Wellington by Richard Holmes
He valued the acquisition of intelligence highly, and usually began the process well before the outbreak of war. He maintained a network of professional spies called hircarrahs, paid them well and looked hard at the information they provided. Commanders were warned not to listen to gossip:
Major Walker sends out Hircarrahs who tell him what they please; he writes the whole down and sends it off to Mr Duncan by whom it is circulated. Major Walker discovers that his Hircarrahs have told him falsehoods; but I doubt if they are punished, or rewarded when they do well.55
And when in doubt officers should check for themselves. An officer who complained that intelligence was poor was told sharply that: ‘you are mounted on a damn good horse and have two eyes in your head’.56 Lastly (though Wellesley might have put it first), war was, start to finish, a matter of logistics. It was here that his keen eye for detail was sharpest, here that his emphasis on preparation was most pronounced. A general who could command an army in the Deccan, with its lines of communication running over 300 miles across major rivers down to the Madras presidency, was as well prepared as any commander could be for the rigours of the Iberian Peninsula.
There were political lessons too. Wellesley’s dispatches show the pains he took to keep his superiors, political and military, apprised of what he did, for in the topsy-turvy world of Indian politics, he was finished if he lost their confidence, even if they did not enjoy his own. He often found himself campaigning with allies who were incompetent or unreliable, and here he plied consummate tact, although, as his private correspondence reveals, with much effort. There were areas where he would brook no compromise. While he treated the commanders of his Indian auxiliary cavalry in a ‘gentleman-like’ manner, he was merciless if they broke his rules. In December 1803 he told Colonel Murray that: ‘If my Maratha allies did not know that I should hang any one found plundering, not only should I have starved long ago, but most probably my own coat should have been taken off my back.’57 He set his face firmly against the ‘sweeteners’ that were routine in Indian political life. When an officer told him that the Rajah of Kittoor had offered 10,000 gold pagodas to be taken under British protection, he was ‘surprised that any man in the character of a British officer should not have given the Rajah to understand that his offer would be considered as an insult …’58 In politics, as in war, the subcontinent was admirable preparation for the Peninsula.
THREE
FALSE STARTS
MAJOR GENERAL SIR ARTHUR WELLESLEY was home, at least as far as home went. His mother was still living off Cavendish Square, but there was little intimacy there, and on the wider stage, his Indian victories cut no ice in London. He had already heard that Richard was to be replaced as governor-general, and was well aware that the whole ‘Wellesley system’ of expanding British power in India would need defending in Whitehall and the City. He had returned to find that William Pitt, the prime minister, had just brought together the Third Coalition against Napoleon. It was expected that Britain would provide some sort of expeditionary force, though there were the usual wild rumours as to where it might be sent, and Wellesley was anxious for a command. Although he did not need money in the way he had before he left for India, the prospect of idleness appalled him.
On 12 September 1805, he called on Lord Castlereagh, a Dublin-born acquaintance from his Irish past, at the Colonial Office in Downing Street. Castlereagh had recently been appointed secretary of state for war and the colonies, an office he held in 1805–6 and again in 1807–9; both crucial periods in Wellesley’s career. Wellesley found himself waiting in Castlereagh’s outer office with a short naval officer who, ‘from his likeness to his pictures and the loss of an arm’, he immediately recognised as Nelson. The admiral had no idea who the young general was, and ‘entered into a conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side, and all about himself, and, really, in a style so vain and silly as to surprise and almost disgust me’. Nelson left the room and returned a few minutes later, having found out who Wellesley was. He was a changed man, and talked:
with a good sense, and a knowledge of subjects at home and abroad, that surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part of our interview had done; in fact, he talked like an officer and a statesman … I don’t know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more.
