Читать книгу Wellington: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 13
Оглавление‘In person he was about 5 feet 7 inches with a long pale face, a remarkably large aquiline nose, a clear blue eye and the blackest beard I ever saw.’
COLONEL WESLEY was aboard one of the ships that were blown home. He stepped ashore in poorer health than ever in January 1796. He went to see his doctor again when he returned to Dublin to settle his affairs there before taking the 33rd on their next tour of duty, this time in the East Indies rather than the West.
There was much to do before they sailed: he had to instruct his successor in the duties of the Lieutenant-General’s aide-de-camp, to write a paper for the guidance of the man who was to take over as Member of Parliament for Trim, to give instructions to the agent who was managing the family’s estates in Meath which had not been sold with the castle, to make such arrangements as he could about the liquidation of his debts, which now stood at over £1,000. He was still busy in Dublin when the 33rd were on the point of sailing for India by way of the Cape of Good Hope. He let them go without him. The voyage would take several weeks and, if he sailed after them in a fast frigate, he would be able to catch them up before they got into the Arabian Sea.
He left Dublin for London in June and, taking rooms at 3 Savile Row, he set out for the shops to equip himself for what might prove to be a long absence in the East. There were clothes to buy and, equally important, there were books. For these he went to Faulders, the booksellers and book-binders in Bond Street, and from here and other shops he came away with a library that could surely not have been packed in its entirety in the trunk, complete with ‘Cord Etc.’, which he bought from Mr Faulder for £1 11s 6d. There were histories of warfare, sieges and military campaigns, an account of the topography of the Indian sub-continent, a copy of the Bengal Army List, books about Egypt and the East India Company, maps and German, Arabic and Persian grammars and dictionaries, as well as two volumes of Richardson’s Persian dictionary costing the extraordinarily large sum of twelve guineas. There were three volumes of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, four of the works of Lord Bolingbroke and of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, five of the theological expositions of William Paley, six of Plutarch’s lives, nine of the philosophical works of John Locke, thirteen of David Hume’s History of England, fifteen volumes by Frederick the Great and, for lighter reading, twenty-four volumes of the works of Jonathan Swift. There were books by Voltaire, Crébillon and Rousseau, Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and the memoirs of Marshal Saxe. Listed between books by Smollett and the licentious Amours du Chevalier de Fauhlas were nine volumes of Women of Pleasure. Between a history of France and Cambridge’s War in India was a medical treatise on venereal disease.1
With these and many other books safely corded in their trunks, Wesley, by now a full colonel, sailed from Portsmouth when the wind was sufficiently fresh and rejoined the 33rd at the Cape. Here he also found two young ladies, not long out of their schoolroom, on their way to India. The elder of the two, Jemima Smith, was described by a young officer who met them at this time as ‘a most incorrigible flirt, very clever, very satirical, and aiming at universal conquest. Her sister, Henrietta [aged seventeen] was more retiring, and I think more admired … with her pretty little figure and lovely neck [that was to say bosom] … She made a conquest of Colonel Arthur Wesley who had arrived at the Cape with the 33rd Regiment.’*2
Certainly in the company of these two girls, the Colonel, so studious in the frigate on her long passage down the west coast of Africa, became lively and entertaining, ‘all life and spirits’. A captain in the 12th Regiment, Maria Edgeworth’s cousin, George Elers, who had recently arrived at the Cape, provided this sketch of him:
In person he was about 5 feet 7 inches [actually more like 5 feet 8 or 9 inches] with a long pale face, a remarkably large aquiline nose, a clear blue eye and the blackest beard I ever saw … I have known him shave twice in one day, which I believe was his constant practice … He was remarkably clean in his person …
His features always reminded me of [the tragedian] John Philip Kemble, and, what is more remarkable I also observed the great likeness between him and the performer, Mr Charles Young, which he told me he had often heard remarked. He spoke at this time remarkably quickly, with a very, very slight lisp. He had very narrow jaw bones, and there was a great peculiarity in his ear, which I never observed but in one other person, the late Lord Byron – the lobe of the ear uniting to the cheek. He had a particular way, when pleased, of pursing up his mouth. I have often observed it when he has been thinking abstractedly.3
Colonel Wesley was not detained at the Cape for long: in the middle of February 1797, at the age of twenty-seven, almost eight months after leaving England, he went ashore at Calcutta after a more than commonly tedious passage across the Indian Ocean and up the Bay of Bengal in an East Indiaman, named after Princess Charlotte, King George Ill’s eldest daughter. As soon as he could he called upon the Governor-General, Sir John Shore, a schoolfellow of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan at Harrow, who had started his career as a writer in the service of the East India Company by which his father had also been employed as a supercargo. Shore was a conscientious and hard-working though unremarkable man and ‘as cold as a greyhound’s nose’; but he was astute enough to recognize in Colonel Wesley a promising young man of strong common sense who might well one day be a person of distinction.4
The Colonel, Shore added, also had about him an air of ‘boyish playfulness’; and it was this quality which struck William Hickey, the memoirist, then practising as an attorney in Calcutta and a popular and highly hospitable member of the British community there. Hickey saw him first at a St Patrick’s Day dinner in Calcutta at which the Colonel had been asked to take the chair, a duty which he performed ‘with peculiar credit to himself’.5
‘On the 20th of the same month [March 1797],’ Hickey continued, ‘a famous character arrived in Bengal, Major-General John St Leger, who had for a long period been a bosom friend and companion of the Prince of Wales. From having lived so much with His Royal Highness, he had not only suffered in his health, but materially impaired his fortune, and was therefore happy to get out of the way of the Prince’s temptations by visiting Bengal, upon which Establishment he was placed upon His Majesty’s staff.’
As soon as St Leger arrived, Hickey, who had known him in England, invited him to join a party of guests he was to entertain at his house at Chinsurah. Colonel Wesley was also of the party which, Hickey congratulated himself, was a great success.
We rose early every morning making long excursions from which we returned with keen appetite for breakfast. That meal being over we adjourned to the billiard room … When tired of that game [we played] Trick Track [backgammon] … Thus the morning passed. At about half past three we retired to our respective rooms, of which I have seven for bachelors, to dress, and at four precisely sat down to dinner.6
Hickey gave another party at Chinsurah on the King’s birthday, 4 June; and again on that occasion Colonel Wesley was one of the guests. Their host had procured a ‘tolerably fat deer’ and a ‘very fine turtle’ and engaged ‘an eminent French cook from Calcutta to dress the dinner’. He had taken ‘especial care to lay in a quantum sufficit of the best champagne that was procurable’; his ‘claret, hock, and madeira’, he knew, were ‘not to be surpassed in Bengal’. The party accordingly went off with the ‘utmost hilarity and good humour’. ‘We had several choice songs … followed by delightful catches and glees … and General St Leger in the course of the evening sang “The British Grenadiers” with high spirit.’ The party did not break up until between two and three o’clock in the morning; and nearly all the guests woke up with dreadful hangovers.
Freely as the claret was pushed about at Chinsurah, however, the drinking there was moderate when compared with that in the officers’ mess of the 33rd Foot, over which Colonel Wesley presided, and in the house of Wesley’s second-in-command, Lieutenant-Colonel John Sherbrooke, at Alypore, three miles from Calcutta. Here the drinking of the 33rd’s officers was astonishing. One of the 33rd’s parties, so Hickey wrote, consisted of eight as strong-headed fellows as could be found in Hindustan, including Colonel Wesley.
