Wellington

by Richard Holmes

  All this reinforced his tendency to trust almost nobody and to do everything himself, producing the symptoms of what we would now term a control freak. His chief medical officer, James McGrigor, was one of the most efficient and farsighted military doctors of his age, and Wellington not only secured him a knighthood after the Peninsula, but also helped him obtain the Order of the Bath when, belatedly, medical officers were made eligible for it. But when, after Salamanca, McGrigor used his initiative to establish a line of evacuation that differed from (and was a good deal better than) that prescribed by Wellington, he was given a fierce roasting. ‘I shall be glad to know who is to command the army, you or I?’ thundered Wellington. ‘As long as you live, sir, never do so again; never do anything without my orders.’59

  Captain Norman Ramsay, Royal Horse Artillery, had distinguished himself at Fuentes de Oñoro, leading his troop to safety through a thick cloud of French cavalry. After the battle of Vitoria in 1813, although Wellington instructed him not to move his troop until he personally told him to, Ramsay moved on the orders of a staff officer. But Wellington meant just what he said, and put Ramsay under arrest, where he remained for three weeks. The incident rankled, and contributed to the Royal Artillery’s belief that Wellington had a low regard for the arm. Ramsay and Wellington did not speak again, and the gunner was killed at Waterloo. But long-term hostility was rare, for Wellington often followed a wigging with cordiality. The evening that McGrigor received his great rebuke, he found himself seated at Wellington’s side for a genial dinner.

  There was not much geniality in Wellington that autumn, however, for, as McGrigor observed, ‘this was the period of his life when fortune seemed to turn her back on him’. He decided to push Clausel towards the French border, but the northern town of Burgos, capital of Old Castile and recently refortified on Napoleon’s orders, stood in his way. Wellington was ill-prepared for a siege, with only three heavy guns – Thunder, Lightning and Nelson (which had lost one of its trunnions) and little enough ammunition even for them. The French field army declined to attack his covering force and bring on a general engagement. He took some outlying defences but had lost over 2,000 men to 623 French by the time he decided to break up the siege on 21 October 1812.

  Amongst the casualties was Major the Hon. Edward Somers Cocks, eldest son of John, Lord Somers, killed by a point-blank musket shot while leading the light companies of the Highland Brigade in an assault on the main wall, retaken by the French in a sortie. Many officers agreed with John Mills that his loss was ‘irreparable’. He had commanded a troop of the 16th Light Dragoons with outstanding success for two years before becoming a major in the 79th Highlanders. One of his brother officers in the 16th, Lieutenant William Tomkinson, told how: ‘The men in his troop … were very fond of him, and would hollo, when in a charge, “Follow the captain, stick close to the captain” … he had always been so lucky in the heat of fire that I fancied he would be preserved to the army.’60 He was a particular favourite of Wellington’s: brave, well-connected and devoted to his profession. He had spent some time as one of his ‘directed telescopes’, an ‘out-post officer’ charged with long-range reconnaissance and confidential missions.

  His loss shook Wellington to the very core. When he heard of it, he entered the room of Colonel Frederick Ponsonby, one of his staff, paced about and then said ‘Cocks was killed last night’ but could not utter another word. They buried him in the 79th’s camp, in the presence of the officers of the 16th Light Dragoons and the 79th. Wellington attended with all his staff, but was so over-wrought that nobody dared speak to him. ‘He is regretted by the whole army,’ wrote Tomkinson, ‘and in those regiments in which he has been no man can lament a brother more than they do him.’61 Wellington told Lord Somers that had he lived, the young man would have been ‘one of the greatest ornaments of his profession … an honour to his family, and an advantage to his country.’62