He later reflected that ‘if the Secretary of State had been punctual, and admitted Lord Nelson in the first quarter of an hour, I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had …’ Nelson left to join HMS Victory the following day, and sailed off to fight at Trafalgar. The two men never met again.1
Wellesley saw a good deal of Castlereagh over the next few weeks, defending Richard’s achievements to the Secretary-of-State. As Elizabeth Longford puts it, ‘while Castlereagh resisted the advocate’s pleas, he came to believe in the advocate’s personality and skill’.2 On several occasions Wellesley went riding with Pitt, now fading fast, and spoke out on behalf of ‘our late system in India’, and advised on the conduct of the war against France. He found Pitt ‘too sanguine … he conceived a project and then imagined that it was done, and did not enter enough into details’. Pitt, for his part, was favourably impressed by the general who ‘never made a difficulty, or hid his ignorance in vague generalities. If I put a question to him, he answered it distinctly; if I wanted an explanation, he gave it clearly; if I desired an opinion, I got from him one supported by reasons that were always sound.’3 He argued against one especially hare-brained scheme for mounting a two-pronged attack on the Spanish colony of Mexico, with one expedition striking out from Jamaica and the other moving from Madras by way of the Philippines and Australia, pointing out that even if the two forces duly converged in Mexico, the United States would not be likely to view with equanimity the old world’s sudden resurgence in the new.
With connections like this, it would have been surprising if Wellesley had not obtained a command, despite the hostility of Horse Guards. The Duke of York, commander-in-chief, had made it clear that he thought Harris had been wrong to give Wellesley the Mysore command in place of Baird, and to the end of his life, he maintained that Wellesley was ambitious and untrustworthy. Nevertheless, Wellesley was appointed to command a brigade in an expedition to be sent to north Germany in the distant hope of collaborating with the Prussians. But on 2 December 1805, Napoleon trounced the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz, and devastated the coalition. Pitt presciently told an assistant to roll up a map of Europe, as it would not be wanted for ten years, and went home to die. Wellesley found himself back in England, commanding a brigade at Hastings. With Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar and the break-up of Napoleon’s camp at Boulogne, this was scarcely an embattled coastline, and although he famously declared that ‘I have eaten of the King’s salt, and, therefore, I consider it my duty to serve with unhesitating zeal and cheerfulness, when and wherever the King or his Government may think proper to employ me’, he was bored and sidelined.4 However, in January 1806, he was appointed the Colonel of the 33rd Regiment, a real honour for a junior major general, and happily told his friend Lieutenant Colonel John Malcolm that: ‘The regiment which they have given me, and [employment on] the Staff, have made me rich.’5
He spent some of his new money on re-entry into politics. Castlereagh advised him to contest Rye, a pocket borough ‘where the government interest was paramount’, because it would enable him to protect Richard’s ‘character and service from unjust aspersions’, and he was duly elected in April 1806.6 But the government was not in a strong position. After Pitt’s death the ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ took office, with Lord Grenville as prime minister and Charles James Fox as foreign secretary. ‘We are not actually in opposition,’ lamented Wellesley, ‘but we have no power.’7 Still, there was plenty of work to be done in the House. Another MP, James Pauli, a successful merchant who had returned disgruntled from India, led the attack on Richard Wellesley, and there were many, inside parlia
ment and outside it, who were inclined to follow. The opulence of the marquess’s lifestyle had astonished his successor, who complained that there were so many sentries inside his residence that ‘if I show my head … a fellow with a musket and fixed bayonet presents himself before me’. Opponents attacked Richard’s dealings with Indian princes, his role in bringing about the Maratha wars, and claimed that that he had wasted public money. They hoped to see him impeached, and there was every chance that his fall would damage Arthur, for amongst the contested expenditure was a grant of 30,000 rupees paid to Arthur in the Deccan. In parliament, Arthur, seeking a quick decision rather than a long campaign, demanded that specific charges should be brought in place of generalised accusations, thereby greatly contributing to his brother’s survival in public life.
