Wellington: A Personal History

2 An Officer in the 33rd

1787 – 93

‘Those who think lightly of that lad are unwise in their generation.’

‘HE IS HERE at this moment, and perfectly idle,’ Lord Mornington wrote on his brother’s behalf. It was, he added, a ‘matter of indifference’ to him what commission his brother got, provided he got it soon and it was not in the artillery which would not suit his rank or intellect.1 Early in March 1787, a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday, the reply came: Arthur Wesley could be offered a commission as ensign in the 73rd (Highland) Regiment of Foot.

His mother was delighted. She thought him much improved upon his return from Angers, she told two friends of hers, Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, who were living together on terms of romantic friendship, totally isolated from society in a cottage at Llangollen in North Wales. These ladies, described by Prince Pückler-Muskau as ‘certainly the most celebrated virgins in Europe’, had already met Arthur Wesley. He had been taken to see them by his grandmother, Lady Dungannon, who lived nearby, while still an Eton schoolboy, and he had been awkward in their company, disturbed by their semi-masculine attire and Lady Eleanor’s top hat. But he was not awkward now, his mother assured them. ‘He really is a charming young man,’ she said. ‘Never did I see such a change for the better in any body.’2

She used her influence with the Marquess of Buckingham, the Duke of Portland’s successor as Lord-Lieutenant in Dublin, to have him appointed to his lordship’s staff as aide-de-camp; and she recorded with satisfaction his promotion to Lieutenant in the 76th (Hindoostan) Regiment of Foot, and then, since this regiment was returning to India, his transfer to the 41st.

He called upon the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’ on his way to take up his duties in Ireland; and they agreed with his mother that the eighteen-year-old boy was now greatly improved and had much to recommend him. He was ‘a charming young man’, Lady Eleanor decided, ‘handsome … and elegant’.3

Not everyone in Dublin concurred with her. One young lady was thankful to be able to escape from his company; another, older woman, Lady Aldborough, having taken him to a picnic in her carriage, declined to have him with her on the return journey because ‘he was so dull’; yet another refused to attend a party if that ‘mischievous boy’ was to be of the company: he had such an irritating habit of flicking up the lace from shirt collars. To the Napier family he gave the impression of being ‘a shallow, saucy stripling’. It had to be conceded, though, that the time spent in dancing classes in Angers had not been wasted, that he rode well even if his seat was a trifle ungainly, and that, while on occasions rather stiff, his manner, when not in one of his prankish moods, was pleasant enough, his conversation interesting, though small talk was never his forte.4

It was quite clear that he enjoyed the company of women and, when at ease with them, was ‘good humoured’ in their company. He also enjoyed the excitement of gambling. Indeed, it was said of him that, like the denizens of White’s club in St James’s, he would bet on anything. On one occasion, for example, he won 150 guineas by getting from Cornelscourt outside Dublin to Leeson Street, a distance of six miles, in under an hour. But he lost as often as he won; and sank ever deeper into debt. He seems not to have kept a mistress as his brother, Richard, did at great expense, having chosen to live with an attractive Frenchwoman of extravagant tastes and philoprogenitive inclinations whom he later married after she had given birth to five children;5 but Arthur does appear to have frequented a brothel, once evidently being fined for an assault upon a fellow customer of the establishment, a Frenchman whose stick he seized and beat him with.6

Yet Arthur Wesley had his serious and ambitious side. He took trouble to exercise his talent with the violin and to improve the quality of his playing. He read a great deal: he was once discovered studying Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The Hon. George Napier who had served on Sir Henry Clinton’s staff in America and was then a captain in the 100th Foot, commented, Those who think lightly of that lad are unwise in their generation: he has in him the makings of a great general.’7

He was already beginning to make a name for himself, as the ambitious Richard had done so quickly. Arthur contrived to get elected at the age of nineteen to the Irish House of Commons for the family seat of Trim, formerly held by his brother William, having first become a Freemason and having publicly declared his opposition to the Corporation of Trim’s decision to confer the freedom of the place upon Henry Grattan, the Irish patriot whose views on Roman Catholic emancipation were not conducive to the peace of mind of Lord Buckingham; and, although he did not speak in the House of Commons for two years, when he did so his maiden speech was quite well received. So were his subsequent interventions, even if, in the opinion of Jonah Barrington, a judge in the Irish court of admiralty, whom he met at a dinner party, he never spoke on important subjects.8

Lieutenant Wesley began to believe that he could become a politician if he so willed it. Yet, as revolution gained momentum in France with the storming of the Tuileries in August 1792, the September Massacres and the execution of the King, Wesley’s thoughts turned again and again from politics to the Army and to service overseas. By transfers and purchase, he was advancing in his profession. From the 41st Foot he had been transferred to the 12th Light Dragoons; from the Dragoons he had returned to the infantry as a captain in the 58th Foot; from the 58th he had gone back to the cavalry as a captain in the 18th Light Dragoons; and, having appealed to his brother Richard for the money, he had bought a major’s rank in the 33rd Foot.

