To War with Wellington

by Peter Snow

  Toulouse became a city of celebration. The white cockade appeared everywhere as if by magic. Napoleon’s statue was tossed off the roof of the Town Hall and at a joyous dinner that night Wellington pronounced the toast: ‘Louis XVIII!’ Then Larpent watched General Álava leap to his feet and raise his glass ‘with great warmth’ to ‘El Liberador de España’. ‘There was then cheering all in confusion for nearly ten minutes! Wellington bowed, confused, and immediately called for coffee. He must have been not a little gratified with what had passed.’

  In the middle of April the Bourbon King Louis XVIII whom Wellington described as a ‘walking sore’, racked by gout from head to toe, took back the throne his brother had lost to the guillotine in 1793.

  Wellington’s Peninsular War was over. It had not brought down Napoleon directly. Britain’s allies in central and eastern Europe had done that. But it had helped. The surefooted tramp of Wellington’s warriors, fighting their way across the Peninsula, sometimes forward, sometimes back, never giving up, never beaten in battle, aided by the Spanish revolt, had kept a quarter of a million French troops bogged down when Napoleon badly needed them elsewhere. The Peninsula had become an open wound, sapping his strength. To the rest of Europe, desperate to see France’s grip loosen, Wellington’s string of successes had been a constant source of inspiration.

  Wellington’s men, whose occasional excesses had driven him to those famous outbursts of fury, had emerged from the campaign as the most formidable enemies of France anywhere in Europe. Wellington now had more experience of fighting the French continuously than any other general. And if his progress had been too slow and deliberate for his army to claim total victory this time, their chance would come.* Napoleon was down but not out. Just fourteen months later, Wellington and some of his Peninsular veterans – far too few for his liking – would fight the decisive battle. From commanders like Picton and Ponsonby to front-line soldiers like Wheeler and Todd, the victors of Salamanca and Vitoria would confront Napoleon on a different battlefield. And the leader few of them loved but all respected, ‘that long-nosed beggar that licks the French’, would lead them in the ultimate showdown with the man he had yet to meet in straight combat. Wellington’s Peninsular Campaign had decided the fate of Spain and Portugal. His next one would decide the fate of Europe.

  15

  In the Elysian Fields

  Paris and Vienna, 1814–1815

  JUST AFTER ELEVEN o’clock on the morning of 20 April 1814, while Wellington was still in southern France, one of his Peninsular veterans, a thirty-eight-year-old Scottish colonel, supervised the departure of Napoleon from his palace at Fontainebleau. Colonel Neil Campbell had received a letter from Britain’s Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh in Paris four days earlier: ‘I have to acquaint you that you have been selected on the part of the British government to attend the late chief of the French government to the island of Elba …’ Campbell was ordered to show ‘every proper respect and attention to Napoleon, to whose secure asylum in that island it is the wish of his royal highness the Prince Regent to afford every facility and protection’. Campbell felt some sympathy for his new protégé. The man who had once ruled most of Europe had experienced ‘much heartlessness and ingratitude’ in his short stay at Fontainebleau. It was there that he had abdicated a week earlier, abandoned even by loyalists like Marshal Ney. In the last day or two he had been deserted even by his valet and his own personal bodyguard, an Egyptian Mameluke, who had slept at the foot of his bed with a dagger at his side.

  Campbell watched Napoleon walk to a waiting carriage and then turn and say farewell to the bevy of old soldiers of the Imperial Guard who had stuck by him to the end. He told them he could have fought on, but that would have meant civil war as around a quarter of his army had now turned against him. He said, ‘I embrace you,’ then he raised his hand in salute and added, ‘Adieu, remember me!’ Some of the officers and men wept, others called out, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ Napoleon was then carried away at a gallop accompanied by a great entourage of aides and attendants and more than fifty horsemen of the Imperial Guard. He was to keep the title of emperor and would be allowed to take more than a thousand soldiers with him to Elba. As his coach rattled down the road to Fréjus, he learned that he would also be allowed to retain the guns and other munitions stored on Elba. The allies had given him the island to govern. It was to be his province not his prison, and Campbell would be his manager rather than his jailer. There were few at this early stage who saw any danger in trying to contain the world’s most restless military genius on a small island only 150 miles from France.