Meanwhile Arthur was taking a decisive step in his private life. Despite his subsequent love affairs, he had never forgotten Kitty Pakenham. In 1801 Colonel William Beresford wrote from Dublin to ask ‘if Miss Pakenham is an object to you or not’, adding that she looked as well as ever. Arthur was also corresponding with Olivia Sparrow, one of Kitty’s closest friends, and assured her that: ‘Notwithstanding my good fortune, and the perpetual activity of the life which I have led, the disappointment, and the object of it, and all the circumstances, are as fresh upon my mind as if they had passed only yesterday.’ He added that ‘the merit of your friend is still felt’, and begged to be remembered to her ‘in the kindest manner’. Kitty, for her part, was desperately anxious that Arthur should not feel ‘obliged to renew a pursuit, which perhaps he might then not wish or my family (or some of them) take kindly’.8 However, on the basis of the news enthusiastically relayed by Mrs Sparrow, she was confident enough to break off her engagement to Colonel the Hon. Galbraith Lowry Cole, second son of the Earl of Enniskillen. Cole was as downcast by the rejection as Wellesley had been years before. One of his brothers thought that there was ‘not the smallest chance’ of his marrying. ‘Since that love affair with Kitty Pakenham,’ he wrote, ‘Lowry seems like a burnt child to the fire …’9
There is no evidence that, at this stage, Wellesley was driven by a sense of obligation, for he had ample opportunity to withdraw. But he assured Mrs Sparrow that he had come home ‘for one purpose only’, and in November 1805 professed himself ‘the happiest man in the world’ when Kitty agreed to marry him. It is hard to disagree with Joan Wilson, Kitty’s biographer, that it is ‘almost unbelievable’ that no meeting was then arranged between them. Kitty was desperately worried by Arthur’s departure for Germany: her Aunt Louisa wrote that ‘she coughs sadly and looks but ill’. She was engaged to a man who was too busy to come and see her, and although she publicly maintained confidence in ‘the very first of human creatures’, the episode put her under a strain that was all too evident when they eventually did meet again – on their wedding day. The wedding took place on 10 April 1806 in the Longford’s Dublin drawing-room, with the Reverend Gerald Wellesley officiating. Arthur was not impressed by the first sight of his bride in ten years, muttering to Gerald: ‘She has grown ugly, by Jove!’ In contrast, Kitty’s friend Maria Edgeworth found him ‘very handsome, very brown, quite bald [in fact close-cropped] and a hooked nose’. Arthur went back to his brigade after a week’s honeymoon, leaving Gerald to escort Kitty to 11 Harley Street, which was to be their London home. When she was presented at court, the kindly Queen Charlotte called her a ‘bright example of constancy’, and asked if she had ever written to Wellesley during his long absence. ‘No, never, Madame,’ replied Kitty. ‘And did you never think of him?’ enquired the Queen. ‘Yes, Madame, very often.’ There was no mention of Olivia Sparrow’s tireless efforts.
The marriage was a mistake. Wellesley later told his close friend Harriet Arbuthnot that: ‘I married her because they asked me to do it & I did not know myself. I thought I should never care for anybody again & that I shd be with my army &, in short, I was a fool.’10 This holds little water. There is no trace of any external pressure on him, and if he did not know himself at thirty-seven, he had left it precious late. The real reasons seem more complex. First, deeply in love with Kitty, he had been downcast by her brother’s rejection of his suit: he was not a man to take a rebuff lightly, and the incident rankled, just as his supersession by Baird had. Second, absence had indeed made the heart grow fonder. Towards the end of his time in India, he was desperately anxious to get back home, and would not be the last returning warrior to fasten his hopes on the girl he left behind him, and to hope for more from a relationship than it could ever deliver. He had been warned that she was ‘much altered’, but replied that it was her mind he cared for, and that would not alter. By the time he saw just how much she had changed, it was too late for an honourable retreat. If Kitty’s mind had remained as he imagined, there might still have been some hope. But it was soon evident that she did not run the household as crisply as her husband had run the 33rd Regiment, and there were many ‘domestic annoyances’ as he was drawn into difficulties with servants or the accounts. When they had first met, he had appreciated her sharp wit, and saw her at the centre of an admiring circle. Now the roles had changed. He was dominant and admired, she nervous and unsure. Arthur had accomplished his mission and purged the Pakenham family’s rejection of his suit. Now he had other things to do, and, assuming that his new wife would understand his own fierce commitment to duty, he took no time to get to know her. It was a disastrous beginning.
