Authors: Richard Holmes
On 28 June, Wellington took his seat in the House of Lords as baron, viscount, earl, marquess and duke, wearing a field marshal’s uniform beneath his ducal robes, and hearing the Lord Chancellor applaud the fact that he had received ‘all the dignities in the Peerage of this realm which the crown can confer’ in little more than four years.
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The House of Commons paid its own tribute on 1 July, and the City’s Court of Common Council – which had petitioned to have him tried for Cintra – gave a banquet in his honour. So too, in his own happily inimitable style, did the Prince Regent. When the prince proposed his health, Wellington rose to reply and began: ‘I want words to express …’ ‘My dear fellow,’ interrupted the prince, ‘we know your
actions
and we will excuse your
words
, so sit down.’ The duke did so at once, with all the delight of a schoolboy given an unexpected holiday.
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His own holiday was coming to an end, and he set off for the continent in early August, shortly after giving away his niece, Emily Wellesley-Pole, at her wedding to FitzRoy Somerset. HMS
Griffon
took him to Bergen-op-Zoom, and he travelled on via Antwerp to Brussels, to see the Prince of Orange, Slender Billy of Peninsula days, whose father was king of the Netherlands. He accompanied the prince around the frontier fortresses, noting as he did so ‘good positions for an army’, one of them at ‘the entrance to the
forêt
de Soignies by the high road which leads to Brussels from Binch, Charleroi, and Namur’.
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He arrived in Paris on the 22 August, and moved into 39 rue du Faubourg St Honoré, built in 1720 and owned by Napoleon’s youngest sister Pauline, Princess Borghese. Charles Stewart’s agents had just bought it from her, fully furnished, for what Wellington thought a ‘remarkably cheap’ price; he would happily have paid £2,000 a year to rent it, and told the Foreign Office that he was content to have that sum stopped from his salary. It is still the British Embassy, and Duff Cooper, ambassador there in 1944–7, called it: ‘The perfect example of what a rich gentleman’s house should be. Neither palatial nor imposing, but commodious and convenient, central and quiet …’
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Napoleon thought Wellington’s appointment an unwise one, as he would be facing those he had humbled, and his presence in Paris was certainly one of the many ‘piquant contrasts’ of that first restoration, with bewigged
émigré
dukes going to mass with scarred marshals, and Swiss sentries at the Tuileries presenting arms to crippled veterans who turned back a coat lapel to reveal the Legion of Honour. Wellington met Marshal Ney out hunting soon after his arrival – though there was wide agreement amongst the young men at the embassy that French hunting was staid stuff, with few chances of ‘an English run’. Soult and Wellington recognised one another well enough, for Wellington had scrutinised Soult through his telescope on the ridge at Sorauren, and Soult had peered at Wellington in their coach when they were both on their way home in April. In December he met Massena at a party. The two men quizzed one another through lorgnettes as they might have done before a battle, and Massena was first to advance, saying: ‘My lord, you owe me a dinner – for you positively made me starve.’ ‘You should give it to me, Marshal,’ replied the duke, ‘for you prevented me from sleeping.’
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He saw a good deal of the royal family, and endured Louis’ spectacular greed. The corpulent monarch (Wellington described him as ‘a walking sore’) would tip a whole serving-dish of strawberries onto his plate without offering them to anybody else.
Wellington was a welcome figure at the city’s many salons, attending the Duchesse d’Angoulême’s parties at the Pavillon de Flore, and enjoying afternoons with Mme de Staël, ‘a most agreeable women’, provided you kept her off politics. Not all his lady friends were above reproach. Pretty little Aglaé Ney, the marshal’s wife, was having an affair with a young Englishman, Michael Bruce, and Giuseppina Grassini, the opera singer once known as
‘La Chanteuse de l’Empereur’
had been Napoleon’s mistress. She may well have been Wellington’s too, and Lady Bessborough, staying in Paris that autumn, found his attentions to the singer rather too obvious. He certainly kept her portrait in his room, but then again, as Christopher Hibbert dryly observes, he kept pictures of Pauline Borghese and Pius VII there too. He also saw a very great deal of the tragic actress Marguerite Josephine Weimer, such a splendidly caparisoned lady that Napoleon had stuffed the not inconsiderable sum of 40,000 francs between her breasts after their first night together. She boasted that both the duke and emperor had been her lovers:
‘Mais M. le duc était de beaucoup le plus fort.’
