Wellington: The Iron Duke

WELLINGTON WAS a child of eighteenth-century Ireland, deeply marked by the time and place of his birth. Throughout his long life there was the lonely quality of the outsider about him, and this isolation has clear origins in his childhood as a member of a besieged Protestant minority in a Catholic land. He would have resented George Bernard Shaw’s assertion that he was ‘an intensely Irish Irishman’. Indeed, he was to deny his Irishness by (so it was said) observing that not everyone born in a stable was a horse. The growing sense of insecurity felt by the Protestant ascendancy as nationalist pressure increased at the end of the eighteenth century helped imbue him with a sense of impending catastrophe, and a feeling that if the government’s grip faltered, the result would be torched mansions and butchered gentry. But his personal contact with Catholicism deprived the religion of the ferocity it possessed for Englishmen bought up on the mythology of the fires of Smithfield in Mary Tudor’s day and the risk of forcible conversion by the Jacobites and their Catholic allies. Wellington was innately conservative in most of his political opinions, but his own upbringing in Ireland and his experience of fighting alongside Catholic allies in the Peninsula encouraged him to fight a long, hard battle to remove the penal legislation which bore down so heavily upon Catholics, and the achievement of Catholic emancipation in 1829 was to be not least amongst his accomplishments.

In Wellington’s approach to both military discipline and parliamentary reform we see his deep-seated fear of the mob, a harking back to an age when the social pyramid seemed firm and the civil power had armed force at its back. He was to maintain that he learnt nothing new about war after his return from India in 1806, and the library that he took to the Indian subcontinent was full of works reflecting the eighteenth century at its most formal. Social, economic and political change between Wellington’s birth and death were profound. The population of Great Britain rose from approximately 13 million in 1780 to over 27 million in 1851, and its distribution altered, with a marked shift from the countryside to the towns. Revolutionary changes in agriculture enabled this burgeoning urban population to be fed, while industrial developments, beginning with the transformation of the textile industry, were to turn the Britain in which Wellington died into what was, without hyperbole, ‘the workshop of the world’. There have been few other periods of history when a long life has bestridden so much change.

‘Every conquest,’ wrote Philip Guedalla, ‘leaves a caste behind it, since conquerors are apt to perpetuate their victory in superior social pretensions.’

(#litres_trial_promo) In Ireland the process was characteristically complex. In the thirteenth century the Normans overran Ireland, and intermarried with daughters of Gaelic princes so that many Norman families were absorbed by the land they had conquered. For instance, the de Burghs became the Burkes of Connacht, ‘almost indistinguishable in the eyes of the government from their Gaelic neighbours’.

(#litres_trial_promo) By the fifteenth century, English writ ran in Dublin and the Pale around it: large towns were English in sympathy, but the countryside was solidly Gaelic. The Tudors set about the reconquest of Ireland, though they were not able to complete it until 1603. From 1609 there was immigration by Protestants from England and Scotland, and in 1641 a rebellion against the settlers led to a war which culminated in Oliver Cromwell’s invasion in 1649. Although his ‘massacres’ at Drogheda and Wexford were arguably not a breach of the laws of war, they left an enduring legacy of bitterness.

When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, most Catholic landowners were better off than they had been under Cromwell, but were still grievously disappointed. Charles died in 1685 and his brother James II swung towards the Catholics. He made the Earl of Tyrconnell viceroy and appointed growing numbers of Catholics to key offices. But the Glorious Revolution of 1688 dashed Catholic hopes: William III invaded Ireland and beat lames on the River Boyne. The Treaty of Limerick ended the war in 1691, and although its terms seemed not ungenerous to the Catholics, the triumphant Protestants immediately set about strengthening their ascendancy with a series of anti-Catholic laws. Catholics could not vote, enter parliament or the legal profession, hold commissions in the army or navy, or even own a horse worth more than £5. Restriction of land ownership ensured that by 1778 only about 5 per cent of land was in Catholic hands. The Catholic peasantry, however, did not owe their misery primarily to the penal laws but to the impact of a growing population on land that was often poor, and where famine was rarely far away.

Things were very different for members of the ascendancy. It was a social elite, professional as well as landed, defined primarily by its Anglicanism, for its descent could be Norman, Old English, Cromwellian or even Gaelic.

