Wellington

by Richard Holmes

  Heads of department, like Fletcher, the chief engineer, Dickson, commander Royal Artillery, and McGrigor of the medical department were expected to brief their commander briskly and without consulting their papers. ‘He was very fidgety,’ recalled McGrigor, ‘and evidently displeased when I referred to my notes.’86 Although both Fletcher and Dickson were knighted, Wellington was often critical of the artillery, largely, thought Larpent, ‘because their officers are rather heavy and slow’.87

  There was nothing heavy or slow about Wellington’s personal staff officers. It was said that ‘in looking for able young men for his personal staff he preferred ability with a title to ability without’, partly a reflection of his conviction that the army as a whole should be officered by gentlemen.88 Lord FitzRoy Somerset (the future Lord Raglan, and as such British commander-in-chief in the Crimea) was appointed an aide-de-camp through the Duke of Richmond’s influence in 1808. At Roliça Wellington, who had known him from childhood, asked: ‘Well, Lord FitzRoy, how do you feel under fire?’ and was pleased by the answer ‘Better, sir, than I expected.’89 Lord FitzRoy was appointed Wellington’s military secretary, responsible for his confidential correspondence, as a 22-year-old captain in 1808, and the two men remained closely associated until Wellington’s death. Wellington thought that FitzRoy had no particular talents, but always told the truth and could be relied upon to carry out his orders quickly and exactly.

  Also on the staff were the Prince of Orange, prince of the Netherlands and a colonel in the British army; the Marquess of Worcester, later seventh Duke of Beaufort, who had been involved with Harriette Wilson; Captain the Hon. Alexander Gordon, the Earl of Aberdeen’s brother; Lord Burghersh, only son of the Earl of Westmoreland; and Lord March, son of the Duke of Richmond. But connections would not save an incompetent youngster. Wellington’s nephew William, son of William Wellesley-Pole, showed himself ‘lamentably idle and ignorant’ and was sent home after ‘doing things he has no right to do’.90 Wellington also had particular friends on the general staff and in the army more widely. Ned Pakenham, assistant adjutant-general until he took over the 3rd Division and was wounded at Badajoz, and Galbraith Lowry Cole, Kitty’s old suitor, now commanding the 4th Division, were treated with extraordinary confidence.

  Wellington was certainly neither the first nor the last general to surround himself with young men whose military careers depended on him. There was nothing homoerotic about the relationship, though he was certainly very close to them. We have already seen him distraught at the death of Cocks, and when Lord March was severely wounded, Wellington, one of his own legs badly bruised, rode several miles to see him and emerged from his room, hobbling on two sticks, with tears rolling down his cheeks. He was sometimes closer to men who, like McGrigor, Larpent or his favourite chaplain Samuel Briscall, were in the army but not of it, than he was to the mass of his officers. His personal orderly, a gruff old German trooper called Beckerman, was a particular favourite. He was utterly reliable but not cringingly deferential (many more recent commanders have enjoyed similar relationships with their drivers). In all this we see a man who needed affection but disliked large-scale public adulation, and who managed to create, in his busy headquarters, that happy family life that had eluded him elsewhere.

  There were women in his life, although it is a measure of his discretion that hard evidence is difficult to find. He disapproved of Richard’s scandalous behaviour, and in 1810 had told Henry: ‘I wish that Wellesley was castrated; or that he would like other people attend to his business and perform too.’ Lady Sarah Napier might have been repeating gossip passed on by her soldier sons (or relaying a Whig canard) when she wrote after Talavera that Wellington ‘publickly keeps a mistress at head-quarters’. Larpent later hinted that he was having an affair with his landlady in Toulouse, and there is a ‘brief but affectionate’ note from a Spanish lady amongst his papers. He once granted an officer leave to spend forty-eight hours in Lisbon on the grounds that that was as long as any reasonable man might wish to stay in bed with the same woman, and it may be that he was as brisk with his amours as with much else. But Elizabeth Longford’s point is crucial: ‘his private life created no scandals of the dimension that did so much damage to Richard’s career’.91