  Two weeks later Wellington rode into his defeated enemy’s capital on a white horse, cool and aloof as ever. Far from being in sombre mood Paris was alive with every kind of festivity – balls, parties, picnics and, at the very moment he arrived, a massive military parade. Everyone who mattered was watching the victory parade, the Tsar of Russia, the King of Prussia, the Emperor of Austria and, of course, the plump and pampered figure of the Bourbon King, Louis XVIII, who had replaced Napoleon on the throne of France. Wellington caused as much of a stir as any of them as he rode up accompanied by Lord Castlereagh. In the next few months Castlereagh would be at the peace congress in Vienna arguing with Britain’s allies about how to carve up the Europe that Napoleon had left behind.

  Wellington’s new role was to raise eyebrows all over Europe. He was to command the allied army in the Netherlands with the task of keeping an eye on France’s northern border. But, much more strikingly, the man who had crushed Napoleon’s armies from Lisbon to Toulouse was to be Britain’s ambassador in Paris. The Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, apparently blissfully unaware that he had made one of the most spectacularly inappropriate appointments in history, wrote to Wellington: ‘I am most happy to find by a letter from Castlereagh that you are not unhappy to accept the embassy to Paris. I am sure there is no situation in which you could be at present of more use.’ Wellington’s brother Henry, who was doing an effective job as Britain’s ambassador to Spain, was also blind to his government’s insensitivity in appointing a military victor ambassador to the people he had defeated. ‘I am happy to hear you’ve not refused the embassy to Paris. After all you have been through you will find in diplomacy very pretty amusement.’ In a letter back Wellington told his brother all the family gossip, and then added in a postscript: ‘I believe I forgot to tell you I was made a duke.’

  Wellington spent only a few days in Paris but he soon showed, as he had throughout the Peninsular Campaign, how much he enjoyed socialising. One of the first men he met was Marshal Blücher, the redoubtable seventy-one-year-old warhorse who had led the Prussian armies into France from the east as Wellington marched on Toulouse. The two men could do little else but shake hands and smile at each other as neither spoke the other’s language. Alexander Gordon’s brother, the diplomat Lord Aberdeen, threw a party at which Wellington chatted energetically about his campaigns, saying he was very glad he had never been opposed to Napoleon on a battlefield. Little did he imagine that he would meet Napoleon and Blücher in one of the greatest battles ever fought in almost exactly a year’s time.

  Wellington’s warriors, like the new Duke himself, were convinced the fighting was over. For most of them the first few weeks of peace that spring passed in a delightful and sometimes drunken haze. George Bell, who had fought with Wellington all the way from Ciudad Rodrigo, was still little more than a teenager. ‘How wonderful was the feeling of quiet. No trampling of horses nor clashing of arms, no tirwhit of a shell or the whop of a cannon ball splashing the mud in one’s face or perhaps the brain of your camarado.’ Like many of the Peninsular units, Bell’s infantry regiment, the Cumberland Gentlemen, was being moved slowly up to Bordeaux through some of the best wine country in France. Many of them now had or expected the pay that was owing to them. ‘An issue of six months’ back pay in gold opened the eyes, and the mouths and the hands, and the hearts of the whole army.’

  The men of the Rifles
had stopped off at the town of Castel Sarrasin on the banks of the Garonne. It was a delightful, very friendly place, where the now close-knit team of comrades such as George Simmons, still recovering from his innumerable wounds, John Kincaid, Jonathan Leach and Ned Costello lived a charmed life. Kincaid found plenty of time ‘to make love to the pretty little girls with which the place abounded’. Officers as well as other ranks like Costello found themselves liberally entertained by the French. Costello and some companions enjoyed a rumbustious evening with a crowd of French soldiers who demonstrated their determination to forget the past. When a tipsy French corporal struck up a song that attacked the British, he was bundled unceremoniously down the stairs by his fellows. Leach, invited to see some French troops parading, spotted Nicolas Soult, one of the six Napoleonic commanders Wellington had defeated in the Peninsula, presiding in his new role as one of King Louis’ top generals. ‘He appeared sullen and dejected,’ observed Leach. ‘But this was probably his natural manner.’

