Wellington: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ given him permission to call on me; and then wanted to take hold of my hand.

       ‘Really,’ said I, withdrawing my hand, ‘for such a renowned hero you have very little to say for yourself.’

       ‘Beautiful creature! where is Lome?’

       ‘Good gracious,’ said I, out of all patience at his stupidity – ‘what come you here for?’

       ‘Beautiful eyes, yours!’

       ‘Aye, man! they are greater conquerors than ever [you] shall be; but, to be serious, I understood you came here to try to make yourself agreeable?’

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

       ‘Après avoir dépeuplé la terre, vous devez faire tout pour la repeupler,’ I replied.

       ‘You should see me where I shine,’ he observed, laughing.

       ‘Where’s that, in God’s name?’

       ‘In a field of battle,’ answered the hero.

       ‘Battez-vous, donc, et qu’un autre me fasse la cour!’ said I.⁵

      Sir Arthur soon became her ‘constant visitor’, a ‘most unentertaining one, Heaven knows!’ she thought; and, ‘in the evenings, when he wore his broad red ribbon [of the Order of the Bath], he looked very like a rat-catcher.’⁶

      It was not long after his arrival in London that Sir Arthur encountered Lord Nelson who was on a few days’ leave and had come up from Merton Place, his country house in Surrey, to see Lord Castlereagh. Wellesley also happened to have been called for interview with the Secretary for War and the Colonies on the same day, and the two men found themselves waiting together in a room in the Colonial Office in Downing Street.

      Years later the General recalled this meeting with ‘a gentleman, whom from his likeness to his pictures and the loss of an arm, I immediately recognized as Lord Nelson’.

       He could not know who I was [Wellington told John Wilson Croker], but he entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side and all about himself and, in reality, a style so vain and so silly as to surprise and almost disgust me.

       I suppose something that I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the office-keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a different man, both in manner and matter.

      His ‘charlatan style’ had quite vanished and ‘he talked of the state of the country and of the aspect and probabilities of affairs on the Continent with a good sense and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad’.

       The Secretary of State kept us long waiting [Wellington continued] and certainly for the last half or three-quarters of an hour, I don’t know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more. Now, if the Secretary of State had been punctual … I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had, but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior man; but certainly a more sudden or complete metamorphosis I never saw.*⁷

      Wellesley was the same age as Castlereagh; they came from similar Irish backgrounds, and had sat together in the Irish House of Commons. They had been fellow guests at Sir Jonah Barrington’s dinner table in Dublin. The General felt at ease with the Minister, and spoke freely to him about Indian affairs and personalities, confiding his belief that the Government were not supporting his brother as Governor-General in the way they should. He said as much to Lord Camden, Castlereagh’s predecessor as Secretary for War, and now Lord President of the Council. In fact, Lord Wellesley, severely criticized for the disasters of the recent Marāthā war, had been recalled and was on his way home; and his brother went to see his friend, the proud, touchy and extremely fat Marquess of Buckingham, the former Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, to seek his advice about the attitude which Richard should adopt when he arrived in England. ‘Bucky’ said that opposition to the Government was ‘the best political game of the day’. ‘He was very anxious that you should belong to the opposition,’ Sir Arthur reported. ‘He urged every argument to induce me to inflame your mind against Pitt, particularly that he had not given you the Garter.’⁸

      But Sir Arthur did not agree with ‘Bucky’; and bored beyond measure by the tedium of the two days he spent at Stowe, he told his brother that he and Lord Bathurst, a friend of Pitt and future Secretary for War, both believed that he ought to remain neutral for the moment, biding his time and observing the course of events.⁹

      On leaving Stowe, and while his brother was still at sea, the General went to see Richard’s children. They were all in good health, he reported to their father, the boys manly and well-behaved ‘fine fellows’, the girls ‘very handsome and accomplished (particularly the youngest)’. This ‘must surely be at least some consolation’ to Richard, even though his services in India had not been treated as they deserved.¹⁰

      The General could not give such favourable reports of the rest of their family. Their grandmother, Lady Dungannon, had long since died, having been arrested for debt, taken away to a sponging house, and from there to a French convent from which she had been brought back to England, apparently not in the least ashamed of her misdemeanours. Her widowed daughter, the General’s mother, was living a completely self-absorbed life in her house off Cavendish Square, evidently quite unaffected one way or another by her son’s return from India, her letters addressed to her offspring there having been so impersonal, so Henry Wellesley said, that they could have been read aloud at Charing Cross.¹¹

      When Sir Arthur called at the Horse Guards his reception by the Duke of York was even more off-hand than that accorded to him by his mother. He had never felt at ease with the Duke in the way that he did with Castlereagh and Camden. It rankled with him that his promotion to major-general in the East India Company’s service had not immediately been confirmed in London; and he believed that the Duke had wanted General Baird to have the command at Seringapatam rather than himself. Captain Elers heard that the Duke of York made this plain enough when General Harris returned from India and attended a reception at the Horse Guards. ‘Harris, who was not very quick in a difficulty, was asked suddenly by the Duke, ‘Pray, General Harris what reason had you for superseding General Baird in the command at Seringapatam and giving it to a junior officer?’ Poor Harris stammered and the Duke turned his back on him and began a conversation with some officers.’*¹²

      General Wellesley got on much better with the Prime Minister than he did with the Commander-in-Chief and went to see Pitt more than once at his house in Putney. He also had opportunities of talking to other ministers at Camden Place, Lord Camden’s house at Chislehurst in Kent. They all found the young General sensible and extremely well informed, Pitt deciding that he wisely stated every difficulty before performing any service, though none once he had undertaken it, a complimentary view Sir Arthur felt incapable of returning since the fault of the Prime Minister’s character was being ‘too sanguine’: he conceived a project and then imagined it was done, and did not enter enough into the details.¹³

      The General on the contrary was now well known for his close attention to detail; and it became recognized by the Cabinet that his clear, succinct and well-considered opinions were well worth seeking when any new stroke against the French was in contemplation. When asked, for example, what he thought of a plan, favoured by the Prime Minister, of urging the СКАЧАТЬ