Richard Colley Wesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley, KG, PC, PC, styled Viscount Wellesley from
birth until 1781 and known as The Earl of Mornington from 1781 until 1799, was an Irish
and British politician and colonial administrator. He was the eldest son of Garret Wesley, 1st
Earl of Mornington, an Irish peer, and Anne, the eldest daughter of Arthur Hill-Trevor,
1st Viscount Dungannon; and brother of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington. He first
made his name as Governor-General of India between 1798 and 1805 and later served as
Foreign Secretary in the British Cabinet and as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
Education and early career Wellesley was born in 1760 in Ireland, where
his family were part of the Ascendancy, the old Anglo-Irish aristocracy. He was educated
at the Royal School, Armagh, Harrow School and Eton College, where he distinguished himself
as a classical scholar, and at Christ Church, Oxford.
In 1780, he entered the Irish House of Commons for Trim until the following year, when by
his father's death he became 2nd Earl of Mornington, taking his seat in the Irish House of Lords.
He was elected Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Ireland in 1782, a post he held for the
following year. Due to the extravagance of his father and grandfather, he found himself
so indebted that he was ultimately forced to sell all the Irish estates. However in
1781 he was appointed to the coveted position of Custos Rotulorum of Meath.
In 1784 he joined also the British House of Commons as member for Bere Alston. Soon afterwards
he was appointed a Lord of the Treasury by William Pitt the Younger.
In 1793 he became a member of the Board of Control over Indian affairs; and, although
he was best known for his speeches in defence of Pitt's foreign policy, he was gaining the
acquaintance with Oriental affairs which made his rule over India so effective from the
moment when, in 1797, he accepted the office of Governor-General of India.
Work in India
Mornington seems to have caught Pitt's large political spirit in the period 1793 to 1797.
That both had consciously formed the design of acquiring a great empire in India to compensate
for the loss of the American colonies is not proved; but the rivalry with France, which
in Europe placed Britain at the head of coalition after coalition against the French republic
and empire, made Mornington's rule in India an epoch of enormous and rapid extension of
British power. Robert Clive won and Warren Hastings consolidated the British ascendancy
in India, but Mornington extended it into an empire. On the voyage outwards, he formed
the design of annihilating French influence in the Deccan.
Soon after his landing, in April 1798, he learned that an alliance was being negotiated
between Tipu Sultan and the French republic. Mornington resolved to anticipate the action
of the enemy, and ordered preparations for war. The first step was to effect the disbandment
of the French troops entertained by the Nizam of Hyderabad.
The invasion of Mysore followed in February 1799, and the campaign was brought to a swift
conclusion by the capture of Seringapatam on 4 May 1799 and the killing of Tipu Sultan.
In 1803, the restoration of the Peshwa proved the prelude to the Mahratta war against Sindhia
and the raja of Berar, in which his brother Arthur took a leading role. The result of
these wars and of the treaties which followed them was that French influence in India was
extinguished, that forty million people and ten millions of revenue were added to the
British dominions, and that the powers of the Maratha and all other princes were so
reduced that Britain became the true dominant authority over all India. He found the East
India Company a trading body, but left it an imperial power.
He was an excellent administrator, and picked two of his talented brothers for his staff:
Arthur was his military adviser, and Henry was his personal secretary. He founded Fort
William College, a training centre intended for those who would be involved in governing
India. In connection with this college, he established the governor-general's office,
to which civilians who had shown talent at the college were transferred, in order that
they might learn something of the highest statesmanship in the immediate service of
their chief. A free-trader like Pitt, he endeavoured to remove some of the restrictions on the
trade between Britain and India. Both the commercial policy of Wellesley and
his educational projects brought him into hostility with the court of directors, and
he more than once tendered his resignation, which, however, public necessities led him
to postpone till the autumn of 1805. He reached England just in time to see Pitt before his
death. He had been created a Peer of Great Britain in 1797, and in 1799 became Marquess
Wellesley in the Peerage of Ireland. He formed an enormous collection of over 2,500 painted
miniatures in the Company style of Indian natural history.
Napoleonic Wars On the fall of the coalition ministry in 1807
Wellesley was invited by George III to join the Duke of Portland's cabinet, but he declined,
pending the discussion in parliament of certain charges brought against him in respect of
his Indian administration. Resolutions condemning him for the abuse of power were moved in both
the Lords and Commons, but defeated by large majorities.
