To War with Wellington

by Peter Snow

  Most of Wellington’s soldiers came home to a warm welcome, but for some wives the men had been away too long. Ned Costello helped one of his fellow sergeants track down the wife he hadn’t seen in years. Eventually they were directed to a house where a ten-year-old girl, clearly the sergeant’s daughter, opened the door. The moment the wife saw her long-lost husband she burst into hysterics. She had remarried. Seconds later a strapping carpenter walked up and held her to him. Costello’s friend stood clenching his fists for some time but then drew a deep breath and said to the new husband: ‘As she seems to prefer your manner of doing business, suppose you clinch the bargain with a sixpence and take her to you altogether?’ The deal was done; the sergeant threw a guinea into his daughter’s lap and then walked out with Costello for a long drink in the nearest pub.

  On 22 August 1814 Wellington arrived in Paris to take up his duties as ambassador. With his usual foresight he had arranged for the government to purchase a fine house for its embassy. The house, more like a palace, was in the heart of Paris in the Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and successive British ambassadors have had reason to be grateful to Wellington for providing them with a residence only a stone’s throw from the palace of the French president. It had been the home of Napoleon’s sister Pauline for eleven years. Its gardens, backing on to the Champs-Elysées, were soon nicknamed the Elysian Fields.

  Wellington’s prime diplomatic job in Paris was to persuade the French government to abolish the slave trade, which Britain had already determined to do. It was the first of two liberal causes this otherwise inveterate conservative would pursue with energy and enthusiasm. The other was Catholic Emancipation, which he backed as prime minister a decade and a half later. His campaign on the slave trade was an uphill task. He warned William Wilberforce, the great champion of abolition, in a letter on 8 October 1814 that it was ‘impossible to get anything inserted in a French newspaper … in favour of the abolition, or even to show that the trade was abolished in England from motives of humanity’. One of the problems he explained was that the British press was so anti-French that ‘we shall never be able to exercise the influence which we ought to have upon this question’. But in November he was able to report to Wilberforce that ‘orders have at last been issued to prevent the trade in slaves by French subjects on the coast of Africa north of Cape Formoso’. He said that much still remained to be done, but France had agreed to abolish the trade completely within five years.*

  Wellington ran into some of his old Peninsula opponents in Paris. He met Ney, whom he had fought and defeated at Bussaco, and Soult, whom he had outsmarted at Oporto in 1809 and pushed back from the Pyrenees to Toulouse from the summer of 1813 onwards. Both had now deftly changed sides and were working for the King. He had a friendly exchange with Masséna, whom he had always thought the most impressive of Napoleon’s marshals. After a chat about the battles they had fought with each other, Masséna said: ‘My Lord, you owe me a dinner – for you made me starve horribly.’ Wellington burst into his well-known guffaw: ‘You should give it to me, Marshal, for you prevented me from sleeping.’

  As well as mixing with Napoleon’s ex-marshals Wellington enjoyed a fling with the Emperor’s ex-mistresses. He was frequently seen with Giuseppina Grassini, an opera diva from La Scala, who had been one of Napoleon’s favourites. If Wellington wasn’t having an affair with her, he did little to deny it. By this time Kitty had joined him in Paris, and even the most worldly of Britain’s aristocrats found the Duke’s treatment of her a bit shabby. Fred Ponsonby and his family saw a lot of Wellington that summer and Ponsonby’s mother, the Countess of Bessborough, wrote that, much as she admired the Duke, ‘I am afraid he is behaving very ill to that poor little woman; he is found great fault with … not on account of making her miserable or of the immorality of the fact, but the want of protocol and publicity of his attentions to Grassini.’ Another flame of Napoleon’s, Marguerite Weimer, an actress known as Mademoiselle George, was twenty-seven when she met Wellington in 1814. She later boasted that both men had been her lovers, ‘Mais M. Le Duc était de beaucoup le plus fort’ (‘But the Duke was by far the more vigorous’). One Parisian grandee, the Duke de Broglie, said of the Duke: ‘He was a true Englishman, a piece of the old rock, simple in mind, straight, solid, prudent but hard, tough and a little naive. The clumsy and pressing gallantries he permitted himself towards pretty young women he pushed as far as they would let him.’

