly had four children in as many years; but the marriage was not a success.

Maria had initially accompanied her husband to Scindia’s Delhi camp, but soon departed to Agra where she tried, without success, to pull strings with the Mughal court in order to get permission to live in Taj Gunj, immediately beside the Taj Mahal. When her request was formally turned down she became angry at what she regarded as a humiliating rebuff, and headed off with her infants towards Calcutta. Kirkpatrick was forced to admit to John Shore, Cornwallis’s deputy^aj (and eventual successor), that ‘by personal argument and insistence I may possibly be able to get her consent [to return]’, but that he could not guarantee it. He then promised that ‘I should take care that nothing of an embarrassing nature should arise,’ perhaps implying that public rows were already a feature of the marriage.²³ By the end of 1788 it was decided that Maria should return to England with the children, and settle in Bath.

The marriage struggled on, with William continuing to write affectionate letters to his wife for a further nine years; but her replies became shorter and increasingly perfunctory. By 1794 William was complaining that Maria’s letters were ‘wholly inadequate … scribbled in haste, often illegible, very inaccurate and what is worst of all (with regard to the feelings of a husband and a father) extremely deficient in those details which it is so easy for you to furnish, and which I must naturally wish for. Let me entreat you, therefore, my dear girl, to discontinue this hurry-scurry mode of conducting your correspondence with me, and to recollect that you are not writing by the penny post but by a conveyance that seldom offers, and to a husband at some thousand miles distance from you.’²⁴ The following year Maria ceased to reply to his letters at all. By 1797 a legal separation was agreed to, due to Maria’s ‘misconduct’.²⁵ The four girls from the marriage were packed off to live with their various cousins at the Handsome Colonel’s. There is no evidence that William and Maria ever met again; certainly William’s grandchildren were all told that Maria had died after the birth of her youngest child, and after his death were astonished to discover a bequest to her in William’s will, which she duly received.²⁶Ironically, she turned out to be living in India, apparently with a new lover.

For five years, from 1787 until 1792, during Maria’s absence in Bath, William Kirkpatrick’s career languished, and he wrote irregularly to Kennaway, explaining that he had not put pen to paper more often as ‘my disappointments were so near my heart that I could have handled no other subject, and as you could give me no relief, I determined to give you no pain’.²⁷ Depressed and dejected, he returned to badly-paid regimental duties.

William’s linguistic talents brought him a second break, however, in 1792, when he was appointed to head a mission to Nepal. Travelling through previously unexplored parts of the Himalayas, he was the first European to reach Nayakote, where the Nepalese rajahs then held court. Though the mission yielded no diplomatic results, it was regarded as an important sortie into new territory, and William later produced a book on his travels—A Description of the Kingdom of Nepaul—which was widely applauded. The expedition moreover brought about his reconciliation with Cornwallis, who went on record saying of William that ‘no one could have acquitted himself with more ability, prudence and circumspection’.²⁸

The expedition returned Kirkpatrick to favour, and in March 1793 he was able to write an excited note to Maria in England revealing that ‘my friend Kennaway’ was retiring due to ill-health in December, and that if ‘my friend Mr Shore’ got appointed Governor General to replace Cornwallis, as looked likely, ‘there can be little doubt of my succeeding [Kennaway] at the Residency at Hyderabad. God bless you my dearest girl. I am not allowed to add more.’²⁹ By November both appointments had come through, and Kirkpatrick wrote to Bath that his prospects had suddenly dramatically changed. His income would now be substantial, and ‘I am hopeful by the practice of a proper economy to be in a few years in possession of what I consider a competency.’ It would also now be possible to give the girls ‘a private education’.

He saved for last the news that he was due to set off overland down the east coast of India from Calcutta the following week, and that ‘the place where my brother James commands lies on my route to Hyderabad. It is my wish he should proceed thither with me, to fill an appointment the succession to which has been secured for him by Sir John Kennaway … With his talents and the chance before him of getting the assistantship under me sooner or later it will introduce him with great advantages into the diplomatic line. I am strongly of the opinion he ought not to decline the offer.’³⁰

In 1793 James Achilles Kirkpatrick appeared at first sight to be a very different figure from his tortured, complex half-brother. Easy-going and generous, with an effortless gift for friendship, James was blessed with his father’s good looks, though with his mother’s much fairer Scottish colouring. He had full lips, startling blue eyes and a mop of straw-coloured hair which he swept back foppishly over his forehead and wore rather longer than was usual at the period. He was considered by his contemporaries to be tall and well proportioned as well as unusually handsome. But he was a sensitive man and, like his brother, he felt the need for continual reassurance; indeed his letters are full of expressions of affection for his correspondents which sometimes read like cries for reciprocation.

By the age of twenty-nine James had spent fourteen years in the Company’s Madras army without in any way distinguishing himself as a soldier; but he shared William’s gift for languages, and as well as having complete mastery of Persian and Hindustani, he seems to have spoken the languages of the south—notably Tamil and Telegu—with some fluency. If, as seems likely, James had been brought up by Indian ayahs after his mother’s death, it is quite possible that this fluency may have dated back to his Madras childhood; certainly there are frequent reports that many British children of the period alarmed their parents by speaking the Hindustani (or in this case, presumably, Tamil) of their ayahs as their first language.

As with William, it was this linguistic ability that would in time be James’s escape route from the drudgery of the military line; but in contrast to William, whose Orientalist learning had not stopped him from adopting a straightforwardly John Bull attitude towards India, James from the beginning had a far more affectionate view of the country where he was born and where he had spent the early years of his childhood. In an anonymous autobiographical fragment which he submitted to the Madras Courier in 1792 he described himself as ‘an officer who from his proficiency in the Persian and Hindoostanee tongues, and conversancy in the manners and customs of the race of men by whom those languages are spoken, had contracted a certain degree of partiality towards them’.³¹

One aspect of this ‘partiality’ was a relationship with an Indian bibi with whom he had lived for many years and by whom he fathered a son. In 1791 James brought the boy back to England during a year’s sick leave, after which the child joined the multi-ethnic household of children, legitimate and illegitimate, presided over by the Handsome Colonel in Kent, no doubt to the growing puzzlement of his country neighbours.

As well as a ‘partiality’ towards Indians, James also had an overwhelming aesthetic feeling for the sheer beauty of India, something that is apparent throughout his correspondence. Again and again his letters praise the landscape through which he is passing, writing home soon after his return to the Deccan in February 1792 about the ‘charming verdure that cloathes the whole country and renders it so delightful to the eye … you may walk bare headed in the sun without inconvenience almost any hour of the day’. He particularly admired Tipu Sultan’s Mughal-style pleasure gardens near Bangalore: ‘They please me very much … and are laid out with taste and design, the numerous cypress trees that form the principal avenues are the tallest and most beautiful I ever saw.’

A month later, when his regiment was involved in the siege of Tipu’s island capital Seringapatam during the Third Mysore War, even the ‘alarming mortality’ among the European troops and the ‘infectious exhalations from millions of putrid carcases that cover the whole surface of the earth for twenty miles around the capital’ could not blind James to the astonishing loveliness of the city he was engaged in besieging: ‘The palaces and gardens upon the island without the city far exceed the palace and gardens at Bangalore in extent, taste and magnificence, as they are said to fall short of the principal ones within the city. Of this last we have an exterior view from our trenches, and considering how much it overtops the lofty walls and battlements of the city, its height must be as considerable as its extent is great.’