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And then there was Harriette Wilson, kissed ‘by main force’ in the Bois de Boulogne and rattling on ambiguously and unreliably about the duke’s practice of visiting noble ladies
à cheval
.
But it was not all strawberries and beautiful women. The British government was keen to persuade France to put an end to the slave trade in her colonies, and the issue was one that engaged Wellington’s emotions as well as his professional attention. The abolitionist Thomas Clarkson visited Paris and was delighted to discover that the duke ‘had made himself master of the subject’. Wellington assured William Wilberforce, who had done so much to get slavery abolished in Britain in 1807, that he would pursue his task ‘with all the zeal of which I am capable’.
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Despite encouraging signs in early skirmishes, he could not carry the position, partly because the Chamber of Peers (created, in the new French constitution, on the model of the House of Lords) contained many men whose fortunes had been made in the trade.
Yet Wellington’s position was just as uncomfortable as Napoleon had suggested. The Bourbons had indeed learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. ‘They imposed upon us,’ wrote Philippe de Ségur, nobleman but Napoleonic officer, ‘the flag under which they had fought us.’ Seasoned veterans were sent off on half-pay while former
émigrés
took command. Families ruined by the revolution hoped for more than the restored monarchy could deliver, and Bonapartists compared
le tondu
(back at the peak of his form for that last campaign of 1814) with their gouty king. ‘We who were lately masters of Europe,’ wrote General Foy sadly, ‘to what servitude are we reduced? … O Napoleon, where are you?’
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France had evidently not settled to the hands of its new rulers, and Wellington was persistently warned of attempts to kill or abduct him. In October, the British prime minister begged him to leave Paris as soon as possible. It would not, however, be essential to move him without good cause, so as not to ‘betray any alarm on our part as to the prospect of internal convulsion in France’.
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He was asked if he would rather go to Vienna, to assist Castlereagh in the negotiations concerning the framing of a post-war settlement, or take command in North America. Wellington replied that he would rather stay on in Paris for the time being, but Liverpool replied that ‘we shall not feel easy till we hear of your having landed at Dover, or at all events, of your being out of French territory,’ so on 16 November the duke agreed that he would go, although he saw no need for haste.
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A peace treaty was signed between Britain and America on 24 December 1814, blasting one excuse for his removal, but Castlereagh was now required back in England, and so Wellington was sent to Vienna as British representative. News of the peace travelled too slowly to reach America before Ned Pakenham had attacked the Americans at New Orleans. Before leaving England, he had been advised that as commander-in-chief, he would not need to hazard his person as he had when a divisional commander; he replied that he knew this well, but would not hesitate to lead if he had to. When the attack bogged down in the face of heavy fire from well-entrenched defenders, some of the attacking infantry broke, and Pakenham rode forward to rally them, shouting: ‘For shame! Recollect that you are British soldiers.’ He was shot through the spine and killed. Wellington was both sad at Ned’s death and angry at Ned’s naval colleague, whom he blamed for the failure.
We have but one consolation, that he fell as he lived, in the honourable discharge of his duty, and distinguished as a soldier & as a man.
I cannot but regret that he was ever employed on such a service or with such a colleague.
The expedition to New Orleans originated with that colleague, & plunder was its object … The Americans were prepared with an army in a fortified position which still would have been carried, if the duties of others, that is of the Admiral, had been as well performed as that of him whom we lament.
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But providence performed it otherwise & we must submit …
Ned’s death struck another blow at Wellington’s own marriage. Elizabeth Longford suggests that the facial likeness between Ned and Kitty was so strong that Wellington may have seen in his brother-in-law the looks that he once found so attractive in his wife, and Ned’s regard for his sister and hero-worship of Wellington may have helped preserve the peace between the soaring duke and his awkward, short-sighted duchess.
