Wellington: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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      As it happened, in the middle of October the French overwhelmed an Austrian army under Karl Mack at Ulm. But on the day after Ulm’s surrender, Nelson, mortally wounded during the battle, destroyed the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar. The ailing Prime Minister, so cast down by news of Ulm that Lord Malmesbury believed his death to be imminent, was given fresh hope by the news of Trafalgar; and on 9 November, at the Lord Mayor’s banquet at Guildhall, he was observed to be in good spirits. Sir Arthur Wellesley was among the guests who heard him respond modestly to the toast, ‘The Saviour of the Nation’, with the memorable words, ‘Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions; and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.’¹⁴

      ‘That was all,’ Sir Arthur commented admiringly. ‘He was scarcely up two minutes; yet nothing could be more perfect.’¹⁵

      After being so well received by members of the Government, it came as all the more of a disappointment to General Wellesley when in December he was told what was to be his own contribution to Europe’s salvation: he was to be given command of a brigade to be sent to Hanover. After three weeks in rough seas, including Christmas Day in a gale off Heligoland, his brigade was landed at Bremen where he endured a further six weeks of cold, rain and inactivity before being ordered home again.

      By the time of his return, Napoleon had won his greatest victory over the combined Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz; and Pitt had been even more distressed by this than by Mack’s defeat at Ulm. He had been brought home from Bath on 9 January 1806 to his house at Putney where, glancing at a map of Europe on the wall, he is said, perhaps apocryphally, to have given voice to the most quoted of all his utterances, ‘Roll up that map. It will not be wanted these ten years.’¹⁶ He died a fortnight later, to be succeeded as First Lord of the Treasury in the so-called ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, by his cousin, Lord Grenville, with Charles James Fox as Foreign Secretary, and William Windham as Lord Castlereagh’s successor at the Colonial Office.

      After the abortive expedition to Bremen, General Wellesley, for all the confidence that Pitt’s ministers had appeared to have reposed in him, was found no employment more responsible by the new Government than the command of a brigade at Hastings. Here, conscientious as always, he studied the problems of the Rye inundations and examined the possibilities of Winchelsea Castle being strengthened as a military fortress. ‘We are not actually in opposition,’ he wrote to a friend in India, ‘but we have no power.’¹⁷ He did, though, now have a wife.

10 Kitty Pakenham

       1790 – 1806

       ‘She has grown ugly by Jove!’

      HE HAD first set eyes on the Hon. Catherine Dorothea Sarah Pakenham, daughter of the second Baron Longford, years before in Ireland where her father, a post-captain in the Royal Navy, had, for a few months before he had come into the family title, been Member for County Longford. Arthur Wesley had often called at the Longfords’ house in Rutland Square in Dublin and had made his feelings for Kitty known. She was a small, slim, vivacious and generous girl, indiscreet in her gossipy talk, much given to condemning the failings of others and to making dogmatic statements on matters which her knowledge of them did not justify. She read a great deal, sermons and books on religious matters as well as popular novels. An occasionally haughty manner concealed an inner uncertainty; but she was a well-liked young figure in Dublin society.¹

      Her parents had not at that time taken kindly to Arthur Wesley’s interest in their daughter. A younger son in a large family, his prospects had not then seemed bright and his reputation, like his eldest brother’s, was far from unblemished. This was the attitude also of Kitty’s brother, Thomas, who became the third Baron Longford upon their father’s death at the age of forty-nine in 1792.

      So all thoughts of marriage had to be abandoned; but Arthur Wesley assured Kitty that, should those prospects become more certain, and her brother become more, kindly disposed towards him, his own mind would ‘remain the same’, a promise that he afterwards felt to be binding upon an honourable man. The years passed. He seemed almost to have forgotten her; certainly he never once wrote to her from India; none of the shoes he bought were destined for her feet, nor jewels for her throat, nor shawls for her shoulders. But she evidently had been thinking of him as she later admitted one day to Queen Charlotte at court. ‘I am happy to see you at my court, so bright an example of constancy,’ the Queen said to her, according to Kitty’s own account given to her friend, Maria Edgeworth. ‘If anybody in this world deserves to be happy, you do. But did you really never write one letter to Sir Arthur Wellesley during his long absence?’

      ‘No, never, madam.’

      ‘And did you never think of him?’

      “Yes, madam, very often.’²

      Yet there had been a time, when, hearing nothing from him, so Kitty told her best friend, the Hon. Olivia Sparrow, the wife of a rich, elderly soldier, General Bernard Sparrow, she had begun to suppose ‘the business over’. Another officer, Galbraith Lowry Cole, second son of the Earl of Enniskillen and three years younger than Arthur Wellesley, had fallen in love with her and had asked her to marry him. She had hesitantly accepted him. But then she was given to understand by her friend, Mrs Sparrow, who was in correspondence with him in India, that Arthur Wellesley was still attached to her. He had written to Mrs Sparrow to say that notwithstanding his good fortune and ‘the perpetual activity’ of his life in India the disappointment he had met with eight years before, and ‘the object of it and the circumstances’ were still as fresh in his mind ‘as if they happened only yesterday’. When you see your friend,’ he had added, ‘do me the favour to remember me to her in the kindest manner.’³

      When told of this letter, Kitty replied, ‘Olivia, you know my heart … and can imagine what gratitude I feel, (indeed much more than can be expressed) for his kind remembrance … You know I can send no message; a kind word from me he might think binding to him and make him think himself obliged to renew a pursuit, which he might not then wish or my family (or at least some of them) approve … Do you not think he seems to think the business over?’⁴

      Although still unsure about Arthur Wellesley, after much worry and consideration and to the annoyance of his family, she had broken off her engagement to Lowry Cole, greatly to his sorrow. ‘I had expected that before this Lowry would have married,’ one of his brothers wrote to another member of their family in October 1802. At present I see not the smallest chance of it … Since that love affair with Kitty Pakenham, Lowry seems like a burnt child to fear the fire and not to have any wish to hazard his happiness by paying attention to anyone else.’*⁵

      The distressing contretemps had undermined Kitty’s health; she had grown thin and worn and had lost much of the prettiness and most of the bouncy sprightliness of her younger days. In October 1803 she had gone to Cheltenham to try to recoup her strength. Lowry Cole was there at the same time and his brother wrote, ‘Kitty is in Cheltenham. I am beginning to think she wishes to bring on the subject again with Lowry, but he fights shy. She will deserve it, as she treated him cruelly.’⁶

      Only too well aware that she had much changed, Kitty was extremely nervous when she heard that, in a letter to Olivia Sparrow dated August 1804, Arthur Wellesley had declared that his ‘opinion and sentiments respecting the person in question’ were the same as they had ever been; and she was even more apprehensive when she learned that he had arrived in London and had authorized Olivia ‘to renew the proposition he had made some years ago’.

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