Authors: Richard Holmes
He told Richard that he longed for military employment: ‘it is such an object to me to serve with some of the European armies that I have written to Lord Grenville upon the subject; & I hope that he will speak to the Duke of York’.
12
He had no illusions about the jobs he might get, assuring Richard that: ‘I don’t want a Chief Command if it cannot be given to me … I should be very sorry to stay at home when others go abroad, only because I cannot command in Chief.’
13
The war was not going well. Napoleon beat the Prussians in the double battle of Jena-Auerstadt in October 1806 and went on to occupy Berlin. However, in July, Lieutenant General Sir John Stuart had beaten the French General Reynier in a scrambling little battle at Maida, in southern Italy. It was hardly Austerlitz, but it did help persuade Arthur, sent a detailed report of the action from a friend who was there, that French columns could indeed be seen off by a British line.
In March 1807 the government, unsettled by the death of Fox, fell, and the king summoned the sick and drowsy Duke of Portland to form a new administration. The Duke of Richmond was to be lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and Arthur was offered the post of chief secretary for Ireland with a salary of £6,566 a year. He accepted it only on the condition that he would be allowed to relinquish it at short notice if a command became available, and duly moved with Kitty and their month-old son, Arthur Richard, to the chief secretary’s house in Dublin’s Phoenix Park.
Ireland had changed greatly since his last visit. As a result of the rebellion of 1798, Pitt had become convinced that constitutional union between Britain and Ireland was the answer to the Irish question. The government deployed all its patronage of ‘jobs, places and peerages’ to gain support, for the union was opposed by most ascendancy politicians as well as by nationalist parliamentarians like Grattan. In 1800, the Irish parliament voted itself into oblivion, and a reduced number of Irish constituencies were thenceforth represented at Westminster. But the viceroy and his court survived, and ‘above all the Castle continued; with its complex machinery of patronage and contacts, manipulated politically by the Chief Secretary and administratively by the Under Secretary …’
14
The balance of power was still ‘invincibly Protestant’, and ‘the wretched cabins remained eternally unaltered, with the same ragged families inside, the same sprouting weeds on the roof, and the same holy pictures on the walls …’
15
Arthur recognised that ‘a good use of the patronage of the government’ was essential to the preservation of power, and no sooner had he arrived than he found himself marshalling that patronage in the Tory interest for the 1807 elections. He saw that there was no prospect of altering the laws that bore down upon the Catholics – the king’s steadfast resistance to any such reform had finished the previous ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ – but he told Lord Fingall, a Catholic nobleman, that they would be enforced ‘with mildness and good temper’.
16
Above all, he believed that the union was deeply unpopular. ‘Show me an Irishman,’ he declared later, ‘and I’ll show you a man whose anxious wish is to see his country independent of Great Britain.’
17
He thought that no political concession would alter this spirit, and that the Irish looked eagerly towards a French invasion, which would enable them to throw off the English yoke. He argued then, as he was to argue at Westminster twenty years on, that the worst thing that could befall any country was civil strife. The political supremacy of Britain over Ireland had to be maintained at all costs, and steps taken to deal with a French descent. ‘I lay it down as decided that Ireland,’ he wrote, ‘in a view to military operations, must be considered as an enemy’s country …’
18
In the spring of 1807, Wellesley heard that the government was planning an expedition to Denmark, and forced Castlereagh’s hand by declaring that he would not stay in Ireland whether or not he was given a command. On 24 July, he told the Duke of Richmond that he had been offered a post if the expedition did go ahead. ‘I don’t know, and I have not asked,’ he wrote, ‘whether I am to return to my office when this
coup de main
will have been struck or will have failed.’ He concluded that he had not mentioned the expedition to the nervous Kitty, and did not propose to do so ‘till it will be positively settled that we are to go’.
19
It was not a coup which aroused much support in England. The victorious Napoleon, who had just concluded the Treaty of Tilsit with the Tsar, had decreed that European ports were closed to British trade. Although the combined French and Spanish fleets had been badly mauled at Trafalgar, the neutral Portuguese and Danish fleets might yet fall into French hands and make an invasion of Britain possible. George Canning, the foreign secretary, asked Denmark to place her fleet under British protection for the remainder of the war and when the steadfast Danes refused, sent an expedition under Lieutenant General Lord Cathcart to take it by force. This looked uncommonly like theft, and Charles Napier, one of the martial brothers who were to distinguish themselves in the Peninsula, echoed public opinion when he wrote ‘Poor Danes!’