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It is no surprise that Kitty stayed behind in Paris with the Somersets when Wellington set off for Vienna on 24 January 1815. He travelled at top speed, stopping for only four hours a night, and arrived in the depths of an Austrian winter – the overheated rooms soon gave him a cold. It was not a time for quick decisions. When Wellington asked his colleagues what they had done towards achieving a settlement for Europe, Prince Metternich, the Austrian representative, replied: ‘Nothing; absolutely nothing.’ He soon immersed himself in the politics of peace-making, trying to find some way of reconciling the aims of the Russian-inspired Holy Alliance of Prussia, Austria and Russia, with Britain’s need to collaborate with France in order to secure a lasting peace. And there were enough ladies about to raise the enticing prospect of liaisons: Castlereagh’s half-brother Charles, now raised to the peerage, was ambassador at Vienna, and was the lover of one of the Duke of Courland’s pretty daughters; another announced her devotion to Wellington. But on the morning of 7 March 1815, he was just getting ready to go hunting when he heard momentous news: Napoleon had escaped from Elba. It quickly became clear that he had landed in France, and that the army was going over to him en masse – on 20 March Napoleon was carried shoulder-high into the Tuileries.
On 12 March, Wellington told Castlereagh that the allies planned to assemble three large armies: one, wholly Austrian, in nothern Italy; another, with Austrians, Bavarians, Badeners and Württembergers, on the upper Rhine; and a third, largely Prussian, on the lower Rhine, whence it would join British and Hanoverian troops in the Netherlands. The Russians, moving to the theatre of war more slowly, would constitute a reserve. Tsar Alexander hoped to ‘manage the concern’ in a council consisting of himself, the king of Prussia and the Austrian Prince Schwarzenberg. He had asked Wellington to join him, but the duke thought that ‘as I should have neither character nor occupation in such a situation, I should prefer to carry a musket’.
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Wellington was invited to remain British plenipotentiary in Vienna or to become commander-in-chief of British forces in the Netherlands, and not surprisingly chose the latter. Before he left Vienna, Tsar Alexander laid his hand on his shoulder and said: ‘It is for you to save the world again.’
Wellington arrived in Brussels on 4 April 1815 and found himself facing difficulties on every front. The dismal performance of King Louis and his supporters induced him to seek what he called a ‘third term’, to give the French a choice between the legitimate (but unappetising) Bourbons and the illegitimate (but appealing) Bonaparte. He thought that there might be some hope with a junior branch of the Bourbons in the person of the Duc d’Orléans (who did indeed become king as Louis-Philippe in 1830), but Castlereagh told him that dynastic changes were not among the government’s objectives. And although he got on well with Slender Billy (known less flatteringly as the Young Frog), his relationship with the prince’s father, King William I of the Netherlands (the Old Frog), was less comfortable. In part this reflected the fact that the king’s own position was insecure. His realm combined Holland with large parts of the former Spanish and Austrian Netherlands, and there were already signs of the schism that would later separate the southern provinces, the future Belgium, from Holland. Many of his officers and men had fought for Napoleon, and their loyalty could not be taken for granted. But although Wellington was very careful not to offend his allies – when Madame Catallani sang at a concert at the end of April he stared down his officers when they called for an encore of ‘Rule Britannia’ – he was concerned that the garrisons of the frontier fortresses might go over to the French. On 3 May, he was appointed a field marshal in the Netherlands army and commander-in-chief of its forces in the theatre of war, superseding the Prince of Orange who, by way of compensation, was to be given command of a corps in the allied army.
For an allied army it was to be, with British, KGL and Hanoverian units combined within British divisions and Netherlands troops in their own divisions but interleaved into the fabric of the army. In arranging his force, Wellington deployed those talents rough-hewn in India and polished in Spain, using veterans to stiffen youngsters, and the robust to buttress the less reliable. Sir John Fortescue catches the real cleverness of the structure:
In every British Division except the First, foreigners were blended with Redcoats. Alten’s and Clinton’s had each one brigade of British, one of the [King’s German] Legion, and one of Hanoverians; Picton’s and Colville’s had each two brigades of British and one of Hanoverians. Even so, however, the subtlety of mixture is as yet not wholly expressed. In Cooke’s division of Guards the three young battalions were stiffened by an old one from the Peninsula. In Alten’s, where all the British were young, the battalions of the Legion were veterans and the Hanoverians were regulars; in Colville’s, where the British were both old and young, the Hanoverians were both regulars and militia; in Clinton’s, where the British as well as the troops of the Legion were old, the Hanoverians were all militia.
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