(#litres_trial_promo) A later nationalist writer described an Ireland that the ascendancy scarcely touched, an Ireland that was ‘dark, scorned and secretly romantic’.

(#litres_trial_promo) There was little real contact between this hidden Ireland and the sparkling world of parties in Sackville Street, duelling behind Lucas’s coffee house near Dublin Castle (the seat of the government), tea at the Kildare Street Club, and life in the Palladian mansions that sprang up across the countryside, where they stood like Protestant islands in a Catholic sea. The agricultural writer Arthur Young visited Ireland in the late 1770s and wrote of how: ‘Speaking a language that is despised, professing a religion that is abhorred, and being disarmed, the poor find themselves in many cases slaves even in the bosom of written liberty.’

(#litres_trial_promo) It is small wonder that some commentators drew parallels between rural Ireland and the cottonfields of the Carolinas.

One of the estates visited by Arthur Young was Dangan Castle in County Meath, close to the little town of Trim and a long day’s journey by coach from Dublin. He observed that part of the estate had been turned into an ornamental lake with its own islands, pleasing enough in its effect, but not exactly the work of an improving landlord keen on his barley and turnips. The owner was Garrett Wesley, Earl of Mornington, professor of music at Trinity College Dublin and composer of such enchanting pieces as ‘Here in Cool Grot’, ‘Gently Hear me, Charming Maid’, and ‘Come Fairest Nymph’. His father had been born a Colley of Castle Carbury, a member of a family that originated in the English Midlands and had lived in Ireland for three hundred years without a single Irish name appearing on its pedigree. He had taken the name and, more to the point, inherited the fortune of his cousin, Garrett Wesley of Dangan. The new Mr Wesley removed to the family seat at Dangan and sat in the Irish parliament for the family borough of Trim. A grateful government elevated him to the Irish House of Lords, and his son Garrett continued the family’s ascent by being created an earl in 1760, for reasons which, as Elizabeth Longford gently observes, are not immediately obvious.

The previous year Garrett Wesley had married Anne Hill, eldest daughter of Arthur Hill (later Lord Dungannon), and she duly presented him with a son and heir, Richard Colley Wesley, in 1760; another son, William, in 1763; a daughter, Anne, in 1768; and a third surviving son, Arthur, in 1769. Two younger sons followed, Gerald Valerian in 1770 and Henry in 1773. Arthur Wesley always celebrated his birthday on 1 May, although biographers variously maintain that he was born on 6 March or 3, 29 or 30 April. There is a similar dispute about the place of his birth, with Dangan Castle, Trim, a coach on the Dublin road, and even a packet-boat at sea amongst the many places vying for the honour. His proud parents, however, announced that the birth had taken place in their Dublin house, 6 Merrion Street, where Lady Mornington’s bedroom looked out across a little garden to the charming symmetry of Merrion Square in the comfortable heart of ascendancy Dublin.

Arthur spent his early years in Dublin and at Dangan. Dangan Castle itself is now a shell, with its long, elegant two-storey façade looking out over the green landscape. The ruins behind show that the Georgian house was built on the remnants of something solid and medieval, constructed in an age when security mattered more than appearance.

Arthur was sent to the little diocesan school at Trim, in the shadow of the ruined tower of St Mary’s abbey and just across the Boyne from the great square Norman keep which stands as a stark symbol of the invaders’ power. The family then moved to London, something in the nature of a retreat, because the earl’s finances, weakened by the musical indulgences of Dublin and Dangan, were in decline so that ‘we are not able to appear in any degree as we ought’. While the brilliant Richard shot from Harrow to Eton and then on to Christ Church Oxford, gaining golden opinions as he did so, Arthur was sent to Brown’s seminary in the King’s Road, where, as he admitted, he was ‘a shy, idle lad’. He went on to Eton in 1781, but as he told an early biographer, G. R. Gleig, who served under him as a subaltern in the Peninsula and went on to become a clergyman:

Besides achieving no success as a scholar, he contracted few special intimacies among his contemporaries … His was indeed a solitary life; a life of solitude in a crowd; for he walked generally alone; often bathed alone; and seldom took part in either the cricket matches or boat-races which were then, as they are now, in great vogue among Etonians.

