Farzana Read online

  Every low Frenchman he advanced…repaid his unjust preference with ingratitude; low they were in every sense of the word, in birth, in education and in principle. He turned the force into a minute miniature of the French Revolution – wretches were raised from cooks, bakers and barbers to majors and colonels and absurdly entrusted with the command of brigades – the quintessence of egalité and the acme of the French Revolution.5

  A corollary of Perron’s devotion to ‘the Napoleonic scheme’ was that he hated anything to do with the British ‘and made no secret of his disposition to thwart and oppose them in every possible way.’6 The intensity of his hatred was matched only by George Thomas’s loathing of the French. The two men could never have worked together, and when Daulat Rao Scindia asked the Irishman to remain in his service Thomas replied loftily that ‘Principles of honour forbid me from acting under the command of a Frenchman’. Resigning, he removed his force from Perron’s command and returned to his duties with his adoptive father Appa Khande Rao in the north.

  Then came another blow. During a confrontation with the Sikhs near the town of Shamli in the Doab, Thomas received an urgent message from his employer. Appa Khande Rao had been suffering for some time from an incurable illness, probably cancer, and wrote to his adopted son saying that he could bear the pain no longer. He had resolved to end his life ‘by plunging into the sacred waters of the Ganges’, and if Thomas wished to bid him farewell, he should return to his headquarters forthwith. But the message had been delayed on its way. Thomas had barely set off when he was greeted by the news that, finding the Ganges a river too far, Appa Khande Rao had drowned himself in the Jumna.

  The death, two years earlier, of Mahadji Scindia had marked the end of an era. The sainted Ahalyabai Holkar, ‘the most sober and capable ruler that the house of Holkar has ever produced’,7 had passed away at the age of seventy in August 1795, and her cousin Tukoji, ‘an imbecile in both mind and body’ since his defeat by de Boigne, would follow suit in August 1797. So had, in October 1795, the twenty-one year old peshwa. He had lived the whole of his short life under the stifling control of his father’s chief minister Nana Fadnavis and had deliberately thrown himself off the roof of his palace. ‘Having fractured several limbs and been much wounded by the tube of a fountain on which he fell’,8 the melancholy young man had then ‘expired in the arms of his closest friend’. The death of the peshwa turned Poona into a veritable viper’s nest of back-stabbing and intrigue as the Maratha warlords tussled for the right to choose a successor. But the departures that most affected George Thomas were the retirement in 1796 of Benoit de Boigne, and the suicide in the spring of 1797 of Appa Khande Rao. That these two most appreciative and remunerative of employers should be succeeded by men who became his inveterate enemies was ill fortune indeed.

  Appa Khande Rao’s heir, his nephew Wavan Rao, was naturally resentful of the favours and affection his uncle had bestowed on George Thomas. Once confirmed in his inheritance, he therefore demanded the return of all Thomas’s estates. In an effort to compromise, Thomas offered to pay him their equivalent value, but Wavan Rao brushed the offer aside and ‘was foolhardy enough to resort to force’.9 No doubt Thomas would have seen off the ‘undisciplined rabble’ that passed for Wavan Rao’s army had Perron not welcomed the confrontation as an opportunity to teach the bumptious British maverick a lesson. The French general sent a battalion, led by Farzana’s former officer and Thomas’s erstwhile colleague, the ubiquitous Chevalier Dudrenac, to assist Wavan Rao, and against their combined forces Thomas stood little chance. By the end of 1797 he had lost everything except Jhajjar, the revenues of which were nowhere near enough to support his 3,000-strong army.

