Arthur Wellesley

Arthur Wellesley arrived in India in 1797 as colonel of the 33rd Foot. His elder brother Richard arrived the following year as Governor-General — the man who would demand a subsidiary alliance Tipu Sultan could not accept and march before the final answer arrived. The family connection did the younger brother no harm: he was given responsibility for the campaign's preparations, which in a war decided by supply was not a ceremonial job.

Thirty miles from the capital, Tipu Sultan made a stand. Wellesley commanded in the action, and the 33rd on its own broke a force reported at some ten thousand attackers, earning the commander-in-chief's thanks. It was a clean success, and it drove the Mysoreans back inside their walls.

Then came the episode that matters more. On the night of 5 April 1799, Wellesley was ordered to clear a watercourse and grove called Sultanpet Tope, held by Mysorean troops and swept by rocket fire. Attacking in the dark, through cover, his force was broken up and driven back; he lost control of his men, became separated from them, and had to report the failure in person. The position was taken the next day, in daylight and with proper reconnaissance.

It was a small action with no bearing on the outcome of the war, and it stayed with him. The lesson — never attack ground you have not seen, at night, without knowing what is in it — is one he applied for the next sixteen years, at a scale that decided Europe.

Wellesley commanded the reserve on 4 May and did not lead the assault; that was Baird, who had spent more than three years a prisoner in the fort. But when the plunder of the captured city got out of hand it was Wellesley who was appointed to command in Srirangapatna and restore order, and he stayed on as Governor of the place.

He formed a professional judgement of the enemy's equipment that is worth recording, because it cuts against the romantic version: having handled the captured artillery park, he rated Mysore's guns inferior to the Maratha ordnance he met four years later. What impressed him was the rockets.

India made him. From Srirangapatna he went on to command against the Marathas, winning at Assaye in 1803 — a battle he later called the hardest fighting he ever saw, harder than anything in Europe. He returned to Britain with a reputation, took the Peninsular command, drove the French out of Spain, and on 18 June 1815 beat Napoleon at Waterloo.

The through-line is the point. A young officer sent to south India to fight Tipu Sultan learned there how to move an army that eats, how to reconnoitre before committing, and how to hold a defensive position — and the man Europe remembers for stopping Napoleon served his apprenticeship against Mysore. The same pattern runs through Cornwallis, who arrived having lost America, and through Baird, who arrived as a returning prisoner.