  We are on safer ground where other relaxations are concerned. Most great generals have their safety-valves – absorbing occupations that enable them to forget the cares of office, if only for the moment. For Joffre in the First World War it was a good lunch, eaten in reverent silence; for Alan Brooke in the Second, it was birdwatching. For Wellington, it was foxhunting, although he was a thruster who hunted to ride, not an aficionado who rode to hunt and enjoyed watching hounds work. No sooner had he arrived at headquarters than Larpent wrote:

  We have three odd sorts of packs of hounds here, and the men hunt desperately: firstly, Lord Wellington’s, or, as he is called here, the Peer’s; there are fox-hounds, about sixteen couple; they have only killed one fox this year, and that was what is called mobbed. These hounds for want of a huntsman straggle about, and run very ill, and the foxes run off to their holes on the Coa … Lord Wellington has a good stud of about eight hunters; he rides hard, and only wants a good gallop, but I understand knows nothing of the sport, although very fond of it in his own way.92

  Thomas Browne was pleased to see that:

  He had at Head Quarters a pack of hounds from England & hunted two or three times a week with such Officers of Head Quarters as chose to join in the chase. There were not many, as few could afford to have English horses, & our Spanish or Portuguese steeds were not equal to the work. There was no want of foxes, but it was a difficult and rocky country to ride over. He went out shooting every now & then, but did not appear fond of it, as he was a very indifferent shot.93

  Hunting improved when Tom Crane, late of the Coldstream Guards, came out as huntsman. Lady Salisbury sent Wellington the sky-blue coat of the Hatfield Hunt, and suitably attired he rode to hounds:

  no longer the Commander of the Forces, the General-in-Chief of three nations, the representative of three sovereigns, but a gay, merry country gentleman, who rode at everything, and laughed as loud when he fell himself as he did when he witnessed the fall of a brother sportsman.

  George Murray told Larpent that ‘on hunting days he could get almost anything done, for Lord Wellington stands whip in hand ready to start, and soon dispatches all business …’ Some generals took the opportunity ‘to get him to answer things in a hasty way … which they acted upon’, so he would not do business with them on hunting days. ‘“Oh d – n them,” said he, “I won’t speak to them again when we are hunting.”’

  Wellington also enjoyed a good party, and bent the same ferocious energy to partying that he did to everything else. On 13 March 1813, he gave a ball at Ciudad Rodrigo, at which he invested Lowry Cole with the Order of the Bath. Larpent wrote that:

  He stayed at business at Freneida until half past three, and then rode full seventeen miles to Rodrigo in two hours to dinner, dressed in all his orders etc., was in high glee, danced himself, stayed supper, and at half past three in the morning went back to Freneida by moonlight and arrived before day-break at six, so that by twelve he was again ready for business, and I saw him amongst others upon a Court-martial when I returned at two …94

  But for all this, there was no doubting that Wellington was the pivot on which the army turned. He was secretive even with his closest confidants, and remained steadfastly opposed to the notion of a second-in-command, although one was generally foisted on him by the government – first Lieutenant General Sir Brent Spencer, then Lieutenant General Lord Paget (who had the ill luck to be captured soon after coming out in 1812), and lastly Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Graham. As he told Beresford, who he regarded as de facto second-in-command because of his broad understanding of operations, ‘there is nobody in a modern army who must not see that there is no duty for the second in command to perform, and that this office is useless. It can at the same time be
inconvenient, as it gives the holder pretensions which cannot be gratified except at the public inconvenience.’95

  Wellington was convinced that the campaign of 1813 would be decisive, and there were essential preliminaries to be completed before he could embark upon it. The first was the honing of his own army, achieved in winter quarters. Discipline was re-established and useful changes made to equipment: the infantry was given light tin cooking-pots instead of heavy iron camp-kettles, and tents that housed about twenty-five men apiece. All this helped restored morale, bruised by the retreat from Burgos. ‘We were not pleased with Lord Wellington at the beginning of the winter,’ admitted Captain William Bragge. ‘He has now given the infantry tents. Therefore he is again a fine Fellow.’96

  It was also essential to negotiate with the Spanish to ascertain the real limits of his authority as commander-in-chief of their army. In December Wellington travelled to Cádiz to meet the Cortes – the journey took him eleven days – and although he did not accomplish all he hoped for, as an alarmist campaign in the Spanish press had caused concern, he was content with the agreement. The experience helped colour his political views, and he wrote to Lord Bathurst on 27 January that: ‘I wish that some of our reformers would go to Cadiz and see the benefits of a sovereign popular assembly … and of a written constitution … In truth there is no authority in the state, apart from the libellous newspapers …’97 He also organised diversionary operations, like one mounted by Major General Sir John Murray from Alicante: there were still 200,000 French soldiers south of the Pyrenees, and he had to ensure that they could not concentrate against him.