  Seeing their commander without prospects and with no obvious means of maintaining either them or himself, most armies would simply have evaporated, wandering off without a backward glance in search of another employer. But, following Farzana’s example, Thomas had established a generous welfare system for his soldiers, paying pensions to those wounded in his service and to the widows and children of men killed in action. Knowing that few other commanders would treat them so well, his troops remained in Jhajjar, trusting him to find some way of providing for them and expressing neither surprise nor reluctance when he declared that the only solution was to take to open plunder. Thomas’s career was going backwards. ‘In the service of Begum Sumru he had been a respectable military adventurer, of the type (in a humble way) of Marshal Keith in Prussia,’ wrote H.G. Keene. ‘Now he became a freebooter pure and simple.’10

  To outward appearances, George Thomas derived as much pleasure from life as a ‘glorified gang-robber’ as from a career as a respectable military adventurer. There was the same energy in his unprovoked assaults on defenceless districts as there had been in his authorized confrontations with the Sikhs. There was the same success too as towns, forts and villages succumbed to the ferocity of his raids or meekly paid up to pre-empt them. But his volatile temper was increasingly evident and he was drinking heavily. One of his native officers, interviewed in extreme old age, recalled that ‘Jehazi-sahib used to be drunk for a month at a time, but was always sober in times of trouble.’11 Danger kept him sane, yet Jhajjar was too small, his victims too submissive and his triumphs too trivial. He needed something more.

  North-west of Jhajjar lay a vast tract of semi-desert known (from a more verdant era) as Haryana, ‘the Green Land’. Wild and for the most part uncultivated, and covering an area of over 3,000 square miles between the Sikhs in the north, Delhi in the east, and the great Bikaner desert in the south and west, Haryana ‘acknowledged no master and tempted none’ – except Thomas. Eyeing this wilderness from the confines of Jhajjar, he realized its potential. At the end of 1797 he gathered up his army and set out to make himself master of Haryana.

  His first targets were the towns of Hissar and Hansi; Hissar because it was the ancient capital of Haryana and had a population worth plundering, and Hansi because it had a fort. Dating from the eleventh century but ruined since the seventeenth, Hansi Fort was celebrated as one of the strongest in India; ‘above 40,000 Mussulmen lie buried on the circumjacent plain, of the various armies of the faithful who attempted to wrest it from the Hindoos’, wrote Lewis Ferdinand Smith.12 Its crumbling walls enclosed an area of more than 30 acres, yet were home, when Thomas arrived, to just one fakir and two lions.

  ‘Here,’ Thomas told William Francklin, ‘I established my capital.’ Rebuilding the massive walls would have been the work of decades, but once he had evicted the fakir and the lions the Irishman did what he could to fortify his ‘capital’, patching up the ancient brickwork, restoring the wells, building stables and barracks and constructing a suitably forbidding gateway. ‘His gentle and just rule over his subjects and his manifest power to protect them from outside spoliators,’ writes Jadunath Sarkar, ‘soon re-peopled the deserted town, and its population rose to 6,000 souls under his care.’

  ‘I established a mint,’ continued Thomas, ‘and coined my own rupees, which I made current in my army and country; as from the commencement of my career at Jhajjar I had resolved to establish an independency. I employed workmen and artificers of all kinds… I cast my own artillery, commenced making muskets, matchlocks and powder, and in short, made the best preparations for carrying on an offensive and defensive war.’13

  His ‘offensive war’ consisted of conquering the rest of Haryana, marching from district to district bullying or bribing the local chiefs into accepting his authority and incorporating their troops into his army, until he had subjugated the full 3,000 square miles, creating what he called ‘an independent principality over which I could rule with sovereign power’. His ‘defensive war’ came, as he must have known it would, when he announced his next objective. ‘I wished to put myself in a capacity of attempting a conquest of the Punjab, and aspired to the honour of planting the British standard on the banks of the Attock.’ The Attock was the Indus. Power, it seemed, had gone to the Irishman’s head. Why else would
he contemplate what Keene called ‘a conquest from which Alexander the Great had shrunk’?

  Military historians have estimated that at its peak George Thomas’s army consisted of 10,000 men and more than fifty field guns. Although dismissed by purists as undisciplined, with no formal uniform and a distinctly informal relationship with its unconventional commander, it was an extremely effective fighting force with a flair for winning battles. Thomas himself might be regarded as a crazy dreamer, but with this powerful weapon at his disposal his ambition could not be ignored. Neighbouring opinion was unanimous – he must be stopped. The rajahs of Bikaner and Jaipur thought so because their borders with Haryana had already felt the sharp edge of his sword; the Sikhs thought so because he had declared that their Punjabi heartland was his next target, and Perron thought so because Thomas was his bête noire.