  Having failed to take Burgos, Wellington was obliged to retreat in appalling weather, with strong French forces at hand, and described it as ‘the worst scrape I ever was in’. On 23 October, the French cavalry jabbed hard at his rearguard, beating two British cavalry brigades and being checked only by a brigade of KGL infantry, which formed squares that stood like rocks beneath the torrent. The route lay through a wine-producing region, and the army made the most of it. ‘I remember seeing a soldier fully accoutred with his knapsack on in a large tank,’ recalled William Wheeler, ‘he had either fell in or been pushed in by his comrades, there he lay dead. I saw a dragoon fire his pistol into a large vat containing several thousands of gallons, in a few minutes we were up to our knees in wine fighting like tigers for it.’63

  An officer saw Wellington near Salamanca on 15 November 1812: ‘he wore an oil-skin cloak, and looked extremely ill, which was not to be wondered at considering the anxiety of mind and fatigue of body he was enduring’.64 Yet he still had the ability to inspire. Assistant Surgeon George Burrows remembered that:

  The spirit of enthusiasm was raised to the highest pitch, by the electric effect of the words ‘here he comes’, which spread from mouth to mouth with the rapidity of lightning. The noble commander passed our columns in review, as usual unaccompanied by any mark of distinction or splendour; his long horse cloak concealed his under garment; his cocked hat soaked and disfigured with the rain.65

  But Burrows was writing for publication, and in 1814, when Wellington was a national hero. The failure at Burgos and retreat to Portugal shocked many who, like Ensign Mills, were writing private letters.

  Our want of success at Burgos and the subsequent retreat … has turned the tide of affairs here and Spain I think is lost. If ever a man ruined himself the Marquis has done it; for the last two months he has acted like a madman. The reputation he has acquired will not bear him out – such is the opinion here.66

  To his credit, Wellington never sought to shift the blame. At the time, he told Liverpool that ‘The Government had nothing to say to the siege. It was entirely my own act.’ And years later he told friends that:

  It was all my own fault; I had got, with small means, into the forts near Salamanca. The Castle [in Burgos] was not unlike a hill-fort in India, and I had got into a good many of those. I could not get into this, I very nearly did but it was defended by a very clever fellow …’67

  By late November Wellington was at Freneida, south-west of Rodrigo, quartered in the mayor’s house in a small square overshadowed by the church. There is a little courtyard at the back, now firmly gated against the quiet street, but once the haunt of aides-de-camp and orderly dragoons, and a terrace looking across the square. Wellington was in a foul temper when he arrived. James McGrigor found him:

  in a miserable small room leaning over the fire. He was attentively reading some printed paper. He begged me to be seated. I could see that the paper he was reading was Cobbett’s Register [a radical newspaper] … After reading it for a few minutes he threw it in the fire, and anxiously enquired what reports I had of the sick and wounded. He was in a very bad humour; he adverted in bitter language to the disorder of the retreat.68

  Wellington immediately wrote a stern circular to divisional and brigade commanders, complaining that ‘irregularities and outrages’ of all descriptions were committed with impunity because of ‘the habitual inattention of the officers of the regiments to their duty, as prescribed by the standing regulations of the service, and the orders of this army’. Generals and field officers were to insist that captains and subalterns understood and performed their duties: that was the only way in which ‘the discipline and efficiency of the army can be maintained during the next campaign’.69

  The order was deeply resented. William Tomkinson thought it ‘an imprudent letter’, and John Mills asked his mother ‘what encouragement has a man to do his duty?’ John Kincaid of the 95th agreed that ‘not only censure, but condign punishment’ was merited for some of the disorder, and had Wellington hanged soldiers (and commissaries too) and cashiered officers, nob
ody would have blamed him. But:

  In our brigade I can safely say that the order in question excited more of sorrow than of anger; we thought that, had it been particular, it would have been just; but as it was general, that it was inconsiderate; and we, therefore, regretted that he who had been, and still was, the god of our idolatry, should thereby have laid himself open to the attacks of the ill-natured.’70

