Wellington (34 page)

There were other successes during his time as prime minister, notably the creation of the Metropolitan Police in the summer of 1829. However, most politicians believed that the administration could not survive for long without the Canning-ites, lost with Huskisson’s resignation, and the Ultras, who had opposed emancipation. Indeed, had it not been for Wellington’s famous luck, which kept the opposition in disarray, he might have been in greater difficulties sooner. Things were not well at Stratfield Saye, where he found house parties composed of strangers, and even Douro (now twenty-three and falling in love with rare facility), warned his mother about ‘your dress being inconsistent with your station in the world’.
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Wellington found a refuge that year when the king appointed him Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, an office ‘of great influence and power but without any salary’. It brought with it an official residence, Walmer Castle, mid-way between Dover and Deal. One of the coast defences erected by Henry VIII in the 1540s, with great squat round towers to mount what was then the newfangled artillery, Walmer had comfortable, if often elliptically-walled rooms, and a bracing sea air. The duke loved it, and it was there that he ‘found most time to indulge in his lifelong affection for children, one of his great charms’.
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A boy who had to leave his pet toad behind when he was sent away to school received the duke’s regular reports on the creature’s well-being, and a child playing in the garden was greeted benevolently: ‘You are a very nice little fellow, when you are old enough I will get you a commission in the Guards.’ ‘But I’m a girl, Mr Dook,’ it replied.
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That autumn he wrote glumly of ‘complaints from all quarters’. The fall of agricultural prices since Waterloo created a worsening depression in the countryside, and too much of the burgeoning population of the towns (many, like Manchester, Bradford and Birmingham, still unrepresented in parliament) survived on the narrowest of margins. He was also drawn into the debate on army reform. In April 1829, he wrote a lengthy paper setting out his own deeply held views on discipline, arguing that the British army, unlike continental forces raised by conscription, was:

an exotic in England … disliked by the inhabitants, particularly by the higher orders, who never allow one of their family to serve in it. Even the common people will make an exertion to fund means to purchase the discharge of a relation who may have enlisted …
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He believed that it required ‘the gentleman officer’ to provide gallant and selfless leadership, backed by professional non-commissioned officers, and ‘that we should stand firm upon the establishment of our discipline, as it is’. He gave firm evidence to the Royal Commission on Military Punishments, arguing that drink was invariably ‘the great parent of all crime in the British Army’ and declaring that it was ‘out of the question’ that he could have preserved discipline in the forces he commanded without recourse to flogging.
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Although flogging divided opinion within both army and society, the duke’s argument struck a chord even with some private soldiers. John Spencer Cooper, for one, agreed with him.

It is frequently stated that the Duke of Wellington was severe. In answer to this, I would say that he could not have been otherwise. His army was composed of the lowest orders. Many, if not the most of them, were ignorant, idle, and drunken.
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The duke’s administration rumbled on into 1830, although he was increasingly sick of being at its head, and told Harriet Arbuthnot that he was considering standing aside in favour of Peel, soon to inherit his father’s baronetcy and appear as Sir Robert. The king was visibly failing, and did nothing for his constitution by eating prodigious quantities of food and swigging laudanum for a bladder complaint. He died on 26 June, and Wellington, one of his executors, was at once involved in the delicate business of sorting out the late king’s secret and illegal (though canonically valid) marriage to Maria Fitzherbert, whose portrait Wellington saw hanging round the dead king’s neck beneath the nightshirt in which he had demanded to be buried. The modest Mrs Fitzherbert was paid off with £6,000 a year. Less easy was the scandal arising from the suggestion that a half-pay captain, Thomas Garth, the illegitimate son of Princess Sophia, the Duke of Cumberland’s sister, had in fact been fathered upon her by Cumberland himself. Welllington staved off Garth’s attempt at blackmail: Garth disappeared to France, and the papers disappeared for ever. It is now clear, however, that a royal equerry, not Cumberland, was the author of the princess’s misfortunes.