He had seen Tipu’s magnificent Mughal-style garden palace ‘Lall Baug [the Red Garden], in all its glory’ the day before: ‘Alas!’ he writes to his father, ‘it fell sacrifice to the emergencies of war.’ The palace was made hospital for the wounded and the garden ‘toppled to supply materials for the siege. The whole avenues of tall and majestic cypresses were in an instant laid low, nor was the orange, apple, sandal tree or even the fragrant bowers of rose and jasmine spared in this indiscriminate ruin. You might have seen in our batteries fascines of rose bushes, bound with jasmine and picketed with pickets of sandal wood. The very pioneers themselves became scented … ’

He even dodged enemy shells to make a visit to the newly erected tomb of Tipu’s father Haidar Ali, which he greatly admired, though judging it ‘in every respect inferior to the Taj at Agra’. Intriguingly he adds: ‘I herewith enclose you some of the plaister I picked up, which had fallen from Hyder’s tomb stone. It is said to be composed with earth from Mecca, or as it is called, the Scrapings of the Dust from the Holy Tomb of the Prophet, and consequently must possess many rare and invaluable virtues.’³² In another writer these remarks might be taken as satirical; but it is clear from the context that James was being perfectly serious, though ‘Scrapings of the Dust from the Holy Tomb of the Prophet’ was certainly a strange choice of gift for the Handsome Colonel, who throughout his career had shown little interest in religious matters, less still in Muslim relics.

If, aesthetically and emotionally, James’s letters show a great love of India that remained fixed and constant throughout his life, his political views were at this stage less clearly formed. Later in life he would come to regard the East India Company as an untrustworthy and aggressive force in Indian politics. But in the early 1790s he still subscribed to the conventional English view which tended to see Indian rulers as ‘effeminate’ and ‘luxurious’ tyrants, whose ‘unorganised despotism’ sapped their countries of strength and the possibility of progress. This was perceived as a direct contrast to the Company, whose introduction of Western ways to India, protected by an army of ‘undaunted spirit and irresistible ardour’, was believed by most of the British in India to bring unambiguous blessings to the subcontinent.

In his letters home at this time James duly writes of Tipu’s ‘boundless ambition and unrelenting cruelty’, but even at this early period he was unusual among his compatriots in that he saw many qualities to admire in the Sultan of Mysore. He writes that, ‘born and bred in camp, and tutored in the science of war under a great master [i.e. his father Haidar Ali], Tipoo possesses all the characteristic valour and hardiness of the soldier while his achievements in the Fields of Mars are far from discrediting the precepts inculcated by his father’. The various British reverses and defeats bore ample witness to Tipu’s ‘skill in arms. If he is at all addicted to, or versed with the arts of peace it has scarcely been in his power to cultivate them … his whole reign having been one continued state of military preparations or actual warfare’. Moreover, James was astonished by Tipu Sultan’s bravery and his spirit of resistance. Despite the Company’s successful counterattack there was no evidence that Tipu’s ‘firmness is shaken or his perseverance abated’, and although four armies were now advancing in strength towards him, ‘if he has as yet made any offers of submission it is more than I have heard of’.³³

In contrast, James’s elder brother William saw Tipu merely as a caricature: a one-dimensional monster, the worst possible incarnation of ‘Oriental despotism’. For him Tipu was a ‘cruel and relentless enemy’, an ‘intolerant bigot’, a ‘furious fanatic’, an ‘oppressive and unjust ruler … [a] sanguinary tyrant, [a] perfidious negociator’, and, to top it all, a ‘mean and minute economist’.³⁴ In these very different perceptions of Indian rule lay the seeds of much future disagreement between the two brothers.

James survived the bloodshed of the Third Mysore War quite unscathed, only to be badly wounded three months later, in bed, by his own orderly. One morning he woke on his camp bed to find the man, ‘who was of Mughal descent’, stealing from his trunk. The orderly rushed out, then reappeared shortly afterwards with two of James’s own swords. James wrote an anonymous third-person account of the incident for the Madras Courier:

… defenceless and nearly naked as he had risen from his bed … two deadly blows were warded by his hands which though cut deeply were saved from absolute amputation by a letter which happened providentially to be clenched in it. Thus maimed and incapable of further resistance, his last resource was in flight, in attempting which two other wounds inflicted with a deadly aim brought him down. When the blood thirsty and insatiable miscreant thinking he had dispatched him, turned about in search of more victims but not finding any within his reach, and having worked as he doubtless thought at the time mischief hopeless of pardon, he drew his dagger, and in a frenzy of despair, plunged it eight successive times into his own remorseless bosom.³⁵

The attack shook James, and made him fundamentally review his life in India. During his convalescence he wrote to the Handsome Colonel, weighing up where he stood in the service after fourteen years. He was not optimistic: ‘My prospects of promotion,’ he wrote, ‘are as distant at this moment as when I embarked, there being at this moment a hundred Lieutenants above me on the infantry list [who would all receive promotion before him]. Should matters remain on this present footing I cannot reasonably expect more than ten steps yearly, at which rate ten long years must elapse before I attain the rank of Captain—that is to say after a service or rather servitude of three and twenty years.’³⁶ It was a promotion his talented elder brother had managed after just a decade in India.

James had had some letters of introduction at the beginning of the war, but they did not seem to have had the slightest effect. He had given General Sir William Meadows his letter, but ‘the little general was too deeply engaged storming forts and other warlike achievements to acknowledge their receipt, so I can say nothing as to the benefits I may expect to reap from them’. He had letters ‘from Col. Fullarton to his relation Col. Maxwell still unused, and Col. Maxwell is said to have great influence with Lord Cornwallis’. But all in all, James acknowledged, his prospects were not promising, and he pleaded with his father to exert his influence somehow to improve his lot.³⁷ Suddenly missing the comforts and facilities of home, he also asked the Colonel to send out ‘a few dozen of Velna’s Vegetable Syrup, the efficacy of which I was made fully sensible of in my passage out. The want of vegetables during a long campaign has occasioned a return of my old scorbutic complaint.’

At this point, just when he least expected it, influence was exerted on James’s behalf only just four months later; and it came from a totally unexpected and quite unsolicited quarter. In July, his brother’s friend, the newly knighted Sir John Kennaway, wrote to him out of the blue from Hyderabad inviting him to stay, and offering to help him in any way he could. At James’s request, Kennaway intervened with James’s commanding officer, and by August had got him the command of the distant fort at Vizianagram, in tribal territory thirty miles north-west of the important east-coast port of Vizagapatam.³⁸ Vizianagram is, even today, a remote and impoverished spot, surrounded by barren hills and scrappy, scattered tribal outposts. At the end of the eighteenth century it was even more inaccessible, far removed from the centre of things. But at least it was a command, a start.

Then, only three months after James’s appointment at Vizianagram, William wrote to him from Calcutta with the news of his new appointment as Resident at Hyderabad. He invited his brother to join him in some capacity there, telling him to think about the offer, and that they would discuss it when they met: William would be passing Vizagapatam on his way from Bengal in six weeks’ time.