  Harry Smith was on his way to embark at Bordeaux as well. But he was not going home. To the great distress of Juana, his devoted young Spanish wife, who had accompanied him everywhere, Smith was ordered to America. He had made such an impact as a brigade major in Spain that he was given a staff job in the British army now engaged in its third year of war against the United States. After a blissful cruise down the Garonne in a skiff, anchoring every night, Smith parted from his wife in Bordeaux when he boarded the seventy-four-gun Royal Oak alone for the voyage to America. ‘I left her insensible and in a faint,’ said Smith. He arranged for Juana to be escorted home to his father’s house where she would learn to speak English. Fusilier John Cooper, who had fought with Wellington since Talavera, was posted to America too. He was discharged from the army a year later: he was to complain that he had to wait thirty years for his pension of one shilling a week.

  It was time for the generals to go home too. Thomas Picton said goodbye to the men who had done him and Wellington proud, particularly at Badajoz and Vitoria. His officers clubbed together and bought him a fine service of silver plate. Notable exceptions were the officers of the Connaught Rangers, who were damned if they were going to honour the man who had regarded them as a bunch of Irish hooligans able to fight but with no idea how to behave. Picton was upset that Wellington didn’t recognise his achievements with a recommendation for a peerage. He was described as full of feelings of ‘silent reproach and degradation’ and told his friends he now wanted to retire to a quiet farm in his beloved Wales. Many of the departing soldiers added up their regimental losses in the whole campaign, and in every case they calculated they had lost at least half their number. William Wheeler, now a corporal, still suffering from a wound he had received at the Battle of the Nivelle, reckoned he couldn’t count more than a hundred men of the 900 who had left with him from England. Joseph Donaldson of the 94th Scots Brigade said he wouldn’t be able to muster more than 150 of the 900 who went out to the Peninsula. Calculations of the total number of British dead in the Peninsula ranged up to 40,000. Three-quarters of the deaths were not from wounds but from disease.

  When the day for departure arrived, British wives embarked with their husbands, but the women and other camp followers from Spain and Portugal were turned away from the heavily loaded ships. There were hundreds who had attached themselves to British soldiers, cared for the sick and wounded and done valuable service in the camps. Many had not even the wherewithal to return to their homes. ‘These faithful and heroic women were now … to be seen standing on the beach, while they witnessed with bursting hearts the filling of those sails and the crowding of those ships that were to separate them for ever from those to whom they had looked for protection and support.’

  Wellington made time for a special final review of his Peninsular army before it split up for the last time. He issued a General Order conveying his admiration and thanks for all the soldiers had done to push France out of Spain and Portugal. It wasn’t couched in particularly warm terms – that wasn’t Wellington’s style. But it did end with one apparently heartfelt passage: ‘The commander of forces … assures them that he shall never cease to feel the warmest interest in their welfare and honour, and that he will be at all times happy to be of any service to those to whose conduct, discipline and gallantry their country is so much indebted.’

  It was a pledge that many felt he failed to honour. Army pensions remained at a basic minimum for a long time and the government was unable or unwilling to approve a Peninsula medal until 1847 when many of the veterans were dead. Some regiments – like the Guards – made their own arrangement to issue Peninsula medals. Fred Ponsonby’s cavalrymen were granted the privilege of having the word ‘Peninsula’ inscribed on their pennants. Many of Wellington’s soldiers felt let down and angry at what they saw as a failure to recognise their sacrifice. William Fraser, a younger contemporary of the Duke who met him and admired him greatly, regretted that he didn’t do more to press for a Peninsula medal: ‘It seems a pity that when the heart of the nation was honourably and justly … set upon this, he did not find a greater willingness to accede to the request.’ William Grattan, who had been in the heat of many a battle with the Connaught Rangers, called it ‘scandalous’. Grattan’s language is unusually strong. He conceded that Wellington was ‘one of the most remarkable, and perhaps the greatest man of the present age’, but said he felt that the Duke had ‘neglected the interests and feelings of his Peninsular army … Were he in his grave tomorrow, hundreds of voices, that are now silent, would echo what I write.’

