The War of Wars (85 page)

The job of leading the expeditionary force to Portugal fell to a very different sort of man who happened to have 9,500 men at Cork ready for the projected invasion of Venezuela – Sir Arthur Wellesley. By an incredible series of accidents, it was Wellesley who was to lead the new military machine crafted by Moore to greatness.

Had Wellesley drowned in a near shipwreck off Egypt, had his brother not been governor-general of India, had Moore not shown an almost reckless aggression towards Napoleon in the first phase of the war and behaved with more of Wellington’s natural caution, Sir John would almost certainly have been viewed as Britain’s greatest ever soldier instead of the Duke of Wellington. For Arthur Wellesley had that greatest of all military assets: luck.

Arthur Wesley – as he was then called – was born almost as much a child of privilege as Moore had been of merit. His family hailed from the middling aristocracy of Ireland, which counted as the lower aristocracy of England. It originated in England under the name Colley and had travelled to County Kildare in the early sixteenth century. Sir Henry Colley had been prominent in Ireland under Queen Elizabeth. His descendant and Arthur’s grandfather, Richard Colley, adopted the name Wesley when he inherited a fortune from his maternal line, which descended from an ancient Somerset line, the de Wellesleighs, who had travelled to Ireland in Henry II’s reign. Richard Wesley served in the Irish House of Commons and was appointed to the Irish peerage as Lord Mornington.

His son Garret was an attractive, fun-loving and extremely talented composer who secured promotion to an Irish earldom,
but used up most of his inheritance living beyond his means. The infant Arthur’s mother, Anne, was the daughter of Viscount Dungannon. This formidable woman held her family of six children together after her husband’s early death. It was to this long-faced, distinguished-looking woman that Arthur owed his looks, rather than to his plump, bleary-faced father. While Garret penned captivating melodies, such as ‘Come Fairest Nymph’ and ‘Gently hear me, charming maid’, Anne bore him a succession of children – Richard in 1760, William in 1763, Anne in 1768, Arthur in 1769, Gerald in 1770 and Henry in 1773.

Arthur was born on 1 May at the family’s Dublin house. Their country residence was Dangan castle, a day’s ride away. This was an elegant Georgian mansion with its own ornamental lake. Much has been made of Arthur’s having been born of a large family on an island which was somewhat looked down upon by the English socially – just like Napoleon. Yet Napoleon’s highly-strung personality had more in common with Nelson’s. The young Arthur appeared anything but highly strung – in fact something of a dolt. He seemed an amiable, sometimes mischievous, slow-witted, dreamy dunce. A year younger than either Napoleon or Nelson, of a higher social background to Bonaparte, and much superior in pedigree to either Nelson or Moore, in an age when this was hugely important, the boy trundled dreamily through his uneventful childhood as his family’s fortunes subsided about him.

His elder brother Richard seemed to have everything he lacked: he was strikingly good-looking and highly intelligent. He was nine years older than Arthur, which placed him in a paternal supporting relationship to the young brother rather than one of sibling rivalry. Nevertheless he once pointed his brother out to a friend as ‘the biggest ass in Europe’. Arthur was sent to Brown’s seminary in the King’s Road, London, and then to Eton. He was shy, with few friends, uninterested in either rowing or cricket, then in vogue at the school, and performed poorly academically. If he did later utter the phrase ‘the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’, it was certainly not his own education to which he was referring. He enjoyed going on long solitary walks: he was slow of speech. That extraordinary mixture
of ambition and introversion that made him one of the most peculiar of men in later life were already evolving.

His ambitious, high-minded mother was impatient with him. ‘I swear to God,’ she remarked cruelly, ‘I don’t know what I shall do with my awkward son Arthur.’ He was ‘food for powder and nothing more’. The only outstanding thing about this minor aristocratic family fallen on hard times seemed to be the burning ambition instilled in the boys, perhaps by their mother; although at this stage Arthur evinced no sign of it.

With the family lacking the money to continue his education at Eton, he was sent to a tutorial establishment in Brighton. A friend of his wrote that he 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.’