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He was a shy young Irishman in England, still an outsider, with parents who were ‘frivolous and careless personages’ and to whom he does not seem to have been particularly close. He could fight if he had to: at Eton he beat Bobus Smith, brother of the wit Sidney Smith, and while staying with his grandmother, Lady Dungannon, in North Wales, was soundly thrashed by a young blacksmith named Hughes, who was proud to relate how he had beaten the man who beat Napoleon, saying that ‘Master Wesley bore him not a pin’s worth of ill-will.’

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When Lord Mornington died in May 1781, it became clear that the family finances were worse than anyone had suspected. Richard, the new Lord Mornington, left Oxford without taking his degree, and Arthur was taken away from Eton so that what money remained could be spent on Gerald and Henry, who seemed to offer a better return on the investment. Lady Mornington withdrew to Brussels in 1784 and lodged with a lawyer, Louis Goubert. After some brief tutoring in Brighton, Arthur followed her and studied under their landlord in the company of John Armytage, second son of a rich Yorkshire baronet and family friend. Armytage wrote that young Wesley was ‘extremely fond of music, and played well upon the fiddle, but he never gave any indication of any other species of talent. As far as my memory serves, there was no intention then of sending him into the army; his own wishes, if he had any, were in favour of a civilian’s life.’

(#litres_trial_promo) But he was fast running out of civilian options. The family’s Irish estates were deeply mortgaged, and lack of money meant that he could not have been maintained at university even if he had had the aptitude to survive there. The witty and ambitious Richard was clearly the hope of the family: Arthur thought him ‘the most wonderful person in the whole world’. He was prepared to use the family’s patronage, stemming from his own seat in the Lords and control of a seat in the Commons, to gain Arthur a free commission in the army, and had already written to ask the lord lieutenant of Ireland (effectively its viceroy) on behalf of the shy sixteen year old. Lady Mornington declared: ‘I vow to God I don’t know what I shall do with my awkward son Arthur. He is food for powder and nothing more.’

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Young Wesley was destined for an army that was close to the nadir of its fortunes. The regular army, established in 1661, exhibited a familiar pattern of growing to face the challenges of major wars and shrinking rapidly afterwards, with surplus soldiers being discharged to the civilian life from which they had often been anxious to escape in the first place, and officers being sent home on half-pay. Although it had emerged victorious from the Seven Years War (1756–63), it had been beaten in the American War of Independence. Frustratingly, it had won most of the battles but had somehow lost the war, with humiliating surrenders at Saratoga in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781. Matters were not improved by the fact that a growing number of Englishmen sympathised with the colonists. When Major General Sir William Howe, MP for Nottingham, was sent out to North America in 1775, an aggrieved constituent told him: ‘I don’t wish you to fall, as many do, but I cannot say I wish success to the undertaking.’

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The low regard in which the army was held stemmed partly from the fact that, in the absence of a police force, it was frequently called upon to preserve order in a harsh and brutal society. We connect to the Georgian age through its surviving artefacts, and it is easy to forget that, just as a classical front with its long windows and smart portico had often been stuck onto an altogether less elegant building (Dangan Castle is a good example), so old, ugly undercurrents rippled on through the eighteenth century and often into the nineteenth. Executions were held in public throughout Wellington’s lifetime. Traitors were hanged, drawn and quartered: partly strangled, then cut down alive to be castrated and disembowelled before their entrails were burnt and their bodies cut into four. There was, however, growing resistance to such savagery. After the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, victims of this ghastly punishment were revived after hanging to be ‘bowelled alive and seeing’, but after the 1745 rebellion they were hanged till they were dead, or knifed by the executioner before the butchery began. Those involved in the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820, who had planned the murder the cabinet, of which Wellington was a member, were merely beheaded after death, and the mood of the crowd grew ugly as the executioner sawed away at spines and sinews.

Even straightforward hanging did not guarantee a quick death, and the victim’s friends would often rush forward to pull on his legs and hasten death. Bodies were usually sent to the surgeon’s hall for dissection, although they might be gibbeted in some appropriate place as a warning to others: the body of Maria Phipoe, a murderess hanged in 1797, was displayed outside the Old Bailey. There was an odd democracy to the business. In 1760 Earl Ferrers, convicted of murder by the House of Lords, was duly hanged and then dissected, but he went to Tyburn in a landau drawn by six horses rather than the common cart, and died so well that the mob, fickle as ever, showed more sympathy than anger.

