The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (17 page)

He was destined for India—and for a lad who had not been studious, he packed an impressive library of books to take with him, everything from Plutarch to Hume's
History of England
and Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations
; from books on India and its wars, the East India Company and Egypt (along with grammars to teach himself German, Persian, and Arabic) to a plethora of books on the military arts; from divertimentos like the works of Jonathan Swift, Dr. Johnson's
Dictionary
, and Voltaire to Blackstone's
Commentaries on the Laws of England
and a selection of works from John Locke and
Viscount Bolingbroke. (He packed a voluminous library on his return trip, too, though it leant more heavily on romantic novels.) In a hard-drinking age, British officers in India were known to drink even harder; but Wellesley, while far from abstemious in drink (though he was always a light eater with an intentionally dull palate), did not want to fritter away his time with a bottle; he wanted action, and if he couldn't get it, he studied to make himself a master of Indian affairs: civil, economic, geographical, agricultural, and military. He soon had an ally in his yearning for active service; his brother Richard, the future Marquess Wellesley, was named India's governor-general, and Arthur became, de facto, his chief military adviser. Britain's portion of the Indian subcontinent—which was not yet unified under the British Raj—was now in the hands of the Wellesleys.

In 1798, Arthur helped lead the conquest of Mysore—whose Muslim sultan had been conspiring with the French—and was rewarded by being named governor of the state (“I must say that I was the
fit
person to be selected”
³
). He had no affection for the Indians—he thought them absent of redeeming qualities—but he respected their customs and ruled with a temperate, conciliatory, and responsible hand, smiting warlords and brigands and punishing his own troops when they misbehaved. As he put it, the British army was “placed in this country to protect the inhabitants, not to oppress them.”
⁴
He also put his study of Indian languages to good use. Once in conversation with a rajah, he caught out an Indian interpreter mistranslating what he said.

In 1802, promoted to major-general, he led the campaign to restore the pro-British ruler of the Mahratta confederacy and depose his usurper. With that achieved, in early 1803, it became apparent that two Mahratta chieftains, with French-trained armies, were committed to causing trouble. At the village of Assaye, on 23 September 1803, he met the enemy. Wellesley's force was a mere 7,000; he was outnumbered in infantry by six to one, in artillery by at least five to one, in cavalry twenty to one, his men had
marched more than twenty miles, and his guides informed him there were no fords across the river that blocked his way. But Wellesley did his own scouting and found the ford. He brought his men across it and in the subsequent battle was everywhere in the fighting, directing troops into line, ordering a flanking maneuver, having two horses shot beneath him, ever maintaining a cool disposition and a steady nerve. The result was a smashing victory, if at a heavy cost. Wellesley considered it his finest performance in the field; and a bloodier battle for the numbers, he said, he had never seen. There was plenty of courage to admire that day, including that of one British cavalry officer who charged into combat with his horse's reins between his teeth (he had lost an arm in previous combat; his other arm was broken but grimly trying to raise a sabre). Wellesley suffered in excess of 1,500 casualties, more than a third of them Britons, and inflicted nearly four times as many. He pursued the enemy and, with the capture of the Mahratta fortress of Gawilghur, brought the British victory in the Second Mahratta War (1803–05).

Wellesley spent eight years in India, and though he returned home with his brother in 1805 a hero and was made a Knight Companion of the Order of the Bath, he was happy to be done with the subcontinent. India could be profitable, but Indian service was not highly regarded at Horse Guards or in Whitehall. The real enemy was Napoleon; the main battle front was Europe, and Wellesley wanted to be a part of it.

There were also political battles to fight. Wellesley, as a member of Parliament, spoke most often on matters where he had some expertise—India, military affairs, the defense of his brother's administration. But his primary goal was to return to command. The British government was looking to attack Napoleon and his allies at any vulnerable point. There was even talk in the cabinet of seizing Mexico from Spain, then France's ally, though Wellesley had to advise against it, as he also advised against supporting revolutions in Latin America, thinking it a terrible responsibility to stir up civil strife: as an arch-Tory nothing was more hateful to him.

Instead of fighting in the land of sombreros, he became chief secretary for Ireland. Though an Anglo-Irishman himself, Wellesley recognized that the mood in Dublin had changed—or at least was far different from how he remembered it. The Irish were almost uniformly oblivious to the benefits of union with Britain and were all for independence, which convinced him of the need for firm government. Independence was impossible; Ireland was already a target for landings by the French; and without a British government in Ireland, the back door to the invasion of England was left wide open. He was equally firm in his belief that sectarian discord had to be undone, that Protestants and Catholics had to be treated as indistinguishable subjects of the Crown.