William’s journey down the east coast was a slow one. French privateers working out of Mauritius made it impossible for him to travel by boat,³⁹ much the quickest route: ten days on a good wind could have taken him to the port of Masulipatam, then a week’s journey up the old Golconda road would have brought him to Hyderabad. But as this was impossible, he was forced to travel by camel and elephant, and to make his way slowly down the spine of the Eastern Ghats, between the peaks and teak forests of the ghats and the blue coves and inlets of the Bay of Bengal. The brothers met at Vizagapatam, on the northern reaches of the Coromandel coast.^ak

It was a warm Christmas Eve, and James took little persuading to give up his garrison duties and throw in his lot with William. That night, on James’s instructions, the two brothers drafted a letter in William’s name to James’s commanding officer asking him to approve a transfer to Hyderabad.

The brothers spent Christmas together, probably for the first time. But it quickly became clear that James’s discharge would take longer than hoped to wind its way through the Company’s military bureaucracy. It was agreed, therefore, that for the time being he should stay in Vizianagram, and William should head on to Hyderabad alone. After a long period of truce and even friendship, war was again said to be brewing between the Nizam of Hyderabad and his old enemies the Marathas, and it was vital for William to get to Hyderabad as soon as possible to do what he could to forestall it.

William arrived in Hyderabad a month later to find—ominously—that Nizam Ali Khan, the elderly ruler of Hyderabad, was not in his city, but had decamped to the ancient Deccani capital of Bidar, the impregnable fortress that most closely abutted the Hyderabad—Maratha frontier. There it was said he was already engaged in amassing a grand army. Stopping in Hyderabad only long enough to order ‘wax candles, Patna potatoes, some raspberry and cherry brandy, garden peas, good coffee, a pipe of hock and some good red port’,⁴⁰ William got back on his elephant and set off on the eighty-mile journey to Bidar.

The road passed through a landscape whose wasted state testified to the unstable and violent history of the region over the previous 150 years. The flat expanses of neglected and untilled former cotton fields were dotted with heavily fortified villages and burned-out fortlets. A contemporary English traveller described the same journey in pessimistic terms: ‘as for the country I have passed through, nothing can be more melancholy than the appearance of it. Deserted villages, unfrequented roads, and the traces of former cultivation, make the scene more painful than it otherwise would be, by showing what it has once been, and aggravating the look of the present misery, by the contrast of former blessings.’ The same observer also mentioned passing ‘some bodies of predatory horse plundering the country we have passed through’, though the freebooters avoided tangling with him due to his armed escort.⁴¹

Nor was this just an English view of the country. According to the Iranian traveller Abdul Lateef Shushtari, who was related to one of the most powerful clans in Hyderabad and in 1794 was acting as the Nizam’s vakil^al in Calcutta, the countryside around the capital grew more and more ruinous the closer you got to the Maratha frontier: ‘Now, because of rebellious enemies and oppressive tax-collectors, the whole country has become a ruin, its inhabitants scattered and miserable; those few unable to flee are afflicted with famine. Leadership has broken down, the laws of governance are disrupted … There are so many ruins and abandoned homes, that though the region has a peerless climate, nevertheless the country is now worse than in most other places in India.’⁴²

After a four-day journey through this increasingly war-blackened landscape, William saw rising ahead of him the grim battlements of Bidar.

Even today, after a century and a half of decline and neglect, Bidar is still one of the most magnificent fortresses in India. Then it was unmatched. It was built on a great plug of dark brown basalt rising steeply out of the flat planispheres of the Deccan plateau. In every direction, great loops of bleak black crenelations swept for miles over hills and down steep valleys, a seemingly endless expanse of towers and walls, gateways and bastions, arch-shaped merlons and fortified escarpments. Within the embrace of these battlements lay a perfect oasis: white-budded cotton fields and gardens filled with rich well-watered black earth, where bullocks ploughed small neatly-tilled strips edged in palm groves and guava orchards, a great green splash of fertile farmland and a stark contrast to the wasteland immediately outside the walls.

To one side, by the river, lay the dhobi ghats from which came the splash and thud of washermen slapping their clothes on the basalt steps, while in the distance was a small lotus-choked lake punctuated at its corners by domed chattri pavilions. Beyond, in the barren wastes outside the walls and the reach of the irrigation runnels, a scattering of bulbous whitewashed domes signalled the presence of the medieval royal necropolis of Ashtur; in the scrub around it stood two rambling Sufi shrines packed with pilgrims and miracle-seekers come to solicit the aid of long-dead sheikhs.

On the evening of 10 February 1794, three months after he left Calcutta, William Kirkpatrick and his escort passed by the necropolis and entered Bidar under the dogleg of the massive Golconda Gate. They crossed through ring after ring of town and citadel walls, and over a series of deep ditches cut out of the living rock by gangs of medieval slaves. All around in the narrow, crowded streets, between the ancient shrines and the spice souk, the horse and the diamond merchants, the textile sellers and the karkhanas(workshops) where the town’s craftsmen were hammering away at their Bidri-ware pots and hookahs, the newcomers saw evidence of the gathering army, as hordes of freelances from all over India congregated on the city to seek service.

At the best of times the bazaars of the Deccan were filled with a mix of peoples from all over the East; but at this moment Bidar was bursting with a particularly diverse group of mercenary cavalry: Arabs from the Hadramaut, bearded Sikhs from the Punjab, knots of turbaned Afghans and Pathans from the frontier and their Rohilla cousins from the Ganges plains. Wandering through the bazaars too were groups of the Nizam’s regular infantry, the red-jacketed sepoys trained by the French commander, Michel Joachim Raymond, with their black tricorn hats, white shirts and short shin-length boots.⁴³ William’s new Assistant, William Steuart, whom William had just met for the first time in Hyderabad, was impressed: ‘The Nizam’s army … looked larger than ever I saw Scindia’s,’ he wrote. ‘He maintains few foot soldiers, but his cavalry are reckoned 40,000. Such as I have seen are excellent; the men are well dressed & the chiefs pride themselves in giving a uniform long gown to their troopers to distinguish them, some having jackets with two crossed swords in the way of chintz, others with one sword and some plume of yellow or red.’⁴⁴

The cosmopolitan mix in the bazaars was reflected in the architecture of the streets through which these crowds surged. While the bazaars and the fortifications were entirely Indian in style, many of the structures within the city looked for their inspiration to the heart of the Islamic world, bypassing the experiments of the Mughals in northern India to borrow direct from the tilework of the distant Ottomans, or the architectural models of Transoxiana. From atop his elephant Kirkpatrick could see what appeared to be displaced fragments of Timurid Bukhara and Samarkand: melon-ribbed domes that might happily have topped the tomb of Timur himself; delicate lozenges of highly coloured Izniklike tilework with blues as startling as a sapphire in an Ottoman dagger; even amadrassa which would not look in the least bit out of place in the maidan of Safavid Isfahan.