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Many popular ‘sports’ were dangerous and brutal. Bull- and bear-baiting were popular, and noblemen jostled with kitchen-porters in drunken, sweaty cockpits where fighting cocks, their natural talons reinforced with spurs wrought in the best of Georgian taste, fought to the death. A French visitor, César de Saussure, observed that the populace enjoyed ‘throwing dead dogs and cats and mud at passers-by’ as well as playing football, in the process of which ‘they will break panes of glass and smash the windows of coaches and also knock you down without the smallest compunction …’

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As the eighteenth century wore on, there was a growing number of violent reactions to economic fluctuations: a depression in the textile industry triggered rioting in Spitalfields in 1719, and there were very serious food riots in Somerset and Wiltshire in 1766–67. But as the country faced a sequence of economic recessions with the transition from war to peace at the end of the Seven Years War and the War of American Independence, rioting became more serious and the ruling elite increasingly saw it as a threat to its hold on power.

The climax came in 1780 when the unsteady anti-Catholic Lord George Gordon gained widespread support, much of it from the ‘middling sort’ of men who coincidentally also favoured political reform, in his demand for the repeal of an act of 1778 which had removed some of the restraints on Catholics. When parliament rejected his petition, there was an outbreak of violent disorder. It began with attacks on Catholic chapels attached to foreign embassies (the only ones legally allowed), and then, more seriously, went on to take in all the law’s visible manifestations like the houses of prominent judges and magistrates and Newgate prison itself. This was evidently an assault on the establishment, and the government brought over 11,000 regular soldiers into the capital. Almost 300 rioters were shot, another 25 were hanged. Not only was the government badly rattled by the sheer scale of the violence, but many middle-class radicals who had supported Gordon (himself cleared of high treason), were so frightened by the spectre of the mob that they shied away from reform thereafter.

Both the regular army and the less reliable militia played a leading role in the preservation of order, and in doing so found themselves execrated by the populace and at risk of prosecution for murder if they killed anybody. In 1736 Captain John Porteous of the Edinburgh Town Guard ordered his men to fire on a crowd that indulged in stone-throwing at an execution, killing five or six. He was condemned to death for murder, and although he received a royal pardon, the mob burst into his prison, dragged him out, and lynched him. As the English constitutional lawyer Dicey put it:

The position of a soldier may be, both in theory and in practice, a difficult one. He may, as it has been well said, be liable to be shot by a Court-Martial if he disobeys an order, and to be hanged by a judge and jury if he obeys it.

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There was an added shade of complexity. Jurors were, by definition, men of property, and while the military could shoot rioting weavers or colliers without much risk, matters were different if their victims were middle-class men with whom a jury might sympathise. In 1768 a magistrate ordered troops to fire on a crowd supporting the reformer John Wilkes: six were killed and fifteen wounded. The magistrate was tried for murder but acquitted by the judge before a jury (far more likely to take a hostile line) was empanelled, and it followed that the troops themselves could then not be convicted. The Gordon riots, however, aroused no middle-class sympathy. Troops were eventually given carte blanche, and duly dealt with the mob by volley-firing more suitable for a conventional field of battle.

Whatever the importance of its forays to bolster the civil power, the army was designed for use on battlefields and was shaped by the flintlock musket, the weapon carried by the bulk of the armies of the age. And while there were changes in the theory and practice of war during Wellington’s lifetime – for instance the development of the corps d’armée system by Napoleon, and the increasing use of light troops, like the 95

Rifles who earned such lustre in the Peninsula – there was more continuity than change.

It was the age of the flintlock. In the early eighteenth century the flintlock musket, its charge ignited by the sparks flashing out when flint struck steel, at last replaced the matchlock, which had relied on a length of smouldering cord. To load his musket the soldier tore open a paper cartridge with his teeth – a blackened mouth and brick-dry throat were amongst the lesser hazards of battle – and dribbled some powder into the priming pan of his musket, shutting the pan off by snapping a hinged striking-plate, the steel, across it. He then tipped the remainder of the powder down the weapon’s muzzle, following it with the round lead musket ball and then the empty cartridge, ramming it all firmly home. To fire, he first drew back the cock, which held a flint gripped firmly in its steel jaws. When he pressed the trigger the flint snapped forward to strike the steel, which swung forward, uncovering the pan. Sparks ignited the priming powder, which flashed through the touch-hole to ignite the main charge.

