Wellington: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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      Lieutenant Wesley began to believe that he could become a politician if he so willed it. Yet, as revolution gained momentum in France with the storming of the Tuileries in August 1792, the September Massacres and the execution of the King, Wesley’s thoughts turned again and again from politics to the Army and to service overseas. By transfers and purchase, he was advancing in his profession. From the 41st Foot he had been transferred to the 12th Light Dragoons; from the Dragoons he had returned to the infantry as a captain in the 58th Foot; from the 58th he had gone back to the cavalry as a captain in the 18th Light Dragoons; and, having appealed to his brother Richard for the money, he had bought a major’s rank in the 33rd Foot.

      Tired of trotting about at the Lord-Lieutenant’s heels in Dublin for a paltry ten shillings a day, though this was a welcome addition to his scanty private income of £125 a year,* he was anxious to go to war. He gave up gambling; he paid off what debts he could, including one to the boot-maker with whom he lodged; he resigned his Trim seat, and gave away his violin, believing, so a friend later recorded, that playing the fiddle was ‘not a soldierly accomplishment and took up too much of his time and thoughts’.⁹

      He wrote to Richard to ask him to approach the authorities on his behalf and tell them that, if any part of the Army were to be sent abroad, he wanted to go with it. ‘They may as well take me as anybody else.’¹⁰

      For the moment they did not take him. He was kept in Ireland drilling the soldiers of the 33rd and supervising the logging of the regimental accounts, a responsibility he did not find as tedious as might have been expected, for he had a good head for figures, a respect for detail and a pride in his talent for ‘rapid and correct calculation’.¹¹ In the autumn of 1793 he made a brief visit to England where he witnessed his brother’s signature to the deed of sale of Dangan Castle; but he was soon back in Ireland, a lieutenant-colonel by then, in command of the 33rd, frustratingly confined to regimental duties while news came from Paris of the horrors of the Terror and the blade of the guillotine rose and fell.

3 The First Campaign

       1794 – 5

       ‘I was on the Waal, I think from October to January and during all that time I only saw once one General from the headquarters.’

      THE WAR which France had declared on Britain after the execution of the King was not going well. The British army had been ejected from Dunkirk and was soon to be thrown out of Flanders, through which it was vainly hoped an attack could be made on the heart of France; while the French, commanded by the young generals of the Revolution, brave, impromptu and roturier, occupied Holland. The British troops – led by the Duke of York who was quite at home at the Horse Guards, the headquarters of the general staff in Whitehall, but as inexperienced in the field as most of his regimental officers – were ill-clothed and ill-fed, less than competently served by a Royal Waggon Corps, whose men, raised from the rookeries of Blackfriars and Seven Dials, were known as the Newgate Blues. For the sick and wounded, to be carried to such military hospitals as there were was to be consigned to a probable death. Surgeons’ mates were slipshod, negligent and very often drunk. A Dutchman counted forty-two bodies thrown overboard from a hospital barge on which they had been left unattended on the open deck. Officers were likely to go as hungry as their men. Colonel Wesley was warned by an old Guards officer, ‘You little know what you are going to meet with. You will often have no dinner at all. I mean literally no dinner, and not merely roughing it on a beefsteak or a bottle of wine.’¹

      Arthur Wesley, twenty-five years old, was at last to find this out for himself. The orders for which he had long been waiting had come; and in the middle of June 1794 he disembarked the 33rd Foot on the quayside at Ostend from a ship that had brought them over from Cork. At Ostend he was given command of two other battalions as well as his own and handed orders to take them over post haste to Antwerp to reinforce the Duke of York’s position. But the Duke’s position was not tenable for long; and, as the summer weather gave way to a cold autumn and a freezing winter, the British fell back in slow retreat. The 33rd were briefly in action in September at Boxtel where their Colonel handled them well; and later, in the depths of winter, they fought their way through another small town with bayonets fixed. Yet for most of those weeks officers and men alike struggled merely to keep warm and alive in the dreary, frozen countryside of polder and canal. We turn out once, sometimes twice every night,’ the Colonel reported in a letter to a cousin. ‘The officers and men are harassed to death … I have not had my clothes off my back for a long time; we spend the greater part of the night upon the bank of the river [the Waal] … Although the French annoy us much at night, they are very entertaining during the day time; they are perpetually chattering with our officers and soldiers, and dance the carmagnole upon the opposite bank whenever we desire them; but occasionally the spectators on our side are interrupted in the middle of the dance by a cannon ball from theirs.’²

      Utrecht fell; French trees of liberty were set up in Amsterdam; and the ragged British army straggled back, leaving broken carts and dead animals in its wake, towards the Ems and the Weser at Bremen. Colonel Wesley did not wait to see his battalion embark. Leaving a junior officer in charge, he set sail in March for London.

      His first campaign had been a most unpleasant experience; but at least, so he comforted himself, he had learned ‘what one ought not to do, and that is always something’.³ He had also learned that, while many of the British regiments were ‘excellent’, the generals had little idea how to manage an army. ‘I was left to myself with my regiment … thirty miles from headquarters which latter was a scene of jollifications,’ he recalled, ‘and I do not think that I was once visited by the Commander-in-Chief.’⁴ He remembered, too, an occasion when a dispatch was brought in after dinner in the mess. ‘That will keep till tomorrow,’ said the senior officer complacently, returning to the port decanter.⁵

      ‘I was on the Waal, I think from October to January,’ Wesley complained, ‘and during all that time I only saw once one General from the headquarters … We had letters from England, and I declare that those letters told us more of what was passing at headquarters than we learned from the headquarters themselves … The real reason why I succeeded in my own campaign is because I was always on the spot – I saw everything and did everything myself.’⁶

      While his battalion went into camp in Essex, Colonel Wesley resumed without enthusiasm his duties as aide-de-camp to the Lord-Lieutenant in Dublin. Before leaving for Ostend, he had done his best to settle his debts, assigning his income to a tradesman who agreed to pay them off by instalments. But he returned to find that they had not yet all been discharged, while his lieutenant-colonel’s pay and his allowances as an aide-de-camp were meagre in the extreme for a man without private fortune who wished to cut a figure in the world. His brother Richard was generous: he did not seek repayment of the sums he had advanced for the purchases in rank from captain to lieutenant-colonel; but there were limits to what he could ask of him and what Richard himself could afford. As it was, Richard was doing all he could to press his brother’s claims to some office of profit under the Crown. He wrote to the Lord-Lieutenant, an appointment now held by the second Earl Camden, proposing that Arthur was ideally qualified to fill the situation of Secretary-at-War which was ‘likely to be opened soon’. Colonel Wesley himself approached Camden to suggest that he might be appointed to fill vacancies on the Revenue or Treasury Boards, or, perhaps, he might be considered for the post of Surveyor-General of the Ordnance for Ireland when the present incumbent resigned. But Camden was not responsive; nor did he show due appreciation when his aide-de-camp, as Member for Trim, rose to answer Henry Grattan and defend the record of Lord Camden’s predecessor as Lord-Lieutenant, the 10th Earl of Westmorland, who had been recalled in 1795 because of his firm opposition to the emancipation of the Roman Catholics.

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