By late evening, having passed slowly through miles of choked bazaars, the English party finally reached the inner courtyard of the citadel. William’s first letter from Bidar is brief and official, noting only that the Minister, Aristu Jah,^am had abandoned precedent and etiquette and had personally conducted him straight to the Nizam’s durbar in an effort to be friendly, and to impress upon him ‘the anxious desire of the Nizam to connect himself as closely as possible with our government’.⁴⁵

William Steuart, however, left a much fuller description of the Nizam’s durbar at around this time. The Nizam and his Minister he mentions only briefly: ‘The Nizam is polite and extremely attentive,’ he wrote, ‘but his mermidons are haughty and overbearing in a high degree. His Minister is a clever but lazy hound whose avowed maxim is to distress all the subjects in order to please the avaricious disposition of his master whose beard he holds with both hands & with it can manage as he likes.’⁴⁶

This assessment by Steuart greatly underestimated the achievement of the two men who between them saved their kingdom from almost certain extinction: when Nizam Ali Khan acceded to the throne thirty-two years earlier in 1762, few would have guessed that, almost alone of the contending forces of the Deccan, it would be Hyderabad that would survive the vicissitudes of the next seventy-five years.

Although he underestimates the Nizam Ali Khan and his Minister, Steuart gives a revealing account of what it was actually like to attend the Nizam’s durbar, and the telling way it mixed Indian with Middle Eastern custom: eating paan, for example, in the Indian fashion, while drinking small cups of coffee à la Turque: ‘The chiefs after presenting Nuzzirs [symbolic offerings] retire to the adab gah & make their humble obeisance,’^I he wrote.

Afterwards [they] have permission to approach but seldom sit down. There is more state and pomp here than I ever saw at [the Mughal Emperor] Shah Alam’s durbar. Agreeably to the custom of the Nizam’s family he [Nizam Ali Khan] never smokes but swallows large balls of paun which as he has no teeth he cannot chew; he drinks a great deal of coffee, & extremely warm, having a fire in the middle of the durbar to heat it & cup bearers who deliver it in quick rotation in small agate cups. He keeps a great many women, has had or rather they have had 200 children of which number 30 are still alive & of these seven are sons & 23 daughters. The heir apparent looks as old as his father (who is 62) but I imagine is not above 37.

The durbar usually assembles at night; silver candlesticks wax & tallow candles, a constant supply of blue lights one after another held up on blue poles have a pretty effect; some amber tapers are kept burning near his Highness but their smell is so strong that I imagine it serves more to drown that of the tallow which certainly is not agreeable; one stink to drown away another.

Jewels are worn by all the chiefs, such as sarpèches [turban ornaments], pearl necklaces, bazoo bunds [armbands], & even those kurrahs over the wrist which women only in Hindustan wear. The Mussulmens here look like Hindoos, shave close & wear small turbans, long gowns like peishwas and cut the hair near the ear in the regular way of the uncut [i.e. uncircumcised] fellows.

The buildings in which the durbar took place reflected the magnificence of the gathering. William Kirkpatrick was very struck by the stark contrast between the grimness of the outer fortress and the intricate decoration of the private mosques and the apartments of the palaces in the inner citadel. Deccani craftsmen always compensated for their forbidding building material by filling their interiors with fantasies of tilework or stucco, carved woodwork and trompe-l’oeil wall paintings. Of nowhere was this more true than the Rangin Mahal, one of the most sublime medieval interiors in India, where William must have had his private audience with the Nizam. Here the walls were covered alternately with intricate tilework and sculpted panels of arabesques, the hard volcanic granite manipulated as easily as if it were as soft as plaster and as delicate as a lace ruff.

This atmosphere of sophisticated courtly sensuality is found in its most concentrated form in the Deccani miniatures which were being painted in the ateliers of the Nizam’s palaces.^an In the images produced in these workshops, water drips from fountains, parakeets fly to roost and peacocks cry from the mango trees.

Nothing about these charmed garden scenes indicates that the Marathas might ride into the outskirts of the city at any minute, burning and pillaging. Indeed, this calm artistic idyll stood in complete and direct contrast to the political reality of upheavals and traumas across the entire eighteenth-century Deccan. The Nizam’s father, Nizam ul-Mulk, had founded the semi-independent state of Hyderabad out of the disintegrating southern provinces of the Mughal Empire in the years following 1724. He was an austere figure, like his idol, the puritanical Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, instinctively disapproving of the arts and especially of the un-Koranic skill of miniature portrait-painting. A close watch was kept on his nobles, and those who held illicit parties during Muharram were reported to him by his spies. Permission for dance displays and nautches had to be sought from the durbar and was only granted on the occasion of festivals and marriages.⁴⁷

Nizam ul-Mulk was an ingenious general but an even more talented statesman, using bribery and intrigue to achieve what his old-fashioned and outmoded Mughal armies could not. While breaking from the direct control of Delhi, he made a point of maintaining his nominal loyalty to the Mughal Emperor, and throughout the eighteenth century the people of Hyderabad continued to refer to themselves as Mughals and saw their state as a semi-detached fragment of the old empire of Akbar and Shah Jehan. Nizam ul-Mulk also kept a careful watch on the Marathas, using spies and diplomacy to keep them in check. He warned his followers: ‘The Emperor Aurangzeb with his immense army and the expenditure of the entire treasure of Hindustan could not defeat them. Many families were ruined and yet no benefit came out of this campaign. I have made them obedient and faithful to me through diplomacy.’⁴⁸

At his death in 1748, this carefully-created structure tottered towards collapse as Nizam ul-Mulk’s sons fought among themselves and tried to establish themselves as rulers by entering into rival alliances with the neighbouring powers, notably the Marathas to the north and west and the French at Pondicherry to the east. It was fourteen years before Nizam Ali Khan—an illegitimate younger son—finally established himself on the throne, throwing his elder brother Salabat Jang into the dungeons of Bidar, where he was strangled.

By this time, the state looked as if it stood on the verge of extinction as the Marathas, the French, the English and the armies of Haidar Ali of Mysore swooped down on the extremities of Hyderabad like vultures, seizing chunks of the Nizam’s dominions for their own purposes. Yet Hyderabad did not collapse, thanks largely to the diplomacy and the carefully-constructed system of alliances created by Nizam Ali Khan. Militarily, Hyderabad was the weakest of the competing states of the Deccan when he took control, but only it and the East India Company would remain important powers by the time of his death. It was his extraordinary achievement to turn the state from the Sick Man of Late Mughal India into the vital strategic asset of the eighteenth-century Cold War, without whose friendship and support no power could gain dominance in India.

In 1794, when the Kirkpatrick brothers first met him, the Nizam was over sixty years old, a tall, gaunt figure who had lost his teeth and hair, but who retained his watchfulness and his skill at manipulating both the rival factions at his court and the weaknesses of his external enemies. A contemporary miniature of him shows him as an old man—emaciated, lightly freckled and clean-shaven—leaning back on the bolsters of his musnud;^ao to one side are placed a sword and a spittoon.⁴⁹ He is depicted as wise yet cautious, deep in conversation with his Minister in front of a white marble pavilion. He wears a semi-transparent jama of white muslin, and a tight white turban out of which emerges a jewelled aigrette. He has a gilded cummerbund, and a band of large pink gems gleam on his turban. James Kirkpatrick, who got to know him well, left a detailed pen portrait of him:

His stature is of the tallest and his frame still retains indications of that robustness, for which in his youth he was remarkable. His complexion is dark and his features, though never handsome, are by no means deficient in expression, bespeaking a thoughtful and not unintelligent mind. His mien is graceful and dignified, and his address replete with that princely courtesy and condescension, which while sufficiently calculated to inspire ease and confidence in all who approach him, bespeaks him not forgetful of his own dignity, or of the illustrious lineage he lays claim to and professes to set a high value upon.