He went on to study in Brussels, where his mother was living to save money, before attending a riding academy in the stolid middle-French town of Angers, where he showed a surprising ability to pick up the language as well as adequate horsemanship and, unusually for one so solitary when young, enjoyed the social life of the local nobility.

Although he was still happy-go-lucky and idle, his mother detected a ‘remarkable change for the better’ in him. The celebrated Ladies of Llangollen, who he visited in north Wales, described him as ‘charming . . . handsome, fashionable, tall and elegant’. His dazzling older brother, now Lord Mornington and as an Irish peer permitted to sit in the House of Commons, secured for him an appointment to the 73rd Regiment as an ensign in March 1787 at the age of seventeen.

He was then despatched as an aide-de-camp to the Viceroy of Ireland, Lord Buckingham, of the all-powerful Grenville clan, where he played the naughty boy. Dublin girls would not go to a party if ‘that mischievous boy’ attended, according to Lady Aldbury, who also turned him out of her carriage because she found him such dull company on one occasion. He would tweak the neck-cloths of his friends, and was dumped in mid-dance by a local beauty, possibly on account of a boorish advance.

His brother seemed happy enough at his progress, speaking
in loco parentis
of his ‘excellent judgment, amiable manners and admirable temper and firmness’ and secured him a seat in the Irish parliament. Arthur now set his sights on marrying a local heiress, Kitty Pakenham, daughter of Lord Longford, with a huge estate in County Westmeath. The two were clearly deeply in love and Arthur’s rejection by her brother, Tom, on the grounds that he was impecunious, stung him deeply, although later they were to become the firmest of friends.

He resolved to pursue a more determined career in the army to achieve the necessary social and financial standing. In June 1794, at the age of twenty-five, his days of indolence were over. By the same moment in their careers, Nelson had been at sea for eight years, having travelled all over the world, while Napoleon Bonaparte had staged his first great achievement in storming Fort Mulgrave at Toulon. Wesley was a late developer; a young man in no hurry.

By now the features that were to become so famous had emerged. He was of medium height; his face was long, with a pointed, determined chin, a thin-lipped, haughty, aristocratic mouth, a formidable, aquiline but hawk-ended nose, a languid, still dreamy expression and prominent, contemptuous eyes beneath full brows and a high forehead. He was extremely neat and well turned out, dapper even, and certainly good-looking, although not so much as his older brother.

His detached expression and slow diction did not make him immediately charismatic. He seemed an embodiment of the classic English gentleman, which he ardently desired to be, rejecting his long roots in Ireland. Being a Protestant nobleman in a country largely made up of landless Catholic peasants instilled in him the hauteur of a colonist towards native people, although he came from the most enlightened social class in Ireland and afterwards showed some sensitivity to the claims of the Catholics. While the English aristocracy was more relaxed and had fewer airs, Wesley came across as amiable but reserved and even snooty in the manner of a nouveau riche.

It was now time for Wesley’s first baptism of fire in a typical British military catastrophe. With the declaration of war in Europe in 1793, the disappointed suitor asked to be sent as part of the army to
Martinique in the West Indies, but was turned down – which saved him from the disease that decimated the troops that went there. So he borrowed money from his brother to buy a lieutenant-colonel’s commission and was despatched to join the Duke of York’s force in Flanders. In June 1794 he left Cork, reaching the barren flat shores of Flanders later that month. His commander was Lord Moira. Thus at the age of twenty-five – such was the unpreparedness of the British army – he was placed in command of a brigade without having ever seen a shot fired in anger.

He was not slow to show his mettle. Moira put him in charge of a force ordered to take Ostend, while the main reinforcements went off inland to join the Duke of York’s army, which after the rout in Flanders was in headlong retreat along the Scheldt. No sooner had Moira departed than Wesley re-embarked his men and sailed to Antwerp, where he reinforced the Duke of York before Moira arrived by land.

