Authors: Richard Holmes
Captain Thomas Henry Browne, a junior staff officer, was more sanguine. He thought Wellington’s cook ‘a good one & the wine principally furnished by the Guerrillas excellent’.
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Wellington normally dined with twelve to sixteen people at his table, always including some officers of the two principal staff branches, those of the adjutant-general and quartermaster-general, some of the medical and commissariat staff, and commanding officers of nearby regiments. Generals visiting on business were invited to dinner and pressed to stay in quarters kept available for them. Although Wellington drank little by the standards of the age – half a bottle to a bottle with dinner – Browne tells us that, ‘there was an abundance of wine at his table & guests might take just as much as they pleased’. Dinner was at five, and was famously informal. George Gleig, Wellington’s future biographer, dined with him as an infantry subaltern, and found:
The conversation … most interesting and lively. The Duke himself spoke out on all subjects with an absence of reserve which sometimes surprised his guests … He was rich in anecdote, most of them taking a ludicrous turn, and without any apparent effort he put the company very much at their ease …
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At about 8.30, Wellington would summon coffee, and rise as soon as he had drunk it, which was the signal for all present to withdraw, although the young and bold found somewhere comfortable ‘to smoak cigars [Wellington did not allow smoking at his table] & drink grog till bed-time …’ He wrote or read for about half an hour, and then retired.
At Freneida, some distance from the French outposts, Wellington felt able to undress and go to bed in his nightshirt. On campaign, however, he used to change his linen and boots, and lie down on an iron-framed collapsible bed that was carried on a mule. He kept two dragoons, with horses saddled, at his door, so that if any important information came in, he could ride off at a moment’s notice with this small escort. Browne admitted that ‘it has occasionally happened that when his staff awoke in the morning they learnt that their chief had been on horse-back and with the picquets of the army hours before’.
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Even if the army was not on the move, Wellington rose early; he could not bear lying awake in bed. He had a heavy growth of beard, often shaved twice a day, and hated to be disturbed when shaving. Lord Aylmer interrupted this ‘sacred rite with which no emotion was allowed to interfere’ to tell him that Massena had fallen back from the lines of Torres Vedras. ‘Ay, I thought they meant to be off,’ he replied, lifting his razor for a moment. ‘Very well’, and the shave went on.
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He dressed simply, with a blue or grey frock coat, cut slightly shorter than was fashionable, white or blue-grey breeches, and the eponymous boots, shorter and looser than modern riding boots, with the scalloped top typical of the fashionable ‘Hessian’ boot of the period. Larpent thought that:
like every great man, present or past, almost without exception, he is vain … He is remarkably neat and most particular in his dress … He cuts the skirts of his coat shorter to make them look smarter: only a short time since, going to him on business, I found him discussing the cut of his half-boots and suggesting alterations to his servant.
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Outside he wore a cocked hat, with an oilskin cover in bad weather. To deal with summer rain, he wore a short blue cloak (some called it his boat cloak) with a white lining. He also had a white winter cloak – Gleig thought that it was ‘so that he might be more easily recognised from afar’. He wore it in the Pyrenees in the wet winter of 1814, and one officer, watching him writing out orders while sitting on a stone, said: ‘Do you see that old White Friar sitting there? I wonder how many men he is marking off to be sent into the next world.’
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In the Peninsula and at Waterloo he usually carried the same sword, an elegant Indo-Persian weapon now in Apsley House. His immaculate appearance was the source of one of his nicknames, ‘The Beau’. Kincaid recalled that Dan Mackinnon of the Coldstream Guards (such a great practical joker that the famous clown Grimaldi said that if Mackinnon donned the clown’s costume, he would totally eclipse him) rode up to a group of staff officers and asked them if they had seen Beau Douro that morning. Wellington, catnapping on the ground under his cloak, sat up and said: ‘Well, by—, I never knew I was a beau before!’
