Wellington

by Richard Holmes

  speaking to me when he was struck. We were on a point of land that overlooked the plain. I had just been warned off by some soldiers … when a ball came bounding along en ricochet as it is called, and striking him on the back, sent him many yards over the head of his horse. He fell on his face, and bounded upwards, and fell again. All the staff dismounted and ran to him, and when I came up he said, “Pray tell them to leave me and let me die in peace.” I had him conveyed to the rear …70

  At about 7pm FitzRoy Somerset, riding alongside the duke, was hit in the right arm by a musket-ball fired from La Haye Sainte, and walked off to a field hospital where Dr John Gunning took off his arm above the elbow. Somewhat later, a grapeshot passed over Wellington’s horse and hit Uxbridge in the knee. Uxbridge knew what this meant, and exclaimed: ‘By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!’ ‘By God, sir,’ replied Wellington, ‘so you have.’71

  Uxbridge’s leg was, however, still intact when Napoleon launched his last attack, sending five battalions of the Middle Guard, backed by three of the Old, against Wellington’s right centre. Wellington was just behind Maitland’s brigade, now lying down just behind the ridge, when one of the columns approached. He shouted: ‘Now, Maitland! Now is your time!’ And then, unable to resist the temptation, he gave the fire order himself: ‘Up Guards! Make ready! Fire!’ Halkett’s weak brigade joined in the firefight from the east, and Adam’s fresher men played their part from the west. Colonel Sir John Colborne, acting on his own initiative, took 1/52nd out of the line and engaged the French from the flank. No troops, even veterans of the Imperial Guard, could stand such punishment, and the French broke and fell back. Still the crisis was not past, for Halkett’s men also broke in the face of renewed artillery fire when they advanced to follow up the retreating guardsmen.

  Wellington now threw the last ounce of himself into the battle, though his surviving staff begged him to take care. ‘So I will,’ he said, ‘directly I see those fellows driven off.’ Illuminated by a shaft of sunlight that broke through the clouds, he gestured with his hat to order a general advance. He yelled: ‘Go on, Colborne! Go on. They won’t stand. Don’t give them time to rally.’ John Kincaid, down by the sandpit with the 95th, heard a cheer spreading from the right, and: ‘Lord Wellington galloped up on the instant, and the men began to cheer him, but he called out “No cheering, my lads, but forward, to complete your victory.”’72 He sent Vivian’s cavalry forward, and then went on himself, despite warnings from an aide that ‘we are getting into enclosed ground, and your life is too valuable to be thrown away’. ‘Never mind,’ he replied. ‘Let them fire away. The battle’s gained: My life’s of no consequence now.’73 At about 9pm, he met Blücher at La Belle Alliance, and they embraced on horseback. But the allies were still divided by language. ‘Mein lieber kamarad,’ said the old Prussian, ‘quelle affaire’.

  Blücher agreed that his army would carry on with the pursuit, and the duke rode back along the Brussels road to his headquarters in Waterloo, looking ‘sombre and dejected … The few individuals who attended him wore, too, rather the aspect of a little funeral train rather than that of victors in one of the most important battles ever fought.’74 After dismounting, he made the mistake of giving Copenhagen a pat, but the noble steed, who had had a day of it himself, lashed out and narrowly missed his master. He called on the wounded Gordon. ‘Thank God you are safe,’ whispered Gordon. ‘I have no doubt, Gordon, that you will do well,’ said the duke, and had him moved to his own bed. He ate supper at a table laid for too many who would never dine again, looking up anxiously every time the door opened. He drank a single glass of wine, toasting ‘the Memory of the Peninsular War’. Then ‘he held up both his hands in an imploring attitude’, and said ‘The hand of almighty God has been upon me this day’, lay down on a pallet on the floor, and was asleep in an instant.

  He was still asleep when Dr John Hume came in with the preliminary casualty list.