His political service in Ireland did not keep him from military service abroad. He took part in the hugely successful invasion of Denmark and
capture of Copenhagen, which was done to seize the Danish fleet and keep it from Napoleon's hands. More important for the Wellington legend was the popular revolt (1808) against the Napoleonic occupation of Spain, followed by a revolt in Portugal. If India had been Wellesley's training ground, the Peninsular War is where he honed his talents into a form of genius, proving that he understood the political considerations of strategy, the need to make do with the resources available, how to handle allies, the crucial importance of supply, and how to maneuver and arrange his troops (well-positioned, dogged infantry was his specialty, artillery was used to support them, and he was almost contemptuous of cavalry
⁵
). He told his friend John Wilson Croker that he had seen French troops in action before and they were “capital soldiers.” Moreover, “a dozen years of victory under Buon-aparte must have made them better still. They have besides, it seems, a new system of strategy which out-manoeuvred and overwhelmed all the armies of Europe.” But, he added, “if what I hear of their system of manoeuvre is true, I think it is a false one as against steady troops. I suspect all the continental armies were more than half beaten before the battle was begun—I, at least, will not be frightened beforehand.”
⁶

Landing in Portugal in 1809, Wellesley delivered a smashing victory at Vimeiro and was halted from charging on to Lisbon by one of his superiors, though Wellesley thought the capital could be had in three days. Another such superior, Hew Dalrymple, then negotiated a French evacuation of such sweeping generosity that it became a matter of parliamentary investigation (which rightfully cleared Wellesley of any blame—he had not been involved in the negotiations and had been taken aback when he read the terms).

The political investigation compelled his attendance in London. When he returned to Portugal in 1809, his chief supporter in the cabinet—a fellow Anglo-Irish Tory, Lord Castlereagh—had won him supreme command. Wellesley, always outnumbered, shoved the French out of Portugal and Spain. His string of victories, “Vimeiro, Busaco, Torres Vedras, Talavera, Badjoz, Fuentes de Onoro, the Arapiles, Vittoria and the battles of the Pyrenees—these names,” writes the historian Geoffrey Treasure, “so glorious in British military history, were but the great landmarks in six years of
campaigns; there were to be arduous trials and sharp setbacks, but no defeats.”
⁷
The victories were capped by his being made a duke in May 1814, the year Napoleon abdicated.

His military work apparently done, Wellington, as he now was, became Britain's ambassador to France,
⁸
and then a representative at the Congress of Vienna (filling in for his ally Lord Castlereagh). He advocated magnanimity towards the French, who had their own important role to play in the Concert of Europe. The performance of that concert, however, was temporarily delayed by the return from exile of Napoleon—until Wellington thrashed him definitively in the Battle of Waterloo (1815). He then set himself to the erection and maintenance of a conservative monarchical Europe that would squash revolutionary sentiment. The Concert of Europe, which he helped conduct, preserved Europe from any continental conflagration for a hundred years—until the First World War.

At home, he was equally conservative. In 1828 he became prime minister and carried through the 1829 Catholic Relief Act, which allowed Catholics elected to Westminster to take their parliamentary seats. This, he trusted, would help reconcile Ireland to its union with Britain. As a rule, though, he was opposed to the idea of “reform,” saying, “Beginning reform is beginning revolution.”
⁹
Wellington was adamant against extending the franchise or weakening the veto power of the House of Lords; just as he was opposed to abolishing flogging or the purchase of commissions in the Army. As an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, he had a firm belief in the aristocratic principle and also in the dreadfulness of the lower orders of humanity (whose depravity he had seen all too vividly displayed when his officers lost control of their men, and let the “scum of the earth” get drunk and pillage). Yet he was, unlike some of his colleagues, a realist and a pragmatist, a hard-line
conservative of moderate sentiments who knew when to bend rather than break.

He was, all in all, a perfect imperial Englishman: unflappable amidst shells and musket fire; imperturbable (but showing emotion, though with shame, when he surveyed the carnage of a battlefield and wept over the dead, as he did at Badjoz); immovable against threats (“publish and be damned,” as he famously told a courtesan trying to blackmail him
¹⁰
); certain of the inferiority of foreigners, yet solicitous of the welfare and respectful of the customs of those under his protection; clipped, brief, and direct in speech; a man of firm prejudices based on experience and disdainful of ideology; an authoritarian in politics but with the goal of preserving Britain's liberal constitution. As he himself put it, he believed in maintaining “the prerogatives of the Crown, the rights and privileges of the Church and its union with the State; and these principles are not inconsistent with a determination to do everything in my power to secure the liberty and promote the prosperity and happiness of the people.”
¹¹
That, to the best of his ability, is precisely what he did wherever he served the British Empire.