Wellington (24 page)

There had been something of a change in the character of Wellington’s generalship. He himself thought that ‘there seems to be a new spirit among the officers … to keep the troops in order’, and he reciprocated by showing greater trust. When he was preparing his attack on the Nivelle, he kept Charles Alten of the Light Division and his brigadiers, John Colborne and James Kempt, sitting beside him on the summit of the Grande Rhune mountain while he explained how he would ‘beat the French out, and with great ease’, from their position. The explanation concluded, Colborne rose to depart, but Wellington told them all to stay where they were while he dictated his orders to George Murray. There was more than a glimmer of Nelson’s ‘band of brothers’.
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When Rowland Hill beat the French in a hard-fought action at St Pierre, Wellington rode up and congratulated him with the words: ‘My dear Hill, the day’s your own!’ Jac Weiler suggests that Wellington’s new disposition to trust his subordinates reflected his desire to ensure that Britain had generals with experience of independent command. But it is at least as likely that he now recognised that there were indeed generals who were up to the task: the hour had brought forth its men. And he was now prepared to let the Spaniards win victories where they could. On 31 August, he had declined to reinforce a Spanish force under determined attack on the heights of San Marcial above San Sebastián, telling its commander that ‘if I send the English troops you ask for they will win the battle; but as the French are already in retreat you may as well win it for yourselves’.
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And win it they did.

As soon as the weather enabled him to move, Wellington sent Hill and a strong force to lure Soult away from the River Adour at Bayonne. Hill did his job well, cutting off St Jean Pied-de-Port and going on to approach Orthez. On the left, meanwhile, a huge pontoon bridge was brought up by the navy into the bay of St Jean de Luz. As soon as the boistrous weather abated, Lieutenant General Sir John Hope seized a bridgehead over the Adour, and on 24 February 1814 bridging began. Hope was soon secure enough on the far bank to commence the siege of Bayonne. With 17,000 of Soult’s men penned up in the city, Wellington moved parallel with Hill to attack the French at Orthez, where he beat Soult on 27 February 1814. Wellington, well forward on horseback as usual, laughed when Alava cried out that he had a ‘knock’ on his backside. The next moment Wellington himself was hit by a musket-ball which drove his sword-hilt hard against his thigh, breaking the skin and causing a contusion which had him limping for several days. Alava said that the duke had brought it on himself by laughing at his misfortune.

Orthez cost Soult 4,000 men to Wellington’s 2,000, and one of his new conscript divisions had left a rich haul of prisoners. However, he remained a doughty adversary, and there was a real danger that Suchet would march north from Catalonia to join him. Wellington’s intelligence system, so reliable in the Peninsula, had now outrun its sources, and news from further north was confusing. Napoleon, badly defeated at Leipzig in October 1813, was enjoying something of a revival in a lightning campaign against the Russian, Prussian and Austrian army advancing into Champagne. Wellington decided to take Toulouse, which was believed to be strongly royalist in sentiment.

Early in April 1814, he rode down to the River Garonne with only two of his staff, and a French sentry fired at him unsuccessfully. There was a well-established understanding that pickets did not fire upon one another, and the man’s officer, scandalised, came forward to apologise, saying that the fellow was a new recruit. Wellington had a conversation with the officer, stealing a good look at the river-line as he did so. Then he raised his anonymous cocked hat, and rode off. On 10 April, his army launched attacks from the south, west and north, but Soult wisely decided not to allow himself to be shut up in the city as the pincers closed around it, and slipped away to the east after inflicting 4,500 casualties in return for over a thousand fewer.