  As I entered, he sat up, his face covered with the dust and sweat of the previous day, and extended his hand to me, which I took and held in mine, whilst I told him of Gordon’s death, and of such of the casualties as had come to my knowledge. He was much affected. I felt the tears dropping fast upon my hand. And looking towards him, saw them chasing one another in furrows over his dusty cheeks. He brushed them away suddenly with his left hand, and said to me in a voice tremulous with emotion, “Well, thank God, I don’t know what it is to lose a battle; but certainly nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one’s friends.”’75

  He rose at once, and began his formal dispatch to Earl Bathurst, which was speedily to arouse criticism because it was less generous with its praise than many wished. It did, however, ‘attribute the successful result of this arduous day to the cordial and timely assistance’ he received from the Prussians, affirming that their attack ‘was a most decisive one’.76 When, in later life, Wellington was asked if there was anything he could have done better, he replied: ‘Yes, I should have given more praise.’77 Yet it was his suggestion that all ranks who fought in the battle should be given a medal, and the Waterloo medal was to become the first generally issued to the British army.

  I re-read Wellington’s dispatch in the lee of the farm buildings at La Haye Sainte, and was struck, once again, by the sheer scale of Wellington’s achievement. To write, largely from memory, a detailed account of the events of 15–18 June, with only a few hours’ sleep and so many of his friends killed or wounded, was a prodigious accomplishment. He rode back to Brussels, where he wrote notes to the Earl of Aberdeen, commiserating on the death of his brother and adding, with his eye for detail, that Gordon had ‘a black horse, given to him, I believe, by Lord Ashburnham, which I will keep till I hear from you what you wish should be done with it’. Another letter informed the Duke of Beaufort that his brother FitzRoy had lost his arm, but with luck would survive ‘to join me again; and that he will long live to be, as he is likely to become, an honour to his country, as he is a satisfaction to his family and friends’.78 Then he saw Creevey through his open window, and called him in. ‘It has been a damned serious business,’ he affirmed. ‘Blücher and I have lost 30,000 [actually nearer 23,000] men. It has been a damned nice thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.’ He used much the same words in a letter to Richard:

  It was the most desperate business I was ever in. I never took so much trouble about any battle, and was never so near being beat. Our loss is immense, particularly in that best of all Instruments, British Infantry. I never saw the Infantry behave so well.79

  Wellington believed that ‘we have given Napoleon his death blow’, and he was right. As the allied armies advanced, Wellington took care to emphasise that France was a friendly country: their quarrel was with Napoleon and his adherents. Sergeant Edward Costello of the 95th (soon to cement friendship between adversaries by marrying a French wife), was so impressed that he inserted the relevant General Order in his memoirs, but Captain Cavalié Mercer was not pleased that his former enemies ‘shall be treated like gentlemen, and not get the punishment which France, as a nation, so richly deserves’.80 An armistice was signed on 3 July, and the allies entered Paris on the 7th, though without a parade, which might have caused resentment. When Blücher declared his intention of blowing up the Pont de Iéna, named after the great Prussian defeat of 1806, Wellington posted a single British sentry on the structure, reasoning that the Prussians would not kill an allied soldier. He pressed a policy of moderation on the allies as well as on his own government, declaring that if Napoleon was to be executed then the sovereigns ‘should appoint an executioner which should not be me’.

  He found himself drenched by a torrent of honours: Louis XVII gave him his own broad ribbon of the Order of the Holy Ghost, and other sovereigns followed with orders and titles. He slipped comfortably into the bright social life of the French capital, hotly pursued by the pretty little Lady Shelley, and seeing so much of Lady Frances Wedderburn-Webster that the St Jam
es’s Chronicle reported that her husband (himself no mean womaniser), was divorcing her and seeking damages. Eventually the Wedderburn-Websters successfully sued the newspaper, but the episode was unfortunate. However, Wellington was not deflected from his duty by a pretty face. When Aglaé Ney came to ask him to intervene on behalf of her husband, who was to be shot for treason, Wellington refused, arguing that he was a representative of the British government and a servant of the allies. Michel Ney went to his death in front of a wall at the Luxembourg gardens, and it was typical of his resolute courage that he gave the order to fire himself.

  Appointed commander of the allied army of occupation, Wellington set up his headquarters in the Château de St Martin, near Cambrai, and divided his time between there and Paris. He produced the usual flood of orders, warning officers not to ride over crops when hunting, reminding them that no provocation justified their entering into a fist-fight (the sword was a gentleman’s weapon), prescribing a new ‘mode of changing the front of a column [to be] practised by the regiments of infantry’, and reflecting on the relative ranks of civil and military officers. He took three visiting American ladies to the field of Waterloo, and was noticeably silent at dinner that evening. Yet his public life was less happy; reviled as le tyran de Cambrai by Bonapartists and extreme royalists alike, he was at constant risk of assassination, and one man who fired at him was not simply acquitted by a French jury but left 10,000 francs in Napoleon’s will. As the army of occupation grew smaller and his own presence became no less irritating to the French, he knew that he could not stay on indefinitely, and in December 1818 he was offered the post of master-general of the ordnance, and a seat in the cabinet. He accepted, and, at the age of 49, embarked upon a political career.

  Wellington was not sorry to have fought his last battle. He made no secret of the fact that Waterloo, that ‘close-run thing’, had been won by the narrowest of margins and perhaps that miscalculation which had allowed Napoleon to drive a wedge between him and Blücher had shaken him more deeply than he cared to admit. And, familiar though he was with battles, he had been shocked by the slaughter. Oh, do not congratulate me,’ he begged his brother William’s wife, putting his hands to his face to hide the tears, ‘I have lost all my dearest friends.’ He recovered his poise during his time in Paris, and put on weight too. But there were still times when the memory of Waterloo flooded back and unmanned him. Lady Shelley recalled him ‘his eye glistening, and his voice broken’, as he spoke of the battle:

  ‘I hope to God,’ he said one day, ‘that I have fought my last battle. It is a bad thing to be always fighting. While in the thick of it, I am much too occupied to feel anything; but it is wretched just after. It is quite impossible to think of glory. Both mind and feelings are exhausted. I am wretched even at the moment of victory, and I always say that next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained. Not only do you lose those dear friends with whom you have been living, but you are forced to leave the wounded behind you. To be sure one tries to do the best for them, but how little that is! At such moments every feeling in your breast is deadened. I am now just beginning to retain my natural spirits, but I never wish for any more fighting.’81

  SIX

  PILLAR OF THE STATE

  THIS TIME Wellington had a home to return to. His agent had been searching for a suitable country seat, and had eventually purchased Stratfield Saye, between Basingstoke and Reading, from Lord Rivers for £263,000, less than half the sum granted the duke for that purpose by parliament. The house was not well regarded and, at the time, the duke planned to demolish it and build a splendid new structure called Waterloo Place. Happily the scheme was never realised, and Stratfield Saye survives as one of the most pleasant stately homes of England, dignified without being grand, and accessible in a way that Blenheim Palace, built to celebrate the victories of the Duke of Marlborough, is not.

  Before accepting office, Wellington had made it clear that he was not a party man. He happened to be ‘sincerely attached’ to the present Tory government, but believed that ‘factious opposition to the government’ was ‘highly injurious to the interests of the country’, and he would not indulge in it if his friends were to lose power.1 As master-general he commanded the ordnance corps – officers and men of the Royal Artillery, officers of the Royal Engineers and other ranks of the Royal Corps of Sappers and Miners. He also controlled the civilian ordnance department, responsible for stores and equipment for both army and navy and the maintenance of barracks at home and abroad. The master-general did not normally chair the board of ordnance, and much day-to-day work was pushed along by his secretary – from early 1819, FitzRoy Somerset. Wellington’s cabinet seat, however, enabled him to advise the government on defence matters generally, and, in the absence of a police force, this included the preservation of civil order.

  The times were violent. Britain’s phenomenal industrial development and her take-over of markets once dominated by France had been accompanied by a rapid rise in population, from 15.74 million in 1801 to 24.15 by 1831. By 1801 about a third of this growing population lived in towns, and that proportion grew dramatically for the rest of Wellington’s life. Just as the distribution of population changed, so too did its source of wealth, as industry came to dominate both trade and agriculture. Yet few – and all of them men – could vote and governments, both Whig and Tory, were composed of, and governed in the interests of, landowners. It was not surprising that the French Revolution had found answering echoes in Britain, and Tom Paine’s radical The Rights of Man, published in 1791, demanding radical reform, had sold a staggering 200,000 copies. The excesses of the revolution had turned most Englishmen away from radicalism, but powerful undercurrents remained, and final victory over France, which added to social problems by throwing thousands of discharged soldiers onto the streets, saw a resurgence in demands for political reform. In 1819, a demonstration in Manchester, where the radical leader ‘Orator’ Hunt addressed a huge crowd, got out of hand, and cavalry charged the mob, causing many casualties.

