Wellington

by Richard Holmes

  The crisis passed. The king, who had talked wildly about dismissing the government if it abandoned proceedings, had no real intention of doing so, and popular agitation abated. The Coronation, on 19 July 1821, went off reasonably well, with a furious queen locked out and the king shamelessly ogling Lady Coningham, unkindly nicknamed the vice-queen. But the king was still desperately anxious to be rid of the queen, and when, on Napoleon’s death that year, he was told that his ‘greatest enemy’ was dead, he replied: ‘Is she, by God!’ Caroline did in fact die on 7 August 1821: her partisans diagnosed a broken heart.

  The royal divorce, part tragedy and part farce, deepened Wellington’s gloomy opinion of the state of the nation, with its untrustworthy monarch and fickle populace. Nor was there much comfort at home. One visitor to Stratfield Saye found the whole place an indication of ‘the lack of sympathy between Duke and Duchess’ whose bedrooms were as far apart as it was possible for them to be. Wellington told his close friend Harriet Arbuthnot that:

  He had repeatedly tried to live in a friendly manner with her … but it was impossible … She did not understand him, that she could not enter with him into the considerations of all the important concerns which are continually occupying his mind, and that he found he might as well talk to a child … his tastes were domestic, that nothing wd make him so happy as to have a home where he could find comfort; but that, so far from that, she made his house so dull that nobody wd go to it.6

  Mrs Arbuthnot eventually concluded that the duke was right, and that Kitty was indeed ‘totally unfit for her situation. She is like the housekeeper and dresses herself exactly like a shepherdess, with an old hat made by herself stuck on the back of her head, and a dirty basket under her arm’. Although she did her best to please him, her efforts were often almost comically misplaced: when he complained about her greying hair, she not only bought herself a wig but overdid the rouge. Her accounts were still in a tangle, and she pressed the duke for her allowance of £500 a year to be increased to £670. He would not hear of it. £500 was generous for a lady of her rank, he asserted; only princesses had more.

  And so the marriage spun further down its vicious circle. Wellington was sharp with his wife, and she responded by becoming agitated. It was all the more painful because he could be utterly charming to women who did not bore him: Lady Shelley had him drawing a battle-plan of Orthez on the knee of his breeches, and he was wonderful with her children and, indeed, with almost everybody else’s. But he was stiff with his own. His eldest son, Douro recalled that ‘he never even patted me on my shoulder when I was a boy, because he hated my mother’, but the boy grew up to worship a man he both loved and feared. He was haunted by the thought that he would one day inherit the title: ‘Think what it will be like when the Duke of Wellington is announced and only I come in.’7

  Some of Wellington’s old habits died hard. At about this time he had what Elizabeth Longford calls ‘a passionate love affair’ with Lady Charlotte Greville, daughter of the Duke of Portland, and a family scandal was averted only when she undertook to ‘make the immediate and unqualified relinquishment of all intimacy & correspondence with the Duke of Wellington’.8 He was very close to Harriet Arbuthnot, signing one of his letters ‘Your most devoted and affectionate Slave’, and joking that she was ‘La Tyranna’ for he could do nothing without her consent. However, it was probably her mind and her capacity for friendship and discussion he valued, for she was ‘a deeply conventional and faithful wife’.

  Wellington hunted with his usual enthusiasm, and enjoyed shooting, although he was notoriously erratic. One of Lady Shelley’s daughters was so frightened that her mother exclaimed: ‘What’s this, Fanny? Fear in the presence of the Lord of Waterloo? Stand close behind the Duke of Wellington, and he will protect you.’ It was sound advice, because that was the safest place. He winged a dog and a keeper, and then hit an old lady doing her washing. ‘I’m wounded, Milady’, yelled his victim. ‘My good woman,’ replied Lady Shelley, ‘this ought to be the proudest moment of your life. You have had the distinction of being shot by the great Duke of Wellington.’9