In September Wesley was ordered to the aid of General Sir Ralph Abercromby to reinforce Boxtel behind the river Dommely which had been taken from the French. Abercromby had, however, blundered into the main French army and had to beat a hasty retreat. Wesley was given control of the rearguard where he arrayed his troops in line and coolly stopped the French advance, allowing the main force to retreat safely. He was commended for his courage in the engagement. The army made a stand behind the river Waal and then went into winter quarters for several months under continuing French fire. He was bitter at being thus exposed with no real plan of campaign, spending most nights on the bank of the river under attack.

At last, in January 1795, he and his men were allowed to retreat through the grim winter of snow, ice, slush and mud to Bremen. As a contemporary described it:

Far as the eye could reach over the whitened plain were scattered gun-limbers, wagons full of baggage, of stores, of sick men, sutlers’ carts and private carriages. Beside them lay the horses, dead; around them scores and hundreds of soldiers, dead; here a straggler who had staggered onto the bivouac and dropped to sleep in the arms of the
frost; there a group of British and Germans around an empty rumcask; here forty English Guardsmen huddled together around a plundered wagon; there a pack-horse with a woman lying alongside it, and a baby, swathed in rags, peeping out of the pack, with its mother’s milk turned to ice upon its lips – one and all stark, frozen, dead.

Wesley and his troops were evacuated in March. The inexperienced young colonel and his raw recruits were safely embarked. He was warmly commended by Lord Cornwallis as ‘a sensible man and a good officer’.

Wesley renewed his suit for Kitty’s hand, failed again, and departed upon another expedition to the West Indies, which however was driven back by severe gales in a matter of weeks. He was now ordered to a more exotic location – India. He left for India in June 1796 at the age of twenty-seven. He reached Calcutta after a sea journey of eight months, stepping ashore opposite the elegant fortress of Fort St George along the foetid, disease-infested banks of the Hoogley in February 1779.

Wesley had occupied himself on the claustrophobic journey by extensive reading. The governor-general, Sir John Shore, described him as sensible but full of ‘boyish playfulness’. He spent his first few months gadding about Calcutta, Madras and Penang, enjoying the luxury of innumerable Indian servants and drinking raucously with his brother officers. But real opportunities for advancement at last beckoned: with Britain and France at war the latter decided on a more forward imperialist policy of expansion in India at the expense of the local princes supported by the French.

He also had a superb stroke of luck: his brother, Lord Mornington, was appointed governor-general of India by his friend William Pitt. Mornington, whom a contemporary maliciously described as living for ‘nothing else’ but display, accepted this superb opportunity. He decided that the family name was too plebeian and adopted the name of Wellesley, linked back to the female line of his grandfather. He was accompanied by another brother, Henry, as his secretary. The nepotism
of this arrangement caused considerable muttering among other officers. Arthur Wellesley, as he now became, was soon to be promoted to full colonel well in advance of longer-serving officers of his rank. Like Nelson he had official favour to thank for his first major promotion.

Mornington’s target was the state of Mysore, under the control of the most fearsome and effective of Indian princes, Tippoo Sultan, the ‘Tiger’, son of Hyder Ali who had been a consistent thorn in the British side but had been kept behind his borders by the competent Cornwallis, Mornington’s predecessor as governor-general. Tippoo was a wise and enlightened ruler by contemporary Indian standards, showing considerable religious tolerance for a Moslem towards the Hindu majority and being interested in economic and scientific advances.

The British concluded treaties with Tippoo’s neighbours, the Peshwa at the head of the Mahratta confederacy and the Nizam of Hyderabad, the largest state of central India. Mornington set about pressing the reluctant governor of Madras, Lord Clive, to adopt a more aggressive attitude towards Tippoo. When the Indian prince made an alliance with the governor of French Mauritius, Mornington was provided with his pretext for action, namely ‘the transactions which have passed between the enemies of my country’. In fact Mornington had already heavily reinforced Madras, despatching his brother Arthur to the town in 1798.

Wellesley was placed under the command of General George Harris, the commander-in-chief at Madras. As a junior officer reporting directly to his brother, the governor-general, he was immediately detested by his brother officers. His demeanour, by turns bumptious and superior for so young an officer, yet boyish and seeking to win friends, did little to improve matters.