Wellington and Waterloo

by Foster, R E

  Wellington had been born in Dublin, probably on 1 May 1769. His parents were the unworldly Garret Wellesley, first Earl of Mornington, and Anne Hill, daughter of Viscount Dungannon. The man Victorians revered as the embodiment of Englishness was consequently Irish. Though the family traced its origins to Somerset, they had migrated to Ireland in the thirteenth century. By the eighteenth century, they were unexceptionable members of the Protestant Ascendancy. Yet Wellington never set foot in Ireland after 1809, and in his will of 1807 expressed the desire that his children neither live nor go there.30 This conscious downplaying of his Irish, as opposed to his British, ancestry might be seen by critics as being all of a piece with his subsequent failure to afford due credit to the Prussians for the part they played in the triumph of the British Army in 1815.

  But Wellington’s life before 1815 should not be seen as one long inexorable preparation for the slopes of Mont St Jean. He was well into middle age by then, and had already been hailed as one of Britain’s most distinguished warriors by dint of his achievements in the Peninsular War. These too, though, can easily be seen out of context, still more so his earlier years in India. Wellington was not so well known (at least, not so soon or as completely), to his countrymen as the familiar biographical approach might lead us to suppose. Neither were some of his accomplishments universally perceived as victories. This was partly a question of media. Looking back from the vantage point of the early 1860s, Rees Gronow rightly pointed out that:

  If the present generation of Englishmen would take the trouble of looking at the newspapers which fifty years ago informed the British public of passing events both at home and abroad, they would, doubtless, marvel at the very limited and imperfect amount of intelligence which the best journals were enabled to place before their readers. The progress of the Peninsular campaign was very imperfectly chronicled.

  But there was also an even more important personal and political dimension to Wellington’s story of which contemporaries were only too aware: suspicions lingered as to how far his success was attributable simply to his being the undeserving recipient of favours from his elder brother and a government of which he became a member. The aim of the present chapter is to sketch the broad outlines of that tale, to show when and how the Duke became recognised as a national hero. Without it, the subsequent story of Waterloo is denied its true perspective. It is also, inevitably, the story of the army. An institution which had always had something of an ambivalent standing in the minds of Englishmen, its reputation was not helped by the fact that in Wellington’s youth it had been humiliated in the war against the American colonists. When the Duke’s formidable mother despaired of her son as ‘food for powder and nothing more’, she spoke with a deep sense of frustration.31

  Lady Mornington’s frustration suggests that Wellington’s reticence when it came to talking about his formative years stemmed from an embarrassing awareness that his childhood had not lived up to his later standards of success and purpose. His parents clearly invested their greatest hopes in their eldest son, Richard (1760–1842), who distinguished himself at Eton and Oxford. Their other surviving children were William (1763–1845), Anne (1768–1847), Gerald (1770–1848) and Henry (1773–1847). Though Arthur followed his elder brothers to Eton in 1781, his younger sibling, Gerald, quickly outshone him there. Henry’s entering Eton in 1784 was the cue for the undistinguished Arthur to be withdrawn. Stories about him during these early years are very few; several only entered the public domain after his death. One recalled a school holiday when the Wellesley brothers were invited to stay with their aunt, Lady Dungannon, in Shropshire. En route, in order to shock her, they concocted the story that their sister Anne had eloped with a footman. The brothers’ fiction would be echoed later in reality: in March 1809, Henry’s wife, Charlotte, was to elope with the future Lord Uxbridge, Wellington’s cavalry commander at Waterloo.32

  Another story circulating widely at the time of the Duke’s death, strangely overlooked by most biographers, is more revealing respectively of Arthur and Richard. It concerned an encounter he and his brother Richard had with David Evans and his sister, whilst staying in North Wales. Wellington, then aged about 12, challenged 8-year-old David to a game with the latter’s marbles. When Wellington made to steal them, David’s 10-year-old sister was enlisted to recover them. Richard, relishing the battle:

  incited the two to fight, and mounting himself upon a heap of dirt upon the roadside, dared the girl, to touch Arthur […] and laughed at the fun; but when he beheld his brother Arthur drop his colours, and deliver the marbles, and beat a hasty retreat, the tears fell from his eyes.33

  Whilst he lived, Richard, the generous and dominant elder brother, apparently paid for David Evans to receive a weekly newspaper. No less telling, Wellington ‘never shewed any mark of remembrance’ of the episode, except for one brief meeting with Evans soon after Waterloo.34

  Richard’s aid was of greater importance in the rise of Arthur than the latter was wont to admit. Following Lord Mornington’s death in May 1781, his embittered widow was left with six children and limited funds. It fell to Richard to assume the role of patriarch. He decided that Arthur might benefit from a year at the Royal Academy of Equitation at Angers in Anjou. The recollections of Alexander Mackenzie, his governor there in 1786, of a sickly Arthur Wellesley who spent most of the time on a sofa playing with a white terrier, do not suggest that the investment reaped an immediate dividend.35 His mother remained unimpressed, for on his return to England she saw him for the first time in a year ‘at the Haymarket Theatre, saying, “I do believe there is my ugly boy Arthur.”’36 Angers did at least confirm that the army would be Arthur’s destination. Brother Richard, second Earl of Mornington, duly smoothed his passage. He spent some £4,000 on Arthur’s behalf, money used to obtain him commissions in seven regiments between March 1787 and April 1793. Though he did not serve with any of them, Arthur rapidly rose from ensign in the 73rd Foot to major in the 33rd.