In 1809 Wellesley was appointed ambassador to Spain. He landed at Cádiz just after the
Battle of Talavera, and tried unsuccessfully to bring the Spanish government into effective
co-operation with his brother, who, through the failure of his allies, had been forced
to retreat into Portugal. A few months later, after the duel between George Canning and
Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, and the resignation of both, Wellesley accepted
the post of Foreign Secretary in Spencer Perceval's cabinet. Unlike his brother Arthur, he was
an eloquent speaker, but was subject to inexplicable "black-outs" when he was apparently unaware
of his surroundings. He held this office until February 1812, when
he retired, partly from dissatisfaction at the inadequate support given to Wellington
by the ministry, but also because he had become convinced that the question of Catholic emancipation
could no longer be kept in the background. From early life Wellesley had, like his brother
Arthur, been an advocate of Catholic emancipation, and with the claim of the Irish Catholics
to justice he henceforward identified himself. On Perceval's assassination he, along with
Canning, refused to join Lord Liverpool's administration, and he remained out of office
till 1821, criticising with severity the proceedings of the Congress of Vienna and the European
settlement of 1814, which, while it reduced France to its ancient limits, left to the
other great powers the territory that they had acquired by the Partitions of Poland and
the destruction of the Republic of Venice. He was one of the peers who signed the protest
against the enactment of the Corn Laws in 1815. His reputation never fully recovered
from a fiasco in 1812 when he was expected to make a crucial speech denouncing the new
Government, but suffered one of his notorious "black-outs" and sat motionless in his place.
Ireland and later life
Wellesley lived together for many years with Hyacinthe-Gabrielle Roland, an actress at
the Palais Royal. She had three sons and two daughters by Wellesley before he married her
on 29 November 1794. He moved her to London, where Hyacinthe was generally miserable, as
she never learned English and she was scorned by high society: Lady Caroline Lamb was warned
by her mother-in-law that no respectable woman could afford to be seen in Hyacinthe's society.
Their children were: Richard Wellesley, a member of parliament
Anne Wellesley, who married firstly Sir William Abdy, 7th Baronet, and secondly Lieutenant-Colonel
Lord Charles Bentinck Hyacinthe Mary Wellesley, who married Edward
Littleton, 1st Baron Hatherton Gerald Wellesley, who served as the East India
Company's resident at Indore the Rev. Henry Wellesley, Principal of New
Inn Hall, Oxford. Through Lady Charles Bentinck, Wellesley is
a great-great-great grandfather to Queen Elizabeth II.
Following his wife's death in 1816, he married, on 29 October 1825, the widowed Marianne Patterson,
whose mother Mary was the daughter of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last surviving
signatory of the United States Declaration of Independence; her former sister-in-law
was Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. They had no children. If not as unhappy as his first
marriage, it was generally regarded as a failure: Wellington, who was very fond of Marianne
and was then on rather bad terms with his brother, pleaded with her not to marry him.
In 1821 he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Catholic emancipation had now become
an open question in the cabinet, and Wellesley's acceptance of the viceroyalty was believed
in Ireland to herald the immediate settlement of the Catholic claims but they would remain
unfulfilled. Some efforts were made to placate Catholic opinion, notably the dismissal of
the long-serving Attorney-General for Ireland, William Saurin, whose anti-Catholic views
had made him bitterly unpopular. Lord Liverpool died without having grappled with the problem.
Canning died; and on the assumption of office by Wellington, his brother resigned the lord-lieutenancy.
He is said to have been deeply hurt by his brother's failure to find a Cabinet position
for him. He had, however, the satisfaction of seeing the Catholic claims settled in the
next year by the very statesmen who had declared against them. In 1833 he resumed the office
of Lord Lieutenant under Earl Grey, but the ministry soon fell, and, with one short exception,
Wellesley did not take any further part in official life.
On his death, he had no successor in the marquessate, but the earldom of Mornington and minor honours
devolved on his brother William, Lord Maryborough, on the failure of whose issue in 1863 they
fell to the 2nd Duke of Wellington. He and Arthur, after a long estrangement,
had been on friendly terms for some years: Arthur wept at the funeral, and said that
he knew of no honour greater than being Lord Wellesley's brother.
Legacy
The Township of Wellesley, in Ontario, Canada, was named in Richard Wellesley's honour, despite
the many references to his brother, Arthur Wellesley in the surrounding area.
Province Wellesley, in the state of Penang, Malaysia; was named after Richard Wellesley.
It was originally part of the state of Kedah. It was ceded to the British East India Company
by the Sultan of Kedah in 1798, and has been part of the settlement and state of Penang
ever since. Now it has been renamed Seberang Perai in the Malay language.
The Wellesley Islands off the north coast of Queensland, Australia, were named by Matthew
Flinders in honour of Richard Wellesley. The largest island in the group is Mornington
Island. Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne,
was named after him. As of the summer of 2007, a portrait of Marquess
Wellesley hangs in the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace.
Notes
References
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh,
ed.. "Wellesley, Richard Colley Wesley, Marquess". Encyclopædia Britannica. Cambridge University
Press. Bibliography
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Compendium of Irish Biography. Dublin: M. H. Gill & son. Wikisource
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Butler, Iris. The Eldest Brother. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973.
Ingram, Edward, ed. Two Views of British India: The Private Correspondence of Mr. Dundas and
Lord Wellesley, 1798–1801. Bath: Adams and Dart, 1970.
Harrington, Jack, Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan., ISBN 978-0-230-10885-1 Martin, Robert Montgomery, ed. The Despatches,
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