Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (72 page)

²
McGrigor,
304
-5.

³
To Col. Peacocke,
26th
Oct.,
1809.
Gurwood.

4
To Brig.-Gen. Craufurd,
23rd
July,
1810.
Gurwood.

newspapers, encouraging the anti-war Opposition and conveying valuable information to the French, but aroused partisan feelings in the field. These Wellesley would have none of; his wish, he stated, was to be the head of an army not a party, and to employ indiscriminately those who could best serve the public, be they who they might.

Yet his discipline was never negative. He made it his business to teach his officers the same meticulous care and attention to duty in which he had schooled himself. Success, he told them, could only be attained by attention to minute detail and by tracing every part of an operation from its origin to its conclusion, point by point. An indefatigable worker, he expected every one about him to be so too. He made it a rule, he said, always to do the work of the day in the day. Regular habits, a superb constitution and a well-regulated mind had been the foundations of all his triumphs. " When I throw off my clothes," he once remarked, " I throw off my cares, and, when I turn in my bed, it is time to turn out."
¹
He taught his army to do the same.

At the root of this punctilious, fastidious, clear-sighted man's nature was a deep and abiding sense of duty. It was not an inspired and burning passion like Moore's or Nelson's; Arthur Wellesley made no pretence of being at home in such altitudes. But, though his feet were firmly planted on his mother earth—one on the battlefield and the other in Bond Street—he was inherently a man of his salt. He spoke the truth, honoured his bond and kept faith. He regarded a lie as an act of cowardice and a breach of promise as a vulgar betrayal. He had learnt to eradicate these easy frailties from his own character, just as he had taught himself to be frugal and reticent, in his youth when he had had to master his Irish ebullience and artist's sensitivity in order to survive in a
milieu
of thrustful elder brothers and inadequate family resources. Adherence to bond and duty was not so much a natural bent of his rather mysterious nature—in which ran suppressed rivers of deep emotion—as a close-fitting mask which he had early donned in self-protection and to which in due course his own features had come to conform. Yet it was one which, like his talent for economy, perfectly served his country's need. He spared himself no care or labour which could further her ends'and made every man and every penny go as far as man or penny could go.

In November, 1809, at the close of his second Peninsular campaign, he was a slight, upright, wiry-looking man of forty with keen grey eyes and an aquiline nose. His habitual dress, though neat to the

¹
Leaves from the Diary
of
an Officer,
37.
He always got up directly he was called.

point of dandyism, was almost consciously unostentatious: a plain blue frock coat, a small, glazed, cocked hat without feathers, a short cape and strapped grey trousers. He eschewed plumes and gold lace, went about without a Staff, and was usually followed at a discreet distance by a single orderly. He liked seeing things for himself without fuss. " Our post," wrote one of his junior officers, " was next the enemy. I found, when anything was to be done, that it was his also."
¹

At this time the Commander-in-Chief was far from popular. In England the glamour of his early victories had faded. He was blamed for the rashness of his summer campaign, the loss of his wounded and the hardships of the retreat from Talavera. His family was assailed by Opposition pamphleteers as a tribe of proud, rapacious Irish Tories with greedy fingers in every public pie; his brilliant elder brother, Lord Wellesley—a Spanish grandee grafted on an Irish potato, as the Prince of Wales called him
²
—was almost the best-hated man in England with his intolerable viceregal airs, his notorious debts, his "common whore," Sally Douglas, who, rumour said, he had taken in state on his mission to Spain.
³
Arthur Wellesley's own elevation to the peerage after Talavera as Viscount Wellington was regarded as a Tory job, and the £2000 a year pension voted him in Parliament was publicly attacked by the Common Council of the City of London. Even his army, unable to understand the broader issues underlying the campaign of 1809, thought of him as a rash Irishman, a brilliant tacti
cian but no strategist, who had
gambled away the lives of his men at Talavera and callously allowed them to rot in the Guadiana marshes to please his Spanish allies. A surgeon at the military hospital at Lisbon told Charles Napier that Lord Wellington deserved hanging for his reckless waste of life.

Yet those who were brought into contact with him seldom retained such impressions for long. He was so industrious, clearheaded, sensible and efficient. For everything he did he had a reason and, when he chose to explain it in his clear, lucid way, it always proved unanswerable. As he himself wrote of Marlborough, he was remarkable for his cool, steady understanding.
⁴
If any of his senior officers quarrelled—as in those days of hot tempers, hard drinking and prickly honour they were very apt to do—he was always ready with his moderation, balance and good sense to compose the difference.
"A
part of my business and perhaps not the most easy part,"

¹
Kincaid,
14.
²
Creeve
y, I,
129.

³
Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(ed. Griggs),
24;
Paget Brothers,
143.