Arthur’s brigade did not interfere with his parliamentary duties, and with Henry’s help, he was to slip deftly from one economical seat to another, representing Mitchell in Cornwall after the 1806 election and Newport, Isle of Wight, in 1807. But he was not truly comfortable in politics. He later told Croker that he was mistrusted by Horse Guards because:
In the first place, they thought very little of anyone who had served in India … Then because I was in Parliament, and connected with people in office, I was a politician, and a politician can never be a soldier. Moreover, they looked upon me with a kind of jealousy, because I was a lord’s son, ‘a sprig of nobility’, who came into the army more for ornament than use.11
He told Richard that he longed for military employment: ‘it is such an object to me to serve with some of the European armies that I have written to Lord Grenville upon the subject; & I hope that he will speak to the Duke of York’.12 He had no illusions about the jobs he might get, assuring Richard that: ‘I don’t want a Chief Command if it cannot be given to me … I should be very sorry to stay at home when others go abroad, only because I cannot command in Chief.’13 The war was not going well. Napoleon beat the Prussians in the double battle of Jena-Auerstadt in October 1806 and went on to occupy Berlin. However, in July, Lieutenant General Sir John Stuart had beaten the French General Reynier in a scrambling little battle at Maida, in southern Italy. It was hardly Austerlitz, but it did help persuade Arthur, sent a detailed report of the action from a friend who was there, that French columns could indeed be seen off by a British line.
In March 1807 the government, unsettled by the death of Fox, fell, and the king summoned the sick and drowsy Duke of Portland to form a new administration. The Duke of Richmond was to be lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and Arthur was offered the post of chief secretary for Ireland with a salary of £6,566 a year. He accepted it only on the condition that he would be allowed to relinquish it at short notice if a command became available, and duly moved with Kitty and their month-old son, Arthur Richard, to the chief secretary’s house in Dublin’s Phoenix Park.
Ireland had changed greatly since his last visit. As a result of the rebellion of 1798, Pitt had become convinced that constitutional union between Britain and Ireland was the answer to the Irish question. The government deployed all its patronage of ‘jobs, places and peerages’ to gain support, for the union was opposed by most ascendancy politicians as well as by nationalist parliamentarians like Grattan. In 1800, the Irish parliament voted itself into oblivion, and a reduced number of Irish constituencies wer
e thenceforth represented at Westminster. But the viceroy and his court survived, and ‘above all the Castle continued; with its complex machinery of patronage and contacts, manipulated politically by the Chief Secretary and administratively by the Under Secretary …’14 The balance of power was still ‘invincibly Protestant’, and ‘the wretched cabins remained eternally unaltered, with the same ragged families inside, the same sprouting weeds on the roof, and the same holy pictures on the walls …’15 Arthur recognised that ‘a good use of the patronage of the government’ was essential to the preservation of power, and no sooner had he arrived than he found himself marshalling that patronage in the Tory interest for the 1807 elections. He saw that there was no prospect of altering the laws that bore down upon the Catholics – the king’s steadfast resistance to any such reform had finished the previous ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ – but he told Lord Fingall, a Catholic nobleman, that they would be enforced ‘with mildness and good temper’.16
Above all, he believed that the union was deeply unpopular. ‘Show me an Irishman,’ he declared later, ‘and I’ll show you a man whose anxious wish is to see his country independent of Great Britain.’17 He thought that no political concession would alter this spirit, and that the Irish looked eagerly towards a French invasion, which would enable them to throw off the English yoke. He argued then, as he was to argue at Westminster twenty years on, that the worst thing that could befall any country was civil strife. The political supremacy of Britain over Ireland had to be maintained at all costs, and steps taken to deal with a French descent. ‘I lay it down as decided that Ireland,’ he wrote, ‘in a view to military operations, must be considered as an enemy’s country …’18
In the spring of 1807, Wellesley heard that the government was planning an expedition to Denmark, and forced Castlereagh’s hand by declaring that he would not stay in Ireland whether or not he was given a command. On 24 July, he told the Duke of Richmond that he had been offered a post if the expedition did go ahead. ‘I don’t know, and I have not asked,’ he wrote, ‘whether I am to return to my office when this coup de main will have been struck or will have failed.’ He concluded that he had not mentioned the expedition to the nervous Kitty, and did not propose to do so ‘till it will be positively settled that we are to go’.19 It was not a coup which aroused much support in England. The victorious Napoleon, who had just concluded the Treaty of Tilsit with the Tsar, had decreed that European ports were closed to British trade. Although the combined French and Spanish fleets had been badly mauled at Trafalgar, the neutral Portuguese and Danish fleets might yet fall into French hands and make an invasion of Britain possible. George Canning, the foreign secretary, asked Denmark to place her fleet under British protection for the remainder of the war and when the steadfast Danes refused, sent an expedition under Lieutenant General Lord Cathcart to take it by force. This looked uncommonly like theft, and Charles Napier, one of the martial brothers who were to distinguish themselves in the Peninsula, echoed public opinion when he wrote ‘Poor Danes!’
