Читать книгу Wellington: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 21

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’; but it was ‘a fearful responsibility’ to ‘stir them up’.⁵

Despite these reservations as to its wisdom, a small British force of 9,000 men was assembled at Cork for an invasion of Venezuela, and Sir Arthur, who had been promoted lieutenant-general on 25 April, was appointed to command it. He set about his plans and preparations with his familiar thoroughness, ‘making out in his own handwriting lists of all the stores required, down to the very number of flints for small arms’. But then came news of a Spanish revolt. On 2 May the people of Madrid turned furiously on the French garrison and shot or stabbed every soldier they could find; and, although the revolt was soon put down by the ruthless fire of French guns, little more than a fortnight later the anger broke out again in other towns, in other provinces. Spanish officials who had collaborated with the French were dragged out into the streets and murdered; governors were lynched; committees were organized; administrative councils known as juntas provinciales were established; troops were enrolled; proclamations, promising support to Prince Ferdinand, heir to the deposed King and Queen of Spain, and death to the French, were read to cheering crowds. When representatives of the Asturian juntas landed in England with appeals for help to a country with which Spain was still officially at war, they were greeted sympathetically; and the Foreign Secretary, George Canning, declared that ‘Britain would proceed upon the principle that any nation in Europe which stirs up with a determination to oppose [France]… becomes immediately our ally.’ The revolt spread to Portugal; and General Junot was forced to concentrate his scattered forces around Lisbon.

General Wellesley immediately recognized – and conveyed his belief to the Cabinet – that here was ‘a crisis in which a great effort might be made with advantage’. It was ‘certain that any measures which [could] distress the French in Spain’ would oblige them to ‘delay for a season’ the execution of their other plans. He proposed that the force being collected at Cork for a landing in Venezuela should be diverted to the Iberian peninsula, much as this would distress General Miranda who, indeed, became so ‘loud and angry’ when he encountered Sir Arthur in the street that Wellesley told him that they should ‘walk on a little so that we might not attract the notice of everybody passing’.⁶

In the hopes of being given orders for the Peninsula, Wellesley saw to it that instructions were sent to Cork to ensure that the troops there were properly equipped for such a campaign, with adequate transport and cooking equipment, and that, for the sake of their health, they were to be landed frequently from the crowded ships in the harbour.⁷

In daily expectation of orders to sail, Wellesley handed over the business of the Chief Secretary for Ireland’s office to John Wilson Croker, a garrulous, up-and-coming lawyer and notorious gossip born and educated in Ireland and since 1806 Member of Parliament for Downpatrick.

One evening after dinner in Harley Street, when the two men were sitting over the wine and Lady Wellesley had gone upstairs to the drawing-room, Sir Arthur fell into a ruminative silence. Croker asked him what he was thinking about.

Why, to say the truth,’ he replied, ‘I am thinking of the French that I am going to fight. I have not seen them since the campaign in Flanders, when they were capital soldiers, and a dozen years of victory under Bonaparte must have made them better still. They have besides, it seems, a new system of strategy which has out-manoeuvred and overwhelmed all the armies of Europe. Tis enough to make one thoughtful; but no matter: my die is cast, they may overwhelm me, but I don’t think they will out-manoeuvre me. First, because I am not afraid of them, as everybody else seems to be; and, secondly, because, if what I hear of their system of manoeuvres is true, I think it is a false one against steady troops.’⁸

Before leaving London for Cork, he went to see various friends and relations in England. He went to dinner at Coombe Wood with Lord Hawkesbury, the Home Secretary; he called upon his sister Anne, whose first husband, a son of Lord Southampton, had died in 1794, and who was now married to Culling Charles Smith of Hampton; on his way to Holyhead he went to Llangollen to see his family’s old friends in their little house there and he came away with a Church of England prayer book in Spanish which had once belonged to the Duke of Ormonde and which he was to study on the voyage out, for linguistic rather than liturgical reasons.⁹

By the time he returned to London his orders had been given him: he was to drive Junot out of Portugal. On 12 July 1808 he set sail for Corunna in the Donegal, soon transferring to the faster Crocodile, with high hopes of doing so.

