Wellesley was, unrepentantly, a government man, and unlike his predecessors made no secret of his ‘utter contempt’ for the opinions of ‘the most loathsome den of the India House’.3 Though he would win the directors a vast empire, he came within a whisker of bankrupting their 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.