Major Walker sends out Hircarrahs who tell him what they please; he writes the whole down and sends it off to Mr Duncan by whom it is circulated. Major Walker discovers that his Hircarrahs have told him falsehoods; but I doubt if they are punished, or rewarded when they do well.55
And when in doubt officers should check for themselves. An officer who complained that intelligence was poor was told sharply that: ‘you are mounted on a damn good horse and have two eyes in your head’.56 Lastly (though Wellesley might have put it first), war was, start to finish, a matter of logistics. It was here that his keen eye for detail was sharpest, here that his emphasis on preparation was most pronounced. A general who could command an army in the Deccan, with its lines of communication running over 300 miles across major rivers down to the Madras presidency, was as well prepared as any commander could be for the rigours of the Iberian Peninsula.
There were political lessons too. Wellesley’s dispatches show the pains he took to keep his superiors, political and military, apprised of what he did, for in the topsy-turvy world of Indian politics, he was finished if he lost their confidence, even if they did not enjoy his own. He often found himself campaigning with allies who were incompetent or unreliable, and here he plied consummate tact, although, as his private correspondence reveals, with much effort. There were areas where he would brook no compromise. While he treated the commanders of his Indian auxiliary cavalry in a ‘gentleman-like’ manner, he was merciless if they broke his rules. In December 1803 he told Colonel Murray that: ‘If my Maratha allies did not know that I should hang any one found plundering, not only should I have starved long ago, but most probably my own coat should have been taken off my back.’57 He set his face firmly against the ‘sweeteners’ that were routine in Indian political life. When an officer told him that the Rajah of Kittoor had offered 10,000 gold pagodas to be taken under British protection, he was ‘surprised that any man in the character of a British officer should not have given the Rajah to understand that his offer would be considered as an insult …’58 In politics, as in war, the subcontinent was admirable preparation for the Peninsula.
THREE
FALSE STARTS
MAJOR GENERAL SIR ARTHUR WELLESLEY was home, at least as far as home went. His mother was still living off Cavendish Square, but there was little intimacy there, and on the wider stage, his Indian victories cut no ice in London. He had already heard that Richard was to be replaced as governor-general, and was well aware that the whole ‘Wellesley system’ of expanding British power in India would need defending in Whitehall and the City. He had returned to find that William Pitt, the prime minister, had just brought together the Third Coalition against Napoleon. It was expected that Britain would provide some sort of expeditionary force, though there were the usual wild rumours as to where it might be sent, and Wellesley was anxious for a command. Although he did not need money in the way he had before he left for India, the prospect of idleness appalled him.
On 12 September 1805, he called on Lord Castlereagh, a Dublin-born acquaintance from his Irish past, at the Colonial Office in Downing Street. Castlereagh had recently been appointed secretary of state for war and the colonies, an office he held in 1805–6 and again in 1807–9; both crucial periods in Wellesley’s career. Wellesley found himself waiting in Castlereagh’s outer office with a short naval officer who, ‘from his likeness to his pictures and the loss of an arm’, he immediately recognised as Nelson. The admiral had no idea who the young general was, and ‘entered into a conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side, and all about himself, and, really, in a style so vain and silly as to surprise and almost disgust me’. Nelson left the room and returned a few minutes later, having found out who Wellesley was. He was a changed man, and talked:
with a good sense, and a knowledge of subjects at home and abroad, that surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part of our interview had done; in fact, he talked like an officer and a statesman … I don’t know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more.