He has generally I believe, been considered as a Prince who though not endowed with either splendid talents or great mental resources, has proved himself on some trying occasions not deficient in those arts which are considered in the East as constituting the essence of Government … His defects as a warrior are amply compensated by his skill as a politician.⁵⁰

Most contemporary observers, however, attributed the extraordinary skill with which the Hyderabadis had manoeuvred their way through the minefields of Deccani politics less to Nizam Ali Khan than to his brilliantand wily Prime Minister, Aristu Jah, ‘the Glory of Aristotle’. Though a ruthless politician, Aristu Jah was a deeply civilised man, and his extensive patronage of both painters and poets led to a revival in both arts after the austere rule of Nizam ul-Mulk. Perhaps partly because of this, a great many miniatures of him survive. They show a tall, cunning-looking man, heavily built with a wily expression, a hooked nose and a carefully trimmed beard. He is always shown towering over his contemporaries with a small red turban, a simple string of pearls over his chest, and another pearl bracelet around his right wrist; in his hand, invariably, is the snake of a gold hookah. Contemporary Hyderabadi chronicles say he never left this pipe for a second, and that ‘the smell of his scented tobacco’ was one of the great features of the Minister’s durbar. This passion for his pipe was something that also struck Edward Strachey when he met Aristu Jah:

The minister was smoking in the proper oriental style. He neither laid hold of his hookah nor did he open his mouth purposely to receive the mouthpiece, but his servant watched him, and put the point of it close to his lips. Now and then he stroked the minister’s whiskers with it and when a good opportunity offered [itself ] poked it a little way into his mouth. The minister who did not appear to have observed it before took a whiff. When he began to speak, the man took it out again, stroked his whiskers with the mouthpiece and again put it to his master’s mouth at the proper time. When the minister made a movement as if he was disposed to spit, one of his faithful attendants held out both hands and received a huge mouthful of spittle, with great care he then wiped it on a cloth which was by him and wrapped it up carefully, appearing then ready to receive in his hands any such deposit however precious, which his master might think fit to place there.⁵¹

In the durbar, alongside Aristu Jah and the Nizam, there was a third figure who would play a major role in the lives of both Kirkpatrick brothers, and indeed in time was to become a close relation by marriage of James. Mir Alam had risen to power from respectable but impoverished origins as the Private Secretary to Aristu Jah. When John Kennaway arrived in Hyderabad he saw Mir Alam merely as a sycophant in the train of the Minister: ‘I do not think he has much influence even with the Minister whose every sentiment and opinion he adopts with a blind servility, ’ he wrote in 1788.⁵²

Since then, however, Mir Alam had led a successful embassy to Calcutta, had befriended Lord Cornwallis and been made the Nizam’s vakil to the Company, through whom the Nizam’s relations with the British were to be channelled. As a result the Mir was beginning to show signs of increasing independence from Aristu Jah, his former patron, especially in the matter of the looming conflict with the Marathas, which he openly opposed, and compared to needlessly ‘throwing sand in a hornets’ nest’.⁵³

For much of his reign, Nizam Ali Khan had indeed avoided making war with the Marathas, and followed his father’s advice to woo them with diplomacy rather than challenge them with arms. Now however, partly under the influence of the Minister, he had decided to change his policy, and with the aid of his new infantry regiments trained by General Raymond, had allowed himself to be persuaded that it might finally be possible for his troops to meet the Marathas in battle. For this reason he and Aristu Jah were very anxious to forge an alliance with the English through William, and to enlist the armies of the Company on their side. Aristu Jah was the most Anglophile of the Nizam’s advisers, and alone in the durbar realised the real and growing military strength of the Company. His ideas, however, were not widely shared, and another powerful faction at court, led by the Paigah nobles who made up the Nizam’s praetorian guard, made no secret of the fact that they would have liked Hyderabad to ally with the Marathas and against the English. A third faction wished the Nizam to make an alliance with Tipu and the French.

What no one at court knew yet was that Sir John Shore, the new Governor General, had already decided to reject the Nizam’s request to the Company to unite against the Marathas. Before William Kirkpatrick set off to Hyderabad, Shore had briefed him to stick to the existing Triple Alliance, signed four years earlier in 1790, which bound the Marathas, the Nizam and the Company together as allies, and which isolated the Company’s great enemy Tipu Sultan, who remained outside the alliance. Events would show that this was a crucial error of judgement by Shore, and one that very nearly destroyed both the state of Hyderabad and the Company’s still fragile presence in southern and central India.

William Kirkpatrick initially made a very good impression on the Nizam’s court, not least for his exceptional linguistic abilities. Gobind Krishen, the Maratha vakil at the Hyderabad durbar, reported to Pune: ‘This Kirkpatrick has wonderful intelligence and mastery of Persian speech, is equally careful in writing, understands accounts, and is well informed in public business and is versed in astronomy. In this way he is expert in everything.’⁵⁴ William realised, however, that his popularity at the Nizam’s court would greatly diminish as soon as the Minister realised that he would not be persuaded to join in the projected campaign against the Marathas. As negotiations between the Nizam and the Marathas continued over the course of the next few months, and with the two sides openly preparing for war, William wrote to Shore that he was resisting all the attempts of Aristu Jah and the Nizam to lure the British ‘from our system of moderation and neutrality’.

He also did his best to persuade the Hyderabadis that in his opinion their army was simply not up to taking on the celebrated infantry regiments of the Marathas. These were trained in the latest French military techniques by one of the greatest military figures of eighteenth-century India, Comte Benoît de Boigne, and famed for their ‘wall of fire and iron’, which had wreaked havoc upon even the best-drilled Indian armies sent against them.⁵⁵ Aristu Jah, wrote Kirkpatrick, did not seem to think ‘the danger so imminent, as I should be inclined to do, were a brigade of De Boigne’s to be actually employed against him, for in this case I am afraid that the business would be over before the people at home would be able to send out the necessary orders for our taking this state under our protection’.⁵⁶

By December, however, Kirkpatrick realised that he was failing to get his message across: not only the Nizam, but the entire camp at Bidar had convinced themselves that victory against the Marathas was within their grasp. Every night the dancing girls sang songs about the forthcoming triumph, and Aristu Jah even announced to the court that when they took Pune he would send his Maratha counterpart Nana Phadnavis, ‘the Maratha Machiavelli’, off to exile in Benares ‘with a cloth about his loins, and a pot of water in his hands, to mutter incantations on the banks of the Ganges’. ‘There would appear to be a storm brewing in the head of [Aristu Jah],’ William Kirkpatrick wrote to Shore, ‘which may possibly burst at no great distance of time … Whenever it takes place I shall dread its consequence; and not be without my fears of these consequences being ere long.’⁵⁷

Kirkpatrick was right to be anxious. In December 1794, just as news arrived that his brother James had finally succeeded in getting transferred from Vizianagram to Hyderabad and was already on his way, the order was given. The Nizam’s huge army lumbered out of the safety of Bidar and headed off to war in the direction of the Maratha capital of Pune.

The campaign was as short as it was disastrous.