Toulouse was indeed delighted to welcome Wellington, and he entered the city on 12 April to find Napoleon’s statue lying smashed on the ground and workmen chipping imperial iconography from public buildings. He was to give a dinner at the prefecture that evening, and was dressing when Colonel Frederick Ponsonby galloped in from Bordeaux with extraordinary news: Napoleon had abdicated. ‘You don’t say so, upon my honour! Hurrah!’ Wellington, still in his shirtsleeves spun round on his heel, snapping his fingers like a schoolboy.’
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Official confirmation arrived during dinner. Napoleon had abdicated on 6 April 1814, and had been given a pension and the tiny Mediterranean island of Elba. Louis XVIII had been restored. Wellington at once called for champagne and proposed a toast to the French king. Alava then proposed ‘El Liberador de España!’ Immediately everyone was on his feet, acclaiming Wellington in French, Spanish, Portugese and German. ‘And this was followed,’ writes Larpent,

not by a regular three times three, but by a cheering in all confusion for nearly ten minutes! Lord Wellington bowed, confused, and immediately called for coffee.
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W
ELLINGTON WENT
to the theatre in Toulouse on the night of 12 April 1814 with the white cockade of the Bourbons on his cocked hat. The play was
‘Richard Coeur de Lion’
, but the audience’s mind was elsewhere, for ‘a person in black, attended by many candles, having a paper in his hand’ made his way into a nearby box and read out the terms of the new constitution. Europe had been at war for most of Wellington’s adult life. Looking back at the period from our vantage point nearly two centuries on, with two dreadful wars within living memory, it is easy to forget the destruction caused by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Alan Schom lays much of the blame at Napoleon’s door, declaring that ‘The memory of Genghis Khan paled in comparison’, and estimating war deaths at three million.
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This is probably too low a figure, for France alone had lost 860,000 soldiers killed, half of them below the age of 28.
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Most British contemporaries welcomed the peace and were determined that it should be preserved. But quite how this should be accomplished, and how domestic politics should reflect the new change in emphasis, were different matters altogether.

On 21 April Wellington was visited by Castlereagh’s half-brother, Sir Charles Stewart, who offered him the appointment of British ambassador in Paris. Because Wellington’s brothers had fallen out with Lord Liverpool, he could not join the government, and he accepted the Paris embassy with alacrity. Stewart also told him that he was to be made a duke. The elevation was gazetted on 3 May, and on the 9
^th
, he wrote to acknowledge Liverpool’s kindness and his indebtedness to the Prince Regent. A month later he told Henry almost as an afterthought: ‘I believe I forgot to tell you I was made a Duke.’
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On the journey to Paris he deferred to the Duc d’Angoulême, and General Clausel, calling on his former adversary, was surprised to find that the field marshal opened his own door: there was not an aide-de-camp in sight. He entered Paris on 4 May, riding a white horse but wearing plain clothes – blue frock-coat and top-hat – for he came as an ambassador, not a conqueror. ‘I felt for my own part,’ recalled the radical John Cam Hobhouse, ‘an insatiable desire to see him, and ran many chances of being kicked and trampled down to get near our great man.’
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The Comtesse de Boigne saw him enter a ballroom ‘with his two nieces [daughters of his brother William] hanging on his arm. There were no eyes for anyone else.’
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He was not in Paris for long, for Castlereagh asked him to visit Madrid, ‘in order to try whether I cannot prevail upon all parties to be more moderate, and to adopt a constitution more likely to be practicable …’
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Wellington submitted a long memorandum to the restored King Ferdinand, and gave practical advice on the reconstitution of the Spanish army. He was not optimistic that his efforts would bear much fruit, however, for the king’s reactionary advisers were in firm control, and Ferdinand himself told the duke that the only acts of the Cortes of which he approved were those making Wellington commander-in-chief and giving him an estate. His pessimism was well founded, and there was a revolt against the capricious monarch in 1820. Ferdinand was restored, ironically with French military assistance but he died in 1833 leaving a legacy of division and bitterness that resulted in a long period of civil war.

On his way back from Madrid, Wellington stopped at Bordeaux, the main port of embarkation for his Peninsular army. The enthusiasm for peace was not shared by many of those whose business was war. John Kincaid declared that they had been ‘born in war, reared in war, war was our trade, and what soldiers had to do in peace was a problem yet to be solved among us’.
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Officers faced the prospect of being shunted off on half-pay and soldiers discharged to an uncertain future. There were ironies even here. Ned Pakenham, who was quite content to face the hazards of peace, was selected to command an army sent to the southern United States, soon to become a theatre of the misnamed War of 1812. John Spencer Cooper, eager to return home to Barnard Castle with his brother, only needed his colonel’s signature on his discharge papers, but could not get it before his ship also sailed for America.