Misfires were common. Flints had a life of twenty or thirty shots and gave little warning of imminent failure: they simply failed to spark and had to be replaced. Sometimes flint and priming-powder both did their job, but resulted only in a ‘flash in the pan’ which did not ignite the charge. And even when the weapon did fire, it was shockingly inaccurate. In 1814 Colonel George Hanger suggested that although a musket might hit a man at 80 or even 100 yards, a man would be very unlucky indeed to be hit at 150 yards by the man who aimed at him. And that, of course, was the catch, for most infantry soldiers aimed not at individuals but at the mass of the enemy’s line. A Prussian experiment on a canvas target 100 feet long and 6 feet high demonstrated that there were only 23 per cent hits at 225 yards, 40 per cent at 150 yards and 60 per cent at 75 yards. In 1779 a battalion of Norfolk militia, many of its members no doubt more handy with the plough than the musket, hit a similar target with 20 per cent of its shots at 70 yards. These experiments were exactly that, and with an enemy returning fire, results in battle were likely to be far worse. With such a weapon, the volume of fire counted for more than its accuracy, and recruits were drilled repeatedly until the sequence of loading had become second nature and they could fire three or even four shots a minute. Drill was also important in enabling them to move forward in columns, the usual formation for covering the ground, and then to deploy into line so that the maximum number of muskets be brought to bear.

It was axiomatic that good infantry, drawn up in suitable formation (squares or oblongs were ideal) on favourable ground, should be able to resist the attack of cavalry. Although the cavalry of the age still sought to charge whenever possible, it often rendered more useful service by dealing in the small change of war. Cavalry in general, and especially light cavalry, provided a framework of pickets which screened armies in camp or on the march. Although Wellington figured briefly in the Army List as a light dragoon, he was never a real cavalry officer, and rarely showed the arm much sympathy, complaining that its officers had a trick of ‘galloping at everything’. Recent research has shown that he was as unfair in this as in some of his other sweeping judgements, and the achievements of the cavalry which served him were by no means derisory.

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Artillery had already begun its long rise that was to end in it dominating the battlefield a generation after Wellington’s death. Cannon were categorised by the weight of the iron roundshot they fired, with handy 6-pdrs to heavy 12-pdrs forming the mainstay of field artillery and more cumbersome pieces, like 24-pdrs and 32-pdrs, taking pride of place when it came to battering the walls of fortresses. The roundshot, pitched to hit the ground just in front of its target and then to ricochet through the enemy’s formation smashing limbs and striking off heads at every bound, was the most common projectile, with an effective range of about 800 yards and a maximum range of perhaps twice that. At close range gunners switched to canister, a circular tin containing a number of lead or iron balls. The tin burst open when it left the muzzle, turning the cannon into a giant shotgun. Almost half the balls from a British 6-pdr would hit a large target at 400 yards, making canister a lethal weapon. One of my abiding memories of the battlefield of Assaye is the sheer prevalance of canister shot, from small shot the size of a thumb-nail to big shot the size of a golf-ball. The path of the Maratha gun-line could almost be traced by the battalions of urchins pressing canister upon the unwary visitor.

A third artillery projectile, spherical case – known in the British service as shrapnel after its inventor, Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel of the Royal Artillery – consisted of an iron sphere filled with powder and musket-balls. The shell was ignited by a fuse composed of tightly-packed powder in an ash or beech plug; bursting range was regulated by cutting the end off the fuse.

Cannon, like infantry muskets, were muzzle-loading throughout Wellington’s service. They were horse-drawn, with field guns requiring teams of six or eight horses. In most artillery units the gunners marched behind their pieces, but in horse artillery, designed to keep pace with, and cross the same country as cavalry, all gunners rode. Finally, the rocket made a brief and inglorious appearance in the British army during the Napoleonic Wars, but it was not deemed a success, and Wellington in particular had poor regard for it. When told that sending a rocket troop away would break its commander’s heart, he snapped: ‘Damn his heart: let my orders be obeyed.’

