Free The Damnation of John Donellan by Elizabeth Cooke

alluring prospects’, Donellan insisted, but despite all the injustices he had suffered, he stayed loyal to the British Crown. He paints a noble picture of himself: ‘But neither the resentment for the wrongs that had been heaped upon him – over-looked, degraded, every studied indignity thrown upon him – could make him for a moment forget his duty to the Company or his allegiance to his natural Sovereign.’
    Donellan, along with several other officers, was found guilty and stripped of his rank. Although the others were later reinstated to their rank, Donellan was not. He returned to England. For a while he nursed his ‘injustices’ – for, it would appear, at least eight years – but then he decided to try for a commission in the cavalry in 1767 or 1768. He could not, however, obtain this without a clean bill of military health. The East India Company sent a verbal message that his conduct had been considered blameless in India.His commission was returned; however, he still needed his commanding officer Forde’s ‘certificate of good behaviour’. He wrote to Forde saying that he hoped ‘a trifling misconduct would not bar his advancement in life’. But Forde refused to endorse him.
    It would not be the last time that Donellan pleaded his innocence in the face of intransigent authority.
    Donellan was put on the half-pay list and for ever afterwards referred to himself as captain; but he never completely removed the stain to his character. Forde, in opposition to his senior commanding officer, Lord Clive, would not say outright that Donellan’s behaviour was unacceptable; but neither would he put pen to paper to agree that Donellan had been ‘courageous’. (Clive, at least, did send a letter to Donellan in September 1761 saying that he had showed courage in an expedition to Golconda.) There is no evidence that Forde ever supported Donellan, or even forwarded the verdict of the original court martial at Masulipatnam to the East India Company. As a result, Donellan did not apply for another military posting: his career as a serving officer was over.
    He was now forced to apply his talents in another direction.
    John Donellan had been born on 6 November 1737 in County Clare, Ireland, the illegitimate son of Colonel Nehemiah Donellan who was the commanding officer of the 39th Regiment. The O’Connor Donellan estate papers of County Galway list the family pedigree: one James Donellan was Nehemiah’s father, and Nehemiah himself pursued an active military career, having been wounded at the battle of Fontenoy in May 1745 in the War of the Austrian Succession. John Donellan was acknowledged and treated well by his father, who obtained him his post in the East India Service.
    A surviving print of Donellan, drawn at the time of the Boughton trial, with the title ‘Published as the Act directs, 1st May 1781 by I. Walker’ shows him in profile: he has a clean-shaven and youthful face, with a high forehead, and he is wearing a fashionable cutaway coat and a white stock with a small frill at his throat. Another penand-ink drawing shows him facing the artist with a rather bemused smile. Donellan looks like an intelligent, even kindly, person. In1882 Edward Allesley Boughton Ward-Boughton-Leigh, Theodosia’s grandson, described him as a ‘good-looking man … very handsome’. Another print, currently in the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University, of the Pantheon Assembly Rooms shows a figure leaning on a column in the left foreground who is generally believed to be Donellan. Rather shorter than average and slight in stature, he stands with one hand slightly behind his back and the other in his breast pocket, reminiscent of popular depictions of Napoleon. He is looking towards a couple who are talking to his left; his air is proprietorial, and he has the same slight smile on his face.
    The London that Donellan returned to from India in the