Wellington: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ go to it … & that it drove him to seek abroad that comfort & happiness that was denied to him at home … At his home he had no creature to speak to, for that discussing political or important subjects with the Duchess was like talking Hebrew to her.¹²

      Busy as he was with these political affairs which he could not discuss with his wife, Sir Arthur reminded Lord Castlereagh more than once of his determination not to give up the military profession, of his fear that were he to let an opportunity to serve slip by for the sake of clinging to ‘a large civil office’, he might lose ‘the confidence and esteem of the officers and soldiers of the army’.¹³

      His chance came towards the end of July 1807 when an expedition was being planned to force the Danes to give up possession of their fleet to the British before it was seized by the French. General Wellesley was offered the command of a division in this expedition, and eagerly accepted it. He sailed almost immediately in the fire-ship Prometheus for Copenhagen.

      It was decided at the Horse Guards, however, that his experience of European warfare was too limited to allow his being given command of one of the leading divisions. He was to be in command of the reserve, and was, moreover, to have a more seasoned officer as second-in-command. As Wellesley knew only too well, the Horse Guards thought ‘very little of any one who had served in India’. Besides, he was not only a politician but also ‘a Lord’s son, “a sprig of nobility” who came into the army more for ornament than use’. ‘When the Horse Guards are obliged to employ one of those fellows like me, in whom they have no confidence,’ he later told a friend, ‘they give him what is called a second-in-command — one in whom they do have confidence – a kind of dry nurse.’¹⁴

      Wellesley’s ‘dry nurse’ was a Brigadier named Richard Stewart. An efficient officer and a tactful man, Stewart supervised both the embarkation of the division and its disembarkation north of Copenhagen; but he did so in such a manner as not to cause offence to his superior who ‘saw no kind of objection to anything he suggested’. So ‘all went à merveille’. But when the division had landed, the men giving ‘one simultaneous and tremendous cheer’, General Wellesley insisted upon leading it against the Danish force which had been sent out from Copenhagen against the invaders. ‘Come, come,’ he said when Stewart offered his advice as to how the advance should be conducted, ‘’Tis my turn now.’¹⁵

      ‘I immediately made my own dispositions,’ he afterwards related, ‘assigned Stewart the command of one of the wings, gave him his orders, attacked the enemy [at Köge on 29 August], and beat them. Stewart, like a man of sense, saw in a moment that I understood my business, and subsided with (as far as I saw) good humour into his proper place.’¹⁶

      Copenhagen was now satisfactorily invested; and Wellesley would have liked to remain outside its walls until the place was forced to surrender. But the commander of the expedition, Lieutenant-General Lord Cathcart, the son of the ninth Lord Cathcart, a former Ambassador at St Petersburg, an officer who had been at Eton before General Wellesley was born, had no doubt that a bombardment of the city was required. Despite this, Wellesley’s relations with the Danes he encountered were uniformly amicable: one of these was named Rosencrantz, and the General confessed that he had a strong temptation to ask after Guildenstern; another thanked him for ensuring the good behaviour of his troops while they lay in the neighbourhood, though he himself considered that they behaved only ‘tolerably well’ and were ‘very unpopular in the country’. A Danish general expressed his regret that ‘political views should counteract the private feelings of individuals’; while a lady, some of whose property was looted but returned to her with many apologies, made Sir Arthur a present of fruit and invited him to shoot on her land.¹⁷

      On 6 September Copenhagen surrendered. General Cathcart was created a viscount and he and Admiral Gambier – who had been in command of naval operations and was raised to the peerage for his considerable efforts – were awarded prize money which was estimated to amount to £300,000.¹⁸

      General Wellesley returned to his duties as Chief Secretary for Ireland, preceded by a mare which had been taken on the expedition by Major-General Thomas Grosvenor who had not known that the animal was in foal.*

12 Portugal

       1808

       ‘Sir Harry, now is your time to advance.’

      ‘I HAVE GOT PRETTY high upon the tree since I came home,’ Sir Arthur Wellesley wrote contentedly from the Lodge in Phoenix Park soon after his return to Dublin. ‘I don’t think it probable that I shall be called upon [to return to India] … Men in power in England think very little of that country, and those who do think of it feel very little inclination that I should go there … They think I cannot well be spared from objects nearer home.’¹

      There was, indeed, much to concern them in Europe. Following the French victories over the Prussians at Jena and Auerstädt and over the Russians at Friedland, France and Russia had become allies by agreements reached at Tilsit and had resolved to divide Europe between them, reducing Austria and Prussia to impotence. Britain thus stood alone against Napoleon. Denmark joined France in October; and Spain undertook to assist in a French attack upon Portugal which had refused to join Napoleon’s Continental System, a form of economic warfare designed to ruin British trade by excluding British ships from Continental ports.

      French troops invaded Portugal on 19 November under General Andoche Junot, a wealthy farmer’s truculent son who had become Governor of Paris; and ten days later the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil. While Ministers anxiously discussed the measures that might be taken to break the Continental blockade, General Wellesley took every opportunity to remind them of his presence in Dublin and to offer his services in ‘any part of the world at a moment’s notice’.²

      Meanwhile he had to turn his attention to the perennial and insoluble problems of Ireland, to Irish education, to the maintenance of civil order, to the creation of a Dublin police force, to a law requiring absentee clergymen to return to their parishes, to protests against excessive rents and tithes, to the dangers of a French invasion, sometimes voicing the views of a high and impatient Tory – ‘we want discipline, not learning’ – at others speaking with the voice of liberal enlightenment – ‘the great object of our policy in Ireland should be to endeavour to obliterate, as far as the law will allow us, the distinction between Protestants and Catholics, and that we ought to avoid anything which can induce either sect to recollect or believe that its interests are separate and distinct from those of the other.’³

      When he left Dublin for London to attend the House of Commons he was kept equally busy, defending the reputation of the Army when it was assailed by Samuel Whitbread, an energetic member of the Whig opposition; and, as a ‘willing horse upon whose back every man thinks he has a right to put the saddle’, continuing to provide the Cabinet with detailed advice about their proposed military operations.⁴

      He was asked to comment on an expedition to Sweden, to suggest ways in which to counter a rumoured Franco-Russian assault on India, and to confer with General Francisco de Miranda, a Venezuelan revolutionary, living in exile in London, who had recently returned to the country of his birth where he had unsuccessfully endeavoured to lead the peasants in an uprising against the Spanish authorities.

      Wellesley did not take to Miranda; nor did he like the Foreign Office’s idea of making another attempt to foster revolution in Venezuela. He wrote a report on its military aspects, but made it clear that he ‘had always had a horror of revolutionising any country for a political object’. If they ‘rose of themselves, well and good’; СКАЧАТЬ