He later reflected that ‘if the Secretary of State had been punctual, and admitted Lord Nelson in the first quarter of an hour, I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had …’ Nelson left to join HMS Victory the following day, and sailed off to fight at Trafalgar. The two men never met again.1
Wellesley saw a good deal of Castlereagh over the next few weeks, defending Richard’s achievements to the Secretary-of-State. As Elizabeth Longford puts it, ‘while Castlereagh resisted the advocate’s pleas, he came to believe in the advocate’s personality and skill’.2 On several occasions Wellesley went riding with Pitt, now fading fast, and spoke out on behalf of ‘our late system in India’, and advised on the conduct of the war against France. He found Pitt ‘too sanguine … he conceived a project and then imagined that it was done, and did not enter enough into details’. Pitt, for his part, was favourably impressed by the general who ‘never made a difficulty, or hid his ignorance in vague generalities. If I put a question to him, he answered it distinctly; if I wanted an explanation, he gave it clearly; if I desired an opinion, I got from him one supported by reasons that were always sound.’3 He argued against one especially hare-brained scheme for mounting a two-pronged attack on the Spanish colony of Mexico, with one expedition striking out from Jamaica and the other moving from Madras by way of the Philippines and Australia, pointing out that even if the two forces duly converged in Mexico, the United States would not be likely to view with equanimity the old world’s sudden resurgence in the new.
With connections like this, it would have been surprising if Wellesley had not obtained a command, despite the hostility of Horse Guards. The Duke of York, commander-in-chief, had made it clear that he thought Harris had been wrong to give Wellesley the Mysore command in place of Baird, and to the end of his life, he maintained that Wellesley was ambitious and untrustworthy. Nevertheless, Wellesley was appointed to command a brigade in an expedition to be sent to north Germany in the distant hope of collaborating with the Prussians. But on 2 December 1805, Napoleon trounced the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz, and devastated the coalition. Pitt presciently told an assistant to roll up a map of Europe, as it would not be wanted for ten years, and went home to die. Wellesley found himself back in England, commanding a brigade at Hastings. With Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar and the break-up of Napoleon’s camp at Boulogne, this was scarcely an embattled coastline, and although he famously declared that ‘I have eaten of the King’s salt, and, therefore, I consider it my duty to serve with unhesitating zeal and cheerfulness, when and wherever the King or his Government may think proper to employ me’, he was bored and sidelined.4 However, in January 1806, he was appointed the Colonel of the 33rd Regiment, a real honour for a junior major general, and happily told his friend Lieutenant Colonel John Malcolm that: ‘The regiment which they have given me, and [employment on] the Staff, have made me rich.’5
He spent some of his new money on re-entry into politics. Castlereagh advised him to contest Rye, a pocket borough ‘where the government interest was paramount’, because it would enable him to protect Richard’s ‘character and service from unjust aspersions’, and he was duly elected in April 1806.6 But the government was not in a strong position. After Pitt’s death the ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ took office, with Lord Grenville as prime minister and Charles James Fox as foreign secretary. ‘We are not actually in opposition,’ lamented Wellesley, ‘but we have no power.’7 Still, there was plenty of work to be done in the House. Another MP, James Pauli, a successful merchant who had returned disgruntled from India, led the attack on Richard Wellesley, and there were many, inside parlia