  On 22 May 1813, he crossed the frontier into Spain, turning his horse as he did so and doffing his hat with the words: ‘Farewell, Portugal! I shall never see you again.’ His intelligence network, now working better than ever before, speedily told him that the main French army, under Joseph and Jourdan, had relinquished Madrid and was marching north in an effort to join Clausel, now commanding French forces in the north-west. Wellington was anxious to catch Joseph before the meeting could take place, and set off in hot pursuit. This time he moved faster than his enemies. Joseph’s army, ‘encumbered with a King, a Court, large portions of a Civil Service …’ had such an abundance of camp-followers that one disenchanted general described it as ‘a walking bordello’. On his way through Salamanca, Wellington attended mass, his ‘very light-grey pelisse coat, single-breasted, without a sash’ in sharp contrast to the glittering Spanish generals in his suite. It was the same at Zamora, where they could not understand that ‘the man sitting there so meekly in a grey coat’ was the famous Lord Wellington.98 Soon he was at Burgos, of evil memory, but a series of mighty explosions announced that the French, as Harry Smith put it, ‘had blown Burgos to where we wished it’ and did not intend to make a stand.

  Wellington caught them at last at Vitoria, in the valley of the River Zadorra, on 21 June. Although the French were well-placed to meet an attack from the west – Wellington’s line of approach – he divided his army into four large columns and ordered two of them to attack from the west, pinning the French to their positions, while the others struck through the hills to the north, feeling for the French flank. The French fought well to begin with, and inflicted 5,000 casualties on the allies, but Wellington’s army was at the peak of its form and would not be denied. The 3rd Division, back under Picton’s command, played an especially distinguished part, led forward by Picton himself with cries of ‘Come on, ye rascals! Come on, ye fighting villains!’ As the flanking attacks bit home, the French collapsed, abandoning the whole of their baggage and all but two of their guns.

  The large-scale looting that followed temporarily cost Wellington more men than the 7,000 lost by the French, and he fulminated predictably against poor discipline and lack of attention to duty. His letter to Bathurst complained that the battle had ‘totally annihilated all order and discipline’. ‘This is the consequence of the state of discipline of the British army,’ he concluded. ‘We may gain the greatest victories; but we shall do no good, until we shall so far alter our system, as to force all ranks to perform their duty.’99 This time he had a point, for this was not the necessity-driven theft of the sort that had disfigured the retreat from Burgos, but larceny on a gigantic scale in which officers participated enthusiastically, and which brought the pursuit to a halt. William Tomkinson described an Aladdin’s cave of ‘carriages, wagons, mules, monkeys, parrots …’ and admitted that his regiment’s commissary took £600 in cash.100 The 15th Light Dragoons carried off King Joseph’s silver chamber-pot, earning the nickname ‘The Emperor’s Chambermaids.’ Captain Browne, having escaped from brief captivity, found a friendly sergeant who stuffed his pockets with £210 of captured money, saying ‘at all events your Honour if you have got a hard thump today you have got your pockets well lined with Doubloons’.101 Wellington himself had the paintings of the Spanish royal collection packed and sent to England for safe-keeping. In March 1814, he told Henry Wellesley that he was anxious to return them, but was invited by King Ferdinand to retain them as they had ‘come into your possession in a manner as just as they are honourable’.102 Marshal Jourdan’s baton was found in the baggage, and Wellington sent this trophy to the Prince Regent. Amongst the prisoners was Madame Gazan, wife of a general on Joseph’s staff. When asked if another unfortunate lady was also a general’s wife, she replied: ‘Ah, pour cela – non, elle est seulement sa femme de campagne.’103

