Authors: Richard Holmes
Salamanca gives the lie to the suggestion that Wellington was simply a great defensive general. Maximilien Foy, who commanded a French division that day, thought that the battle:
raises Lord Wellington’s reputation almost to the level of Marlborough. Hitherto we have been aware of his prudence, his eye for choosing a position, and his skill in utilising it. At Salamanca he has shown himself a great and able master of manoeuvres. He kept his dispositions concealed for almost the whole day: he waited till we were committed to our movements before he developed his own: he played a safe game: he fought in the oblique order – it was a battle in the style of Frederick the Great.
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Salamanca opened the road to Madrid, which the allies entered on 12 August 1812. Substantial quantities of arms and ammunition were captured, and Wellington became embroiled in lengthy discussions as to the best use to which these could be put. News from other parts of Spain was generally good, especially in the south, where Soult had at last given up the long siege of Cádiz. The Spanish appointed Wellesley
generalissimo
of all their forces, and on 22 September, he heard from Henry (himself now a Knight of the Bath) that the Prince Regent made him a marquess, and parliament voted him £100,000 towards the cost of a future residence. He would have preferred ready money, for he had been complaining to Bathurst that his daily allowance of ten guineas, reduced by income tax and other deductions to about eight, simply failed to meet the demands placed on him, and he would be ‘ruined’ unless it was increased.
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And he was not hugely gratified by his promotion in the peerage, complaining: ‘What the devil is the use of making me a marquess?’
The cumulative strain was biting deep into him and the Goya crayon sketch of Wellington, drawn from life in Madrid that summer, shows haunted eyes set in a worn face. His correspondence also reveals a man battered by a sea of troubles. His army continued to commit ‘enormous outrages’ which were likely to forfeit Spanish sympathy. The Spanish themselves were brave but hopelessly unmilitary and corrupt. His own government did not understand the war, and Horse Guards had no idea of the difficulties the army laboured under – on 13 September he pointed out that nobody in his army had been paid since late April – and the incompetent and the inadequate were foisted upon him. When one of the latter, Lieutenant General Sir William Erskine, threw himself through a window, it transpired that ‘he had been two years confined, and that he should not have been sent out here as chief officer of the cavalry – it was too great a risk’.
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On looking at a list of senior officers being sent out to join him, Wellington jested darkly that he did not know what effect their names would have upon the enemy, but they certainly frightened him.
All this reinforced his tendency to trust almost nobody and to do everything himself, producing the symptoms of what we would now term a control freak. His chief medical officer, James McGrigor, was one of the most efficient and farsighted military doctors of his age, and Wellington not only secured him a knighthood after the Peninsula, but also helped him obtain the Order of the Bath when, belatedly, medical officers were made eligible for it. But when, after Salamanca, McGrigor used his initiative to establish a line of evacuation that differed from (and was a good deal better than) that prescribed by Wellington, he was given a fierce roasting. ‘I shall be glad to know who is to command the army, you or I?’ thundered Wellington. ‘As long as you live, sir, never do so again; never do anything without my orders.’
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Captain Norman Ramsay, Royal Horse Artillery, had distinguished himself at Fuentes de Oñoro, leading his troop to safety through a thick cloud of French cavalry. After the battle of Vitoria in 1813, although Wellington instructed him not to move his troop until he personally told him to, Ramsay moved on the orders of a staff officer. But Wellington meant just what he said, and put Ramsay under arrest, where he remained for three weeks. The incident rankled, and contributed to the Royal Artillery’s belief that Wellington had a low regard for the arm. Ramsay and Wellington did not speak again, and the gunner was killed at Waterloo. But long-term hostility was rare, for Wellington often followed a wigging with cordiality. The evening that McGrigor received his great rebuke, he found himself seated at Wellington’s side for a genial dinner.