Assured by the Spanish authorities in Corunna that the French grip on their country was faltering day by day, General Wellesley sailed on in the Crocodile around the coast of Coruña province, coming up with his transports off Cape Finisterre, then sailing down past the shores of Pontevedra to land in Portugal at Oporto by the mouth of the Douro river.¹⁰

The Portuguese were less sanguine than the Spaniards in Corunna; but the Bishop, who was the head of Portugal’s Supreme Junta, was amenable and listened politely to the British General’s request for five hundred mules for the transport of the British army when it landed sixty miles further south in Mondego Bay. The General was most insistent about these animals. Supply, he well knew, would be as vital a consideration in the wide expanses of Spain as it had been in India where, as he said, ‘If I had rice and bullocks I had men, and if I had men I knew I could beat the enemy.’¹¹ The Bishop was clearly surprised by the request for so many animals but agreed to make arrangements to supply them. He was evidently impressed by the bearing and directness of the young General and was clearly much gratified by the proclamation he undertook to give to the Portuguese people, assuring them that their allies, the British, had come to restore their ‘lawful Prince’ to the throne, and guaranteeing the independence of their Kingdom and the preservation of their ‘holy religion’. The General emphasized the need for respect for religious susceptibilities in Portugal in a General Order to his men which forbade them to enter a church during the performance of divine service without permission, and which required them to take off their hats should they wish to enter a place of worship ‘from motives of curiosity’, when a service was not being performed. Officers must remove their hats when the Host passed them in the streets and soldiers must salute. Should the Host pass a guard-post the sentries must turn out and present arms.¹² Soldiers were allowed to attend Mass; but, in fact, as the General was to discover: ‘Although we have whole regiments of Irishmen, and of course Roman Catholics, nobody goes to Mass … I have not seen one soldier perform any act of religious worship, excepting making the sign of the cross to induce the people of the country to give them wine.’¹³

Dismayed as the Bishop may well have been by the irreligion of his allies, he cannot have failed to be gratified by their General’s order as to the respect to be shown to the ‘holy religion’ of his flock. Nor can he have failed to be much gratified, as the General certainly was, by news which reached them from Andalusia.

This news seemed to confirm the blithe optimism of the authorities in Corunna. For east of Córdoba the French General Pierre Antoine Dupont, recently created a count by Napoleon in recognition of his previous successes in the field, had been trapped and forced to surrender by a Spanish force at Baylen.

In expectation of beating the French themselves, the British army, 13,000 strong, began to land on the Portuguese shore of Mondego Bay a hundred miles north of Lisbon in the first week of August 1808. The soldiers, sitting four by four on the thwarts of the heavily laden boats, their packs and muskets gripped tightly between their knees, plunged violently through the Atlantic breakers towards the burning sand of the beach where sailors, the white surf frothing round their thighs, stood naked at the water’s edge, watching the boats sweep forward through the spray. In the instant that the waters rushed back under the foam of a broken wave, the sailors ran out towards the boats to hurl a rope to them.

On shore piles of food and ammunition, equipment and forage lay waiting for transport to take them inland. A harassed German commissary, scribbling an inventory in his notebook, looked in consternation at the guns and wagons, ‘the mountains of ships’ biscuits, haversacks, trusses of hay, barrels of meat and rum, tents’, and all the impedimenta of an invading army. Around him officers shouted orders, sergeants sweated and cursed, soldiers picked about in the wreckage of splintered boats, orderlies looked around for suitable sites for tents, aides-de-camp with nothing better to do paddled barefoot in the surf, while frightened horses, released from weeks of confinement in the dark and stuffy holds of ships, galloped wildly along the shore, snorting, panting, neighing, biting one another, and rolling over in the sand, as dragoons chased after them, bridles in hand.

Brown-skinned peasants, their long hair falling to their shoulders beneath enormous three-cornered hats, carrying goads six feet long, led the Bishop’s bullock carts through the din and muddle, making a fearful screeching noise of their own, a squealing of axles so cacophonous that the German commissary thought the scratching of a knife on a pewter plate was like ‘the sweet sound of a flute’ beside it. Watched by scores of monks and friars carrying huge and luridly coloured umbrellas, the peasants offered pumpkins and figs, grapes and melons, wine and apples for sale to the thirsty troops.