  Officers quickly sent copies home, and the order was printed in newspapers, provoking muttering at Wellington’s severity and embarrassing the government. There is no doubt that the order was unfair; if men stole food, it was because the commissariat had broken down and they could either pillage or starve. As Ian Fletcher observes, drink was another matter, but even here some veterans argued that it was only looted wine that kept men going.71 But all this was overshadowed by news of a far more important retreat. Napoleon had stayed too long in Moscow, and suffered appalling losses as he fell back. In Spain, however, ‘the South was free, and Andalusia sang in the sunlight. Twelve hundred miles away the Grande Armée was dead.’72

  That winter, as his army recuperated in north-eastern Portugal, Wellington settled into the routine of life in winter quarters. At Freneida there was an air of practical informality. Commissary August Schaumann noted that:

  There was no throng of scented staff officers with plumed hats, orders and stars, no main guard, no crowd of contractors, actors, valets, mistresses, equipages, horses, forage and baggage wagons, as there is at a French or Russian headquarters. Just a few aides-de-camp, who went about the streets alone and in their overcoats, a few guides, and a small staff guard; that was all.73

  When the army was on the move during a campaign, Wellington usually slept in a small tent enclosed in a large marquee, which also served as sitting-and dining-room. Staff officers had a tent apiece. Wellington’s cook, James Thornton, took over the kitchen in places like Freneida, but in the field he cooked under a tarpaulin draped over poles, with his fire surrounded by an earth bank scooped with niches to hold the saucepans. Meat was suspended on a pole over the fire. When it rained hard, as it often did, there was nothing to eat but bread and cold meat. General Miguel de Alava declared that he was tired of enquiring what time the army was to move and what was for dinner and being answered: ‘Daylight. Cold meat.’ Wellington thought that Thornton was no genius. ‘Cole gives the best dinners in the army,’ he wrote. ‘Hill the next best; mine are no great things.’74 This was partly because Wellington had no real interest in food, once telling Cambacérès ‘I don’t much care what I eat’, while Creevey remembered a very poor meal which ‘made no impression on the Duke, who seemed quite as pleased and well satisfied as if he had been in a palace’.75

  Captain Thomas Henry Browne, a junior staff officer, was more sanguine. He thought Wellington’s cook ‘a good one & the wine principally furnished by the Guerrillas excellent’.76 Wellington normally dined with twelve to sixteen people at his table, always including some officers of the two principal staff branches, those of the adjutant-general and quartermaster-general, some of the medical and commissariat staff, and commanding officers of nearby regiments. Generals visiting on business were invited to dinner and pressed to stay in quarters kept available for them. Although Wellington drank little by the standards of the age – half a bottle to a bottle with dinner – Browne tells us that, ‘there was an abundance of wine at his table & guests might take just as much as they pleased’. Dinner was at five, and was famously informal. George Gleig, Wellington’s future biographer, dined with him as an infantry subaltern, and found:

  The conversation … most interesting and lively. The Duke himself spoke out on all subjects with an absence of reserve which sometimes surprised his guests … He was rich in anecdote, most of them taking a ludicrous turn, and without any apparent effort he put the company very much at their ease …77

  At about 8.30, Wellington would summon coffee, and rise as soon as he had drunk it, which was the signal for all present to withdraw, although the young and bold found somewhere comfortable ‘to smoak cigars [Wellington did not allow smoking at his table] & drink grog till bed-time …’ He wrote or read for about half an hour, and then retired.

  At Freneida, some distance from the French outposts, Wellington felt able to undress and go to bed in his nightshirt. On campaign, however, he used to change his linen and boots, and lie down on an iron-framed collapsible bed that was carried on a mule. He kept two dragoons, with horses saddled, at his door, so that if any important information came in, he could ride off at a moment’s notice with this small escort. Browne admitted that ‘it has occasionally happened that when his staff awoke in the morning they learnt that their chief had been on horse-back and with the picquets of the army hours before’.78