Wellesley commanded one of Cathcart’s divisions, and was given a steady brigadier called Richard Stewart as his second-in-command, ‘a kind of dry nurse’, as Wellesley put it. He landed an advance guard near Copenhagen on 16 August 1807, and the rest of the army followed to lay siege to the Danish capital. When a relief column appeared, he was sent to deal with it and good-humouredly put Stewart in his place by saying ‘Come, come, ’tis my turn now.’ By 3 September he had cleared the whole island of Zeeland of Danish regulars and militia, at a cost to his division of only 6 killed and 115 wounded. The city surrendered on 8 September after a brief bombardment, which Wellesley disliked, arguing that ‘we might have taken the capital with greater ease’.
20
He helped negotiate the terms of a capitulation that gave the British the Danish fleet of eighteen ships of the line, and allowed a British occupation force to remain until the fleet had been towed to British ports and damage to British property had been repaired. On 14 September he asked Cathcart for permission to return home. He had been ‘very uncertain and very indifferent’ over whether he should retain the chief secretaryship, but now found that he had not been replaced and that ‘there is much to do in Ireland. The
long nights
are approaching fast, and if I am to have any concern in the government of that country, it is desirable that I should be there.’
21
Cathcart made no objection, and he returned to England at the end of the month.
Although the Copenhagen expedition taught Wellesley little, it had one important legacy. Major General Thomas Grosvenor had taken his favourite mare on the expedition, Lady Catherine, sired by John Bull out of a mare by the Rutland Arabian. She was found to be in foal and was sent home, and at Eaton Hall, home of Grosvenor’s cousin, Earl Grosvenor, she foaled a strong chestnut colt called Copenhagen. He was bought by the Hon. Charles Stewart, Wellesley’s adjutant-general in the Peninsula, who sold him to Wellesley. He became Wellesley’s favourite charger, and survived the Peninsula and Waterloo, where he came close to braining his master with an ill-tempered kick when he dismounted after the battle. Copenhagen retired to Stratfield Saye, and was a great favourite with Kitty, who used to feed him bread, so that he regularly approached lady visitors ‘with the most confiding familiarity’. He died in 1836 and lies buried at Stratfield Saye beneath a Turkey Oak in Ice-House Paddock. ‘There may have been many faster horses, no doubt many handsomer,’ said Wellesley, ‘but for bottom and endurance I never saw his fellow.’
22
The autumn saw Wellesley back in Dublin, where Kitty was heavily pregnant: she gave birth to their second son, Charles, on 16 January 1808. Wellesley busied himself with tithes, education, police reform and corn exports, and still hoped that it might be possible ‘to obliterate, as far as the law will allow us, the distinction between Protestants and Catholics’. He strove to promote ‘mild government’ and criticised absentee landlords, but it was clear that serious reform was out of the question, and he longed to be away from Dublin and back on campaign.
He was summoned to Westminster, where he received the thanks of parliament for his work in Denmark. He spoke out again in support of Richard, and defended the army’s conduct in Denmark and the taking of the Danish fleet. He continued to advise the government on the many military projects that floated into view and then sank beneath the waves of impracticability. First there was to be an expedition to Sweden. Then there was talk of a Franco-Russian descent on India against which preparations must be made. And then nationalists in Spain’s South American colonies were to be encouraged to rise up with British support. Wellesley did not approve of ‘revolutionising any country for a political object’ and disapproved of republican constitutions ‘too regularly constructed to ever answer any practical effect’. Besides, it would not do to stir up in Caracas what one sought to put down in Cork. However, he had been promoted lieutenant general on 25 April, and was now senior enough to be given command of a force of 9,000 men earmarked for an expedition to South America, where it would assist the Venezuelan patriot Francisco de Miranda, then living in exile in London. The precedents were not encouraging, for Lieutenant General John Whitelock, forced to surrender his own tiny expedition at Buenos Aires, had just been court-martialled and cashiered. But once again fate intervened, and Wellesley was given a new objective, a good deal nearer home.