For three months the Nizam’s army advanced slowly towards Pune along the banks of the Manjirah River. The Marathas advanced equally slowly towards the Mughals (as the Hyderabadis called themselves^ap). Of the two armies, the Marathas’ was slightly larger—around 130,000 men against the Mughal total of around ninety thousand; the Maratha force was also much the more experienced and better led. Both armies were equally divided between cavalry and infantry, though only the Hyderbadis had a regiment of female infantry dressed in British-style redcoats, brought along primarily to protect the Nizam’s harem women, who also came along on the trip in a long caravan of covered elephant howdahs.⁵⁸

The slow march towards Pune was marked by frequent courtly but inconclusive negotiations between the two sides; to the end the Nizam insisted that he was not invading the Maratha territories, merely enjoying a prolonged hunting expedition along the marches of his territory. At every stage, negotiation was preferred to fighting, and intrigue to outright war. Like the baroque social etiquette of the Nizam’s court, the military strategy of the Nizam seemed like an elaborate and courtly charade, a slow and penetrating game of chess rather than a real campaign with living soldiers suffering actual fatalities.

While negotiations continued, both sides spent much of their energies on attempts at destabilising the army of the other through bribes and covert intelligence work. Aristu Jah spent a vast sum—rumoured to be around one crore rupees^aq—trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade Scindia and his famous de Boigne brigades to desert the Maratha army, while Nana Phadnavis spent a smaller sum—reportedly around seven lakh rupees^ar—trying to encourage the pro-Maratha and pro-Tipu factions in the Hyderabad durbar to betray Aristu Jah. Mir Alam, Aristu Jah’s former protégé, was believed to be among those who received Nana bribes.⁵⁹ The British Resident in Pune, Sir Charles Warre Malet, thought Mir Alam’s behaviour particularly suspicious when he came to the Maratha court to negotiate, and he relayed his suspicions back to William: ‘He appears to have done little else since his arrival at Pune,’ wrote Kirkpatrick to Shore, ‘but complain and insinuate perpetual suspicions [of Aristu Jah] to Sir Charles Malet, the utility of which I have never been able to discover. On the contrary they only serve to perplex and procrastinate matters.’⁶⁰

Aristu Jah, meanwhile, concentrated all his efforts on trying to persuade Kirkpatrick to throw in his lot—and more specifically the armies of the East India Company, especially the two British regiments stationed at Hyderabad—with the Nizam. But William refused to alter his position: in this war, he maintained, the Company was to be strictly neutral. He even rather stiffly refused to answer Aristu Jah’s question as to which route the Hyderabad army would do best to take, saying it was ‘against all sense of propriety’ for him to give advice on such a matter.

Finally, on the evening of 14 March 1795, the Nizam’s army arrived at the top of a ridge known as the Moori Ghat, and looked down to see the Maratha army encamped a day’s march below them. At eight o’clock the following morning, 15 March, the Nizam gave the order for his troops to descend from the heights of the ghat. The Marathas were waiting for them at the bottom.

Firing began soon after lunch, at around 2 p.m. It was the two rival battalions of French-trained infantry that came into contact first, with the ‘Corps Français de Raymond’ fighting under the French Republican tricolore and making steady progress into the centre of their Maratha counterparts, the famous de Boigne brigades, who fought under the French Bourbon emblems. To William’s great surprise, Raymond’s twelve newly raised infantry regiments used their higher altitude to great effect, showering de Boigne’s flanks with sprays of grapeshot. Kirkpatrick was more surprised still when the Mughal Women’s Regiment, the Zuffur Plutun or Victorious Battalion, advanced equally steadily downhill with their muskets, and succeeded in holding their own against the Maratha right wing.^as By nightfall, Raymond’s force, deserted by their Paigah cavalry escort, had been forced to retreat a little in the face of a fierce cannonade from de Boigne’s artillery. But the bulk of the Nizam’s army had succeeded in reaching their designated campsite on the banks of a rivulet three miles on from the slopes of Moori Ghat. There they dug in for the night, well positioned for the expected battle the following morning.

No one was quite sure at the time what went wrong, but just after eleven o’clock that night, a sudden panic broke out in the Nizam’s camp. Looking back on the rout the following morning, William wrote:

The events appear to me like a kind of dream, so unexpected, so unaccountable, and so amazing were they. Nothing in the least can be reasonably said to have gone wrong on the part of the Nizam’s army that was slightly engaged with the enemy. A couple of Sirdars [noblemen] of some note were killed, and perhaps a hundred men: but His Highnesses troops were in quiet possession of the ground they wanted to occupy for the night at 11pm, when the pusillanimity of the Nizam or of his Minister, or of both together, led to the fatal resolution of falling back … The consequences were such as might be expected: universal trepidation and great loss of baggage:—but these were only the immediate consequences. Those that are likely to follow threaten very seriously the future independence of this state, since it seems but too probable that His Highness will be obliged to yield to all the demands of the Pune government. ⁶¹

What in fact had happened, as Kirkpatrick later learned, was that an intermittent cannonade by the Marathas had panicked the Nizam’s women, and especially Bakshi Begum, the Nizam’s most senior wife, who threatened to unveil herself in public if the Nizam did not take his entire zenana(harem) into the shelter of the small and half-ruined moated fort of Khardla. This lay at the very bottom of Moori Ghat, just over three miles behind the front line. During the confusion of the Nizam’s inexplicable retreat, a small party of Marathas looking for water stumbled across a Mughal picket, and the brief exchange of fire in the dark was enough to throw the remaining Hyderabadi troops into a complete panic. They rushed back to the walls of the Khardla Fort, leaving all their guns, baggage camels, ammunition wagons, stores and food behind them.

When dawn broke the following morning, the Marathas found to their amazement that the Mughals had not only thrown away their strategic advantage, but left their arms, ammunition and supplies scattered over the battlefield while taking shelter in an utterly indefensible position. Charles Malet wrote in his official report that morning that ‘we are necessarily astonished at the important consequence that ensued in the unaccountable flight of the Nizam’s army, by which not only the respectability of his personal character and government was sacrificed, but the very existence of himself and his army endangered’.⁶² Their amazement did not, however, stop the Marathas from taking full advantage of the Mughal reverse: by ten o’clock in the morning they had brought in four hundred abandoned Mughal ammunition carts, two thousand camels and fifteen heavy cannon. By eleven they had completely surrounded the army of Hyderabad, and began raining shot down on the fort from the sixty cannon which they managed to manoeuvre onto the lower slopes of Moori Ghat. There had hardly been a battle; but already it was all over for the Nizam.⁶³

By the following morning provisions in the fort were already beginning to run low, and the Marathas had sent in an envoy to settle terms. ‘The distress of the army for water and forage is increasing hourly,’ wrote William, who had taken shelter with the rest of the Nizam’s entourage,

its quarters being so straightened that it can procure but little of either without such exertions as it does not appear disposed to make. The Maharatta durbar publickly holds a very moderate language on occasion of its late extraordinary success: but it remains to be seen whether its demands will correspond with its professions … Gobind Krishen [the Maratha envoy] has arrived to settle the terms of an accommodation … for the rest however I fear the approaching negotiations will be far from terminating in a manner favourable to the political interests of the Company.⁶⁴

In the event negotiations rambled on for twenty-two days. Each day the situation grew worse in the Hyderabad camp as the Marathas tightened the siege. Each day, as the Nizam hesitated, the Marathas raised their demands. Many in the Nizam’s camp suspected that the lack of any serious resistance or any attempt to break the siege was due to treachery within the Hyderabad ranks, with suspicion later falling on both Mir Alam and the pro-Maratha Paigah nobles. These suspicions increased when it emerged that the key Maratha demand was the disgrace and surrender of the presumed plotters’ principal enemy, the Nizam’s pro-English Minister, Aristu Jah. Whatever its cause, the scale of the disaster for Hyderabad was now increasingly clear: ‘The Nizam is obliged to yield to all the demands of the M[aratha]s,’ wrote William, ‘and ceases to be an independent prince.’⁶⁵

Many of the letters that William wrote at this period are lost, as the messengers who carried them failed to make it through the Maratha lines, and were cut down by the patrolling Pindary horsemen. The few which have survived show that the situation within the fort was insupportable, and that Kirkpatrick’s small English party was suffering as badly as the rest.