⁴
Stanhope,
Conversations,
31.

he told the fiery Craufurd, who had conceived a grievance against a brother officer, "is to prevent discussions and disputes between the officers who may happen to serve under my command.
...
I hope that this letter may reach you in time to induce you to refrain from sending me the paper which you inform me you have written."
¹

For here was a Commander-in-Chief who did not stand upon ceremony or take personal offence. It was hard to quarrel with him: he saw your point of view while clarifying and enforcing his own. "You and I necessarily take a different view of these questions," he told Craufurd, " I must view them in all their relations; your view of them is naturally confined to their relation with your own immediate command." Much of his time was spent in trying to adapt impossible War Office and Treasury regulations to the exigencies of a Continental campaign for which they had never been designed. Yet he refused to inveigh against them needlessly or to allow his subordinates to do so; all that could be done, he told the latter, was that they should assist each other as much and clash as little as possible. Adhering steadfastly to his chosen path, he was always ready to compromise on inessentials: to go down metaphorically on his knees, as he had done before Cuesta at Talavera. "Half the business of the world," he wrote, "particularly that of our country, is done by accommodation and by the parties understanding each other."
²

This genius for being reasonable, coupled with his clarity and common sense, enabled Wellington—unlike most men habituated to discipline and comma
nd—to deal with politicians. Bei
ng free from Moore's troublesome sense of moral indignation, he never made them uncomfortable with tedious reiterations of principle. So long as they ultimately came along with him, he always allowed them a way to wriggle round their difficulties. And though he left them in no doubt as to what he wanted and meant to do—there is nothing in life, he once remarked, like a clear definition—he never expected or asked them to do the impossible. "In my situation," he told a colleague, " I am bound to consider not only what is expedient but what is practicable."
³
He remembered that Ministers had to do so too. He realised that they were harried and abused in Parliament and the country, that there was a shortage of money and troops. He made no more claims on them than were absolutely essential, told them the exact truth and explained, in language which the busiest fool could understand, the common-sense reasons for his requests.

¹
To Brig.-Gen. Craufurd,
29th
May,
1810.
Gurwood.

2
To Rt. Hon.
j.
Villiers,
20th
Sept.,
1809.
Gurwood.

³
To
Rl
Hon.
j.
Villiers,
6th
Dec,
1809.
Gurwood.

He only pressed them when he had to: "would it be fair or indeed honest in me," he wrote to the British Ambassador at Lisbon, " to ask for a man more than I thought absolutely necessary."

For, frigid and almost inhuman though he sometimes seemed, Wellington had a curiously detached sense of justice. He could be just even in his own cause. Having explained to Lord Liverpool exactly why he needed transports in the Tagus, he added that none of his reasons were worth anything if the ships were needed elsewhere. Such moderation, despite the sacrifices it involved, had its reward. It established a sense of confidence between Cabinet and General: made them conscious of their mutual dependence. When Wellington really needed support from England he could rely on receiving everything that was available.

Thus it came about that, while the ordinary Englishman despaired of Portugal and expected nothing better than an evacuation,
¹
a Government with a precarious majority accepted Wellington's contention that it should be held. This was the more praiseworthy in that any fighting there was bound to be defensive and could offer few prospects of political glory. But after seventeen years of almost unbroken war British statesmen were at last learning how to wage it. " We must make our opinion," the War Secretary wrote," between a steady and continued exertion upon a moderate scale and a great and extraordinary effort for a limited time which neither our military nor financial means will enable us to maintain permanently. If it could be hoped that the latter would bring the contest to a speedy and successful conclusion, it would certainly be the wisest course; but unfortunately the experience of the last fifteen years is not encouraging in this respect."
²
Instead of seeking in every corner of the globe like their predecessors for opportunities "to give a good impression of the war in England," Ministers, therefore, concentrated on building up expanding strength in Portugal. In this they were helped by the fact that in the fifth year after Trafalgar and Austerlitz there was not much left outside Europe for them to conquer and nowhere inside it save Portugal where they could even hope to retain a footing. The capture of the last French Caribbean islands in the summer of 1809 released the garrisons of no less than seventeen British stations for service elsewhere. By the following summer a small but steady flow of reinforcements was heading for Portugal from every corner of the world.

Yet the growth of this confidence and support was a gradual

¹
"The people here are
become indifferent to that country." (Sydenham to
Wellesley
,
19th
Sept.,
1809),
.Wellesle
y, I,
258.
See
also Lennox, II,
228, 233.
"Quit it we must." (Lady Sarah Napier,
19th
Dec,
1809.)

²
Fortescue, VII,
562.

thing and largely of Wellington's own creation. The Lord Liverpool who became the War Secretary of the Peninsular campaign was the despised Hawkesbury of the Peace of Amiens and Addington's Administration. His own and his chief's tenure of office were so slender that they had at first to trim their sails to every parliamentary wind. " The Government are terribly afraid that I shall get them and myself into a scrape," Wellington wrote in April, 1810, "but what can be expected from men who are beaten, in the House of Commons three times a week ?
^M1
Yet, though he did not expect them to last for more than a few months, he calmly took the responsibility of urgin
g them to cling to Portugal, kn
owing that if he failed the full weight of the disaster would fall on his own head. At the best the defensive campaign he was planning could win him little credit —one, as he said, in which there could be few brilliant events and in which he was almost bound to lose the little reputation he had. " I am perfectly aware," he wrote, "of the risks which I incur personally, whatever may be the result of the operations in Portugal. All 1 beg is that, if I am to be responsible, I may be left to the exercise of my own judgment."
²