  Although Vitoria was a less desperate battle than Talavera or Albuera, it was of far greater strategic significance: a Te Deum was sung in St Petersburg, and Beethoven composed ‘Wellington’s Victory’ in its honour. The French grip on Spain was definitively broken, and all Napoleon’s generals could now do was to hold the Pyrenees and their approaches in an effort to prevent an invasion of southern France. However, Marshal Soult, who replaced Joseph and Jourdan in mid-July, skilfully reorganised his army and mounted a counter-offensive. He cut up British detachments at Roncesvalles and Maya, but was checked by Wellington himself at Sorauren, just north of Pamplona, on 28 and 30 July. ‘The 28th was fair bludgeon-work …,’ Wellington told his brother William. ‘I escaped unhurt as usual, and I begin to believe that the finger of God is upon me.’104

  San Sebastián, keystone of the frontier, was blockaded by the allies in late June and bombarded in July 1813. It was attacked on the 25th after two practicable breaches had been established, but the assault was beaten off with heavy losses. Wellington concluded ‘that it would be necessary to increase the facilities of the attack before it should be repeated … and desired that the siege should for the moment be converted into a blockade’.105 It was not until late August that he was ready to proceed. Bombardment was renewed on the 26th, and five days later the place was assaulted in daylight so that the attackers could profit from the low tide. The garrison resisted desperately, compelling Graham, in command of the attack, to pause and recommence artillery fire, but by nightfall the town, now largely in flames, was in allied hands. The capture of San Sebastián was marred by the depressingly familiar pillage that followed it, and anti-British feeling was aroused by rumours that Wellington had fired the town deliberately, to punish it for its pre-war trade with the French. Had he wished to do so, he could have mortared the place at no risk to his army, but that was not an argument that commended itself to the wilder sections of the Spanish press.

  Operations on the north-east coast of Spain were not going well, with the allies held in check by Marshal Suchet near Barcelona. Wellington considered intervening in that sector, but concluded that he was better placed to enter France from the north-west. News from elsewhere in Europe was encouraging, with early reports suggesting that Napoleon was in real trouble deep in Germany. With San Sebastián taken, he proposed to cross the River Bidossoa and then force the passes of the Pyrenees beyond it.

  On 7 October Wellington crossed the Bidossoa, giving Ensign Howell Rees Gronow of the 1st Foot Guards his first view of ‘the immortal Wellingto
n’:

  He was very stern and grave looking; he was in deep meditation, so long as I kept him in view, and spoke to no one. His features were bold, and I saw much decision of character in his expression. He rode a knowing-looking thoroughbred horse, and wore a gray overcoat, Hessian boots, and a large cocked hat.106

  Wellington was now a field marshal. He had been promoted full general in 1812, although the new rank only applied in the Peninsula, but his success at Vitoria encouraged the Prince Regent to write (Elizabeth Longford points out that the language is as fine as the writing is faint) from Carlton House on 3 July that:

  Your glorious conduct is beyond all human praise, and far beyond my reward. I know no language the world affords worthy to express it … You have sent me, among the trophies of your unrivalled fame, the staff of a French Marshal, and I send you in return that of England.107

  Alas, it was not that simple, for there was no regulation field-marshal’s baton in the British army of the age, and the prince, that ‘fountain of taste’ had helped design one. The Duke of York, never slow to tarnish the gilt, also sent a letter of congratulation, observing that the promotion had been mooted after Salamanca but was turned down because of the ‘spirit of jealousy’ it would have inspired.

  The French defended the Bidossoa from stout field fortifications, but Wellington broke their line at Vera. The fall of Pamplona on 31 October released more troops, and with their aid he then unhinged Soult’s defence with battles on the Nivelle, the Nive and St Pierre, and was able to threaten Bayonne. On 1 November, he issued a proclamation to the French population, warning it to take no part in the operations but stressing that he had ordered that no harm would be done to civilians. However, it was soon evident that while British and Portuguese soldiers were conducting themselves so well that ‘the inhabitants are living very comfortably and quietly with our soldiers cantoned in their houses’, the Spanish were another matter altogether. They fiercely resented what the French had done to their country, and in consequence ‘plundered a good deal, and did a good deal of mischief …’108 This persuaded Wellington to send some of his Spanish troops back to Spain, which reduced the size of the force available to meet Soult when campaigning resumed in 1814, but also reduced the risk of large-scale French popular resistance to his invasion.