There was not much geniality in Wellington that autumn, however, for, as McGrigor observed, ‘this was the period of his life when fortune seemed to turn her back on him’. He decided to push Clausel towards the French border, but the northern town of Burgos, capital of Old Castile and recently refortified on Napoleon’s orders, stood in his way. Wellington was ill-prepared for a siege, with only three heavy guns – Thunder, Lightning and Nelson (which had lost one of its trunnions) and little enough ammunition even for them. The French field army declined to attack his covering force and bring on a general engagement. He took some outlying defences but had lost over 2,000 men to 623 French by the time he decided to break up the siege on 21 October 1812.
Amongst the casualties was Major the Hon. Edward Somers Cocks, eldest son of John, Lord Somers, killed by a point-blank musket shot while leading the light companies of the Highland Brigade in an assault on the main wall, retaken by the French in a sortie. Many officers agreed with John Mills that his loss was ‘irreparable’. He had commanded a troop of the 16
th
Light Dragoons with outstanding success for two years before becoming a major in the 79
th
Highlanders. One of his brother officers in the 16
th
, Lieutenant William Tomkinson, told how: ‘The men in his troop … were very fond of him, and would hollo, when in a charge, “Follow the captain, stick close to the captain” … he had always been so lucky in the heat of fire that I fancied he would be preserved to the army.’
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He was a particular favourite of Wellington’s: brave, well-connected and devoted to his profession. He had spent some time as one of his ‘directed telescopes’, an ‘out-post officer’ charged with long-range reconnaissance and confidential missions.
His loss shook Wellington to the very core. When he heard of it, he entered the room of Colonel Frederick Ponsonby, one of his staff, paced about and then said ‘Cocks was killed last night’ but could not utter another word. They buried him in the 79
th
’s camp, in the presence of the officers of the 16
th
Light Dragoons and the 79
th
. Wellington attended with all his staff, but was so over-wrought that nobody dared speak to him. ‘He is regretted by the whole army,’ wrote Tomkinson, ‘and in those regiments in which he has been no man can lament a brother more than they do him.’
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Wellington told Lord Somers that had he lived, the young man would have been ‘one of the greatest ornaments of his profession … an honour to his family, and an advantage to his country.’
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Having failed to take Burgos, Wellington was obliged to retreat in appalling weather, with strong French forces at hand, and described it as ‘the worst scrape I ever was in’. On 23 October, the French cavalry jabbed hard at his rearguard, beating two British cavalry brigades and being checked only by a brigade of KGL infantry, which formed squares that stood like rocks beneath the torrent. The route lay through a wine-producing region, and the army made the most of it. ‘I remember seeing a soldier fully accoutred with his knapsack on in a large tank,’ recalled William Wheeler, ‘he had either fell in or been pushed in by his comrades, there he lay dead. I saw a dragoon fire his pistol into a large vat containing several thousands of gallons, in a few minutes we were up to our knees in wine fighting like tigers for it.’
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An officer saw Wellington near Salamanca on 15 November 1812: ‘he wore an oil-skin cloak, and looked extremely ill, which was not to be wondered at considering the anxiety of mind and fatigue of body he was enduring’.
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Yet he still had the ability to inspire. Assistant Surgeon George Burrows remembered that:
The spirit of enthusiasm was raised to the highest pitch, by the electric effect of the words ‘here he comes’, which spread from mouth to mouth with the rapidity of lightning. The noble commander passed our columns in review, as usual unaccompanied by any mark of distinction or splendour; his long horse cloak concealed his under garment; his cocked hat soaked and disfigured with the rain.
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But Burrows was writing for publication, and in 1814, when Wellington was a national hero. The failure at Burgos and retreat to Portugal shocked many who, like Ensign Mills, were writing private letters.
Our want of success at Burgos and the subsequent retreat … has turned the tide of affairs here and Spain I think is lost. If ever a man ruined himself the Marquis has done it; for the last two months he has acted like a madman. The reputation he has acquired will not bear him out – such is the opinion here.