  Old feuds were set aside and old enmities suspended as these unlikely allies plotted the downfall of the man who now dared call himself the ‘Rajah from Tipperary’. Then came the moment Farzana must have been dreading. The Sardhana Brigade was ordered by Daulat Rao Scindia to assist in the defeat and capture of George Thomas.

  Refusing the order was out of the question. Whatever her feelings for George Thomas, Farzana’s authority and the future of the brigade depended on compliance. But when she sent for Captain Saleur and told him that the brigade was duty-bound to obey the order, she added that on no account was it to be responsible for harming the man who had saved her life. Then all she could do was keep her head down and wait.

  END OF A DREAM

  When Thomas boasted of conquering the largely Sikh-ruled Punjab on behalf of the British, he was being deadly serious. ‘I have nothing in view but the welfare of my King and country.’ he wrote to the authorities in Calcutta. ‘I shall be sorry to see my conquests fall to the Marathas. I wish to give them to my King and to serve him for the remainder of my days.’14 But he had chosen a moment when British attention was focused elsewhere; and his suggestion – unfortunately, in the opinions of some – was ignored.

  In 1798 there had been a change of Governor General in Bengal. The avowedly pacific Sir John Shore had followed the instructions of the Company and the British government not to intervene in the internal wars of India. But Shore had been replaced by Lord Mornington (soon to become Marquess Wellesley), an uncompromising empire builder who had barely touched Indian soil before he was preparing for battle. The fact that Napoleon Bonaparte had just landed in Egypt with the stated intention of proceeding to India gave Wellesley the pretext he needed. France’s greatest ally in India was Tipu Sultan of Mysore, who had long been in correspondence with Paris and was calling himself Citoyen Tipu in anticipation of a mutually rewarding alliance.

  The British had fought three wars against Mysore, but these had left Tipu in possession of half his kingdom and still defiantly advertising his French sympathies. Wellesley had therefore mobilized some 40,000 troops (including a division commanded by his brother Arthur, the future Duke of Wellington) for a fourth and last war to topple Tipu and end Mysore’s defiance. Not only did George Thomas therefore receive no encouragement from the British over the Punjab, he received no support from them when Perron and his assorted allies decided to bring his Haryana ‘kingdom’ to an end.

  The resulting campaign against Thomas would become the stuff of legend, largely thanks to the European officers in the Maratha army who took part in it. Lewis Ferdinand Smith, now a captain, was serving under Perron, as were the Sardhana Brigade’s former commander Major Evans, the Chevalier Dudrenac, junior subalterns James and Robert Skinner, and John Hessing’s son George. These men, all of whom knew Thomas personally, had watched his exploits in Haryana like spectators at a high-wire act, willing him to succeed in a stunt they themselves would never have dared attempt. They fought against him because they were being paid to, but they took more pride in the contest than in their victory.

  In letters, and journals and memoirs, and in the case of Smith in newspaper articles, they told of how Thomas had been poised on the banks of the Sutlej for his invasion of the Punjab when he was informed that a Maratha army under Perron’s second-in-command – Louis Bourquien, the one-time cook who like so many others had once served in the Sardhana Brigade – was moving into southern Haryana; of how Thomas had ridden 96 miles in less than forty-eight hours* to pre-empt a Maratha attack on Jhajjar and of how he had then dragged his field guns across miles of strength-sapping sand to the defence of Hansi. They lauded his courage and tactical brilliance as, for nearly five months, he evaded capture by a force many times larger than his own, and they recorded how finally, with George-garh fallen to the Marathas, his army decimated and all but one of his European officers dead, he took refuge in Hansi Fort.

  Both Major Evans and Smith’s younger brother were killed in the subsequent battle for Hansi. (‘I hope the liberal reader will permit me to indulge my feelings for the loss of an incomparable brother,’ wrote Lewis Ferdinand, ‘killed in the storm of Thomas’s camp whilst gallantly leading up his battalion to the charge. Such a brother I sincerely believe the world never produced, for the warmth of his fraternal affection.’) But so ineffective were their cannonballs against the bulky earthen walls of the fort, and so fierce was Thomas’s defence of his capital that eventually the Marathas had to settle for a siege. After a month spent in tense expectation of a brilliant defensive manoeuvre from Thomas, Bourquien sent Smith into the fort under a flag of truce to parlay.