Two days after landing Sir Arthur Wellesley was riding down the road to Leiria in what one of his aides-de-camp noticed was a disconsolate mood. He had received dispatches from London informing him that he was not to command the army after all. It transpired that Lord Castlereagh, and those other Ministers who had supported his claims, had been overborne by the Duke of York and senior officers at the Horse Guards who – with the approval of the King who ‘always stood up for old Generals & disliked aspiring young ones’¹⁴ – demanded that a more senior officer be appointed. Wellesley was, after all, they argued, a very recently promoted lieutenant-general, not yet forty, most of whose experience had been in India. There were numerous other names on the Army List more senior to his. One, indeed, was already in the Peninsula as Governor of Gibraltar. This was Sir Hew Dalrymple, fifty-seven years old, a grandson of Viscount Stair and son of a distinguished Scottish lawyer, a Guards officer who had been promoted major-general as long ago as 1794, though he had only once been on active service. Then there was another veteran Guards officer whose claims to high command could likewise not be ignored, Sir Harry Burrard, who was also in his fifties and had been a reliably Tory Member of Parliament for Lymington for several years as his uncle and grandfather had before him. The appointment of Dalrymple and Burrard to the army in Portugal was not, however, so much to prevent the young Wellesley being given the credit for winning what might prove to be an important battle, as to prevent the command passing into the hands of a man the Government had good cause both to dislike and to fear. This was Sir John Moore, a particularly handsome, upright and tactless man of Whiggish persuasions, somewhat haughty in manner and given to expressing disturbing criticisms of the Government and particularly of the Foreign Office. Moore had been sent to Sweden to help King Gustavus who was threatened not only by France but also by Denmark and Russia. He had quarrelled with the King whose sanity was questionable and had brought his army home. He was now ready to command some other enterprise. It was hoped that if he were told that his services would be welcome in Spain as a subordinate to two other officers whose names would be almost unknown to him he would feel compelled to refuse the opportunity. But this was to reckon without regard to Moore’s strong sense of duty. After a frosty interview with Lord Castlereagh, he agreed to serve under the two Guards officers both of whom were, indeed, senior to him but neither of whom had even a small share of his presence or talent.

Before Moore arrived in the Peninsula, however, and before either of his two superiors reached Portugal, General Wellesley, advancing with six British and one Portuguese brigade, had come across the French near the village of Obidos, on either side of the road to Lisbon. Here his eager skirmishers charged forward with such impulsive excitement that many of them were killed before the enemy, commanded by the astute General Henri François, Comte de Delaborde, choosing not to make a stand, sensibly fell back to a stronger position at Roliça. Anxious to waste no further lives unnecessarily, Wellesley ordered a cautious flanking movement; but his centre, with the impetuosity his skirmishers had shown near Obidos, surged forward before the outflanking manoeuvre had developed. Delaborde withdrew once more, having not only gained valuable time for Junot to concentrate and regroup his forces but also having inflicted nearly 500 casualties on the British army which outnumbered his own almost four to one.

When Wellesley reached Vimeiro, fifteen miles nearer Lisbon, he had been reinforced by about 4,000 British troops who had just landed in the sandy estuary of the river Maceira and thus commanded an army quite capable of beating the one which Junot was marching towards him. He was anxious to attack at once; and he rode down the coast to seek permission to do so from Sir Harry Burrard who had just arrived in the sloop Brazen. Sir Harry demurred; better to wait, he said, until Moore arrived with his 2,000 additional men. He would not himself go ashore for the moment as he had letters to write. ‘I only wish Sir Harry had landed,’ Wellesley gloomily reported to Castlereagh, and had seen things with his own eyes.’¹⁵