Tired of trotting about at the Lord-Lieutenant’s heels in Dublin for a paltry ten shillings a day, though this was a welcome addition to his scanty private income of £125 a year,* he was anxious to go to war. He gave up gambling; he paid off what debts he could, including one to the boot-maker with whom he lodged; he resigned his Trim seat, and gave away his violin, believing, so a friend later recorded, that playing the fiddle was ‘not a soldierly accomplishment and took up too much of his time and thoughts’.9

He wrote to Richard to ask him to approach the authorities on his behalf and tell them that, if any part of the Army were to be sent abroad, he wanted to go with it. ‘They may as well take me as anybody else.’10

For the moment they did not take him. He was kept in Ireland drilling the soldiers of the 33rd and supervising the logging of the regimental accounts, a responsibility he did not find as tedious as might have been expected, for he had a good head for figures, a respect for detail and a pride in his talent for ‘rapid and correct calculation’.11 In the autumn of 1793 he made a brief visit to England where he witnessed his brother’s signature to the deed of sale of Dangan Castle; but he was soon back in Ireland, a lieutenant-colonel by then, in command of the 33rd, frustratingly confined to regimental duties while news came from Paris of the horrors of the Terror and the blade of the guillotine rose and fell.

3 The First Campaign

1794 – 5

‘I was on the Waal, I think from October to January and during all that time I only saw once one General from the headquarters.’

THE WAR which France had declared on Britain after the execution of the King was not going well. The British army had been ejected from Dunkirk and was soon to be thrown out of Flanders, through which it was vainly hoped an attack could be made on the heart of France; while the French, commanded by the young generals of the Revolution, brave, impromptu and roturier, occupied Holland. The British troops – led by the Duke of York who was quite at home at the Horse Guards, the headquarters of the general staff in Whitehall, but as inexperienced in the field as most of his regimental officers – were ill-clothed and ill-fed, less than competently served by a Royal Waggon Corps, whose men, raised from the rookeries of Blackfriars and Seven Dials, were known as the Newgate Blues. For the sick and wounded, to be carried to such military hospitals as there were was to be consigned to a probable death. Surgeons’ mates were slipshod, negligent and very often drunk. A Dutchman counted forty-two bodies thrown overboard from a hospital barge on which they had been left unattended on the open deck. Officers were likely to go as hungry as their men. Colonel Wesley was warned by an old Guards officer, ‘You little know what you are going to meet with. You will often have no dinner at all. I mean literally no dinner, and not merely roughing it on a beefsteak or a bottle of wine.’1

Arthur Wesley, twenty-five years old, was at last to find this out for himself. The orders for which he had long been waiting had come; and in the middle of June 1794 he disembarked the 33rd Foot on the quayside at Ostend from a ship that had brought them over from Cork. At Ostend he was given command of two other battalions as well as his own and handed orders to take them over post haste to Antwerp to reinforce the Duke of York’s position. But the Duke’s position was not tenable for long; and, as the summer weather gave way to a cold autumn and a freezing winter, the British fell back in slow retreat. The 33rd were briefly in action in September at Boxtel where their Colonel handled them well; and later, in the depths of winter, they fought their way through another small town with bayonets fixed. Yet for most of those weeks officers and men alike struggled merely to keep warm and alive in the dreary, frozen countryside of polder and canal. We turn out once, sometimes twice every night,’ the Colonel reported in a letter to a cousin. ‘The officers and men are harassed to death … I have not had my clothes off my back for a long time; we spend the greater part of the night upon the bank of the river [the Waal] … Although the French annoy us much at night, they are very entertaining during the day time; they are perpetually chattering with our officers and soldiers, and dance the carmagnole upon the opposite bank whenever we desire them; but occasionally the spectators on our side are interrupted in the middle of the dance by a cannon ball from theirs.’2

Utrecht fell; French trees of liberty were set up in Amsterdam; and the ragged British army straggled back, leaving broken carts and dead animals in its wake, towards the Ems and the Weser at Bremen. Colonel Wesley did not wait to see his battalion embark. Leaving a junior officer in charge, he set sail in March for London.