  But to his eternal sorrow, Smith discovered that far from planning a daring escape, Thomas had ‘abandoned himself to one of those prolonged debauches to which he was unfortunately addicted’ and was staggeringly drunk. ‘To mitigate the severity of his misfortunes and dissipate the dangers with which he was environed,’ wrote a sympathetic Smith, ‘I advised him to an honourable surrender. He followed my counsel, surrendered the fort on 1st January 1802, and with his family and private property was conveyed to the Company’s frontiers under my protection.’

  Thomas owed this unexpectedly lenient treatment less to Farzana’s precaution than to his admirers in the Maratha army. ‘On our side,’ wrote James Skinner, ‘Bourquien was the only French officer, the rest were country-borns and English who agreed that it would be disgraceful if Thomas should be taken prisoner and put into confinement; for Bourquien had declared in bravado that so he would use that blackguard Englishman when he got hold of him.’15 But by plying Bourquien with drink until he was ‘in high spirits and good humour’, the group had managed to persuade him to offer Thomas terms, and ‘when at last he called out in his broken English “Well Gentlemen, you do as you like,” we lost no time in making use of this power.’

  Heartsick and exhausted, Thomas was escorted to Anupshahr by Lewis Ferdinand Smith and handed over to Captain William Francklin of the Bengal Army. Francklin had been detailed to take Thomas to Calcutta and put him on a ship back to Ireland, and it was the Irishman’s extraordinary reminiscences during their apparently leisurely voyage down the Ganges that inspired Francklin to write The Military Memoirs of Mr. George Thomas. So determined was he to do his subject justice that he delayed their progress with a three-month stay in Benares. But not long after they had resumed their journey Thomas was taken ill. Francklin arranged for him to be transferred to the military cantonments at nearby Berhampore. And there, on 22 August 1802, George Thomas died. He was forty-six years old.

  Before leaving Anupshahr George Thomas had made one last request. Given that it was common practice for European men returning home to leave their Indian-born wives and families behind in India, it raised no eyebrows and was willingly granted. He asked that his wife, his three young sons and his baby daughter be conveyed to Sardhana and left in the care of Farzana.

  ____________________________

  * Levassoult died in late May or early June 1795; October is thought to be the date when the stone was placed on his grave. The inscription is now barely legible.

  * This was Smith’s version but, writin
g many years later in the Calcutta Review, Keene would have Thomas’s ‘fine Persian horse carrying his master 120 miles in 22 hours’.

  PART THREE

  THE ONLY LADY AT THE TABLE

  1803–1836

  13

  A GENIUS FOR MAJESTY

  The death of George Thomas in 1802 was followed within a few months by that of Walter Reinhardt’s son Louis Balthazar. Beyond the fact that drink had played a part both in their lives and their deaths, the two men could hardly have had much in common. Where Thomas attracted almost universal admiration, Louis Balthazar attracted nothing but contempt. He had remained incarcerated since the Sardhana mutiny, and Farzana had been careful to keep her distance. But when he died at the age of forty-eight she arranged for him to be buried close to his father in Agra. Officially he died of cholera, unofficially he died of drink. Rumours that he had been poisoned by Farzana lest he make another attempt to take over the musnud of Sardhana never gained credence; ‘as the son of Sombre was too silly to be dreaded,’ wrote Lewis Ferdinand Smith, ‘so he was too insignificant to be poisoned.’

  Balthazar’s son, Aloysius, had predeceased his father by less than a year but, probably for Reinhardt’s sake, Farzana continued to support his wife Juliana and their daughter Julia Anne. She invited them, as she had done his still-surviving mother Bara Bibi, to move to Sardhana. To George Thomas’s family also she gave a permanent home. His children grew up in Sardhana and at least two of the Thomas boys later joined the Sardhana Brigade; Farzana became particularly attached to the second son, John, a gentle dreamer whom she cared for, it was said, as dearly as if he had been her own.