Hessing commanded 3,000 Maratha regular troops in the Battle of Kharda, where the Maratha armies defeated the Nizam of Hyderabad on 12 March 1795. In June 1801 Hessing commanded four battalions outside Ujjain, which were attacked and defeated by Yashwantrao Holkar, the Maratha ruler of Indore. Hessing served in the Maratha armies against the East India Company in the Second Anglo-Maratha War.^{[citation needed]}

Due to ill health, he resigned his command of four battalions in 1800, being succeeded by his son, George Hessing, who was then 18. He took instead a position as Commandant of Agra Fort, and died in Agra on 21 July 1803 while in command of the Maratha forces there.^{[citation needed]}

John Hessing's tomb is located in the Padretola, or Padresanto, a Christian cemetery in Agra. The tomb was commissioned by Hessing's wife, Anne:

The tomb of John Hessing, hard by, is a still more splendid edifice, being a copy, in red sandstone, of the famous Taj Mahal, and on a pretty extensive scale too, though far smaller than the original. The tomb, which was completed in or about the year of the British conquest, bears an inscription in good English, setting forth that the deceased colonel was a Dutchman, who died Commandant of Agra, in his 63rd year, 21 July 1803, just before Lake's successful siege of the place.*

• Keene, H. G. (1887) The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan.

• Red Taj: Tomb of Col John Hessing Archived 17 May 2017 at the Wayback Machine