Wellington: The Iron Duke

Arthur Wesley had his own call to arms in 1786, when he was sent to the Royal Academy of Equitation in the French town of Angers. The school’s register describes him as ‘Mr Wesley, gentilhomme Irlandais, fils de Mylaidi Mornington.’ With his friends Mr Walsh and Mr Wingfield, sons of Lords Walsh and Powerscourt, the ‘groupe des lords’, Wesley was entertained by local noble families, and made a good impression on M. de Pignerolle, the academy’s director, who described him as ‘an Irish lad of great promise’. Yet he was still noticeably frail and was often not well enough to ride, but spent happy hours on the sofa, playing with his terrier Vick. He was never really fond of dogs, but made an exception for terriers. When in India he had a white terrier called Jack which, badly frightened when a salute was fired, made its own way over a hundred miles home.

Angers taught him three things. He became a good horseman, albeit, despite the Academy’s motto of ‘Grace and Valour’, more practical than he was elegant. His French was in much the same style, because although his vocabulary and grammar were good enough, he tended to take the language by frontal assault: somebody later remarked that he spoke French as he fought them, bravement. His French stood him in good stead in a Europe where French was the language of diplomacy and the arts, and his comparative fluency eluded all too many of his countrymen. In 1814 his senior aide-de-camp, Colin Campbell, was disputing possession of an umbrella with the mayor of Bordeaux after a civic reception. Campbell tugged, bowed, and declared ‘c’est moine’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Lastly, in these formative years, Wesley was influenced by gentlemen like M. de Pignerolle; old-style royalists who owed proud allegiance to a notion of absolute monarchy whose days were already numbered. Elizabeth Longford recounts a telling anecdote. In 1840, at a dinner in Apsley House, his London home, the duke gazed at portraits of Louis XVIII and Charles X in all their finery, and said to Lord Mahon: ‘How much better, after all, these two look with their fleurs de lys and Saint-Esprits, than the two corporals behind or the fancy dress in between.’ The corporals were Tsar Alexander I of Russia and King Frederick William III of Prussia in uniform, and the fancy dress was George IV in full Highland fig.

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When Wesley returned to England in late 1786 his mother was astonished at the improvement in ‘my ugly boy Arthur’. But he had to be found a job, and the family was still short of money. His brother Mornington immediately wrote to the Duke of Rutland, lord-lieutenant of Ireland.

Let me remind you of a younger brother of mine, whom you were so kind as to take into your consideration for a commission in the army. He is here at this moment, and perfectly idle. It is a matter of indifference to me what commission he gets, provided he gets it soon.

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Mornington was already a rising man, with a seat in the Westminster parliament and brother William sitting for the family seat of Trim in the Irish Commons: it was in Rutland’s interest to indulge him. A commission in the cavalry or foot guards might have been more than the market would bear, as Mornington must have known. But a junior regiment in India was another matter altogether, and on 7 March 1787, shortly before his eighteenth birthday, Arthur Wesley was gazetted ensign in the 73

Highland Regiment of Foot. Mornington continued to pluck the harp-strings of patronage: in October that year he induced the new lord-lieutenant, Lord Buckingham, to appoint Arthur one of his aides-de-camp on ten shillings a day (almost twice his daily pay as an ensign), and on Christmas day 1787, he became a lieutenant in the 76

Regiment. An attempt by the secretary at war to economise by putting all aides-de-camp on half-pay caused some fluttering, but the scheme was soon dropped. Arthur now transferred to the 41

Regiment, as the 76

had been designated for service in the unhealthy East Indies. He set off for Ireland in January 1788, and on his way visited those ‘inseparable friends’, the Ladies of Llangollen, who had been told by his excited mother that:

There are so many little things to settle for Arthur who is just got into the army and is to go to Ireland in the capacity of Aid De Camp to Lord Buckingham, and must be set out a little for that, in short I must do everything for him and when you see him you will think him worthy of it, as he really is a very charming young man, never did I see such a change for the better in anybody. He is wonderfully lucky, in six months he has got two steps in the army and appointed Aid De Camp to Lord Buckingham which is ten shillings a day.

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Lady Dungannon accompanied him to see the ladies, one of whom reported on him as: ‘A charming young man. Handsome, fashioned tall, and elegant.’

What charmed rural Wales did not appear to such advantage in more cosmopolitan Dublin, and Lady Buckingham called Arthur and his fellow aides, ‘the awkward squad’. Arthur ordered supper for the vicereine and her ladies, picked up flowers knocked over by a bearish nobleman, was dubbed ‘a mischievous boy’ by an irritated picnic guest, and was abandoned by a beauty at a ball when his small-talk ran dry. He had gambled at Angers, and bet more deeply in Dublin, winning 150 guineas, close to a year’s pay, from ‘Buck’ Whaley by walking from Cornelscourt to Leeson Street in under an hour. He lodged on Lower Ormond Quay, and his landlord, a boot-maker, lent him money when some of his other bets did not turn out as well. In later life he told George Gleig that debt: ‘Makes a slave of a man. I have often known what it was to be in want of money, but I never got helplessly into debt.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Gleig deferentially assumed that his hero did not get into debt at all, but it is truer to say that in borrowing, as in war, he never over-extended himself completely (though there were tense moments), and an aide-de-camp’s credit was good in the bright Dublin summer of 1789. Yet news of the French Revolution cast a shadow over the gaiety. ‘A’n’t you sorry for poor dear France,’ wrote his sister Anne, now expediently married to a peer’s son. ‘I shall never see Paris again.’

