he Raja of Nagpur and Sindhia, which it was hoped that
Holkar would ultimately join. By this time, a rupture of the peace with
France was known to be impending, and Lord Wellesley eagerly seized the
opportunity to crush Sindhia, while he urged the home government to
seize the Cape of Good Hope and the Mauritius. Two expeditions were
directed against Sindhia's territory, the one under Arthur Wellesley,
moving from Poona in the west towards the Nizam's frontier; the other,
under General Lake, operating on the north-west against the highly
trained forces, under French officers, assembled before Delhi. Both
campaigns were eminently successful. Wellesley captured Ahmadnagar on
August 11, encountered the combined armies of Sindhia and the Raja of
Nagpur at Assaye on September 23, and, after a desperate conflict,
obtained a decisive victory. Twelve hundred of the Marathas were left
dead on the field and 102 guns were captured. He then advanced into
Berar and completely defeated the army of the Nagpur Raja at Argaum.
Lake marched from Cawnpur, took Delhi and Agra, assuming custody of the
Mughal emperor, and inflicted a final defeat on a powerful Maratha army,
no longer under French officers, at Laswari. Large cessions of territory
followed. The treaty of Bassein was recognised by Sindhia and the Raja
of Nagpur. Gujrat, Cuttack, and the districts along the Jumna passed
into British possession, and the East India Company became the visible
successor, though nominally the guardian, of the Mughal emperor.

Meanwhile, Holkar remained a passive spectator of the contest. Jealous
as he was of Sindhia, he was by no means prepared to acquiesce in the
subjection of the great Maratha power. Having taken up a threatening
position in Rajputana, and defied Lake's summons to retire, he was
treated as an enemy, and proved a very formidable enemy. Instead of
relying, like Sindhia, on disciplined battalions, he fell back on the
old Maratha tactics, and swept the country with hordes of irregular
cavalry who lived by pillage. In 1804 a British force of 1,200 troops
under Colonel Monson was lured away from its base of supplies by a
feigned retreat and incurred a very serious reverse; scarcely a tenth of
them, utterly broken, "straggled, a mere rabble, into Agra". This
disaster was soon afterwards retrieved by other divisions of Lake's
army, but three attempts to storm the strong fortress of Bhartpur were
repulsed by the raja, Ranjit Singh, an ally of