  Even if the army was not on the move, Wellington rose early; he could not bear lying awake in bed. He had a heavy growth of beard, often shaved twice a day, and hated to be disturbed when shaving. Lord Aylmer interrupted this ‘sacred rite with which no emotion was allowed to interfere’ to tell him that Massena had fallen back from the lines of Torres Vedras. ‘Ay, I thought they meant to be off,’ he replied, lifting his razor for a moment. ‘Very well’, and the shave went on.79 He dressed simply, with a blue or grey frock coat, cut slightly shorter than was fashionable, white or blue-grey breeches, and the eponymous boots, shorter and looser than modern riding boots, with the scalloped top typical of the fashionable ‘Hessian’ boot of the period. Larpent thought that:

  like every great man, present or past, almost without exception, he is vain … He is remarkably neat and most particular in his dress … He cuts the skirts of his coat shorter to make them look smarter: only a short time since, going to him on business, I found him discussing the cut of his half-boots and suggesting alterations to his servant. 80

  Outside he wore a cocked hat, with an oilskin cover in bad weather. To deal with summer rain, he wore a short blue cloak (some called it his boat cloak) with a white lining. He also had a white winter cloak – Gleig thought that it was ‘so that he might be more easily recognised from afar’. He wore it in the Pyrenees in the wet winter of 1814, and one officer, watching him writing out orders while sitting on a stone, said: ‘Do you see that old White Friar sitting there? I wonder how many men he is marking off to be sent into the next world.’81 In the Peninsula and at Waterloo he usually carried the same sword, an elegant Indo-Persian weapon now in Apsley House. His immaculate appearance was the source of one of his nicknames, ‘The Beau’. Kincaid recalled that Dan Mackinnon of the Coldstream Guards (such a great practical joker that the famous clown Grimaldi said that if Mackinnon donned the clown’s costume, he would totally eclipse him) rode up to a group of staff officers and asked them if they had seen Beau Douro that morning. Wellington, catnapping on the ground under his cloak, sat up and said: ‘Well, by—, I never knew I was a beau before!’82

  Wellington dealt with a prodigious amount of correspondence. He tried to answer letters as they arrived and his workload was absurdly centralised by modern standards. Officers wishing to go on leave were obliged to apply to him in writing or in person, and were usually informed that their personal circumstances were insufficiently pressing for them to take leave: Wellington took none himself. The dejected and the dissatisfied wrote to complain. A cashiered dragoon officer was told that he was mistaken to think that ‘any thing which happened to you in this country was occasioned by any feeling of irritation on my part, or any thing but a desire to uphold the discipline and subordination of the army’. The man owed his downfall to ‘great and persevering indiscretion and the misapplication of very great talents’, and it was impossible for him to be restored to his rank in the service. Wellington begged him ‘with your talents and prospects in other professions’, to reconsider the wisdom of joining as a gentleman volunteer in the hope of making his way.83 He took his duties as colonel of the 33rd very seriously, telling its commanding officer in October 1812 that no changes should be made to uniform unless they were requir
ed by regulations: ‘Every thing is now, I believe, as I found it 20 years ago; and if once we begin to alter, we shall have nothing fixed, as there are no bounds to fancy.’84

  He had usually completed a great deal of correspondence by the time he saw his senior staff at about 9am. There were two principal staff officers, the quartermaster-general, for much of the period Major General George Murray, and the adjutant-general, Major General the Hon. Charles Stewart, Castlereagh’s half-brother. The former was responsible for movements, camps and bivouacs, and the latter for personnel issues such as appointments, transfers and the promulgation of regulations. Neither was a chief of staff in the modern sense, although Murray, a very competent staff officer, came closest to it. Stewart, presuming, perhaps, on his half-brother’s importance to Wellington, went so far as to cross him, maintaining that the examination of prisoners of war was not his responsibility. ‘I was obliged to say’, recalled Wellington,

  that, if he did not at once confess his error, and promise to obey orders frankly and cordially, I would dismiss him instanter and send him back to England under arrest. After a good deal of persuasion he burst out crying, begged my pardon, and hoped that I would forgive his intemperance.85