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Wesley was still not firmly set on his career. Although he spoke of trying to take his new profession seriously, much later in life he rebutted John Wilson Croker’s assertion that it was at the very beginning of his career that he ‘had a private soldier & all his accoutrements & traps separately weighed, to give you some insight into what the man had to do & his power of doing it’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He transferred to the 12

Light Dragoons, still as a lieutenant, in June 1789, but far from devoting himself to the intricacies of his new arm, he dipped a reluctant toe into politics. Brother William had been found a seat in Westminster, and Arthur was destined for Trim, the family borough in Ireland. It was not an easy time to venture into Irish politics, for the tide of nationalism was sweeping across the country. The American War and its Declaration of Independence in 1776 had repercussions for Ireland. There were clear similarities between the position of Ireland and England’s colonies in North America, and when France and Spain entered the war against Britain, Ireland, denuded of regular troops, was a likely target for a hostile expedition. Many Irishmen, from the Protestant minority for the most part, joined volunteer military units, and were soon complaining about the commercial restrictions imposed on Ireland and questioning the right of the Westminster parliament to legislate for it.

In Henry Grattan the nationalist movement had an eloquent parliamentary leader, and shortly before the general election of 1789, Wesley was sent to Trim on his first political errand. The little town’s burgesses were in danger of making Grattan a freeman, something Dublin Castle was anxious to avoid. Wesley made his first political speech to an audience of eighty burgesses, reporting that he:

got up and said that the only reasons why Mr Grattan should get the freedom of the corporation was his respectability, that really if we were to admit every man because one of two people said he was respectable, the whole community would belong to the corporation, that he could never be of any use to us and would never attend, and that I would certainly object, however great my respect for him.

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During a break before the vote, Wesley moved about the room rallying his supporters: ‘I told my friends that it was a question of party and they must stick by me.’ Wesley duly carried the day. He then showed great discretion by declining to yield to ‘requests of all kinds’. An elderly voter asked what he proposed to do about £70 owed by Lord Mornington: ‘I would have nothing to do with it,’ replied Wesley, ‘as in the case of a General Election such a transaction would entirely vitiate my return.’

When the election came on 30 April 1790, Wesley was duly elected, and although opponents briefly disputed his return when the house met in July, they failed to proceed with their petition. He found himself sitting in a parliament in which at least two-thirds of the members owed their election to the proprietors of less than a hundred boroughs. A third of members enjoyed salaries or pensions from the government, absorbing an eighth of Irish revenue. A young Protestant barrister, Theobald Wolfe Tone, leader of the United Irishmen, already in 1790 more militant than Grattan, tellingly described the government’s well-fed but silent majority as ‘the common prostitutes of the Treasury Bench’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The harp of patronage played on, and in addition to his political role, Wesley became a captain in the 58

Regiment in 1791, slipping sideways into the 18

Light Dragoons the following year.

Yet there was still no clear career ahead of him. He dutifully voted for the government, scuttled about on Castle business, and acted for his brother Mornington in disputes over the mortgaged estate at Dangan. And there were more discreet family tasks. Mornington was living with a French courtesan, Gabrielle Hyacinthe Rolland, who bore him several children, but he had also managed to father a son in Ireland, and Arthur was entrusted with the maintenance of his brother’s ‘friend’ and the education of her son. Lord Westmoreland had replaced Lord Buckingham as viceroy in 1789 and economy did not figure among the ‘few good points’ this nobleman was acknowledged to possess. A captain’s pay did not go far and as aide-de-camp to Westmoreland, Arthur found himself drawing on the family agent for loans, and looking for a way of establishing his finances on a firmer footing: marriage seemed the answer.

There was already more to the relationship between Arthur Wesley and Kitty Pakenham than a young man’s quest for an heiress. The Pakenhams lived at Pakenham Hall, Castlepollard, in County Westmeath, a day’s ride from Dangan. Kitty and Arthur had probably met in Dublin in 1789 or 1790, for her charm and good looks made her a great favourite at the Castle, and Arthur became a frequent visitor to the Rutland Square house of her father, Lord Longford, a naval captain and keen agricultural improver. We cannot be sure what Longford would have made of a match between the couple, who were evidently very fond of one another, because he died in 1792 and was succeeded by his son Tom, who was himself to step up from baron to earl on his grandmother’s death in 1794. Perhaps it was Tom’s ‘incipient ideas of grandeur’ that persuaded Arthur to project himself in the best possible light. He borrowed enough money from Richard to buy a majority in the 33

Regiment in April 1793. He even began to speak in parliament, seconding the address from the throne, deploring the imprisonment of Louis XVI and the French invasion of the Netherlands, and congratulating the government on its liberal attitude to Catholics.