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To his credit, Wellington never sought to shift the blame. At the time, he told Liverpool that ‘The Government had nothing to say to the siege. It was entirely my own act.’ And years later he told friends that:
It was all my own fault; I had got, with small means, into the forts near Salamanca. The Castle [in Burgos] was not unlike a hill-fort in India, and I had got into a good many of those. I could not get into this, I very nearly did but it was defended by a very clever fellow …’
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By late November Wellington was at Freneida, south-west of Rodrigo, quartered in the mayor’s house in a small square overshadowed by the church. There is a little courtyard at the back, now firmly gated against the quiet street, but once the haunt of aides-de-camp and orderly dragoons, and a terrace looking across the square. Wellington was in a foul temper when he arrived. James McGrigor found him:
in a miserable small room leaning over the fire. He was attentively reading some printed paper. He begged me to be seated. I could see that the paper he was reading was Cobbett’s Register [a radical newspaper] … After reading it for a few minutes he threw it in the fire, and anxiously enquired what reports I had of the sick and wounded. He was in a very bad humour; he adverted in bitter language to the disorder of the retreat.
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Wellington immediately wrote a stern circular to divisional and brigade commanders, complaining that ‘irregularities and outrages’ of all descriptions were committed with impunity because of ‘the habitual inattention of the officers of the regiments to their duty, as prescribed by the standing regulations of the service, and the orders of this army’. Generals and field officers were to insist that captains and subalterns understood and performed their duties: that was the only way in which ‘the discipline and efficiency of the army can be maintained during the next campaign’.
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The order was deeply resented. William Tomkinson thought it ‘an imprudent letter’, and John Mills asked his mother ‘what encouragement has a man to do his duty?’ John Kincaid of the 95
th
agreed that ‘not only censure, but condign punishment’ was merited for some of the disorder, and had Wellington hanged soldiers (and commissaries too) and cashiered officers, nobody would have blamed him. But:
In our brigade I can safely say that the order in question excited more of sorrow than of anger; we thought that, had it been
particular
, it would have been just; but as it was
general
, that it was inconsiderate; and we, therefore, regretted that he who had been, and still was, the god of our idolatry, should thereby have laid himself open to the attacks of the ill-natured.’
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Officers quickly sent copies home, and the order was printed in newspapers, provoking muttering at Wellington’s severity and embarrassing the government. There is no doubt that the order was unfair; if men stole food, it was because the commissariat had broken down and they could either pillage or starve. As Ian Fletcher observes, drink was another matter, but even here some veterans argued that it was only looted wine that kept men going.
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But all this was overshadowed by news of a far more important retreat. Napoleon had stayed too long in Moscow, and suffered appalling losses as he fell back. In Spain, however, ‘the South was free, and Andalusia sang in the sunlight. Twelve hundred miles away the
Grande Armée
was dead.’
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That winter, as his army recuperated in north-eastern Portugal, Wellington settled into the routine of life in winter quarters. At Freneida there was an air of practical informality. Commissary August Schaumann noted that:
There was no throng of scented staff officers with plumed hats, orders and stars, no main guard, no crowd of contractors, actors, valets, mistresses, equipages, horses, forage and baggage wagons, as there is at a French or Russian headquarters. Just a few aides-de-camp, who went about the streets alone and in their overcoats, a few guides, and a small staff guard; that was all.
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When the army was on the move during a campaign, Wellington usually slept in a small tent enclosed in a large marquee, which also served as sitting-and dining-room. Staff officers had a tent apiece. Wellington’s cook, James Thornton, took over the kitchen in places like Freneida, but in the field he cooked under a tarpaulin draped over poles, with his fire surrounded by an earth bank scooped with niches to hold the saucepans. Meat was suspended on a pole over the fire. When it rained hard, as it often did, there was nothing to eat but bread and cold meat. General Miguel de Alava declared that he was tired of enquiring what time the army was to move and what was for dinner and being answered: ‘Daylight. Cold meat.’ Wellington thought that Thornton was no genius. ‘Cole gives the best dinners in the army,’ he wrote. ‘Hill the next best; mine are no great things.’
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This was partly because Wellington had no real interest in food, once telling Cambacérès ‘I don’t much care what I eat’, while Creevey remembered a very poor meal which ‘made no impression on the Duke, who seemed quite as pleased and well satisfied as if he had been in a palace’.
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