  Just what transformed the dilettante Arthur Wellesley into the soldier who took his profession seriously remains something of an enigma. Undoubtedly the galvanising period was the eighteen months or so that followed the outbreak of war with Revolutionary France in February 1793. The best explanation is that the consequent opportunity to prove himself coincided with the need: he had been courting Lady Catherine (Kitty) Pakenham since autumn 1792 only to have his suit rebuffed in the spring of 1793 by her brother, Lord Longford, on the grounds that he could not adequately provide for her.37 Wellesley responded by taking an active interest in military matters. By September he was the 33rd’s commanding officer with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. A later rare admission was that it was around this time also that he burnt his violin – the facility for music had been inherited from his father – both a symbolic rejection of his frivolous past and a recognition that he must do better. Characteristically, ‘he disliked any mention of the circumstance’.38

  Wellesley’s first active service, however, proved inglorious: in June 1794 he landed with his regiment at Ostend as part of the Duke of York’s ill-fated campaign in the Netherlands. He would later rationalise York’s debacle with the wry observation that, ‘I learnt what one ought not to do, and that is always something.’39 Two years later, the 33rd was posted to India. Newly commissioned as Colonel Wellesley, Arthur left Portsmouth to join it. Whether through an awareness of his lack of theoretical knowledge, or the sharp shock his brief practical experience in the Low Countries had administered him, the time on the journey was not wasted. As well as books on Indian affairs, he took with him several hundred volumes covering the art of war from Caesar to Frederick the Great.

  Britain had been the dominant European force in India since Clive’s 1757 victory at Plassey. Its affairs there were overseen by the East India Company, in turn supervised by a six-man Board of Control in London. The Company, whose headquarters at Fort William, just outside Calcutta, was generally content to maintain its trading monopoly through a series of allian
ces and agreements aimed at preserving a rough equilibrium amongst the indigenous peoples. Notionally, the most important were those who comprised the Maratha Confederacy headed by the Peshwa in Poona. Outside the Confederacy, the Nizam of Hyderabad was the most important figure in central India, with Mysore the dominant state in the south. Inevitably, the Company judged that force was sometimes necessary to preserve its position. If he did not already know it, Colonel Wellesley’s autodidactic voyage presumably taught him that there had already been three wars against Mysore and one against the Marathas.

  Wellesley’s first months in India passed quietly enough. Then, unexpectedly in October 1797, it was announced that his brother Richard was to be Governor-General. The latter had put his brains and connections to good use, having been an MP since 1784 and a member of the Board of Control since 1793. At once brilliant, charismatic, vain and condescending, and frustrated in what he believed to be his legitimate political ambitions at home, the new Governor-General believed that a more aggressive policy in India was the way forward both for himself and Britain. Arthur, for good and ill, was destined to have his own reputation tied to, and determined by, that of his elder brother for the foreseeable future.40

  Mysore, ruled by its Sultan, Tipu, with ambitions to extend his influence in southern India at Britain’s expense, was on an obvious collision course with the Governor-General. The outcome was a foregone conclusion: Tipu died during the brief and bloody storming of his capital, Seringapatam, in May 1799. Arthur, commanding a division, played only a limited part in the military operation. Even so, it would prove contentious. Ordered by his superior, Lieutenant-General Harris, to take a defensive outpost known as the Sultanpettah Tope, during the night of 5 April, a failure to reconnoitre properly meant that he initially failed. It was surely only the fact that his brother was the Governor-General that saw him advanced, ahead of more senior claimants, to the governorship of Mysore. Sympathetic Wellington biographers tend to draw a veil over the episode, or cite his determination to learn from a rare military reverse. The sequence of events, however, would live long in the memory of Wellington’s detractors. Twenty years later, Lady Shelley noted, ‘murmurs’ persisted that ‘his appointment was due to family interest’. A full decade after that, in 1829, when the Duke was Prime Minister, a hostile press reminded readers that ‘it required years of victory entirely to wipe away the impressions then received’. Even Wellington himself later had the good grace to admit, in private, that it was a pivotal moment: the less-than-deserved ‘command afforded me the opportunities for distinction, and thus opened the road to fame’.41

  Wellington in India

  The distinction to which Wellington referred came in the Second Maratha War. The Peshwa of the Maratha Confederacy, rightly surmising that other Maratha chiefs desired his overthrow, sought protection by an alliance with the Company in December 1802. But the very fact of British interference only succeeded in provoking further unrest within the Confederation, spearheaded by Scindiah of Gwalior. In the early afternoon of 23 September 1803, Major-General Wellesley encountered Scindiah and – unexpectedly – his entire army of 50,000 at the confluence of the rivers Kaitna and Juah near the village of Assaye. As a position it was ‘confoundedly strong and difficult of access’.42 Wellesley’s own force numbered barely 7,000, of whom only 1,800 were British. Presuming that with two villages on opposite sides of the river it must therefore be fordable, he nevertheless pressed on. An impressive but hard-fought victory ensued. By the end of the year, Scindiah and his allies had sued for peace.43