If he hoped that all this was likely to impress Kitty’s brother, he was sorely mistaken. For if the Wesleys had lost most of their money, with nothing but mortgaged estates to show for it, the Pakenhams were comfortably off, and Kitty’s brother Ned had his majority bought for him when he was only seventeen. It cannot have been easy for Arthur to ask Tom, actually a little younger than he was, for Kitty’s hand in marriage. He was turned down flat. Arthur Wesley was a young man with very poor prospects, and Kitty could do far better.

I believe that the fatal interview took place in the library at Pakenham Hall, now known as Tullynally Castle, and still in the hands of the hospitable Pakenhams. The house is set in a landscaped park with a lake close by and views to distant hills, with treasures scattered casually about the place. A row of swords, hanging unlabelled from coat-hooks, includes slender small-swords, an essential part of a gentleman’s everyday dress until the end of the eighteenth century; a mighty meatcleaver of a light cavalry officer’s sword; a heavy, neo-classical (and quite useless) ceremonial sword of the Order of St Patrick; and an Edwardian sword that must have belonged to Brigadier General Lord Longford, killed commanding a Yeomanry brigade in an impossible attack at Gallipoli in August 1915.

Reading General Sir George Napier’s autobiography in the library at Tullynally Castle, I was struck, yet again, by the Irish contribution to the army of Wellington’s age. The Napier brothers, Charles, George and William, all served in the Peninsula and duly became generals. Such was their courage that they were repeatedly wounded, and in 1812 Wellington began a letter to their mother, Lady Sarah, telling her that George had lost his arm, with the words: ‘Having such sons, I am aware that you expect to hear of those misfortunes which I have more than once had to communicate to you.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The problem of balancing conscience and duty in the politics of the period is underlined by the fact that Sarah’s nephew, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who had served as an infantry captain in America, became a leader of the United Irishmen and was mortally wounded resisting arrest on the eve of the Great Rising of 1798.

Ireland’s contribution to the British army cannot be judged simply by the officers it provided, whether from noble families like the Napiers or Pakenhams, or the sons of lesser squireens – men like Ensign Dyas of the 51

Regiment, ‘an Irishman whose only fortune was his sword’, whose exploits were a byword for sheer courage.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Ireland of turf-roofed cabins outside the park gates provided the army with a high proportion of its rank and file: 42 per cent of the Royal Artillery towards the end of the eighteenth century, and precisely the same proportion of the whole army by 1830. Although Irish soldiers were concentrated most heavily in ostensibly Irish regiments like the Connaught Rangers, there was scarcely a regiment without them: the 57

(West Middlesex) Regiment was 34 per cent Irish in 1809, and even the 92

Regiment (Gordon Highlanders) was 6 per cent Irish in 1813.

Lord Longford’s rejection of his suit for Kitty was devastating, and a turning-point for Wesley. His violins, he noted bitterly, ‘took up too much of his time and thoughts’: he burnt them with his own hands soon afterwards, and never played again. He did his best, however, to tease a few more notes from the harp of patronage. Infantry battalions had two flank companies apiece, one of grenadiers and the other of light infantry, and he heard that some of these were to be brigaded together and sent abroad. He begged Mornington to intercede with the prime minister, and to

ask Mr Pitt to desire Lord Westmoreland to send me as Major to one of the flank corps. If they are to go abroad, they will be obliged to take officers from the line, and they may as well take me as anybody else … I think it is both dangerous and improper to remove any part of the army from this country at present, but if any part of it is to be moved, I should like to go with it, and have no chance of seeing service except with the flank corps, as the regiment I have got into as Major is the last for service.

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His appeal was unsuccessful, which was as well, for the flank companies from Ireland went off to die of yellow fever in Martinique. Mornington lent him more money, and with it he purchased a lieutenant colonelcy in the 33

that September. He went off to command his regiment, immersing himself in the minutiae of its accounts and preparing standing orders that became a model of their kind.

An expedition to the coast of Normandy under Lord Moira was mooted, and the 33

seemed likely to take part. Wesley resigned his parliamentary seat, found an affluent linen-draper who was prepared to deal with his Dublin debts, but then heard that his regiment was not to go after all. Then came good news: Lord Moira’s force would indeed include the 33

, and would be sent to reinforce the Duke of York’s little army in Flanders. It was accompanied, as good news so often is, by bad. Lord Longford wrote to say that he was firmly resolved that a match with Kitty was impossible. Wesley, however, could not accept the decision as final for, as it was based on ‘prudential motives’, a change in his own circumstances might yet win him Kitty. He wrote and told her that if her brother ever relented, ‘my mind will still remain the same’.

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