Seizure of the Danish fleet may have shocked the tender-hearted in Britain, but it had also irritated Napoleon, who now determined to secure the Portuguese fleet. Spain, its government effectively in the hands of the first minister Manuel Godoy, was an unenthusiastic ally of France, and Godoy agreed to give a French army under General Andoche Junot free passage across Spain to reach Portugal. Junot struck in November 1808, and covered the last 300 miles of his journey in just fourteen days, narrowly missing the Portuguese court. The Portuguese regent, Prince John, had been encouraged by Britain to withstand the French. He hesitated, but was eventually evacuated to the Portuguese colony of Brazil while the fleet fled to Britain. Although the Portuguese initially welcomed the French, they were soon alienated by the invaders’ behaviour. Oporto declared itself independent of France and elected a junta, headed by its bishop. There were risings elsewhere, which confined the French to Lisbon and a handful of fortresses, and the junta in Oporto appealed for British help.
Napoleon was also strengthening his grip on Spain, now full of French troops ostensibly sent there to support Junot. Popular pressure forced the corrupt and conservative King Charles IV to abdicate in favour of his son Ferdinand. But Napoleon wanted to be rid of the Bourbons altogether, and he lured the whole royal family to Bayonne. There, Charles declared that he had abdicated against his will, compelling Ferdinand to step down in his favour. He promptly surrendered the crown to Napoleon, who proclaimed his brother Joseph King of Spain. On 2 May 1808, even before this process was complete, the inhabitants of Madrid attacked the French garrison. Although the rising in the capital was brutally repressed, it sparked off a general insurrection throughout the country. Many civilian officials and military officers argued that it was folly to fight the French, but improvised provincial juntas took on the leadership of what Spaniards call the ‘War of Liberation’.
‘That unlucky war ruined me,’ Napoleon acknowledged frankly in later life, because:
it divided my resources, obliged me to multiply my efforts, and caused my principles to be assailed … it destroyed my moral power in Europe, rendered my embarrassments more complicated, and opened a school for the English soldiers.
23
He believed that intervention in Spain was correct both from the strategic point of view, for the British would have moved in to fill any vacuum, and because the Spaniards themselves deserved better government. It was, he maintained, his methods that let him down. His constant intervention placed Joseph, personally quite popular with many of his subjects, who spoke of him as ‘Uncle Joe’, in an impossible position. In 1809 Joseph offered to abdicate, complaining that ‘I have no real power beyond Madrid, and even in Madrid I am every day counteracted.’ Napoleon was reluctant to delegate authority, and in mid-1811, he maintained six separate armies in Spain, under commanders who usually got on badly, not only with one another but also with their subordinates. For the French, the war in Spain was indeed an ulcer, always irritating and ultimately debilitating.
British historians often tend to depict the Peninsular War as an Anglo-French conflict in which the Spanish occasionally appear as tardy and incompetent British allies. The truth is very different. French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula provoked a fierce nationalist reaction that involved many men who would normally have played no role in politics. A French cavalry officer thought that the Spaniards were motivated solely by ‘religious patriotism’. They had neither discipline nor knowledge of the laws of war, and ‘had but one sentiment, to revenge, by every possible means, the wrongs the French had done to their country’.
24
One French officer saw a hospital in which four hundred men had been hacked to pieces and fifty-three buried alive, and on another occasion a single French soldier was left alive, though with his ears cut off, to testify to the murder and mutilation of 1,200 of his wounded comrades: the experience drove him mad.
Women fought too: the young Augustina Zaragoza famously rallied her countrymen during the sieges of Zaragoza in 1808 and 1809. Ensign John Mills of the Coldstream Guards thought her very ugly, ‘dressed in a jacket, turned up with red … She had half-boots, and pantaloons … I had forgot to mention, a huge cutlass, which hung by her side.’
25
The juntas kept regular armies in the field, though often with much difficulty, and in July a French corps was captured at Bailén in the south. But where the Spanish could not wage war on a large scale, they fought it on a smaller one, and it is no accident that this form of war is still known by the Spanish word for ‘little war’ – guerrilla. Guerrilla leaders included priests, noblemen and smugglers. They fought not only the French but also the Josefinos, those of their countrymen who had thrown in their lot with Joseph Bonaparte, and the conflict took on many of the uglier aspects of a civil war. British officers who served in Spain noted that their reception ranged from wild excitement to silent hostility. John Mills wrote from Madrid that: ‘The men and women (particularly the latter) hug us in the street and call us their preservers’, while there was ‘universal gloom’ in Valladolid. Although Joseph’s Spain remained at war with Britain, in June 1808, the juntas sent representatives to London where, like their Portuguese counterparts, they asked for British assistance.