  Assaye was a significant victory, far eclipsing anything he had hitherto achieved. In later life Wellington was apt to regard it, even more than Waterloo, as his finest action. It prefigured his experience at Waterloo in two important ways. One was his personal bravery under fire. Colin Campbell of the 78th recalled that, ‘The General was in the thick of the action the whole time […] I never saw a man so cool and collected as he was […] though I can assure you, till our troops got the orders to advance the fate of the day seemed doubtful.’ The other was his reaction once the heat of the action had passed: he was much affected by the fact that 1,600 of his men became casualties in face of unexpectedly stout enemy resistance.44 But some at home were less impressed. This was partly a case of the spectacular victory against superior odds being rendered necessary only because Wellington had not anticipated engaging Scindiah in such large numbers. ‘It is obvious,’ concluded the Morning Chronicle, ‘that a bad General may by possibility gain a name merely through the intrepidity of his army in retrieving his blunders.’ Even more though, as the newspaper continued with undisguised racial arrogance, it was a case of Wellington’s army’s bravery being bound to prevail as ‘in no place is this more likely than in India, where European troops are brought in competition with the natives’. The latter feeling was widespread. Just weeks before Waterloo, an anonymous veteran complained bitterly that whilst Britain was celebrating its Peninsular War heroes, it was forgetting its Indian ones:

  The heroes (and they deserve that name) of the Peninsula must not laugh at the battles fought against the native Princes of Asia; for the Duke of Wellington will tell them, that neither in Portugal, Spain or France, did he fight harder or stand in greater peril than against the Mahrattas, at Assaye: and his loss on that occasion, in proportion to his numbers, was as severe as any of his battles in the Peninsula.45

  Napoleon was not alone in thinking on the morning of Waterloo, that his adversary was merely a Sepoy general.

  If Sir Arthur Wellesley, as he became in 1804, really wanted to make his reputation, it was clear that he would have to return home. He finally did so in 1805. India had provided him with invaluable training, both as a soldier and an administrator. Most of all, India made Wellesley rich. The £42,000 he took home was more than sufficient to provide for Catherine Pakenham. They married in April 1806. India did not, however, as reactions to Assaye exemplify, win him much by way of public recognition. News from India appeared intermittently in British newspapers, but without much comment. Between 1797 and 1801 moreover, the public could be forgiven for focusing on the possibility that the country might be invaded: the War of the Second Coalition began only weeks before the invasion of Mysore. The fear of invasion revived after Britain declared war on France in May 1803; it persisted for the duration of the Second Maratha War. India was a distant sideshow compared to events unfolding in Europe. Above all, Sir Arthur Wellesley continued to live in his brother’s shadow. Before 1808, such references as there are in the British press to ‘Wellesley’ are overwhelmingly to Richard, ennobled as Marquis Wellesley in 1799. Sir Arthur was, understandably, perceived primarily as the military instrument of Richard’s ambitions. When the former met Nelson at the Colonial Office on 12 September, the Admiral needed no introduction; Nelson, by contrast, had to ask an official for the identity of the soldier waiting to see Lord Castlereagh.46

  The next three years would both reinforce the impression that the Wellesleys were a family cabal in which Richard was king, and confirm them as a political faction of consequence. Made increasingly uneasy by the style and substance of Richard’s actions, the Board of Control recalled him; by 1806 he was facing charges of misgovernment and corruption. To help defend him, Sir Arthur was found a seat in Parliament. His interventions were few and mercifully brief: it must be considered doubtful whether many parted with the shilling needed to purchase his speech to a committee of the House on East India Company finances. Perhaps the aim was to bore his brother’s critics to death. The case quickly collapsed, not least because the Wellesleys enjoyed informal support from the government.47 And in March 1807 Sir Arthur joined the government (his brothers Henry and William also accepted appointments), when he agreed to serve as Portland’s Chief Secretary for Ireland. As Thompson says, ‘His military engagements in India may not have been fully understood or appreciated at home but his reputation was sufficient for him to be accepted into the high political circle in which his brother had moved
before leaving.’48 Improbable as it might now seem, it looked distinctly possible then that Sir Arthur would abandon his military career for one in politics. Not for the last time, however, Napoleon took steps that would shape Sir Arthur’s destiny. France invaded Portugal in November 1807 and Spain in February 1808. When the popular Ferdinand VII of Spain was deposed by Napoleon in May, the Spaniards rose in revolt. English popular sentiment demanded action. It took the form of an expeditionary force of 9,000 men, which set sail from Cork, on 12 July, with Sir Arthur Wellesley at its head. Controversy thereupon replaced consensus. Why, ranted William Cobbett, with 291 generals available, had Wellesley been chosen? It seemed all too obvious to him that it owed everything to political jobbery.49