  Wellington’s dalliances in Paris caused little offence to the French, who were quite used to that sort of thing, but his presence was fast becoming unpopular for more substantial reasons. King Louis and his government were seen as increasingly incompetent and ineffective. The economy, without Napoleon’s vast empire to feed it, had collapsed. The Emperor may have become deeply unpopular with millions of Frenchmen, but he could lead and inspire. The flabby King Louis clearly couldn’t. The army was deeply divided between royalists and Bonapartists. Both sides deplored the government’s apparent neglect of the army and found it offensive and demeaning to have the commander of British forces on France’s northern border doubling as ambassador in Paris. The more it looked as if the King had to rely on foreign help like Britain’s to bolster his regime, the more unpopular Britain’s ambassador became. In September Wellington wrote, ‘Matters are going on well here,’ but by the beginning of October he was reporting to Castlereagh: ‘There exists a good deal of uncertainty and uneasiness in the mind of almost every individual.’ By late October even the highly intelligent General Foy, a French Peninsular veteran and great admirer of Wellington’s, who had been touched by a visit the Duke made to him when he was lying wounded in hospital that summer, refused to attend any more British embassy soirées. He wrote: ‘Lord Wellington and the English are held in horror by everybody … We who were lately masters of Europe, to what servitude are we reduced. Ld Wellington is CinC of the army of occupation in Belgium … O Napoléon, où es tu?’ (‘O Napoleon, where are you?’).

  On Elba, Neil Campbell’s relationship with Napoleon was cooling too. They had started on the best of terms, with the Emperor obviously keen to cultivate the British. Campbell noted that Napoleon admired Wellington and that he was flattered when he learned that Wellington had been deeply impressed by his campaign to keep the allies at bay in north-eastern France in the early months of 1814. But the appointment of the Duke of Wellington as ambassador to Paris, Napoleon told Campbell, was ‘an open insult and injury to the feelings of the French people’.

  By the end of 1814 Britain’s Prime Minister Lord Liverpool had decided that Wellington should be removed – at least temporarily – from Paris. His presence there was causing too much tension, and Liverpool feared for Wellington’s life, if there was serious unrest in France. There was some talk of despatching the Duke to America to take command of the so-called War of 1812 with the United States, which was not going well. But Wellington believed the war was a mistake and made it very clear he did not want to go there. Besides, he wrote to the Prime Minister, he was indispensable in Europe. ‘There is nobody but myself in whom either yourselves or the country, or your allies, would feel any confidence.’ Anyway, the American war – which had achieved nothing for either side in more than two years of fighting – came to an end that December with the Peace of Ghent. It was news that came too late for Wellington’s brother-inlaw and comrade in arms in the Peninsula, Ned Pakenham. He was killed leading the British attack on New Orleans in the first few days of January 1815.

  Liverpool decided that the best place for Wellington was Vienna. Castlereagh had now spent months there trying to broker an agreement that would satisfy the allies, Prussia, Russia and Austria, that they each had a fair share of the spoils left by Napoleon’s departure. Castlereagh was within reach of a deal that would see Russia absorb Poland and Prussia take a chunk of Saxony. Wellington was left to complete it. He arrived in Vienna on 3 February. Before him lay the prospect of weeks, perhaps months of horse-trading and yet more parties, balls and dazzling soir
ées, which he had always found a pleasant distraction from the serious and lonely business of high command.