  Most of the men who fought with Wellington, however, had come to recognise that they owed him a huge debt as a commander. He had led them from victory to victory by making a cool assessment of the odds each time and by doing all he could to ensure that they were supplied, fed and rested. His personal humanity was not in doubt: the tears in the breach at Badajoz, the grief at the loss of Cocks at Burgos, the letters he wrote to relatives of the dead proved that. He just didn’t show it enough. His Chief Medical Officer James McGrigor asked him to praise the army’s doctors in one of his despatches. Wellington indicated that that would be most unusual. McGrigor had to use all his powers of persuasion before the Duke finally agreed to comply. ‘I have finished my despatch, but, very well, I will add something about the doctors.’ One of Wellington’s staff officers, Charles Napier, reckoned his leader’s failure to be more lavish with praise was the product of his own arrogance. ‘He repulsed the soldiers, and there are few of those who served under him who love him as much as I do. He feels that he owes all to his own abilities and he feels that justly – but he should not show it, for his soldiers stood by him manfully.’

  Wellington inspired admiration rather than affection in the soldiers he led, but the British public adored him. He returned to England towards the end of June to an ecstatic welcome. Less than ten years earlier Napoleon’s troops had been massing on the Channel coast awaiting his order to invade Britain. War with France had cost untold amounts of gold, to subsidise the Russians, Austrians and Prussians and to pay for the war in the Peninsula. It had cost tens of thousands of British lives. And now at last, with Napoleon apparently finally caged, people in Britain, who had lived in fear of invasion or bereavement, had the first real prospect of peace in more than twenty years. Wellington was a hero, and he hadn’t been home for five years. His coach was mobbed nearly all the way from Dover to London. He had a hearty distaste for mass public emotion like this, and when in their excitement people unhitched the horses of his carriage on Westminster Bridge so that they could take the traces and haul him home themselves, his patience ran out. He climbed out of the coach and made the rest of the journey home alone, on horseback.

  His wife Kitty was waiting for him. They had written to each other very little over the five years. She was tremendously proud of what he had achieved and yet felt desperately inadequate as a wife and partner. She had spent most of her time lost in shame and bewilderment that she was unable to induce
him to love and value her. Her letters and other writings are devoid of hope and joy, full of pathetic self-pity. She kept – on and off – what she called her ‘journal’. It makes dismal reading. Again and again she calls her life ‘dull’ and ‘indolent’. ‘Ill and idle,’ reads one typical entry. ‘I have nothing to say of this languid day.’ And later: ‘The desperate dejection, which has oppressed me thus some days passed [sic], will destroy me. I must pray for a calmer mind, for power to calm myself.’ ‘To effect a cure I know that a wound must be probed. When that wound is in the heart, how torturing is the process.’ What energy Kitty had she devoted to bringing up her two boys, Arthur, who was now seven, and Charles, a year younger. She also played mother to Wellington’s godson, Arthur Freese, who the gossips claimed was the result of an affair Wellington had had with an army officer’s wife years earlier. Just what Kitty knew or believed about her husband’s behaviour in the Peninsula she didn’t say. There is no conclusive evidence that he had any love affairs there, though he enjoyed the company of women and was popular with them. Larpent, his judge advocate, who was often in his company, makes it very clear that he doubted a man of Wellington’s drive could remain celibate for five whole years abroad. He records that in Toulouse the Commander in Chief chose to live in a hotel where one suite of rooms was reserved for a Spanish beauty married to the owner. ‘I don’t mean to be scandalous but this may perhaps have decided the choice of the house,’ wrote Larpent.

  Wellington’s return to London did little to revive his marriage, although in anticipation of his return Kitty’s spirits had lifted enough to say she would certainly like to come to Paris, and that she was confident of making a good ambassador’s wife. Her husband had only a few weeks in London before he went to Paris, and he had very little time for any quiet evenings with Kitty. He had left the country a mere knight in 1809 and returned a duke. Parliament reckoned he deserved more than that and presented him with £400,000, a staggering sum worth tens of millions today. Wellington lost no time in making up for his long absence from London society. At one glittering party laid on in his honour, Fred Ponsonby’s sister Lady Caroline Lamb, now long past her affair with Byron, behaved, as usual, outrageously, displaying her green pantaloons to her former lover, the poet, who was also a guest, and piling yet more embarrassment on her family. Wellington did his best to make up for lost time too, but his instinct for order and discipline sometimes got the better of him. He turned up for one soirée wrongly dressed, when the venue’s management had prescribed knee breeches and a white cravat. When the manager told Britain’s national hero that he was in the wrong clothes, he humbly assented and went home.