82
Wellington dealt with a prodigious amount of correspondence. He tried to answer letters as they arrived and his workload was absurdly centralised by modern standards. Officers wishing to go on leave were obliged to apply to him in writing or in person, and were usually informed that their personal circumstances were insufficiently pressing for them to take leave: Wellington took none himself. The dejected and the dissatisfied wrote to complain. A cashiered dragoon officer was told that he was mistaken to think that ‘any thing which happened to you in this country was occasioned by any feeling of irritation on my part, or any thing but a desire to uphold the discipline and subordination of the army’. The man owed his downfall to ‘great and persevering indiscretion and the misapplication of very great talents’, and it was impossible for him to be restored to his rank in the service. Wellington begged him ‘with your talents and prospects in other professions’, to reconsider the wisdom of joining as a gentleman volunteer in the hope of making his way.
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He took his duties as colonel of the 33
rd
very seriously, telling its commanding officer in October 1812 that no changes should be made to uniform unless they were required by regulations: ‘Every thing is now, I believe, as I found it 20 years ago; and if once we begin to alter, we shall have nothing fixed, as there are no bounds to fancy.’
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He had usually completed a great deal of correspondence by the time he saw his senior staff at about 9am. There were two principal staff officers, the quartermaster-general, for much of the period Major General George Murray, and the adjutant-general, Major General the Hon. Charles Stewart, Castlereagh’s half-brother. The former was responsible for movements, camps and bivouacs, and the latter for personnel issues such as appointments, transfers and the promulgation of regulations. Neither was a chief of staff in the modern sense, although Murray, a very competent staff officer, came closest to it. Stewart, presuming, perhaps, on his half-brother’s importance to Wellington, went so far as to cross him, maintaining that the examination of prisoners of war was not his responsibility. ‘I was obliged to say’, recalled Wellington,
that, if he did not at once confess his error, and promise to obey orders frankly and cordially, I would dismiss him instanter and send him back to England under arrest. After a good deal of persuasion he burst out crying, begged my pardon, and hoped that I would forgive his intemperance.
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Heads of department, like Fletcher, the chief engineer, Dickson, commander Royal Artillery, and McGrigor of the medical department were expected to brief their commander briskly and without consulting their papers. ‘He was very fidgety,’ recalled McGrigor, ‘and evidently displeased when I referred to my notes.’
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Although both Fletcher and Dickson were knighted, Wellington was often critical of the artillery, largely, thought Larpent, ‘because their officers are rather heavy and slow’.
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There was nothing heavy or slow about Wellington’s personal staff officers. It was said that ‘in looking for able young men for his personal staff he preferred ability with a title to ability without’, partly a reflection of his conviction that the army as a whole should be officered by gentlemen.
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Lord FitzRoy Somerset (the future Lord Raglan, and as such British commander-in-chief in the Crimea) was appointed an aide-de-camp through the Duke of Richmond’s influence in 1808. At Roliça Wellington, who had known him from childhood, asked: ‘Well, Lord FitzRoy, how do you feel under fire?’ and was pleased by the answer ‘Better, sir, than I expected.’
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Lord FitzRoy was appointed Wellington’s military secretary, responsible for his confidential correspondence, as a 22-year-old captain in 1808, and the two men remained closely associated until Wellington’s death. Wellington thought that FitzRoy had no particular talents, but always told the truth and could be relied upon to carry out his orders quickly and exactly.
Also on the staff were the Prince of Orange, prince of the Netherlands and a colonel in the British army; the Marquess of Worcester, later seventh Duke of Beaufort, who had been involved with Harriette Wilson; Captain the Hon. Alexander Gordon, the Earl of Aberdeen’s brother; Lord Burghersh, only son of the Earl of Westmoreland; and Lord March, son of the Duke of Richmond. But connections would not save an incompetent youngster. Wellington’s nephew William, son of William Wellesley-Pole, showed himself ‘lamentably idle and ignorant’ and was sent home after ‘doing things he has no right to do’.
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Wellington also had particular friends on the general staff and in the army more widely. Ned Pakenham, assistant adjutant-general until he took over the 3
rd
Division and was wounded at Badajoz, and Galbraith Lowry Cole, Kitty’s old suitor, now commanding the 4
th
Division, were treated with extraordinary confidence.