His gloom, however, was soon dispelled. The French moved forward that night, and the next day, 21 August, in their white summer uniforms they marched up the hill towards the British line ‘with more confidence’, so Wellesley recalled years later, smiling with satisfaction, ‘seeming to feel their way less than I always found them to do afterwards’. ‘I received them in line,’ he added, ‘which they were not accustomed to.’¹⁶ And after two and a half hours’ bitter fighting, the British victory was complete: the French, who had suffered nearly 2,000 casualties, were everywhere in full retreat.¹⁷ Wellesley, whose own losses were just over 700, turned in his saddle to Sir Harry Burrard, who had come up from the Brazen but had not interfered with his subordinate’s conduct of the battle, having been, as he generously reported to London, ‘perfectly satisfied’ with General Wellesley’s dispositions and ‘the means he proposed to repulse the enemy’.¹⁸ ‘Sir Harry,’ Wellesley said in a loud voice, ‘now is your time to advance. The enemy are completely beaten and we shall be in Lisbon in three days.’¹⁹

Once again Sir Harry demurred. Excessively wary by temperament, he had been made more cautious still by the uniformly unsuccessful expeditions in which he had previously been engaged. Believing that Junot had a stronger force in reserve than Wellesley supposed, he ordered the return of Sir Ronald Ferguson’s brigade which had already been sent in pursuit. Annoyed beyond measure, Wellesley remarked to his staff as he rode away that they might just as well go off to shoot partridge. The next day ‘Dowager’ Dalrymple, as his subordinate was to refer to him, came from Gibraltar to approve of the action that ‘Betty’ Burrard had taken.²⁰

Wellesley’s position, as he told Lord Castlereagh, was now a ‘very delicate one’. He had never met Dalrymple before and it was ‘not a very easy task to advise any man on the first day one meets him’.²¹ It was particularly difficult to offer an opinion to Sir Hew who showed himself not merely unwilling to listen to advice but resentful of its even being offered, especially by a young Irish general of no ingratiating manner. He certainly did not welcome Wellesley’s tart comments during his negotiations with the French General François-Etienne Kellerman, the extraordinarily ugly son of Marshal Kellerman, who rode into the British lines on 22 August, escorted by two squadrons of dragoons carrying white flags, his face patched with bits of black sticking-plaster.²²

The discussions lasted ‘from about half past two till near nine at night, with the exception of a short time [they] sat at dinner’; and Wellesley, by his own account, said little. ‘I beg you will not believe that I had any hand in wording [the armistice],’ he told Lord Castlereagh. ‘It was negotiated by the General himself in my presence and that of Sir Harry Burrard; and after it had been drawn out by Kellerman himself, Sir Hew Dalrymple desired me to sign it.’²³

Wellesley did sign it, commenting that it was ‘an extraordinary paper’, an observation which elicited a cross response from Sir Hew that there was nothing in it which had not been agreed in the negotiations. In its details it was, indeed, an extraordinary document, although Wellesley afterwards admitted that in substance it was defensible. It provided for the evacuation of the French from Portugal; but they were to be taken home in British ships with all their stores and all that they had acquired in the country which they had invaded, including, in the event, much plunder, some of it melted-down plate from Spanish churches.

Anxious to escape from Sir Hew Dalrymple’s jurisdiction as soon as possible, Wellesley made it clear in letters to London that he wanted to go home without delay. He would stay if the Government wished it; but he was ‘sick of all’ that was going on in Portugal and heartily wished he had never left home. Were he to serve in the Peninsula with Sir John Moore, that would be a different matter altogether, even though, as he told Castlereagh, he had ‘been too successful with this army ever to serve with it in a subordinate position’.²⁴ Moore had followed up a warm letter of congratulation to Sir Arthur on his victory at Vimeiro with an offer to ‘waive all pretensions as senior’ and ‘take any part’ that might be offered him ‘for the good of the service’. Sir Arthur himself had no doubt that Moore ought to succeed Dalrymple in command and he offered to write to the Cabinet to say so. But Moore would not allow this: it smacked too much of intrigue.²⁵

So Sir Arthur was more than ever determined to go home. ‘It is quite impossible for me to continue any longer with this army,’ he told Lord Castlereagh; ‘and I wish, therefore, that you would allow me to return home and resume the duties of my office, if I should still be in office, and it is convenient for the Government that I should retain it; or if not, that I should remain upon the Staff in England; or, if that should not be practicable, that I should remain without employment.’ In effect, he would do anything rather than remain in Portugal under the command of generals whom he described in a private letter as being of ‘stupid incapacity’.²⁶

He could certainly not look forward to a hero’s welcome in England, however. His victory at Vimeiro had been heavily overcast by what was seen in England as the subsequent disgrace of the Convention of Cintra to which he had been a party.