  Two weeks after Wellington had arrived in Austria, Britain’s Commissioner on Elba decided to take a few days away from the island. Campbell’s health was troubling him, he wrote in his journal. ‘I was anxious to consult some medical man at Florence on account of the increasing deafness, supposed to arise from my wounds.’ He said he was uneasy about leaving Napoleon, but the captain of the British warship that took him to Italy promised to return and make a show of cruising around Elba for a day or two. Besides, when he arrived in Florence, Campbell was met by a senior man from the Foreign Office who told him he shouldn’t be uneasy about Napoleon. ‘When you return to Elba,’ said the British Under Secretary of State, ‘you may tell Bonaparte that he is quite forgotten in Europe; no one thinks of him now.’

  16

  Duchess, you may give your ball

  Brussels, 1815

  THERE WAS HARDLY a ripple over the sea as Neil Campbell’s ship, the Partridge, dropped anchor off Portoferraio, Elba’s capital, on the morning of 28 February 1815. There was not enough wind to blow her back into harbour. Campbell had been away ten days. Sensing that something was wrong he had some seamen row him ashore in one of the ship’s boats. He was back on board an hour and half later with the news that Napoleon had escaped two days earlier with a flotilla of four small vessels. He had a thousand attendants with him, including the members of his old Imperial Guard who had stayed with him throughout his exile. Campbell gave chase, but it was futile. Before he could find a breeze to help him close the gap, the Emperor was landing at Fréjus in southern France.

  Napoleon was on French soil again. He headed north and reacted with panache when confronted near Grenoble by a contingent of his old Grande Armée sent to stop him at all costs with muskets at the ready. Stepping forward, alone, he asked if any of them would shoot their Emperor. For a moment there was no sound, then came the shout, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ Marshal Ney and several others, who had deserted Napoleon a year earlier, changed sides yet again, Louis XVIII fled to Belgium, and on 20 March Napoleon was back in Paris.

  The hapless Campbell was carpeted by Castlereagh and sent back to join the army. It wasn’t long before rumours started that he had gone to Italy to see not a doctor but his mistress. Napoleon could hardly believe his good fortune that Britain’s watch on him had been so lax. ‘If they’d kept a frigate in the harbour and another outside it would have been impossible for me to have gone to France …’ His mother had been one of the last to see him leave Elba, bidding him goodbye with the prophetic words: ‘Go, my son. Fulfil your destiny: you were not made to die on this island.’

  Wellington was told the news just before he rode off to join a crowd of grandees for a foxhunt in Vienna. He was handed a despatch that informed him Bonaparte had escaped. Wellington was in no doubt that the diplomacy and the junketing were over. The allies immediately declared Napoleon an outlaw and made it clear they would not rest until he was finally crushed. In London a few of the government’s opponents declared themselves against renewing the war. Sam Whitbread, the strident successor to Charles James Fox as a leading proponent of peace with France, managed to raise seventy-two votes in the House of Commons in favour of negotiating with Napoleon. But Lord Liverpool and his cabinet were united and robust. They were well aware of Napoleon’s legendary capacity to mobilise and strike before his enemies could combine. They called for immediate reinforcement of the allied army in Belgium. It was the only army likely to be ready to resist any early French military initiative. The allies agreed that Wellington should rejoin the force as soon as possible. The Russian Tsar Alexander is said to have placed his hand on Wellington’s shoulder and pronounced, ‘C’est pour vous encore sauver le monde’ (‘It is for you to save the world again’).* The only issue was whether Wellington should command the army in Belgium or take on a subordinate role as chief of staff to some other allied commander. He quickly made it clear that ‘subordinate’ was not a word he understood. Fred Ponsonby, who now knew the Duke’s mind as well as anyone, observed: ‘he refused [the chief of staff job], knowing that all the responsibility would be thrown upon him without the power of enforcing his wishes’. Wellington would set off for Brussels as commander in chief.

  The call went out to units all over Britain to prepare for war again.

  William Hay’s squadron in Ponsonby’s 12th Light Dragoons was doing some routine crowd-control work around London when the news broke about Napoleon. A man who had just travelled up from Dover burst into the pub they were drinking in: ‘I have brought you news today – old Boney has broken out again and got to Paris.’ Hay noted: ‘We were astonished and indeed could not believe our ears.’ But newspapers and letters soon confirmed the news, and there followed ‘an immediate order for us to march by Canterbury, en route to Dover and then to embark for Ostend, and I must confess the news gave me the greatest satisfaction, as I had no liking for the life of a soldier in idleness’.