The Georgian army was a mirror of the state it served. It was heterogeneous, decentralised and riddled with patronage and perquisite. The commander-in-chief at Horse Guards in Whitehall presided over the household troops (horse and foot guards), and the infantry and cavalry of the line. He was, however, subject to political control, itself unevenly applied by the two cabinet ministers with primary responsibility for military matters – the secretary of state for war and the colonies, and the secretary at war. The monarch also took an interest in military affairs, regarding the household troops as a personal preserve, and often becoming involved in that most fecund of royal pursuits, the design of uniform. Artillery and engineers were the creatures of the master-general of the ordnance, usually a peer with a seat in the cabinet, and proved the point by wearing blue uniforms rather than the red which characterised most of the rest of the army. Wellington served on both sides of the fence, both as commander-in-chief and as master-general of the ordnance, an unusual distinction.

The heavy hand of the Treasury lay on the whole machine, for it controlled the commissariat which was responsible for supplying the army with most of what it required in peace and war, although its representatives were regarded as civilian officials rather than military officers. Yet even here there was little consistency, for some items (soldiers’ water bottles, for instance), were supplied by the board of ordnance and stamped with its initials, BO, and others, like uniforms and some accoutrements, were supplied to regiments by their colonels. The latter were actually not colonels at all, but generals given the appointment as a reward or as the equivalent of a pension. Wellington became colonel of the 33

Regiment in 1806, and remained colonel of a regiment until he died. They purchased their regiment’s requisites, using a government grant which they often managed to under spend by economising on the quality of cloth from which uniforms were made or the frequency with which items were replaced.

Artillery and engineer officers were commissioned after attending the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and were thereafter promoted by inexorable seniority. In the infantry and cavalry, however, colonels were intimately concerned in the selection and promotion of the officers in their regiments. About two-thirds of commissions in these arms were purchased, although during major wars it was difficult to find sufficient young men whose relatives were prepared to buy the fortunate youth an accelerated chance of an early death: in 1810 only one fifth of all commissions were bought. An individual wishing to buy a commission had to pay the government the regulation price, adding a non-regulation bonus to the officer he was replacing, using the colonel’s representative, the regimental agent, as his intermediary. Regulations on promotion grew increasingly tight during Wellington’s lifetime, and the Duke of York, commander-in-chief 1798–1808 and 1811–1827, forbade commissioning youths under the age of sixteen. He also established time limits that prevented an officer becoming a captain with less than two year’s service and a major with less than six, increasing these limits to three and nine years in 1806.

Up to the rank of lieutenant colonel, promotion was regimental. A normal peacetime vacancy for a captain, arising because an officer had decided to retire on half-pay, would be offered to the senior lieutenant. If he could afford it, all well and good: if not, the offer was made to the next senior, and so on. The promotion of a lieutenant opened an opportunity for the promotion of an ensign, which was filled in the same way. An astute young man with money behind him could slip from regiment to regiment as opportunities arose, obtaining seniority in an unfashionable regiment and transferring back, in his new rank, to his old regiment, provided its colonel was kept sweet. When officers were killed in action or died of wounds, however, the vacancy was filled by seniority alone: it was small wonder that the ambitious but impecunious drank to ‘a bloody war or a sickly season’.

In practice, more commissions were granted without purchase than ought to have been the case, and an applicant’s ability to bring influence to bear was crucial. Control of a family parliamentary seat, support for the ministry in Commons or Lords, past favours or future promises all helped secure an epaulette. Sometimes a young man could make his way by courage alone. Gentleman volunteers attached themselves to a regiment, messing with its officers but serving as private soldiers, hoping to distinguish themselves and gain a free commission.

Promotion beyond lieutenant colonel was by seniority within the army as a whole. An officer who made lieutenant colonel was bound to die a general if he lived long enough, but there was no guarantee that he would be employed as a general even if he gained the rank. There were always more generals than there were jobs, and officers steadily notched their way up from major general to lieutenant general and so to general, even if they never actually served in any of these ranks. Promotion for a man with neither contacts nor particular talent was a mixed blessing: he might find himself a major general, living at home on his half-pay as lieutenant colonel, waiting for a call which never came.