‘I arrived here this day, and I don’t know whether I am to be hanged drawn & quartered, or roasted alive,’ he wrote to his brother Richard from Harley Street on 4 October, having landed at Plymouth a few hours before. ‘However I shall not allow the Mob of London to deprive me of my temper or my spirits; or of the satisfaction which I feel in the consciousness that I acted right.’²⁷

It was not only the displeasure of the London mob, however, that he had cause to apprehend. The many enemies of his too successful family were making the most of their opportunity to blacken the Wellesley name. The Duke of Richmond told Sir Arthur not to bother about the ‘whispers of those who dislike the name of Wellesley’; but it was difficult to ignore the barbs of such men as Samuel Whitbread, the rich brewer and Radical Member for Bedford, who rejoiced ‘to see the Wellesley pride a little lowered’,²⁸ and William Cobbett, that other leading Radical, a former sergeant-major in the Army and publisher of the influential Weekly Political Register, who confessed himself to be delighted to have the ‘rascals on the hip’. It was evident, Cobbett wrote, that Sir Arthur Wellesley was ’the prime cause – the only cause – of all the mischief, and that from the motive of thwarting everything after he was superseded. Thus do we pay for the arrogance of that damned infernal family.’²⁹

In the columns of his Weekly Political Register, Cobbett went so far as to declare that Sir Arthur Wellesley had come home ‘for the purpose of avoiding another meeting’ with the French.

Sir Arthur Wellesley claimed that he read the abuse of himself ‘with as much indifference as [he did] that of the great General’, Sir Hew Dalrymple. But his brothers did not hide their distress at the charges and insults to which the family was being subjected. William spent his time ‘cursing and swearing’; Henry fell ill; Richard at first wept, then, in Arthur’s words, took to whoring.* Even Arthur, indifferent to previous insults as he had contrived to appear, was stung painfully enough by Cobbett’s charges of cowardice to threaten suing him for libel.³⁰ He also appears to have followed Richard’s example and, censorious of Richard’s ‘whoring’ as he was in his letters to William, to have sought relief in his agitation in the arms of Harriette Wilson. At least Harriette Wilson maintained that this was so; and, if it was, he surely found her body more exciting than she claimed to have found his conversation:

‘Do you know,’ said I to him one day,’ do you know the world talks about hanging you?’

‘Eh?’

‘They say you will be hanged in spite of all your brother Wellesley can say in your defence.’

‘Ha!!’ said [he] very seriously, ‘What paper do you read?’

‘It is the common talk of the day,’ I replied …

He called on me the next morning before I had finished my breakfast. I tried him on every subject I could muster. On all, he was most impenetrably taciturn. At last he started an original idea of his own.

‘I wonder you do not get married, Harriette!’

(By the by, ignorant people are always wondering.)

‘Why so?’

He however, gives no reason for anything unconnected with fighting, at least since the convention of Cintra; and he, therefore, again became silent. Another burst of attic sentiment blazed forth.

‘I was thinking of you last night, after I got into bed.’

‘How very polite to [Lady Wellesley],’ I observed. ‘Apropos to marriage, how do you like it?’

[Sir Arthur] who seems to make a point of never answering one, continued, ‘I was thinking – I was thinking that you will get into some scrape.’

‘Nothing so serious as marriage neither, I hope!’

‘I must come again tomorrow, to give you a little advice.’

‘Oh, let us have it all out now, and have done with it.’

‘I cannot,’ he said putting on his gloves and taking a hasty leave of me.

I am glad he is off, thought I, for this is indeed very uphill work. This is worse than Lord Craven.³¹