Meanwhile Arthur was taking a decisive step in his private life. Despite his subsequent love affairs, he had never forgotten Kitty Pakenham. In 1801 Colonel William Beresford wrote from Dublin to ask ‘if Miss Pakenham is an object to you or not’, adding that she looked as well as ever. Arthur was also corresponding with Olivia Sparrow, one of Kitty’s closest friends, and assured her that: ‘Notwithstanding my good fortune, and the perpetual activity of the life which I have led, the disappointment, and the object of it, and all the circumstances, are as fresh upon my mind as if they had passed only yesterday.’ He added that ‘the merit of your friend is still felt’, and begged to be remembered to her ‘in the kindest manner’. Kitty, for her part, was desperately anxious that Arthur should not feel ‘obliged to renew a pursuit, which perhaps he might then not wish or my family (or some of them) take kindly’.8 However, on the basis of the news enthusiastically relayed by Mrs Sparrow, she was confident enough to break off her engagement to Colonel the Hon. Galbraith Lowry Cole, second son of the Earl of Enniskillen. Cole was as downcast by the rejection as Wellesley had been years before. One of his brothers thought that there was ‘not the smallest chance’ of his marrying. ‘Since that love affair with Kitty Pakenham,’ he wrote, ‘Lowry seems like a burnt child to the fire …’9
There is no evidence that, at this stage, Wellesley was driven by a sense of obligation, for he had ample opportunity to withdraw. But he assured Mrs Sparrow that he had come home ‘for one purpose only’, and in November 1805 professed himself ‘the happiest man in the world’ when Kitty agreed to marry him. It is hard to disagree with Joan Wilson, Kitty’s biographer, that it is ‘almost unbelievable’ that no meeting was then arranged between them. Kitty was desperately worried by Arthur’s departure for Germany: her Aunt Louisa wrote that ‘she coughs sadly and looks but ill’. She was engaged to a man who was too busy to come and see her, and although she publicly maintained confidence in ‘the very first of human creatures’, the episode put her under a strain that was all too evident when they eventually did meet again – on their wedding day. The wedding took place on 10 April 1806 in the Longford’s Dublin drawing-room, with the Reverend Gerald Wellesley officiating. Arthur was not impressed by the first sight of his bride in ten years, muttering to Gerald: ‘She has grown ugly, by Jove!’ In contrast, Kitty’s friend Maria Edgeworth found him ‘very handsome, very brown, quite bald [in fact close-cropped] and a hooked nose’. Arthur went back to his brigade after a week’s honeymoon, leaving Gerald to escort Kitty to 11 Harley Street, which was to be their London home. When she was presented at court, the kindly Queen Charlotte called her a ‘bright example of constancy’, and asked if she had ever written to Wellesley during his long absence. ‘No, never, Madame,’ replied Kitty. ‘And did you never think of him?’ enquired the Queen. ‘Yes, Madame, very often.’ There was no mention of Olivia Sparrow’s tireless efforts.
The marriage was a mistake. Wellesley later told his close friend Harriet Arbuthnot that: ‘I married her because they asked me to do it & I did not know myself. I thought I should never care for anybody again & that I shd be with my army &, in short, I was a fool.’10 This holds little water. There is no trace of any external pressure on him, and if he did not know himself at thirty-seven, he had left it precious late. The real reasons seem more complex. First, deeply in love with Kitty, he had been downcast by her brother’s rejection of his suit: he was not a man to take a rebuff lightly, and the incident rankled, just as his supersession by Baird had. Second, absence had indeed made the heart grow fonder. Towards the end of his time in India, he was desperately anxious to get back home, and would not be the last returning warrior to fasten his hopes on the girl he left behind him, and to hope for more from a relationship than it could ever deliver. He had been warned that she was ‘much altered’, but replied that it was her mind he cared for, and that would not alter. By the time he saw just how much she had changed, it was too late for an honourable retreat. If Kitty’s mind had remained as he imagined, there might still have been some hope. But it was soon evident that she did not run the household as crisply as her husband had run the 33rd Regiment, and there were many ‘domestic annoyances’ as he was drawn into difficulties with servants or the accounts. When they had first met, he had appreciated her sharp wit, and saw her at the centre of an admiring circle. Now the roles had changed. He was dominant and admired, she nervous and unsure. Arthur had accomplished his mission and purged the Pakenham family’s rejection of his suit. Now he had other things to do, and, assuming that his new wife would understand his own fierce commitment to duty, he took no time to get to know her. It was a disastrous beginning.