Wellington was certainly neither the first nor the last general to surround himself with young men whose military careers depended on him. There was nothing homoerotic about the relationship, though he was certainly very close to them. We have already seen him distraught at the death of Cocks, and when Lord March was severely wounded, Wellington, one of his own legs badly bruised, rode several miles to see him and emerged from his room, hobbling on two sticks, with tears rolling down his cheeks. He was sometimes closer to men who, like McGrigor, Larpent or his favourite chaplain Samuel Briscall, were in the army but not of it, than he was to the mass of his officers. His personal orderly, a gruff old German trooper called Beckerman, was a particular favourite. He was utterly reliable but not cringingly deferential (many more recent commanders have enjoyed similar relationships with their drivers). In all this we see a man who needed affection but disliked large-scale public adulation, and who managed to create, in his busy headquarters, that happy family life that had eluded him elsewhere.
There were women in his life, although it is a measure of his discretion that hard evidence is difficult to find. He disapproved of Richard’s scandalous behaviour, and in 1810 had told Henry: ‘I wish that Wellesley was castrated; or that he would like other people attend to his business and perform too.’ Lady Sarah Napier might have been repeating gossip passed on by her soldier sons (or relaying a Whig canard) when she wrote after Talavera that Wellington ‘publickly keeps a mistress at head-quarters’. Larpent later hinted that he was having an affair with his landlady in Toulouse, and there is a ‘brief but affectionate’ note from a Spanish lady amongst his papers. He once granted an officer leave to spend forty-eight hours in Lisbon on the grounds that that was as long as any reasonable man might wish to stay in bed with the same woman, and it may be that he was as brisk with his amours as with much else. But Elizabeth Longford’s point is crucial: ‘his private life created no scandals of the dimension that did so much damage to Richard’s career’.
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We are on safer ground where other relaxations are concerned. Most great generals have their safety-valves – absorbing occupations that enable them to forget the cares of office, if only for the moment. For Joffre in the First World War it was a good lunch, eaten in reverent silence; for Alan Brooke in the Second, it was birdwatching. For Wellington, it was foxhunting, although he was a thruster who hunted to ride, not an aficionado who rode to hunt and enjoyed watching hounds work. No sooner had he arrived at headquarters than Larpent wrote:
We have three odd sorts of packs of hounds here, and the men hunt desperately: firstly, Lord Wellington’s, or, as he is called here, the Peer’s; there are fox-hounds, about sixteen couple; they have only killed one fox this year, and that was what is called mobbed. These hounds for want of a huntsman straggle about, and run very ill, and the foxes run off to their holes on the Coa … Lord Wellington has a good stud of about eight hunters; he rides hard, and only wants a good gallop, but I understand knows nothing of the sport, although very fond of it in his own way.
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Thomas Browne was pleased to see that:
He had at Head Quarters a pack of hounds from England & hunted two or three times a week with such Officers of Head Quarters as chose to join in the chase. There were not many, as few could afford to have English horses, & our Spanish or Portuguese steeds were not equal to the work. There was no want of foxes, but it was a difficult and rocky country to ride over. He went out shooting every now & then, but did not appear fond of it, as he was a very indifferent shot.
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Hunting improved when Tom Crane, late of the Coldstream Guards, came out as huntsman. Lady Salisbury sent Wellington the sky-blue coat of the Hatfield Hunt, and suitably attired he rode to hounds:
no longer the Commander of the Forces, the General-in-Chief of three nations, the representative of three sovereigns, but a gay, merry country gentleman, who rode at everything, and laughed as loud when he fell himself as he did when he witnessed the fall of a brother sportsman.
George Murray told Larpent that ‘on hunting days he could get almost anything done, for Lord Wellington stands whip in hand ready to start, and soon dispatches all business …’ Some generals took the opportunity ‘to get him to answer things in a hasty way … which they acted upon’, so he would not do business with them on hunting days. ‘“Oh d – n them,” said he,
“I
won’t speak to them again when we are hunting.”’