The water in the old fort was green and brackish and gave the defenders dysentery, but despite this sold for a rupee^at a cup. By the end of the first week all spare supplies of forage and food were finished, and the price for even a handful of lentils rose astronomically. The defenders cut down the Tamarind trees in the fort and ate their leaves and bark and unripe fruit. After these were exhausted, starvation began to set in: some died of hunger, others of thirst, and the squalor led to an outbreak of cholera.⁶⁶ By the end of the second week, a third of William’s escort and servants were dead. On 30 March he wrote to Calcutta:

The distress I am witness to hourly goes to my soul, and yet I am unable to relieve it even among my own narrow circle. I assure myself that Sir John Shore will not turn a deaf ear to the petition I have offered up on behalf of some of my sufferers—yet God only knows when or where their hardship will end. I have buried at least 14 or 15 of my people since the rout and we are very sickly. I have held up wonderfully well: but a trip to the sea is necessary to my restoration after what I have lately suffered from Rheumatism.⁶⁷

William was in fact playing down the seriousness of his own illness. Before the siege, the effect of spending the entire monsoon under canvas had already taken its toll, and he had had to spend more and more time flat on his camp bed, taking opium to relieve his pain. The rest of his party and their pack animals had also found the going hard. Even before they left Bidar, Kirkpatrick had lost two of his elephants and two of his camels. Now all of his escort and servants who were not dead were seriously ill, and there was little the Residency’s English doctor, George Ure, could do for them. Particularly badly affected was William’s Assistant, Steuart, who was languishing with a high fever. He never completely recovered, lingering on until October when his strength finally ebbed away.

For the Nizam, the end came on 17 April. A treaty was signed, giving the Marathas the crucial fortresses of Daulatabad,^au Ahmednagar and Sholapur as well as great swathes of Hyderabadi territory worth an annual thirty-five lakh rupees of revenue. The Nizam was left with a fragment of his old territories and an indefensible frontier, as well as a bill of two crore rupees^av in war reparations. The amount of territory to be ceded was reduced by nearly half at the last minute, but the price was the surrender of Aristu Jah, who was handed over as a hostage into the hands of his old enemy, the Maratha Prime Minister Nana Phadnavis. The contemporary Hyderabad historian Ghulam Husain Khan has left an account of the meeting of the two old rivals:

The first words Nana spoke to Aristu Jah were: ‘Nawab Sahib, the one crore [rupees] you spent [in bribes] didn’t achieve anything much, did it? Whereas the 7 lakhs I spent bribing the nobles in your government had a considerable effect—it even led to this our happy meeting!’

Aristu Jah answered grimly: ‘Such is fate!’

‘Your Excellency,’ continued Nana, ‘you undertook in this campaign to despatch me with dhoti and lota [water-pot] to Benares … now that it’s worked out rather differently, what are your intentions?’

‘Well, why don’t you send me on pilgrimage to God’s holy house at Mecca?’ replied Aristu Jah.

‘God willing, we will send your Excellency to the house of God, and this sinner to Benares, whereby we shall both gain spiritual credit. But first you must be the guest of our government for a few days, to observe and be entertained, isn’t that so?’

‘That is indeed so,’ replied Aristu Jah.

Then they both rose and went towards the [Maratha] camp, the two prime-ministers hand in hand … From there, stage by stage, they went to Pune, where Aristu Jah was imprisoned in an old ruined garden which had been appointed for him to reside in. One thousand youths trained in the English manner bearing muskets [sepoys from de Boigne’s brigades] and a thousand Arab mercenaries were posted around the garden to guard him, with several carpet-spreaders, bearers and servers, altogether about 100 attendants to keep him company, men of no rank who were the only ones allowed to enter the camp in the garden. Everyone coming in or going out was searched and any paper with writing on it was confiscated.⁶⁸

On 24 April 1795, William Kirkpatrick and his escort limped back into Hyderabad, a few days ahead of the Nizam’s defeated army. He found his brother James waiting for him at the Residency.

The two brothers had last seen each other sixteen months earlier, at Christmas in Vizianagram on the east coast, in the most optimistic circumstances. William’s career had suddenly revived and he had been able to use his influence and new powers of patronage to help his younger half-brother. Hyderabad was a major posting, and there was every reason to think that the brothers would have good opportunities for advancing their careers by increasing British influence there.

Now things were very different. The scale of the defeat suffered by the Hyderabadis raised a serious question mark about the long-term viability of the Nizam’s dominions, while the failure of the British to help their allies in any way had destroyed the Nizam’s confidence in the reliability of the Company; instead he now looked upon Raymond and the French as his real protectors, thus entirely changing the balance of power in the eighteenth-century precursor to the later Great Game. This was a disastrous development for the Company at a time when Britain and France were at war and victorious French armies were occupying Belgium and Holland, and were now menacing north Italy. Moreover, with the exile and imprisonment of Aristu Jah, the British had lost their main advocate at the Hyderabad court, and the durbar was now dominated by nobles deeply antagonistic to the Company. William was severely ill, and needed to leave Hyderabad to convalesce and recover his health in peace. Worse still, his Assistant, Steuart, was clearly beyond recovery. In such circumstances it was not a happy reunion.

Within a month of the Nizam’s return, it began to be apparent that the French were successfully filling the place once occupied by the English. The Nizam said he was seriously considering disbanding the two English battalions which were stationed at Hyderabad, pointing out to William, with some justification, that there was no point in maintaining them at such a heavy cost when they could not be used to defend him from his prime enemy, the Marathas. On 13 May, William and James went together to see the Nizam, and reported that ‘his discourse chiefly consisted of enquiries and observations relative to the posture of affairs in Europe … From the whole tenor it was easy to perceive that some Frenchman had been taking considerable pains by utterly false or highly exaggerated accounts, to impress him with a firm belief that nothing could any longer resist his nation … ’⁶⁹ Subsequent despatches were filled with details of the growing French power at court and the serious threat to British interests posed by Raymond’s French brigades, which the Nizam had now authorised him to increase in size to ten thousand men.

