Fullarton had a very different background from Picton. He came from a wealthy and long-established Scots land-owning family and was a Whig MP, a Fellow of the Royal Society, an improving landlord, and a patron of Robert Burns. He had been a junior diplomat, before raising a regiment in the course of the American War of Independence of which he naturally became the Colonel. He ended that war in India commanding an army of 14,000 men in operations against Tippu Sultan. Afterwards he had written an influential pamphlet arguing that the East India Company had brought trouble on itself by its unprincipled treatment of native princes and native subjects, and that a more humane policy would be preferable rather than "let them hate so long as they fear" (a favourite motto of Caligula).