Although Charles Greville reported that ‘the new King began very well’, before long it was clear that William IV was going on rather badly. He had been a professional naval officer, and his salty manner of ‘Getting a Grip’ quickly caused unease. He shouted to the assembled generals and admirals to get in step at his brother’s funeral, and bellowed ‘this is a damned bad pen you have given me’ when signing his first declaration.
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He confirmed Wellington’s government in office, but there had to be a general election with the change of monarch, and the opposition seized the opportunity to make parliamentary reform its major issue. The votes were nearly in when there was news of a revolution in Paris, where Charles X, son of Louis, Wellington’s ‘walking sore’, had been brought down by the Paris mob and replaced by the same Duc d’Orléans Wellington had briefly considered as an alternative monarch during the Hundred Days of 1815. In Britain, radicals declared that if the French could have the parliament they wanted, so too could their own countrymen. In fact the Tories won the election, though against an ugly background of machine-breaking and rick-burning in a countryside worn to a thread by the depression.

In September, Wellington went up to Manchester for the opening of the Liverpool-Manchester railway, and doubtless to assess the climate in the industrial north and reinforce his own party’s resources there before the new parliamentary session opened in early November. The duke duly enjoyed his first ride on a train, and near Liverpool, when the train stopped to take on water, he was introduced to his old rival Huskisson, the local MP. They had just shaken hands when another engine – George Stephenson’s
Rocket
– approached on the other track. Huskisson tried to get out of the way, but he was ‘slow and heavy’. The engine knocked him down, and a wheel went over his leg. Although he was carried to a house nearby, there was no hope for him. Greville thought that ‘he died the death of a great man, suffering torments, but always resigned, calm, collected …’ The whole affair was profoundly shocking, with Huskisson ‘crushed to death in sight of his wife and at the feet (as it were) of his great political rival …’
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Wellington was upset, and was only persuaded to continue his journey when told that the mob might turn dangerous if he did not appear. It was clear that Huskisson’s death would have a profound effect on politics, leaving his former followers ‘at liberty to join either the Opposition or the Government’.

Wellington did his best to marshal his forces for the new session, but soon saw that if he included Whigs and Canning-ites he would lose Ultras, and vice-versa. ‘I saw that it was a question of noses,’ he told Lady Salisbury later, ‘that as many as I gained on the one side I should lose on the other.’ And he himself was firmly persuaded that reform was both unnecessary and ‘injurious to … society …’
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He had never been a man for wild charges, but launched one when the new session opened. The opposition leader Lord Grey spoke graciously and moderately, saying that he was not wedded to any particular reform measure, and Wellington, in reply, began as generously. Then the reins slipped through his fingers, and he was carried away:

Under these circumstances I am not prepared to bring forward any measure of the description alluded to by the noble Lord. And I am not only not prepared to bring forward any measure of this nature, but I will at once declare that … I shall always feel it my duty to resist such measures when proposed by others.
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He sat down to a stunned silence, and muttered to Aberdeen, his foreign secretary, ‘I have not said too much, have I?’ The speech, setting his party against any measure of reform, shocked parliament and nation. Wellington immediately found himself receiving assassination threats from ‘Captain Swing’, spectral leader of rioting agricultural labourers, and well-wishers warned him that his life was at risk.