  There was little comfort on the political front. Castlereagh was one of Wellington’s oldest political allies, and without his support Wellington would not have been given command in Portugal in 1808 or been re-employed after Cintra. Although he had rendered his country extraordinary service by maintaining the coalition against Napoleon, as a skilled borough-monger, Castlereagh was deeply unpopular with the radicals. The fact that he was a steadfast supporter of Catholic emancipation alienated many of those who shared his opposition to political reform, and he was hated like few politicians before or since. In 1822, he began to display symptoms of derangement. Wellington listened to his ravings and told him: ‘From what you have said, I am bound to warn you that you cannot be in your right mind.’ Catlereagh covered his face and sobbed: ‘Since you say so, it must be so.’10 The duke warned Castlereagh’s doctor, and all razors and pistols were removed, but Castlereagh kept a little knife in his pocketbook and used this to cut his carotid artery. An exultant mob cheered his coffin on its way into Westminster Abbey, and Lord Byron declaimed:

  So He has cut his throat at last! – He! Who?

  The man who cut his country’s long ago.

  There was doubt over who should take over as foreign secretary. The king favoured Wellington, but the preservation of the party’s unity suggested George Canning, leader of its more liberal wing and Castlereagh’s inveterate enemy, who was at that moment awaiting departure to India to take office as governor general. The king could not stand the man, for he had supported the queen and was a champion of Catholic emancipation, and Wellington had little use for him, but advised the king that the government could not do without him. So Canning was appointed, although the cabinet’s hesitancy almost persuaded him to reject the job out of sheer pique. It was, he complained, as if he had been given a ticket to a fashionable club with the words ‘Admit the Rogue’ written on the back.

  That year Wellington was to represent the British government at an international congress in Verona, prompted by the revolt in Spain and the imminence of French military intervention. However, before he departed, the duke, in his capacity as master-general of the ordnance, was attending the test-firing of some new howitzers, and a loud explosion left him with earache and a loud ringing in his left ear. His physician, Dr Hume, who had served under him in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, called in a specialist who treated the ear with a strong caustic solution, leaving his patient in agony. Dr Hume called next morning and found the duke unshaved and red-eyed, like someone ‘who has recovered from a terrible debauch’. He never fully got over it. His balance was affected, and he was noticeably deaf. In later life he was a familiar figure in the Lords, with his hat pulled down low over his forehead, cupping a hand to his ear in an effort to follow the debate. It is a sad reflection on the medicine of age – Wellington had come through a score of battles with his hearing intact only to be deafened by a doctor.

  He travelled first to Vienna, and complained that he felt very ill: ‘sometimes I feel as if I was drunk & can’t walk. I am very tired of being sick, never having been so before. Even the strength of my Iron constitution now tells against me.’11 A newspaper reported ‘a great alteration in his features, and a great change in his person’, but when he arrived at Verona he proceeded confidently to implement Canning’s policy of condemning French intervention in Spain, and, rather less happily, to support the liberation of Spanish colonies in South America. He found himself playing cards with Napoleon’s widow, Marie-Louise, now Duchess of Parma, settling his debts in gold napoléons, and thought her son ‘a fine lad, just like the archdukes.’12

  The duke returned to England still feeling very seedy. In January 1823, he sent FitzRoy Somerset off to Madrid in a vain effort to persuade the patriots to amend the constitution, granting more power to King Ferdinand and averting a French invasion, but the mission was ‘inevitably doomed and grossly unfair to hi
m’.13 The French invaded in February and restored Ferdinand to absolute power, and amongst the liberal refugees was Wellington’s old friend Alava – probably the only man to have served, on different sides, at Trafalgar and Waterloo. Wellington installed him in a house on the estate at Stratfield Saye, and took him along to Court’s bank, saying that as long as he had any money there, Alava was welcome to draw as much as he thought proper. But he was increasingly uneasy with Canning. He called him ‘the gentleman’, because he was suspicious of Canning’s populist streak and desire to recognise South American revolutionaries (who looked, in their way, not unlike Irish ones), and was unsure whether Canning was a gentleman at all. The duke was defeated over the question of the South American republics, and at the end of 1824 the cabinet agreed to recognise them.

  There was another upset in March 1825, when his younger son, Lord Charles Wellesley, was sent down from Oxford for a year for breaking out of college after a party in Lord Douro’s rooms; both he and Douro were dispatched to Cambridge. And then, in the autumn, there was a sharp clash with Richard, now lord lieutenant of Ireland. They had fallen out during the Peninsular War when Richard’s career had been crippled by his idleness and lechery, and, during the Hundred Days, the disappointed marquess had supported the Whig opposition’s criticism of the campaign. Richard was a widower, for his French wife had died in 1816. He now proposed to marry Marianne Patterson, whom the duke greatly admired, and was accepted. Wellington was aghast that such a woman should marry ‘a man totally ruined’. So too was Marianne’s sister-in-law, Betsy Patterson-Bonaparte: ‘I married [Jerome] the brother of Napoleon the conqueror of Europe,’ she said, ‘Mary has married the brother of Napoleon’s conqueror.’14 Things went from bad to worse when the duke was persuaded to offer help to Lord Wellesley, who had irritated the Protestants by banning the celebrations traditionally associated with William of Orange’s birthday. Wellesley did not respond.

  The duke was tired of the king, fed up with his family, and irritated by painters who invented allegories he disapproved of and got his uniform wrong. Sir Thomas Lawrence, considered by the diarist Charles Greville, son of Wellington’s lover, as the finest of living painters, failed on both counts: first with his waiting-for-the-Prussians Waterloo watch, and then with a sword which was so wrong that the duke ordered him not to leave the session until he had corrected his mistake.

  When, at the end of 1825, Canning suggested that Wellington might go to St Petersburg to see the new tsar, he agreed to do so. Canning maintained that Wellington ‘jumped at the proposal’, but there were those who suggested that Canning said this because he was glad to see the duke out of the city. Wellington took leave of his friends with unusual emotion; Alava had never seen him so moved. FitzRoy Somerset, who accompanied the duke to Russia, thought that at St Petersburg, the duke was treated ‘like a prince’ and was received by Nicholas I and his family ‘in the most marked and flattering manner’.15 The mission seemed a success, because Wellington was able to negotiate the secret Protocol of St Petersburg, by which Britain agreed to mediate between Russia and Turkey to achieve a measure of independence for Greece. They returned by way of Berlin, where they were received with ‘marked kindness’ by the Prussian royal family. There was less kindness at home. In April, a jealous Canning encouraged the opposition to describe Wellington’s mission as a failure, and Lord Liverpool obstinately refused to make his brother Gerald a bishop because of his wife’s adultery. There was more trouble with Douro, and the duke told Mrs Arbuthnot that he was ‘very disappointed’ in him. And there was death in the air: both Lord Liverpool and the Duke of York were ill.

  The Duke of York had never liked Wellington. In 1821 he revealed to Charles Greville an ‘extremely strong’ prejudice against the man:

  He does not deny his military talents, but thinks that he is false and ungrateful, that he never gave sufficient credit to his officers, and that he was unwilling to put forward men of talent who might be in a situation to claim some share of credit, the whole of which he was desirous of engrossing himself. He says that at Waterloo he got into a scrape and allowed himself to be surprised, and he attributes in great measure the success of that day to Lord Anglesey, who, he says, was hardly mentioned, and that in the coldest terms, in the Duke’s dispatch.16

  York died on 5 January 1827, and the king, often convinced that he had charged, disguised as Major General von Bock, at Salamanca, briefly entertained hopes of becoming commander-in-chief himself, but was politely dissuaded. Wellington was the obvious choice, and he became commander-in-chief that month, retaining, at the king’s request, the post of master-general of the ordnance. ‘Yes, yes,’ he told Croker

  I am in my proper place, in a place to which I was destined by my trade. I am a soldier, and I am in my place at the head of the army, as the Chancellor, who is a lawyer, is in his place on the woolsack. We each of us have a trade, and are in our proper position when we are exercising it.17

  But Liverpool, already very ill, suffered a severe stroke on 17 February and could no longer continue as prime minister. Wellington, commander-in-chief or not, was a strong candidate for the office. Both Canning and the duke were summoned by the king, and at a crucial stage in proceedings, the king sent Wellington off for a drive with the gossipy Princess Lieven. After he returned, Canning asked him if he was prepared to serve on in a new administration to ensure stability. The duke asked who was to be prime minister, and Canning replied with icy sarcasm that:

  I believe it to be so generally understood that the King usually entrusts the formation of an Administration to the individual whom it is His Majesty’s gracious intention to place at the head of it, that it did not occur to me … to add that, in the present instance His Majesty does not intend to depart from the usual course of proceeding on such occasions.18

  The furious duke resigned as commander-in-chief and master-general. Resigning the latter was natural enough, since it was a cabinet office, but the former was not, and cartoonists detected pique, showing Wellington, as Achilles, sulking in Apsley House: ‘The Great Captain on the Stool of Repentance’. They had a point, for he had never been above sulking when rebuffed. However, although Canning managed to form an administration by bringing in some Whigs – for Wellington’s close associates, marshalled by his lieutenant, Robert Peel, would not serve – nobody expected it to last. Yet the government fell in an unexpected way. Canning had contracted rheumatic fever at the Duke of Yorks’ funeral in the icy St George’s Chapel at Windsor, and he died that summer. The moderate Tory Frederick Robinson, not long ennobled as Viscount Goderich, became prime minister. He had failed to cover himself with glory during Canning’s administration, and had been unable to steer reform of the Corn Laws through the Lords in the face of Tory opposition. Goderich’s own time in office was blighted by the death of his young daughter, but his moderate administration, with the capable William Huskisson leading it in the Commons, deserved a better fate than it received.

  Wellington had accepted the office of commander-in-chief when the king offered it to him on Canning’s death. He denied that he was a party leader, claiming, as he always had, that he should ‘support the Government whenever their Measures were calculated to promote the Honour or interests of the Country’. However, Gleig was right to term him ‘the acknowledged head of a great political party’, for he was the hero of the ultra-Tories, and spent the summer recess in Tory strongholds in the north, on visits which ‘though ostensibly those of private friendship were by others than himself converted into political demonstrations’.19 The mood was mixed. Gentlemen who dined with him hung on to every word, and ladies ‘as their custom was’ flattered him at every opportunity. But he was less well received in humbler circles: the populace turned out to see him, but their welcome was cold. He was now a party politician, who seemed to advocate policies of which they disapproved.

  The government was already in trouble when Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, liberally interpreting orders to apply ‘a friendly demonstr
ation of force’ to the Turks in an effort to deliver Greece, sank a Turkish fleet in Navarino Bay on 20 October 1827. Whigs and radicals were delighted, and Wellington’s Tory friends were shocked. Goderich lurched on until, on 8 January 1828, in tears once again, he resigned behind a borrowed royal handkerchief. Wellington was dressing at Apsley House the next morning when a note arrived from the Lord Chancellor, followed shortly afterwards by Lord Lyndhurst himself, who had come to take him to Windsor. He found the king sitting up in bed wearing a turban and a dirty silk jacket. ‘Arthur,’ he declared, ‘the cabinet is defunct.’ Wellington was invited to form a government on the clear understanding that Catholic emancipation should be no part of his programme. The duke asked for time to consult his friends, but asked the king if he had any particular objections, and discovered that only the Whig leader, Lord Grey, was unwelcome. Then he set off to consult Peel, who advised him to accept, although he warned that Catholic emancipation was bound to cause trouble, as were unreconciled Canning-ites.