Eyre Coote

Eyre Coote destroyed French power in India at Wandiwash and then saved British power there twenty years later against Haidar Ali. He was an Irish clergyman's son from Limerick who came out as a company officer, and he first mattered at Plassey in 1757, where he was the one member of Clive's council of war to argue for attacking immediately rather than withdrawing. In January 1760 at Wandiwash he met the Comte de Lally's army with roughly equal numbers and broke it in a straightforward infantry battle, killing or capturing the French field force in the Carnatic and the Marquis de Bussy with it. Pondicherry fell the following year and French ambitions in India ended as a serious proposition. He went home rich, sat in Parliament, quarrelled with the East India Company over money and precedence - he quarrelled with almost everyone over money - and returned as commander-in-chief in 1779. The second Mysore war found the Madras army beaten and Haidar Ali's cavalry ranging to the outskirts of the city. Coote, elderly and by then genuinely ill, took the field and beat Haidar at Porto Novo in 1781 with about eight thousand men against many times that number, and again at Pollilur and Sholinghur. Porto Novo is arguably the battle that preserved British India. He collapsed with a stroke at Madras in 1783 on hearing that the war had resumed and died days later. Haidar's son Tipu is said to have marked the news with respect. He is buried at Rockbourne in Hampshire, with a monument put up at the East India Company's expense. The sepoy regiments he commanded remembered him long enough that his name survived in their traditions into the next century.

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