On 15 November the government was defeated in the Commons on a relatively minor matter, and that night Wellington, entertaining the Prince of Orange at a large dinner in Apsley House, was summoned downstairs to meet Peel and two other ministers who told him that he must resign. The cabinet went to St James’s Palace the following morning, and the king received them ‘with the greatest kindness, shed tears, but accepted their resignations without remonstrance’.
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The duke was out of office but not out of work. He was lord-lieutenant of Hampshire, where Captain Swing was hard at his smoky work, and set off ‘for my County, to do what I can to restore order and peace,’ adding that ‘in Parliament, when I can, I will approve; when I cannot, I will dissent, but I will never agree to be the leader of a faction.’
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He also turned his attention to the Tower of London, of which he had been made Constable in 1826, ordering that the noisome moat should be cleared of sewage and that the Tower’s doctor should either do his job or resign. The yeoman warders were to be recruited from former NCOs, ‘a respectable Class of Men’, who richly deserved his patronage. There was the enduring backwash of another family scandal. His nephew William, sacked as an aide-de-camp in the Peninsula, was now, after marriage to an heiress, William Long-Wellesley, but having squandered his wife’s fortune, he decamped with Mrs Helena Bligh who bore him a son and the shock of the news had killed off William’s wife. The duke became guardian of William’s children, but there were still more troubles, ‘poignant commentary’, as Elizabeth Longford puts it, ‘on the fate of a loveless family with a drive towards self-extinction’.
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In the wider world, the duke was uneasy about being in opposition. However, when Lord John Russell rose in the House of Commons on 1 March 1831 and introduced the Reform Bill, he was clear in his mind: he could now see the enemy quite clearly. He declared that ‘from the period of the adoption of that measure will date the downfall of the Constitution.’ Although the bill was carried by the Commons with a majority of one, its fate looked uncertain in the committee stages, and Lord Grey urged the king to dissolve parliament to avoid the bill being defeated. At first William declined to act, but when he heard on 22 April that a Tory peer had tabled a motion that parliament should not be dissolved, he swept down to Westminster – the crown had to be brought from the Tower and his robes from a portrait painter’s – and duly dissolved Parliament.

Wellington was not in the Lords to see the near-brawl that was afoot, with Lord Mansfield screaming abuse and Lord Londonderry brandishing a whip at Lord Richmond, when the king entered. Kitty was dying and now, with the pillars of the world he understood rocking around him, Wellington wanted to be at her bedside. We cannot tell whether her last illness was cholera or cancer, but its progress brought husband and wife together. Kitty, pale and frail on her bed amidst the trophies of the duke’s glory, still rejoiced in the accomplishments of her hero. And as they held hands, she ran a finger up his sleeve to find if he was still wearing an amulet she had once given him. ‘She found it,’ Wellington told a friend, ‘as she would have found it any time these past twenty years, had she cared to look for it.’ How strange it was, he mused, that people could live together for half a lifetime and only understand one another at the end.
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News of the dissolution brought out an exultant mob that attacked the duke’s home and smashed the windows – it ‘did not care one pin for the poor Duchess being dead in the house’ – and was driven off only when a servant fired blunderbusses over their heads. It deepened Wellington’s distaste for the crowd, ‘the mob run mad, and rotten to the core’. The reformers won a huge election victory, but Wellington was unabashed by parliamentary rout or public hostility. Now, even travelling down to Walmer was risky. George Gleig, behaving more like the subaltern he used to be than the reverend gentleman he had become, accompanied him on the journey and was glad to find:

eight well-mounted men of Kent, who immediately broke into two parties, four riding about 100 yards in front of the carriage, while the others followed. They all carried heavy hunting whips, and were besides armed with pistols, as I found were likewise the duke and his servant. But no enemy appeared. The carriage swept up to the old castle gate, and the voluntary escort, having seen the Duke safe, dispersed without attracting attention.
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If he had lost the Commons, he could still find a majority in the Lords, who voted down a new bill in October. But far from settling the issue, this simply increased the frenzy, and Wellington’s windows were smashed again. This time the duke was at home, working at his writing table, and one stone narrowly missed his head and broke a glass-fronted bookcase behind him. Elsewhere there was serious rioting: half the city centre of Bristol was burnt down, and hundreds died when troops eventually restored order. Wellington told FitzRoy Somerset, still soldiering on as military secretary at Horse Guards, that weak leadership was the problem: ‘Remember (and Bristol is an example) that an Army of Stags with a Lion at its head is better than an army of Lions with a Stag at its Head.’
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Undaunted by the defeat of the previous two measures, on 12 December Russell introduced a third Reform Bill into the Commons, only to see it too voted into oblivion by the Lords on 14 April 1832. Greville disapproved of the duke’s continued resistance, but dined with him in May and recorded that: