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9 Return to London

1805 – 6

What, child! do you think that I have nothing better to do than to make speeches to please ladies?’

MAJOR-GENERAL Sir Arthur Wellesley sailed home in the Trident, walking briskly about the deck in the morning, reading the novels he had bought in Madras in the afternoon, writing papers on farming and famines in India and on the possible uses of Indian troops in the West Indies and of West Indian slaves in India. He went ashore at St Helena where he was much taken with the beauty of the island, its ‘delightful climate’ and much amazed by the Governor, a most eccentric gentleman ‘of a description that must have been extinct for nearly two centuries’. Sir Arthur had never seen ‘anything like his wig or his coat’.¹

The Trident reached England in September 1805; and the General listened eagerly to detailed accounts of what had happened in the world in his absence. He heard and read about the Treaty of St Petersburg by which Britain and Russia, later joined by Austria, had agreed to form a European coalition for the liberation of the northern German states; he learned that Napoleon, who had assumed the title of Emperor the year before, had been crowned King of Italy in Milan Cathedral, that the soldiers of the Grande Armée had abandoned their camps around Boulogne and, turning their backs on the English Channel, had marched towards the Danube, and that Lord Nelson had chased a French fleet under Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve across the Atlantic to the West Indies and back again, forcing Villeneuve to seek shelter in Cadiz.

One of his obligations on landing was to settle his debts now that he was in a position to do so, being in possession of what he called ‘a little fortune’. Already in India he had been generous in his unaccustomed wealth, lending over 9,000 rupees to the son of an old friend, a junior employee of the East India Company, who had got himself into trouble by extravagance in bad company. Now, so George Elers heard, he went to thank and repay a tradesman who had lent him £300 or £400 before he had left for India. ‘Can I be of any service to you?’ the General asked him.

‘Nothing for me, but I have a son.’

‘Give me his name,’ said Sir Arthur, ‘You did me a kindness once and I do not forget it.’

He got the man’s son a place of £400 per annum … Sir Arthur also sent £400 to Mrs Sturt, wife of an officer in the 80th [Major William Sturt] who had committed all sorts of follies [which included marrying this pretty woman, a former member of the establishment of the procuress, Mrs Porter, in Berkeley Street].²

It seems that Sir Arthur had himself been a visitor to Mrs Porter’s house in Berkeley Street in the 1790s and that Mrs Sturt may well have been one of the young women then employed there. It is also most likely that he now went back to this house on his return from India and that it was by way of an introduction from Mrs Porter that he met the celebrated courtesan Harriette Wilson.³

He was known to be a man of strong sexual appetite, and his reputation of being ‘a ladies’ man’ as well as a beau had returned with him from India. Indeed, he was already known to many as ‘The Beau’ and the nickname was commonly used for years thereafter. He was reputed to have had affairs with women, usually married women, of his own social class; but it was supposed that, by discretion as much as by taste, he was more inclined at this time to seek sexual pleasure in the arms of such professional coquettes as Harriette Wilson and the girls at Mrs Porter’s.

Harriette Wilson was the daughter of a man of Swiss extraction who had a small shop in Mayfair. She spoke French as well as English, though neither very fluently; and was renowned not so much for her beauty as for her easy manners, gaiety and flighty charm. Sir Walter Scott who once met her at the house of the lively, goggle-eyed author Matthew Lewis, in Argyle Street, described her as being ‘a smart, saucy girl, with good eyes and dark hair, and the manners of a wild schoolboy’.⁴ Having, according to her own account, become the mistress of Lord Craven at the age of fifteen, she had numbered amongst her lovers and admirers the Marquesses of Lorne and Worcester, Lord Frederick Bentinck, Lord Ponsonby, Lord Alvanley, the Hon. Frederick Lamb, Tom Sheridan and George Brummell. In describing these men, and in relating her talks with Sir Arthur Wellesley in her memoirs, their manner of speaking, as Sir Walter Scott acknowledged, was ‘exactly imitated’. Her recollections of her earliest conversations with Wellesley certainly catch his abrupt manner of talking and his inability to indulge in small talk:

He bowed first, then said ‘How do you do?’ then thanked me for having given him permission to call on me; and then wanted to take hold of my hand.

‘Really,’ said I, withdrawing my hand, ‘for such a renowned hero you have very little to say for yourself.’

‘Beautiful creature! where is Lome?’

‘Good gracious,’ said I, out of all patience at his stupidity – ‘what come you here for?’

‘Beautiful eyes, yours!’

‘Aye, man! they are greater conquerors than ever [you] shall be; but, to be serious, I understood you came here to try to make yourself agreeable?’

‘What, child! do you think that I have nothing better to do than to make speeches to please ladies?’

‘Après avoir dépeuplé la terre, vous devez faire tout pour la repeupler,’ I replied.

‘You should see me where I shine,’ he observed, laughing.

‘Where’s that, in God’s name?’

‘In a field of battle,’ answered the hero.

‘Battez-vous, donc, et qu’un autre me fasse la cour!’ said I.⁵

Sir Arthur soon became her ‘constant visitor’, a ‘most unentertaining one, Heaven knows!’ she thought; and, ‘in the evenings, when he wore his broad red ribbon [of the Order of the Bath], he looked very like a rat-catcher.’⁶

It was not long after his arrival in London that Sir Arthur encountered Lord Nelson who was on a few days’ leave and had come up from Merton Place, his country house in Surrey, to see Lord Castlereagh. Wellesley also happened to have been called for interview with the Secretary for War and the Colonies on the same day, and the two men found themselves waiting together in a room in the Colonial Office in Downing Street.

Years later the General recalled this meeting with ‘a gentleman, whom from his likeness to his pictures and the loss of an arm, I immediately recognized as Lord Nelson’.

He could not know who I was [Wellington told John Wilson Croker], but he entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side and all about himself and, in reality, a style so vain and so silly as to surprise and almost disgust me.

I suppose something that I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the office-keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a different man, both in manner and matter.

His ‘charlatan style’ had quite vanished and ‘he talked of the state of the country and of the aspect and probabilities of affairs on the Continent with a good sense and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad’.

The Secretary of State kept us long waiting [Wellington continued] and certainly for the last half or three-quarters of an hour, I don’t know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more. Now, if the Secretary of State had been punctual … I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had, but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior man; but certainly a more sudden or complete metamorphosis I never saw.*⁷

Wellesley was the same age as Castlereagh; they came from similar Irish backgrounds, and had sat together in the Irish House of Commons. They had been fellow guests at Sir Jonah Barrington’s dinner table in Dublin. The General felt at ease with the Minister, and spoke freely to him about Indian affairs and personalities, confiding his belief that the Government were not supporting his brother as Governor-General in the way they should. He said as much to Lord Camden, Castlereagh’s predecessor as Secretary for War, and now Lord President of the Council. In fact, Lord Wellesley, severely criticized for the disasters of the recent Marāthā war, had been recalled and was on his way home; and his brother went to see his friend, the proud, touchy and extremely fat Marquess of Buckingham, the former Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, to seek his advice about the attitude which Richard should adopt when he arrived in England. ‘Bucky’ said that opposition to the Government was ‘the best political game of the day’. ‘He was very anxious that you should belong to the opposition,’ Sir Arthur reported. ‘He urged every argument to induce me to inflame your mind against Pitt, particularly that he had not given you the Garter.’⁸

But Sir Arthur did not agree with ‘Bucky’; and bored beyond measure by the tedium of the two days he spent at Stowe, he told his brother that he and Lord Bathurst, a friend of Pitt and future Secretary for War, both believed that he ought to remain neutral for the moment, biding his time and observing the course of events.⁹

On leaving Stowe, and while his brother was still at sea, the General went to see Richard’s children. They were all in good health, he reported to their father, the boys manly and well-behaved ‘fine fellows’, the girls ‘very handsome and accomplished (particularly the youngest)’. This ‘must surely be at least some consolation’ to Richard, even though his services in India had not been treated as they deserved.¹⁰

The General could not give such favourable reports of the rest of their family. Their grandmother, Lady Dungannon, had long since died, having been arrested for debt, taken away to a sponging house, and from there to a French convent from which she had been brought back to England, apparently not in the least ashamed of her misdemeanours. Her widowed daughter, the General’s mother, was living a completely self-absorbed life in her house off Cavendish Square, evidently quite unaffected one way or another by her son’s return from India, her letters addressed to her offspring there having been so impersonal, so Henry Wellesley said, that they could have been read aloud at Charing Cross.¹¹