  Wellington was one of the thirteen ministers who signed a letter of congratulation to the magistrates who had directed the troops to restore order, believing that unless he did so, it would be hard to get local justices to do their duty. The following year a group of radicals, who met in a stable loft in Cato Street, planned to assassinate the entire cabinet while it was at dinner at Lord Harrowby’s house in Grosvenor Square. Wellington proposed that the cabinet should dine as usual, but each minister should put a pair of pistols in his dispatch box, and soldiers should be posted nearby. Wiser counsels prevailed, however, and they dined elsewhere. The conspirators were arrested: two expressed particular hatred for Wellington, and one declared that he had intended to swear that the duke had begged for mercy on his knees. When the five ringleaders were executed, a sympathetic crowd attacked the hangman. Although the Cato Street Conspiracy was never really a threat to his life, Wellington had a narrower escape when a would-be murderer lay in wait for him in St James’s Park, as he was walking home from the Ordnance Office to Apsley House, his London home. Happily, he fell in with FitzRoy Somerset, and the sight of the two men walking arm in arm was too much for the assassin, who made off.

  George III, too deranged, for the past ten years, to have any impact on politics, died in January 1820, and the Prince Regent became George IV. Wellington had a poor opinion of him and his brothers. ‘By God!’ he told Creevey, ‘You never saw a figure in all your life as he is! Then he speaks and swears so like old Falstaff, that damn me if I am not ashamed to walk into a room with him.’ The royal dukes were ‘the damnedest millstones about the necks of any government that can be imagined. They have insulted – personally insulted – two thirds of the gentlemen of England.’2 But when the new king decided to rid himself of his consort, Caroline of Brunswick, on the grounds of her adultery. Wellington, steadfast royalist that he was, felt obliged to support his monarch, although the king’s private life, cushioned by a succession of pneuma
tic ladies, was hardly blameless. The queen returned to England in June 1820, and was rapturously received by the radicals, not because they had much confidence in her virtue, but because by supporting her they showed their hatred for the king and his ministers. Wellington was the government’s go-between with her attorney-general, Henry Brougham, but the negotiations came to nothing and the government introduced a bill of ‘Pains and Penalties’ to deprive Caroline of her title and dissolve her marriage.

  That summer, between the first and second readings of the bill, feelings ran high. Wellington feared that the army might side with the radicals: a battalion of 3rd Guards was heard shouting ‘God Save the Queen!’ He recommended the government ‘to form either a police in London or a military corps, which should be of a different description from the regular military force, or both’.3 The suggestion did not bear fruit for another eight years, when his political ally, Sir Robert Peel, was home secretary; had it done so earlier, then policemen might have been known, not as Bobbies or Peelers, but, perhaps, as Arties or Wellingtons. There was certainly need for them when the queen appeared for her trial before the House of Lords on 17 August 1820. Wellington was hissed so badly when entering Parliament Square that his horse shied. On another occasion, he was (so it was said), stopped by a gang of road-menders in Grosvenor Place who demanded that he should say ‘God save the Queen.’ ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he replied, ‘since you will have it, God Save the Queen – and may all your wives be like her’.4 There is no doubt that on 28 August 1820, he was attacked by a mob which tried to drag him from his horse, and he experienced, said The Times, ‘considerable difficulty’ before he broke away. Incidents like this heightened Wellington’s distaste for the crowd. ‘The mob are too contemptible to be thought about for a moment,’ he told Lady Shelley, who had so admired him in Paris. ‘About thirty of them ran away from me in the Park this morning, because I pulled up my horse when they were hooting! They thought I was going to fall upon them and give them what they deserved.’5 The government carried the second reading by only the narrowest of margins, and Liverpool decided to drop the bill.