Major-General Sir Hugh Robert Rollo Gillespie KCB (21 January 1766 – 31 October 1814[1]) was an officer in the British Army.

[3] In 1804 he was honourably acquitted[1] by a court martial of suspected involvement in a fraud scandal – he had permitted the regimental surgeons, in the interests of their patients, to exceed the regulation allowances.

[3] He then transferred to India, traveling initially to Hamburg where, though both were in disguise and had no political principles in common, he was warned by Napper Tandy to flee to Danish territory in Altona.

[4] He continued overland through Germany, Austria, and Serbia, to the Euxine where he felt obliged to force his ship's captain at gunpoint to take him to Constantinople as agreed, rather than a corsair port for murder or slavery.

He immediately collected about twenty dragoons, with galloper guns, and he set out ahead of a relief force within a quarter of an hour of the alarm being raised.

Dashing ahead of his men, he arrived at Vellore within two hours, to find the surviving British troops within minutes of extinction by some hundreds of mutineers.

About sixty men of the 69th, commanded by Sergeant Brady (who recognized Gillespie from the West Indies) and by two assistant surgeons, were holding the ramparts but were out of ammunition.

[7] To gain time for the rest of his men to arrive Gillespie led the 69th in a bayonet-charge along the ramparts, engaging in close combat with the enemy.

He was subsequently appointed Commander of the Forces in British-occupied Java and in 1812 he deposed the Sultan of Palembang in Sumatra, and took the royal Javanese city of Yogyakarta.

[9] Two years later, at the beginning of the Anglo-Nepalese War, he led a column to attack a Nepalese hill fort at Khalanga, in the Battle of Nalapani, repulsing a Gurkha counter-attack.