When Sir Arthur called at the Horse Guards his reception by the Duke of York was even more off-hand than that accorded to him by his mother. He had never felt at ease with the Duke in the way that he did with Castlereagh and Camden. It rankled with him that his promotion to major-general in the East India Company’s service had not immediately been confirmed in London; and he believed that the Duke had wanted General Baird to have the command at Seringapatam rather than himself. Captain Elers heard that the Duke of York made this plain enough when General Harris returned from India and attended a reception at the Horse Guards. ‘Harris, who was not very quick in a difficulty, was asked suddenly by the Duke, ‘Pray, General Harris what reason had you for superseding General Baird in the command at Seringapatam and giving it to a junior officer?’ Poor Harris stammered and the Duke turned his back on him and began a conversation with some officers.’*¹²

General Wellesley got on much better with the Prime Minister than he did with the Commander-in-Chief and went to see Pitt more than once at his house in Putney. He also had opportunities of talking to other ministers at Camden Place, Lord Camden’s house at Chislehurst in Kent. They all found the young General sensible and extremely well informed, Pitt deciding that he wisely stated every difficulty before performing any service, though none once he had undertaken it, a complimentary view Sir Arthur felt incapable of returning since the fault of the Prime Minister’s character was being ‘too sanguine’: he conceived a project and then imagined it was done, and did not enter enough into the details.¹³

The General on the contrary was now well known for his close attention to detail; and it became recognized by the Cabinet that his clear, succinct and well-considered opinions were well worth seeking when any new stroke against the French was in contemplation. When asked, for example, what he thought of a plan, favoured by the Prime Minister, of urging the Prussians to attack the French in rear, he said on reflection that it would be at least three months before a sufficient force could be raised and equipped and be in position on the Danube.

As it happened, in the middle of October the French overwhelmed an Austrian army under Karl Mack at Ulm. But on the day after Ulm’s surrender, Nelson, mortally wounded during the battle, destroyed the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar. The ailing Prime Minister, so cast down by news of Ulm that Lord Malmesbury believed his death to be imminent, was given fresh hope by the news of Trafalgar; and on 9 November, at the Lord Mayor’s banquet at Guildhall, he was observed to be in good spirits. Sir Arthur Wellesley was among the guests who heard him respond modestly to the toast, ‘The Saviour of the Nation’, with the memorable words, ‘Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions; and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.’¹⁴

‘That was all,’ Sir Arthur commented admiringly. ‘He was scarcely up two minutes; yet nothing could be more perfect.’¹⁵

After being so well received by members of the Government, it came as all the more of a disappointment to General Wellesley when in December he was told what was to be his own contribution to Europe’s salvation: he was to be given command of a brigade to be sent to Hanover. After three weeks in rough seas, including Christmas Day in a gale off Heligoland, his brigade was landed at Bremen where he endured a further six weeks of cold, rain and inactivity before being ordered home again.

By the time of his return, Napoleon had won his greatest victory over the combined Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz; and Pitt had been even more distressed by this than by Mack’s defeat at Ulm. He had been brought home from Bath on 9 January 1806 to his house at Putney where, glancing at a map of Europe on the wall, he is said, perhaps apocryphally, to have given voice to the most quoted of all his utterances, ‘Roll up that map. It will not be wanted these ten years.’¹⁶ He died a fortnight later, to be succeeded as First Lord of the Treasury in the so-called ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, by his cousin, Lord Grenville, with Charles James Fox as Foreign Secretary, and William Windham as Lord Castlereagh’s successor at the Colonial Office.

After the abortive expedition to Bremen, General Wellesley, for all the confidence that Pitt’s ministers had appeared to have reposed in him, was found no employment more responsible by the new Government than the command of a brigade at Hastings. Here, conscientious as always, he studied the problems of the Rye inundations and examined the possibilities of Winchelsea Castle being strengthened as a military fortress. ‘We are not actually in opposition,’ he wrote to a friend in India, ‘but we have no power.’¹⁷ He did, though, now have a wife.