Arthur’s brigade did not interfere with his parliamentary duties, and with Henry’s help, he was to slip deftly from one economical seat to another, representing Mitchell in Cornwall after the 1806 election and Newport, Isle of Wight, in 1807. But he was not truly comfortable in politics. He later told Croker that he was mistrusted by Horse Guards because:
In the first place, they thought very little of anyone who had served in India … Then because I was in Parliament, and connected with people in office, I was a politician, and a politician can never be a soldier. Moreover, they looked upon me with a kind of jealousy, because I was a lord’s son, ‘a sprig of nobility’, who came into the army more for ornament than use.11
He told Richard that he longed for military employment: ‘it is such an object to me to serve with some of the European armies that I have written to Lord Grenville upon the subject; & I hope that he will speak to the Duke of York’.12 He had no illusions about the jobs he might get, assuring Richard that: ‘I don’t want a Chief Command if it cannot be given to me … I should be very sorry to stay at home when others go abroad, only because I cannot command in Chief.’13 The war was not going well. Napoleon beat the Prussians in the double battle of Jena-Auerstadt in October 1806 and went on to occupy Berlin. However, in July, Lieutenant General Sir John Stuart had beaten the French General Reynier in a scrambling little battle at Maida, in southern Italy. It was hardly Austerlitz, but it did help persuade Arthur, sent a detailed report of the action from a friend who was there, that French columns could indeed be seen off by a British line.
In March 1807 the government, unsettled by the death of Fox, fell, and the king summoned the sick and drowsy Duke of Portland to form a new administration. The Duke of Richmond was to be lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and Arthur was offered the post of chief secretary for Ireland with a salary of £6,566 a year. He accepted it only on the condition that he would be allowed to relinquish it at short notice if a command became available, and duly moved with Kitty and their month-old son, Arthur Richard, to the chief secretary’s house in Dublin’s Phoenix Park.
Ireland had changed greatly since his last visit. As a result of the rebellion of 1798, Pitt had become convinced that constitutional union between Britain and Ireland was the answer to the Irish question. The government deployed all its patronage of ‘jobs, places and peerages’ to gain support, for the union was opposed by most ascendancy politicians as well as by nationalist parliamentarians like Grattan. In 1800, the Irish parliament voted itself into oblivion, and a reduced number of Irish constituencies wer
Above all, he believed that the union was deeply unpopular. ‘Show me an Irishman,’ he declared later, ‘and I’ll show you a man whose anxious wish is to see his country independent of Great Britain.’17 He thought that no political concession would alter this spirit, and that the Irish looked eagerly towards a French invasion, which would enable them to throw off the English yoke. He argued then, as he was to argue at Westminster twenty years on, that the worst thing that could befall any country was civil strife. The political supremacy of Britain over Ireland had to be maintained at all costs, and steps taken to deal with a French descent. ‘I lay it down as decided that Ireland,’ he wrote, ‘in a view to military operations, must be considered as an enemy’s country …’18
In the spring of 1807, Wellesley heard that the government was planning an expedition to Denmark, and forced Castlereagh’s hand by declaring that he would not stay in Ireland whether or not he was given a command. On 24 July, he told the Duke of Richmond that he had been offered a post if the expedition did go ahead. ‘I don’t know, and I have not asked,’ he wrote, ‘whether I am to return to my office when this coup de main will have been struck or will have failed.’ He concluded that he had not mentioned the expedition to the nervous Kitty, and did not propose to do so ‘till it will be positively settled that we are to go’.19 It was not a coup which aroused much support in England. The victorious Napoleon, who had just concluded the Treaty of Tilsit with the Tsar, had decreed that European ports were closed to British trade. Although the combined French and Spanish fleets had been badly mauled at Trafalgar, the neutral Portuguese and Danish fleets might yet fall into French hands and make an invasion of Britain possible. George Canning, the foreign secretary, asked Denmark to place her fleet under British protection for the remainder of the war and when the steadfast Danes refused, sent an expedition under Lieutenant General Lord Cathcart to take it by force. This looked uncommonly like theft, and Charles Napier, one of the martial brothers who were to distinguish themselves in the Peninsula, echoed public opinion when he wrote ‘Poor Danes!’