On 14 June Wellington published his last words to his army:

GENERAL ORDER

1. The Commander of the Forces, being upon the point of returning to England, again takes this opportunity of congratulating the army upon the recent events which have restored peace to their country and the world.

2. The share which the British army has had in producing these events, and the high character with which the army will quit this country, must be equally satisfactory to every individual belonging to it, as it is to the Commander of the Forces; and he trusts that the troops will continue the same good conduct to the last.

3. The Commander of the Forces once again requests the army to accept his thanks.

4. Although circumstances may alter the relations in which he has stood towards them, so much to his satisfaction, he assures them that he shall never cease to feel the warmest interest in their welfare and honour, and that he will at all times be happy to be of service to those whose conduct, discipline and gallantry, their country is so much indebted.
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This tribute came from the heart, but it was not well received by all. Some put it in the context of previous dispatches which thanked too few. ‘A man gets no thanks for getting his head broke now-a-days,’ wrote Captain Arthur Kennedy of the 18
^th
Hussars after Vitoria. ‘This has been amply verified with us, never did a Regiment lose so many officers with so little thanks from the Head Butcher, as literally he is …’
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Lieutenant William Grattan complained of the way that ‘the never-to-be-forgotten services of that wonderful army were treated by the Government and the Duke of Wellington’.
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Soldiers who had married local women had to leave their wives behind them, and the expected rewards of cash or promotion were often not forthcoming from a government striving to retrench, and an army beginning to contract. There was little Wellington could do about much of this. He had tried to get a majority for Harry Smith, but had been told that there were too many senior officers in his way. ‘A pity, by G-d,’ said the duke. ‘Colborne and the Brigade are so anxious about it, and he deserves anything.’
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For the rest of his life he was the target ‘Of begging-letters and hats touched by eager fingers as his horse went by’.
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He certainly did not please everybody. The former Captain George Elers, who had served with him in India and left the army in 1812, was disgusted to find that the duke would not provide him with a job in 1828. He was not even interested in receiving a gift: ‘the Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to Mr Elers, and is much obliged to him for his letter of this day. The Duke has no occasion for a Newfoundland Dog, and will not deprive Mr Elers of him.’
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The disgusted Elers asked rhetorically ‘Can He have a Heart?’ He did indeed have a heart, but he had a head too, and it was never easy to reconcile the honouring of obligation with the exercise of unreasonable patronage. Yet he often tried far harder on their behalf than the disappointed ever knew. When two generals wrote to complain that they had not been knighted after the victory, he told Lord Bathurst that although it was now too late for anything to be done for them, in justice he would forward their letters, and declared that ‘if I had been desired to recommend those … on whom it was intended to confer this honour, I should certainly have mentioned their names in preference to those of many, on whom I see it has been conferred’.
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Wellington travelled to Paris for another burst of lionising, and then sailed from Calais in the sloop
Rosario
, reaching Dover on 23 June. He was welcomed by frantic crowds, and cheered all the way to London. When his carriage reached Westminster Bridge there was a determined attempt to take the horses out of the traces so that the crowd could pull him home – now 4 Hamilton Place, Piccadilly. But he was too quick for them and galloped on alone. He had not seen Kitty for five years. They had corresponded (she thoughtfully knitted him a blanket in 1809 and made a quilt the following year), but he was so concerned about her ability to bear even slightly bad news that he made no mention of the wound he incurred at Orthez. Her eyesight had grown much worse, and she read and drew with her eyes inches from the work. To avoid apparently cutting acquaintances in a crowd because she could not recognise them, she habitually went about with her eyes screwed up and cast down; it was not an engaging trait. And she was no judge of clothes, with an affection for muslin dresses that matched neither her years nor her station. Wellington’s sons, the eldest now Lord Douro, were schoolboys aged six and seven. They had grown up without him, and like so many men who were themselves starved of affection as children, Wellington found it hard to lavish what he himself had lacked. Even now he did not remain at home for long, but slipped away to visit his mother in Upper Brook Street.