His first campaign had been a most unpleasant experience; but at least, so he comforted himself, he had learned ‘what one ought not to do, and that is always something’.3 He had also learned that, while many of the British regiments were ‘excellent’, the generals had little idea how to manage an army. ‘I was left to myself with my regiment … thirty miles from headquarters which latter was a scene of jollifications,’ he recalled, ‘and I do not think that I was once visited by the Commander-in-Chief.’4 He remembered, too, an occasion when a dispatch was brought in after dinner in the mess. ‘That will keep till tomorrow,’ said the senior officer complacently, returning to the port decanter.5

‘I was on the Waal, I think from October to January,’ Wesley complained, ‘and during all that time I only saw once one General from the headquarters … We had letters from England, and I declare that those letters told us more of what was passing at headquarters than we learned from the headquarters themselves … The real reason why I succeeded in my own campaign is because I was always on the spot – I saw everything and did everything myself.’6

While his battalion went into camp in Essex, Colonel Wesley resumed without enthusiasm his duties as aide-de-camp to the Lord-Lieutenant in Dublin. Before leaving for Ostend, he had done his best to settle his debts, assigning his income to a tradesman who agreed to pay them off by instalments. But he returned to find that they had not yet all been discharged, while his lieutenant-colonel’s pay and his allowances as an aide-de-camp were meagre in the extreme for a man without private fortune who wished to cut a figure in the world. His brother Richard was generous: he did not seek repayment of the sums he had advanced for the purchases in rank from captain to lieutenant-colonel; but there were limits to what he could ask of him and what Richard himself could afford. As it was, Richard was doing all he could to press his brother’s claims to some office of profit under the Crown. He wrote to the Lord-Lieutenant, an appointment now held by the second Earl Camden, proposing that Arthur was ideally qualified to fill the situation of Secretary-at-War which was ‘likely to be opened soon’. Colonel Wesley himself approached Camden to suggest that he might be appointed to fill vacancies on the Revenue or Treasury Boards, or, perhaps, he might be considered for the post of Surveyor-General of the Ordnance for Ireland when the present incumbent resigned. But Camden was not responsive; nor did he show due appreciation when his aide-de-camp, as Member for Trim, rose to answer Henry Grattan and defend the record of Lord Camden’s predecessor as Lord-Lieutenant, the 10th Earl of Westmorland, who had been recalled in 1795 because of his firm opposition to the emancipation of the Roman Catholics.

Despairing of getting any help from Lord Camden, Colonel Wesley sought leave of absence from Dublin and returned to England to his battalion which was now stationed near Southampton under orders to sail for the West Indies. He wrote to say that he intended to set out with his men; but, if he hoped to receive some opposition to this plan, he was disappointed. Lord Camden was ‘very sorry to lose him’ but quite approved of his decision to go to the West Indies, being ‘convinced that a profession once embraced should not be given up’. ‘I shall be very glad if I can make some arrangement satisfactory to you against you come back, but if a vacancy should happen in the Revenue Board I fear the Speaker’s son must have the first.’7

So, all hopes of employment in Ireland or England abandoned, Wesley prepared to sail. He was not feeling at all well. As a boy he had repeatedly suffered from minor illnesses, colds and low fever; and his recent campaigning on the Continent had exacerbated what his doctor called his ‘aguish complaint’. He was advised to take calomel and cinnamon, opium and quassia, camphorated spirit of wine and tincture of cantharides.8 Doubtless wary of these prescriptions, he consulted another doctor but this physician also seems to have been unable to effect a cure, while finding his patient a remarkable personality. ‘I have been attending a young man whose conversation is the most extraordinary I have ever listened to,’ he is said to have observed. ‘If he lives he must one day be Prime Minister.’9

The chances that he would at least live were much improved when fortune decided that he was not, after all, to go to the West Indies, the graveyard of so many British soldiers.

Twice the ships of the convoy were swept back by winter gales, on the second occasion after tossing for seven weeks in seas so heavy that one of them was sent scudding helplessly through the Strait of Gibraltar and on to the Spanish coast, while others were scattered across the Atlantic or into the Solent.

4 A Voyage to India

1796 – 8

‘In person he was about 5 feet 7 inches with a long pale face, a remarkably large aquiline nose, a clear blue eye and the blackest beard I ever saw.’

COLONEL WESLEY was aboard one of the ships that were blown home. He stepped ashore in poorer health than ever in January 1796. He went to see his doctor again when he returned to Dublin to settle his affairs there before taking the 33rd on their next tour of duty, this time in the East Indies rather than the West.