  Some of Wellington’s veterans had spent several months with their families since returning from France in the summer. But many were still in America or on their way back after the recent suspension of hostilities there. Harry Smith had served on two separate missions to the United States. He was with Ned Pakenham, ‘one of the ablest Generals England ever produced’, when Pakenham fell to murderous American fire at the Battle of New Orleans. As Smith’s ship reached the Channel on the way home, the news from Paris was shouted to them from a passing vessel. ‘Ho! Bonaparte’s back again on the throne of France!’ ‘Such a hurrah as I set up, tossing my hat above my head!’ wrote Smith. ‘I will be a Lieutenant Colonel yet before the year’s out!’ He was delighted at the prospect of a showdown with Napoleon. His wife Juana had been warmly accepted into his family in London, and was a particular favourite of her English teacher, Smith’s father. But Harry had missed her and when he received the call to head back to war in Europe, he told Juana to pack her bags. He wasn’t going to leave her behind again.

  Another man returning from America was Sergeant William Lawrence, who had soldiered with Wellington right through from Vimeiro to Toulouse. On his return across the Atlantic he was given no chance to visit his family at Bryant’s Piddle in Dorset. His ship was simply waved straight on from Portsmouth to Flanders. William Wheeler was now a sergeant too. To the cheers of a large crowd he sailed with his regiment from Portsmouth and landed at Ostend. On 13 April they heard that Wellington was to command the army in Belgium: ‘I never remember anything that caused so much joy,’ said Wheeler in his journal. ‘Our men were almost frantic, every soldier you met told the joyful news. “Glorious news. Nosey has got the command: won’t we give them a drubbing now.”’ Wheeler and his comrades got a huge welcome in every village they passed through in Belgium. The only slight hiccough was when a group of officers had a few drinks too many one evening and hauled the famous statue in Brussels of the little boy relieving himself – the Manneken Pis – off its plinth and into the fountain. But two days later it was reinstated and ‘looked none the worse for the ducking’.

  15–18 June 1815

  Not everyone looked forward to going back to war. Thomas Todd was a disappointed man. He had joined the Highland Light Infantry in a fit of despondency when he had failed to become an actor in Edinburgh and he now hoped for a discharge. He had served for nearly eight years and was due to be released after seven. The trouble was he had concealed the fact that he was only sixteen when he joined up. The army had now discovered his true age and he couldn’t be discharged until he was twenty-five. He still had a year to do. He toyed with deserting but thought better of it and ended up landing in Antwerp.

  Wellington made very sure the Rifles were summoned to Belgium too. He knew he would have only a fraction of the army he had come to rely on in the Peninsula, but he wasn’t going to be without the 1st/95th. John Kincaid had to give up shooting woodcock in Scotland; Ned Costello, Jonathan Leach and George Simmons
packed their bags and sailed to war. Simmons was horribly seasick. ‘My throat swelled with vomiting to such a degree that I could scarcely speak.’ But he was soon comfortably billeted in a fine house with a garden, writing his usual letters home to his family promising to help with money when he got back. ‘Rumour says Bonaparte is concentrating his forces, and means to attack very soon: for my part I do not care how soon.’

  There were newcomers to Wellington’s ranks too. Tom Morris, a Londoner, had left the family trade of gun-making at the age of sixteen, inspired by the tales of adventure he had heard from the Peninsula. ‘Stirring accounts of the sieges and battles and glorious achievements of the British troops in Spain … created in me an irrepressible desire for military service.’ He knew his parents would disapprove, so he stole out of his house at four in the morning and joined the Highland Regiment, the 73rd Foot. Like Thomas Todd he was sixteen when he joined up but had pretended to be older to qualify for military pay. He had done some service in Holland already and was now nineteen.