Wellington: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ she replied to Mrs Sparrow, if she had cause to believe that Sir Arthur was repeating his offer in fulfilment of an undertaking he had made so long ago. The letter from him which she had been shown did not contain ‘one word expressive of a wish that the proposition should be accepted’. There was no indication that ‘Yes would gratify or that No would disappoint’. Besides, she added, ‘I am very much changed and you know it within these last three years, so much that I doubt whether it would now be in my power to contribute [to] the comfort or happiness of any body who has not been in the habit of loving me for years like my Brother or you or my Mother.’⁷

      Someone else warned Sir Arthur that he would find Kitty Pakenham, now aged thirty-four, ‘much altered’; but he maintained that ‘he did not care. It was her mind he cared for’, he said, ‘and that would not alter’.⁸ So, having obtained permission from her brother to do so, he wrote to her formally proposing marriage. She was reluctant still. She told him that she did not think it fair to engage him before he had seen her, until he was ‘quite positively certain that [she was] indeed the very woman [he] would chuse for a companion a friend for life’. ‘In so many years I may be much more changed than I am myself conscious of,’ she concluded. ‘If when we have met you can tell me … that you do not repent having written the letter I am now answering I shall be most happy.’⁹

      Undeterred but quite without evident enthusiasm, Sir Arthur departed for Ireland in April 1806 at the age of thirty-seven to marry a woman with whom he was not in the least in love. He had been in no hurry to leave England where he had been busy with private as well as public affairs, paying visits to Cheltenham, where he stayed at the Plough, to Stowe to see the Marquess of Buckingham and Cirencester to call upon Lord Bathurst. Taking temporary lodgings at 18 Conduit Street, he had gone out to buy music at Robert Birchall’s shop in New Bond Street – romantic songs, light operas, Mozart – and dinner and breakfast services at Flight and Barr’s china shop in Coventry Street.¹⁰

      He was described by Kitty’s friend, Maria Edgeworth, who saw him now for the first time, as being ‘quite bald’; but this was only because his unpowdered hair was cut so very short. Extremely plain herself, Miss Edgeworth also wrote of him as being ‘handsome, very brown … and a hooked nose’.¹¹

      Sir Arthur could find nothing remotely handsome about his anxious bride who, in Miss Edgeworth’s words, ‘coughs sadly and looks but ill’. Mrs Calvert thought that he ‘must have found her sadly altered, for she was a very pretty little girl, with a round face and fine complexion. She is now very thin and withered … She looks in a consumption.’¹² A few years before, the Prince of Wales, on meeting his bride for the first time, had murmured to Lord Malmesbury who had brought her over to England from Brunswick, ‘Harris, pray bring me a glass of brandy’, before retiring to a far corner of the room. Similarly disappointed, Sir Arthur was said to have whispered to his brother, now the husband of the eldest daughter of Earl Cadogan, the Rev. Gerald Wellesley, who was to conduct the marriage service in the drawing room of the Longfords’ house in Rutland Square, ‘She has grown ugly by Jove.’¹³

      Having already overstayed his leave, Sir Arthur remained in Dublin for less than a week before sailing back to London after the briefest of honeymoons from which he was seen returning on the box of the carriage while his bride remained inside. She followed him to England later in the care of his brother, Gerald; and, having stayed with Mrs Sparrow for a time, while her husband still occupied his bachelor rooms, she set up house with him at n Harley Street, a smart residential street first rated in 1753 and not yet favoured by doctors.¹⁴ Here she settled down uneasily to begin her married life, her husband’s solicitors having drawn up a settlement by which he would contribute £20,000 and she £4,000 with a further £2,000 from her mother. Sir Arthur’s hopes that she would prove as exact in money matters as he was himself were not to be realized.¹⁵

11 Ireland and Denmark

       1806 – 7

       ‘Show me an Irishman and I’ll show you a man whose anxious wish it is to see his country independent of Great Britain.’

      GENERAL WELLESLEY returned to his duties in Hastings, but his eyes were now firmly set on that more imposing stage on the Continent which Lord Longford had rather doubted he would ever ascend. His brother, the Marquess, however, now returned from India, was in much need of his family’s support in the House of Commons where he was under sustained attack from the Member for Newtown who was intent upon blackening Wellesley’s name and record as Governor-General in India. This disputatious Member was James Paull, the dapper little son of a Scottish tailor who had done very well for himself as a merchant in India where he had fallen foul of the Governor-General. The Marquess’s brother William had been Member for Queen’s County since 1801; but William needed support in his defence of the reputation of the family which, if lost, would damage the prospects of them all. So Sir Arthur offered himself as candidate for Parliament at Rye and was duly elected, after paying for much wine and many dinners for the electors and their wives and families, and contributing £50 to the ‘Poor in lieu of Garlands etc., etc.’¹

      In Parliament he staunchly defended his brother against the accusations of Mr Paull, and when Paull widened his charges to include condemnation of the behaviour in India of the ‘indiscreet Knight of the Bath’, he firmly defended himself, asserting roundly that ‘what he did in India was in obedience to the orders he had received; and for the manner of that obedience, and its immediate result, he was ready to answer whether to the House or to any other tribunal in the realm’.²

      Throughout the session he was regular in his attendance at the House and could often be seen walking with brisk step across St James’s Park. He spoke upon Indian affairs when called upon to do so and occasionally upon military matters, once warmly supporting a proposed increase in the pay of junior officers; and, when he returned to his brigade at Hastings during the summer recess, he still concerned himself with Parliamentary business and his brother’s affairs, helping to bring in two new supporters of Lord Wellesley at the St Ives election at a cost of £3,500, considerably more than he had found it necessary to lay out himself upon the electors at Rye.³ At the same time he strongly advised his brother to seek friends among the newspaper editors, since it appeared ‘that the Newspapers [had] made such good progress in guiding what was called publick opinion in this Country that no Man who [looked] to publick station [would] attain his objects, without a connection with & assistance from some of the Editors’.*⁴

      His heart was not in politics, though. He was, after all, a soldier; and so long as other soldiers were gaining honours in fighting Napoleon and his allies, he could not comfortably live out his days on the south coast, however fully he contrived to occupy them.

      Month by month Napoleon was extending his hold upon Europe. Joseph Bonaparte had become King of Naples in March 1806, Louis Bonaparte King of Holland in June. Their brother defeated Prussia at Jena and Saxony at Auerstadt in October and went on to occupy Berlin and Warsaw.

      British victories that year were comparatively trivial. Buenos Aires surrendered to a small British force at the end of June but was retaken by the Spanish in August. In Calabria, Sir John Stuart attacked a French army at S. Pietro di Maida on 4 July and defeated it, but had no cavalry with which to follow up a victory which was celebrated beyond its deserts in London where Maida Hill and Maida Vale were named in honour of it and General Sir John Stuart, Count of Maida, received the freedom of the City.

      In Hastings, General Wellesley wrote to Lord Grenville to offer his services in the hope that the Secretary for War would press his claims upon the Duke of York. He did not care in what situation he served, he wrote in another letter; he would be ‘very sorry to stay СКАЧАТЬ