There was much to do before they sailed: he had to instruct his successor in the duties of the Lieutenant-General’s aide-de-camp, to write a paper for the guidance of the man who was to take over as Member of Parliament for Trim, to give instructions to the agent who was managing the family’s estates in Meath which had not been sold with the castle, to make such arrangements as he could about the liquidation of his debts, which now stood at over £1,000. He was still busy in Dublin when the 33rd were on the point of sailing for India by way of the Cape of Good Hope. He let them go without him. The voyage would take several weeks and, if he sailed after them in a fast frigate, he would be able to catch them up before they got into the Arabian Sea.

He left Dublin for London in June and, taking rooms at 3 Savile Row, he set out for the shops to equip himself for what might prove to be a long absence in the East. There were clothes to buy and, equally important, there were books. For these he went to Faulders, the booksellers and book-binders in Bond Street, and from here and other shops he came away with a library that could surely not have been packed in its entirety in the trunk, complete with ‘Cord Etc.’, which he bought from Mr Faulder for £1 11s 6d. There were histories of warfare, sieges and military campaigns, an account of the topography of the Indian sub-continent, a copy of the Bengal Army List, books about Egypt and the East India Company, maps and German, Arabic and Persian grammars and dictionaries, as well as two volumes of Richardson’s Persian dictionary costing the extraordinarily large sum of twelve guineas. There were three volumes of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, four of the works of Lord Bolingbroke and of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, five of the theological expositions of William Paley, six of Plutarch’s lives, nine of the philosophical works of John Locke, thirteen of David Hume’s History of England, fifteen volumes by Frederick the Great and, for lighter reading, twenty-four volumes of the works of Jonathan Swift. There were books by Voltaire, Crébillon and Rousseau, Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and the memoirs of Marshal Saxe. Listed between books by Smollett and the licentious Amours du Chevalier de Fauhlas were nine volumes of Women of Pleasure. Between a history of France and Cambridge’s War in India was a medical treatise on venereal disease.1

With these and many other books safely corded in their trunks, Wesley, by now a full colonel, sailed from Portsmouth when the wind was sufficiently fresh and rejoined the 33rd at the Cape. Here he also found two young ladies, not long out of their schoolroom, on their way to India. The elder of the two, Jemima Smith, was described by a young officer who met them at this time as ‘a most incorrigible flirt, very clever, very satirical, and aiming at universal conquest. Her sister, Henrietta [aged seventeen] was more retiring, and I think more admired … with her pretty little figure and lovely neck [that was to say bosom] … She made a conquest of Colonel Arthur Wesley who had arrived at the Cape with the 33rd Regiment.’*2

Certainly in the company of these two girls, the Colonel, so studious in the frigate on her long passage down the west coast of Africa, became lively and entertaining, ‘all life and spirits’. A captain in the 12th Regiment, Maria Edgeworth’s cousin, George Elers, who had recently arrived at the Cape, provided this sketch of him:

In person he was about 5 feet 7 inches [actually more like 5 feet 8 or 9 inches] with a long pale face, a remarkably large aquiline nose, a clear blue eye and the blackest beard I ever saw … I have known him shave twice in one day, which I believe was his constant practice … He was remarkably clean in his person …

His features always reminded me of [the tragedian] John Philip Kemble, and, what is more remarkable I also observed the great likeness between him and the performer, Mr Charles Young, which he told me he had often heard remarked. He spoke at this time remarkably quickly, with a very, very slight lisp. He had very narrow jaw bones, and there was a great peculiarity in his ear, which I never observed but in one other person, the late Lord Byron – the lobe of the ear uniting to the cheek. He had a particular way, when pleased, of pursing up his mouth. I have often observed it when he has been thinking abstractedly.3

Colonel Wesley was not detained at the Cape for long: in the middle of February 1797, at the age of twenty-seven, almost eight months after leaving England, he went ashore at Calcutta after a more than commonly tedious passage across the Indian Ocean and up the Bay of Bengal in an East Indiaman, named after Princess Charlotte, King George Ill’s eldest daughter. As soon as he could he called upon the Governor-General, Sir John Shore, a schoolfellow of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan at Harrow, who had started his career as a writer in the service of the East India Company by which his father had also been employed as a supercargo. Shore was a conscientious and hard-working though unremarkable man and ‘as cold as a greyhound’s nose’; but he was astute enough to recognize in Colonel Wesley a promising young man of strong common sense who might well one day be a person of distinction.4