During dinner we drank as usual, that is, the whole company each with the other at least twice over. The cloth being removed, the first half-dozen toasts proved irresistible, and I gulped them down without hesitation. At the seventh … I only half filled my glass whereupon our host said, ‘I should not have suspected you, Hickey, of shirking such a toast as the Navy,’ and my next neighbour immediately observing, ‘it must have been a mistake,’ having the bottle in his hand at the time, he filled my glass up to the brim. The next round I made a similar attempt, with no better success, and then gave up the thoughts of saving myself. After drinking two-and-twenty bumpers in glasses of considerable magnitude, the [Colonel] said, everyone might then fill according to his own discretion, and so discreet were all of the company that we continued to follow the Colonel’s example of drinking nothing short of bumpers until two o’clock in the morning, at which hour each person staggered to his carriage or his palankeen, and was conveyed to town. The next day I was incapable of leaving my bed, from an excruciating headache, which I did not get rid of for eight-and-forty hours; indeed a more severe debauch I never was engaged in in any part of the world.7
For Colonel Wesley these days in Calcutta were a pleasant interlude; but he had not studied McKenzie’s War in Mysore and General Dirom’s Narrative of the Campaign in India to sit drinking bumpers of claret at camphor-wood dinner tables under gently swishing punkahs and passing the mouthpiece of hookahs to the wives of Company officials on lamplit verandas. There was talk of an attack on the Pacific colonies of Spain which had recently come into the war on the side of France, or upon the Dutch, now also England’s enemies, in Java, and Wesley hoped that if such an assault were to be mounted, he might be given a command in it, perhaps the chief command. Yet, as a recent arrival in India, he did not want to appear too importunate. So, when it was suggested he might command such an expedition, he demurred, proposing the name of another more senior officer, with the proviso that if anything should prevent that officer taking it, he would be prepared to accept the command himself, ‘taking chance,’ as he told his brother Richard, ‘that the known pusillanimity of the Enemy’ and his own exertions would ‘compensate in some degree’ for his lack of experience. ‘I hope,’ he added, not troubling to hide his low opinion of them, ‘to be at least as successful as the people to whom Hobart [Lord Hobart, Governor of the Presidency of Madras] wishes to give command … Of course, the Chief Command of this expedition would make my fortune; going upon it at all will enable me to free myself from debt, therefore you may easily conceive that I am not very anxious for the conclusion of a peace at this moment.’8 As though to confirm his qualifications as commander, he sent Sir John Shore a résumé of what was known of the places which were to come under attack and information he had gleaned about the harbours where the expeditionary force might be put ashore.
His hopes, however, were not to be realized; he was not given the chief command but went instead as commanding officer of the 33rd with orders to land them at Manila in the Philippines, and then launch an attack across the Sulu and Celebes Seas and through the Straits of Makassar upon the Dutch garrison in Java. But the expedition was as inconclusive as the 33rd’s attempted crossing of the Atlantic in 1795.
It got off to an unfortunate start: a young clergyman, the nephew of a friend of William Hickey, appointed by Colonel Wesley at Hickey’s request as chaplain of the 33rd, turned out to be ‘of very eccentric and peculiarly odd manners’. A day or two out of Calcutta he got ‘abominably drunk’ and ‘gave a public exhibition of extreme impropriety, exposing himself to both soldiers and sailors, running out of his cabin stark naked into the midst of them, talking all sorts of bawdy and ribaldry, and singing scraps of the most blackguard and indecent songs’. Overcome with remorse when sober, he took to his bunk and, though kindly assured by Colonel Wesley that his behaviour was ‘not of the least consequence’, that no one would think the worse of him for ‘little irregularities committed in a moment of forgetfulness’, ‘that the most correct and cautious men were liable to be led astray by convivial society’, and that ‘no blame ought to attach to a cursory debauch’, the poor young clergyman remained inconsolably penitent, refused to eat and ‘actually fretted himself to death’.9
A week or so later the entire expeditionary force was recalled. There were reports of spreading unrest in British India, while Napoleon Bonaparte, appointed to the command of the French Army of Italy, was triumphantly justifying the trust the Directory in Paris had reposed in him. There had, besides, been mutinies in the British Navy at Spithead and the Nore which were so serious in the eyes of the First Lord of the Admiralty that the Channel Fleet was now ‘lost to the country as much as if it was at the bottom of the sea’. It had consequently been decided in Calcutta that the British forces in the East must be concentrated, and the 33rd brought home forthwith across the Indian Ocean. So it was that before long Colonel Wesley – who had planned his regiment’s part in the expedition with characteristic care and attention to detail – was once more back in India in the company of William Hickey.
But, having been denied the opportunity of distinguishing himself, he felt even less inclined to fritter his afternoons and evenings away at dinner tables or to be satisfied with the undemanding routine of regimental life. He found time to study his books on Indian affairs and even produced a long and detailed refutation of a work that had recently appeared entitled Remarks upon the Present State of the Husbandry and Commerce of Bengal. He also became a familiar figure in the corridors of both Fort St George, where Lord Hobart exercised his authority as Governor of the Presidency of Madras, and Fort William, the headquarters of the Governor-General of India.
