Wellington: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ on the Staff in India.’¹³

      As it was, he had no hand in the direction of such operations as were being conducted, and conducted most incompetently. Colonel William Monson was defeated by Jaswant Rāo Holkar, Maharajah of Indore, who pursued the greatly outnumbered British forces from the banks of the Chumbul to Agra which only a few hundred of them survived to reach; while Lord Lake, Sir Alured Clarke’s successor as Commander-in-Chief, lost nearly 400 men killed and two thousand wounded in an unsuccessful siege of the fortress of Bhurtpore, the stronghold of an ally of Holkar, the Rajah of Bhurtpore.

      General Wellesley’s desire to go home was increased by failing health. He had recently undergone another bout of fever; and, having been much annoyed by the lumbago’ in the early months of 1804, was now, at the end of the year, suffering from rheumatism.

      At the beginning of 1805 he wrote to Madras to enquire about shipping. He would prefer ‘the starboard side of a quiet ship’, he said, but he was ‘not very particular about accommodation’ and did not ‘care a great deal about the price’ or who the captain was, so long as he could sail soon. ‘I am anxious to a degree which I can’t express,’ he said, ‘to see my friends again.’¹⁴

      While awaiting notification of a berth, he said his goodbyes, gave portraits of himself to friends,* made arrangements for the welfare of two elephants which had been given to him by a grateful rajah, settled a sum of money on the son of Dhoondiah Waugh whom he had undertaken to look after on his father’s death; and, in the shops of Madras, bought presents to take to England, including ten pairs of ladies’ shoes. He also bought more books to while away the hours of the long voyage, not the instructive volumes with which he sailed out but much lighter reading: The Letters of Madame de Pompadour, for example, and Beauties of the Modern Dramatists as well as a number of novels with such titles as Illicit Love, Lessons for Lovers, Fashionable Involvements, Filial Indiscretion or the Female Chevalier and, in five volumes, Love at First Sight.¹⁵

      He sailed in March 1805, not too sorry to see the last of India and convinced that, if he had not left when he did, he would have had a ‘serious fit of illness’.¹⁶ All the same he was grateful to have had the opportunity of displaying his talents as an officer there and, so he said years later, of learning ‘as much of military matters’ as he had ‘ever done since’. Moreover, it was certainly true that his command at Seringapatam had afforded him ‘opportunities for distinction, and then opened the road to fame’.¹⁷

      Nor did he go home unrewarded. He had left England impecunious; he was returning with a fortune of between £42,000 and £43,000.¹⁸ He was also going home as a Knight Companion of the Order of the Bath, the insignia of which his friend, Sir John Cradock, who had brought it out from England, got a servant to pin to his coat while he was asleep in bed. He was also presented with the thanks of Parliament, a sword of honour given by the people of Calcutta, a service of plate embossed with Assaye from the officers of his division, and an address from the ‘native people of Seringapatam’ who, having lived for ‘five auspicious years’ under his protection, trusted that the ‘God of all castes and all nations’ would ‘deign to hear with favour’ their prayers for his health, glory and happiness.¹⁹

9 Return to London

       1805 – 6

       What, child! do you think that I have nothing better to do than to make speeches to please ladies?’

      MAJOR-GENERAL Sir Arthur Wellesley sailed home in the Trident, walking briskly about the deck in the morning, reading the novels he had bought in Madras in the afternoon, writing papers on farming and famines in India and on the possible uses of Indian troops in the West Indies and of West Indian slaves in India. He went ashore at St Helena where he was much taken with the beauty of the island, its ‘delightful climate’ and much amazed by the Governor, a most eccentric gentleman ‘of a description that must have been extinct for nearly two centuries’. Sir Arthur had never seen ‘anything like his wig or his coat’.¹

      The Trident reached England in September 1805; and the General listened eagerly to detailed accounts of what had happened in the world in his absence. He heard and read about the Treaty of St Petersburg by which Britain and Russia, later joined by Austria, had agreed to form a European coalition for the liberation of the northern German states; he learned that Napoleon, who had assumed the title of Emperor the year before, had been crowned King of Italy in Milan Cathedral, that the soldiers of the Grande Armée had abandoned their camps around Boulogne and, turning their backs on the English Channel, had marched towards the Danube, and that Lord Nelson had chased a French fleet under Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve across the Atlantic to the West Indies and back again, forcing Villeneuve to seek shelter in Cadiz.

      One of his obligations on landing was to settle his debts now that he was in a position to do so, being in possession of what he called ‘a little fortune’. Already in India he had been generous in his unaccustomed wealth, lending over 9,000 rupees to the son of an old friend, a junior employee of the East India Company, who had got himself into trouble by extravagance in bad company. Now, so George Elers heard, he went to thank and repay a tradesman who had lent him £300 or £400 before he had left for India. ‘Can I be of any service to you?’ the General asked him.

       ‘Nothing for me, but I have a son.’

       ‘Give me his name,’ said Sir Arthur, ‘You did me a kindness once and I do not forget it.’

       He got the man’s son a place of £400 per annum … Sir Arthur also sent £400 to Mrs Sturt, wife of an officer in the 80th [Major William Sturt] who had committed all sorts of follies [which included marrying this pretty woman, a former member of the establishment of the procuress, Mrs Porter, in Berkeley Street].²

      It seems that Sir Arthur had himself been a visitor to Mrs Porter’s house in Berkeley Street in the 1790s and that Mrs Sturt may well have been one of the young women then employed there. It is also most likely that he now went back to this house on his return from India and that it was by way of an introduction from Mrs Porter that he met the celebrated courtesan Harriette Wilson.³

      He was known to be a man of strong sexual appetite, and his reputation of being ‘a ladies’ man’ as well as a beau had returned with him from India. Indeed, he was already known to many as ‘The Beau’ and the nickname was commonly used for years thereafter. He was reputed to have had affairs with women, usually married women, of his own social class; but it was supposed that, by discretion as much as by taste, he was more inclined at this time to seek sexual pleasure in the arms of such professional coquettes as Harriette Wilson and the girls at Mrs Porter’s.

      Harriette Wilson was the daughter of a man of Swiss extraction who had a small shop in Mayfair. She spoke French as well as English, though neither very fluently; and was renowned not so much for her beauty as for her easy manners, gaiety and flighty charm. Sir Walter Scott who once met her at the house of the lively, goggle-eyed author Matthew Lewis, in Argyle Street, described her as being ‘a smart, saucy girl, with good eyes and dark hair, and the manners of a wild schoolboy’.⁴ Having, according to her own account, become the mistress of Lord Craven at the age of fifteen, she had numbered amongst her lovers and admirers the Marquesses of Lorne and Worcester, Lord Frederick Bentinck, Lord Ponsonby, Lord Alvanley, the Hon. Frederick Lamb, Tom Sheridan and George Brummell. In describing these men, and in relating her talks with Sir Arthur Wellesley in her memoirs, their manner of speaking, as Sir Walter Scott acknowledged, was ‘exactly imitated’. Her recollections of her earliest conversations with Wellesley certainly catch his abrupt manner of talking and his inability to indulge СКАЧАТЬ