Wellington: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ command of any sort was given him. To be sure he was offered the opportunity of going to attack the Spanish in Mexico which was, according to a highly complicated plan formed by the Cabinet, to be seized by two armies falling upon it simultaneously, one from Jamaica on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, the other – sailing by way of Singapore, the Philippines (where Manila was to be captured on the way) and Australia – on the Pacific seaboard somewhere in the region of Manzanillo.

      But when he came to study this scheme, Sir Arthur was convinced of its wild impracticality as a military operation, apart from the difficulty of maintaining a government in Mexico should the operation be successful, ‘particularly against the attempts which might be made upon it by the United States’.⁶

      So, for the moment, politics seemed destined to claim him. The death of Charles James Fox in September had unsettled ‘the Ministry of All the Talents’; and when Fox’s successor as Foreign Secretary, Lord Howick, later Earl Grey, introduced the Roman Catholic Army and Navy Service Bill, which proposed opening both services to Roman Catholics and Dissenters alike, the King, convinced that to agree to such a measure would be a betrayal of his coronation oath, announced he would never consent to it and demanded an assurance that Ministers would never press upon him any concessions to Roman Catholics in the future. The Cabinet declined to give any such assurance; so in March 1807 the King summoned the Duke of Portland, old, ill and sleepy as he was, to form a new government.

      The Duke appointed George Canning Foreign Secretary, Spencer Perceval as Chancellor of the Exchequer and brought back Lord Castlereagh as Secretary for War and the Colonies. Sir Arthur Wellesley was invited to accept the post of Chief Secretary for Ireland, at a salary of £6,566 a year, the Duke of Richmond being Lord-Lieutenant, two other Dukes, Rutland and Beaufort, having declined that unwelcome duty.

      Sir Arthur, who had re-entered Parliament as Member for the Cornish borough of Mitchell in January, decided to accept the appointment in Dublin, provided that he might give it up should there be an opportunity of employment in the Army. The Duke of Portland agreed to this condition, and Sir Arthur took up his new post in March 1807.⁷

      Sir Arthur and Lady Wellesley, with their baby son, Arthur Richard, who had been born at 11 Harley Street on 3 February, together with the child’s nursemaid and their other servants, moved into the Chief Secretary’s house in Phoenix Park from which the Chief Secretary rode across each morning, accompanied by the Lord-Lieutenant’s daughters, to his office in the Castle. It was ten years since he had last lived in Dublin and much had changed. In 1798 a rebellion led by the Society of United Irishmen, who were dedicated to the establishment of an independent Irish republic and sought military help from France, had persuaded Pitt that union between Great Britain and Ireland was essential; and union had accordingly been authorized by legislation of the English and Irish Parliaments in August 1800.

      The union, as Sir Arthur immediately recognized in Dublin, was far from universally popular. The Irish were ‘disaffected to the British Government’, he reported to London. They did ‘not feel the benefits of their situation’. ‘Show me an Irishman,’ he wrote on a later occasion, ‘and I’ll show you a man whose anxious wish it is to see his country independent of Great Britain … Independence is what the Irish really aim at.’ To achieve that independence from Britain they were looking eagerly for a French invasion; and in the event of such an invasion ‘the operations which the British army would have to carry on would be of the nature of those in an enemy’s country’. He was ‘positively convinced that no political measure’ that the Government could adopt would ‘alter the temper of the people’ of Ireland, and he was ultimately forced to the conclusion that the Irish should be ‘kept down by main force’, for they had too much power already and would ‘only use more to obtain more and at length separation’. Now and later, as a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry, he clung steadfastly to the belief – perhaps more firmly held than any other in politics apart from his conviction that the worst evil that could befall a nation was civil strife – that the political supremacy of Great Britain over Ireland should be maintained.⁸ In the meantime he settled down to his duties in the Castle with his usual conscientiousness, dealing with mounting piles of correspondence, writing memoranda for the Government on such matters as Ireland’s coastal defences, granting, or more often declining, the numerous, frequently importunate requests for the Government’s patronage which were made to him, regretting the fact that in Ireland ‘almost every man of mark had his price’, refusing permission for the Yeomanry to celebrate their part in the suppression of the 1798 rising on the grounds that it would be an unnecessary provocation to the dissidents, organizing the elections of 1807, which followed upon the dissolution of Parliament, buying some seats, exchanging favours for others, observing the drunkenness, violence and chicanery when seats were contested and a ‘man who registered a vote without a cracked pate was regarded as a kind of natural phenomenon’. In Wexford, he wrote in a matter-of-fact manner in one of his dispatches to London, one candidate killed another in a duel, but as that was ‘reckoned fair in Ireland, it created no sensation’.⁹

      He himself was now Member for Newport in the Isle of Wight, having given up his Cornish seat; and in June he sailed for England, returning to the house in Harley Street. leaving his wife in Dublin to join him later.

      The marriage was proving to be no more successful than it had seemed likely to be at the start. He spent much of his time away from home, allowing it to be supposed that he preferred to accept invitations to stay in country houses without his wife, spending as much time in the hunting field as his duties allowed, leaving her to entertain members of her family and other guests on her own. Soon after the birth of their son, Arthur, in rather uncertain health and thirty-five years old, Kitty became pregnant again and gave birth to her second son and last child on 16 January 1808. Thereafter her relationship with her husband became increasingly strained, he finding her dull and incapable, she being fond and admiring but so nervous and shy in his company that she appeared almost frightened of him and thus irritated him all the more. It was obvious to everyone who knew them that she exasperated him on occasions, particularly when she fussed about his health or tried to hide her ignorance by dogmatic assertions. When their baby, Arthur, had contracted measles at the age of five months, his mother had cause to be anxious; but the father, who had been hunting at Hatfield within three days of his birth and had told her that his return depended upon the likelihood of frost, dismissed her concern. He had ‘no apprehension for the Meazles, being convinced that it is a mild disorder’. All that was needed was ‘common care during the recovery’.¹⁰

      His letters to her were addressed to ‘My dearest Kitty’ and customarily ended in the same affectionate way, but their contents often read as though they were addressed to a steward and a not very competent steward at that:

       I enclose a letter from a Bricklayer. I thought you had paid him. Let me know whether you have or not … Let the Gardener [who had been dismissed] be taken back … I am much concerned that you should have thought of concealing from me any want of money … I don’t understand how this want occurred or why it was concealed … I acknowledge that the conclusion I draw from your conduct upon the occasion is that you must be Mad, or you must consider me to be a Brute, & most particularly fond & avaricious of money. Once for all you require no permission to talk to me upon any subject you please; all that I request is that a [fuss] may not be made about trifles … & that you may not go into tears because I don’t think them deserving of an uncommon degree of attention … It is to be hoped that at some time or other I shall be better understood.’¹¹

      Fifteen years later, while walking in a garden after supper with his dear friend Harriet Arbuthnot, he confessed that he had been ‘a damned fool’ to have married ‘such a person’.

       He assured me that she did not understand him [Mrs Arbuthnot recorded in her journal], that she could not enter with him into the consideration of all the important concerns which are continually occupying his mind, and that he found he might as well talk to a child … He told me … that his tastes were domestic, that nothing w^d СКАЧАТЬ