In November, after Raymond swiftly and efficiently put down a revolt by the Nizam’s younger son, Ali Jah, his rise became even more irresistible. William wrote to his friend Jonathan Duncan in Bombay that only

three years ago [Raymond] was an obscure partisan, but is now at the head of a disciplined force of at least 10,000 infantry with a well equipped train of artillery, pretty well officered with Europeans who are of his own nation and principles. This man who, I have reason to think, is very ill-disposed towards our nation is, you will easily conceive, in more respects than one the source of much uneasiness to me. ⁷⁰

The Nizam rewarded Raymond for his suppression of Ali Jah’s revolt by raising him to a position of new eminence within the durbar and giving him two Persian titles—Azdhar e-Jang, the Dragon of War, and Mutahwar ul-Mulk, the Bravest in the State.⁷¹ He was also awarded a huge estate, located in the strategically vital region immediately next to the Hyderabadi citadel Golconda.^aw

Over the following year, things went from bad to worse. Already the British were alarmed by reports that the French Republican officers in Tipu Sultan’s island fortress of Seringapatam had founded a Mysore Jacobin Club ‘for framing laws conformable with the laws of the Republic’, which had planted a ‘Liberty Tree’ in the Sultan’s capital.⁷² Now ‘Citizen Tippoo’ was discovered by British interceptions to be in communication with Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he formally invited to visit India to liberate the country and expel the British. He had even sent ambassadors to Paris along with a draft treaty in which he proposed an alliance to drive the British out of India.⁷³

It also became clear that Raymond was in regular touch not only with the French officers who drilled Tipu’s infantry, but also with the French Revolutionary command in Pondicherry and Mauritius. On 16 December 1796, William wrote in cipher to Shore, the Governor General, that his spies in the French camp had discovered that ‘Raymond has very lately received a commission from the French Directory; and also that it has been given out in his camp that Tippoo has despatched a large quantity of provisions to Mangalore for the use of the French armament daily expected to arrive at that Port. The accounts may be false, but they are at least an indication of the wishes and disposition of the French party here.’⁷⁴

Shore replied, also in cipher, by asking if it was possible to use subterfuge somehow to ‘frame’ or discredit Raymond so as to make him appear suspect in the Nizam’s eyes—a proposal which might imply that the Kirkpatrick brothers already had experience in such covert intelligence operations. But William replied that he thought the plan too risky, and ‘attended with much more hazard of discredit to myself, than danger to him’.⁷⁵ There was, he advised, only one way of overturning Raymond’s influence: to negotiate a treaty with the Nizam unambiguously promising British support in the event of a Maratha attack. Only then might the Nizam possibly consider himself safe enough to dispense with the support of his French regiments. As before, Shore dithered, and eventually refused permission for William to explore the possibility of such a treaty.⁷⁶

This was the position when William’s health forced him to resign his post as Resident. By early summer 1797 he knew that, despite the precariousness of the British position in Hyderabad, he was simply too ill to continue in the job. For several months he had been telling Shore of his extreme ‘sufferings from rheumatism and a disordered stomach … I might perhaps be able to go on for a year at H[yderabad], yet so much and so often do I suffer from the pains that have so long afflicted me; and so firmly fixed does the constant coldness of my extremities and especially my hands appear to be that I think I should be little better than a dead weight in a situation requiring not only much mental exertion but also a good deal of bodily fatigue.’⁷⁷ By the end of 1796 Shore had given him permission to retire to the coast whenever he felt the need. Writing to the Handsome Colonel in November, William stated that ‘I wait for nothing but the return of Peace in Europe (on which all our politics in this part of the world continually hinge) in order to see what a change of air will do for my shattered frame … The Cape would afford me the best chance.’⁷⁸

But it was not just peace William was waiting for. There was one thing more to be resolved with Shore before he could leave: his brother’s succession to his job. Since the death of Steuart in October 1795, James had been William’s deputy at the Residency—a huge jump in rank for a humble lieutenant who prior to his arrival in Hyderabad had been commanding an obscure garrison in the tribal belt on the modern Andhra—Orissa border. But James had flourished in Hyderabad, where his unusual linguistic skills combined with his instinctive sympathy and liking for Mughal culture had proved a major asset to William.

James had immediately struck up an excellent relationship with the Nizam, and by simple courtesy gained first his ear, and then, later, his trust. Several years later he explained what he believed to be the secret of his success in Hyderabad: ‘The people at Madras I am told are at a loss to conceive by what magic I always continue to work my ends out of the durbar, and if you wish to know what the magic consists in, I will inform you in a few words, that it consists in treating old Nizzy with a great deal of respect and deference, humouring him in all his innocent whims and wishes.’⁷⁹ Typical was James’s idea of ordering a special quilt for the old man as the Hyderabadi winter set in: ‘I am glad to hear the pelisse for old Nizzy is on its way hither,’ he wrote to Calcutta. ‘It will arrive in very good season as the cold weather is just setting in, when the old gentleman requires warm clothing. You have no idea how kindly these marks of attention are taken by him; I may truly say that by such attentions I have gained his warm heart.’⁸⁰

James had also proved himself adept at the kind of intelligence work essential in so faction-ridden and strategically sensitive a posting, where the spies of each rival grouping eavesdropped on each other in a rapid merry-go-round of espionage. As events subsequently showed, in his first two years at Hyderabad James had succeeded in setting up an extensive network of spies and contacts in the court and the French camp, ranging from sweepers and harem guards to various senior Begums in the Nizam’s mahal,some of Raymond’s officers and the Nizam’s official court historian and artist, Tajalli Ali Shah.

William was impressed—and a little surprised—by the performance of his younger brother: ‘I will honestly own,’ he wrote to Shore, ‘that I was a stranger, as I believe he himself also was, to the fullest extents of his talents and capacity for this business, till by being left a few months to himself they had the opportunity of developing themselves.’⁸¹ He and James had become very close in the time they spent living together in the Hyderabad Residency. William confided to Shore that if his brother got the job of Resident he felt quite sure that he would support him financially if the change of air at the Cape failed to mend his wretched health and he was forced to retire altogether from the Company: ‘Such is my reliance on his fraternal affection, and on his attachment to my children, and so infinitely better a life is his than mine, that I should consider myself as much more securely provided for by his obtaining [the job of Resident], than I would be by my aiming to retain this situation for another year or two.’^ax

In the event, James was made Acting Resident—effectively put on probation and given a chance to prove himself—while William was despatched to the Cape to recover his health sometime in the middle of the hot summer of 1797. William was still far from recovered the following January when he was introduced to the incoming Governor General, Lord Wellesley, at Anne Barnard’s house. The two immediately hit it off, sharing a common Francophobia and a similarly bullish attitude to the future of British rule in India.

Writing to his friend Colonel John Collins in Calcutta shortly after he had been offered the job of Wellesley’s Military Secretary, William confided: ‘I have had many conversations with his Ldship since his arrival here [the Cape], in the course of which I have satisfied all his enquiries relative to the politics at the court of Hyderabad … he appears to be extremely well informed for a stranger to Indian affairs [and] to be of pleasing easy manners.’⁸² More importantly, William wrote that he had persuaded Wellesley of the necessity of signing an unambiguous treaty of friendship and support with the Nizam, something Shore had always refused to do. In due course William wrote a long letter to James explaining how to open negotiations with the Nizam; and a few days after this Wellesley wrote himself. James was thrilled at the chance to take on the French, and wrote back flattered and elated by the new Governor General’s ‘wise and liberal propositions’ and ‘masterly’ instructions.

To William he wrote a more heartfelt reply: ‘I need not, I am sure my dear Will, say anything to you on the subject of my gratitude to that most worthy nobleman [Lord Wellesley] for his uniform condescension and kindness towards me. You know my heart, and can form a good idea of my feelings on the occasion … ’⁸³