Wellington and Waterloo E-Book

R. E. Foster

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 518

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The events which unfolded south of Brussels on 18 June 1815 conferred instant immortality on those who took part in them. For the Duke of Wellington, Waterloo consummated victory in a long battle for what he considered to be his due recognition. Whilst he guarded that reputation jealously, he also jeopardised it by his decision to enter politics in what proved to be an especially partisan age. Even the outpouring of national grief which accompanied his death in 1852 could not totally obscure the ambivalence he had aroused in life. The memory of Waterloo, meanwhile, followed its own trajectory. Travellers initially flocked to the battlefield as if drawn by a magnet. What the triumph meant for Britain, and the wider world, moreover, became a battle in itself, one fought variously in the political, literary and artistic theatres of war. As the nineteenth century advanced, it was only Waterloo's less-exalted participants who, relatively, faded from view – or were ignored. Drawing on many under-utilised sources to illuminate some less familiar themes, this timely study offers fresh perspectives on one of Britain's best-known figures, as well as on the nature of heroism. The reader is also given pause for thought as to appropriate forms of commemoration and how national celebrations are prone to manipulation, for their own purposes, by those in government.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title page

Abbreviations

Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction: Perceptions and Perspectives

1 Before Waterloo: Battles for Recognition 1769–1815

2 Waterloo: The Battle of Giants

3 The Battle of Posterity: Opening Shots 1815–1818

4 Heroes and Villains: Wellington, Waterloo and other Battles 1819–1832

5 Wellington and Waterloo Despatched 1832–1852?

6 Victorians Remember: Wellington and Waterloo Reassessed 1852–1901

7 Battling into Posterity: Wellington and Waterloo 1901–2015

Select Bibliography

Notes

Plate Section

Copyright

Abbreviations

Arbuthnot

Francis Bamford & 7th Duke of Wellington (eds.),

The Journal of Mrs Arbuthnot 1820–1832

.

Creevey

Sir Herbert Maxwell (ed.),

The Creevey Papers

.

Chad

7th Duke of Wellington (ed.),

The Conversations of the 1st Duke of Wellington with George William Chad

.

Croker

Louis J. Jennings (ed.),

The Croker Papers

.

Ellesmere

Alice, Countess of Strafford (ed.),

Personal Reminiscences of the 1st Duke of Wellington by Francis, the 1st Earl of Ellesmere

.

Fraser

Sir William Fraser,

Words on Wellington

.

ODNB

H. C. G. Matthew & Brian Harrison (eds.),

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

.

PD

Parliamentary Debates.

Shelley

Richard Edgcumbe (ed.),

The Diary of Frances, Lady Shelley 1818–1873

.

Stanhope

Philip Henry, 5th Earl Stanhope,

Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington 1831–1851

.

WD

J. Gurwood (ed.),

The Despatches of Field-Marshal the Duke of Wellington, KG, during his various campaigns

[…]

from 1799 to 1818

.

WP

University of Southampton Library, MS 61, Wellington Papers.

WS

2nd Duke of Wellington (ed.),

Supplementary Despatches and Memoranda of Field-Marshal Arthur Duke of Wellington, KG

.

Preface and Acknowledgements

As a young boy, the first serious history book I bought was John Naylor’s Waterloo. At senior school, in Taunton, I was in Blackdown House, which took its name from the Somerset hills nearby. Surmounting them is a triangular obelisk to the Iron Duke overlooking the town from which he took his title. Unthinkingly, at home, on my parents’ farm, I daily donned the footwear indelibly associated with his name. In the early 1980s, having completed my undergraduate degree at Southampton, I was lucky enough to be the recipient of a major state studentship from the British Academy. Serendipitously, the Wellington Papers were then in the process of being deposited in the University’s Hartley Library. The resulting doctoral thesis, on the Duke’s Lord Lieutenancy of Hampshire, appeared in book form in 1990. By then, I had embarked upon a teaching career, one which included withdrawing an application I had submitted to Wellington College: if you are not careful, you can become obsessive. Twenty years later, however, my wife indulged me, by taking me to Brussels to mark a personal milestone. This allowed me to realise a long-standing ambition in visiting the iconic campaign sites of 1815. It is no exaggeration to say that the present book originated from what I saw and felt that day. I am grateful to Alan Lindsey who guided us with such informed enthusiasm on that occasion.

My day at Waterloo, on 23 October 2011, crystallised thoughts that had been lurking in my mind for some time. I did not want to write an analysis of the battle or a guide to the field. Neither did I aspire to produce a biography of the Duke. Readers will find that my brief account of the campaign occurs in chapter two, whilst the Duke dies at the end of chapter five! Insofar as it is possible with such well-trodden paths, I wanted to take a different tack. Specifically, with the bicentenary of Waterloo imminent, I wanted to discover how the intertwined stories of the battle and its victor had been perceived in the intervening 200 years. The present book is primarily an exploration of reputations and memories. I am grateful to The History Press for having the confidence in me to carry it out, especially Jo de Vries, head of publishing, and Rebecca Newton, my project editor.

Research for those who are not tenured academics is hugely dependent upon the support of others. It is no exaggeration to say that I could not even have contemplated writing the current book without the exponential advance of online resources over the past decade. I have been enormously indebted to Project Gutenberg and the American University Online Library: they have made available in seconds many essential titles which would have been difficult or prohibitively expensive to obtain. No less a debt is due to those who have seen fit to digitise Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates and a portion of the British Library’s newspaper archives for the nineteenth century. The digital archive of The Times has proved similarly indispensable.

My obligation to more traditional repositories remains, first and foremost, that to Professor Chris Woolgar and his colleagues in the Hartley Library at Southampton responsible for its Special Collections. I would also like to thank the friendly, helpful staff of the Templer Research Centre at the National Army Museum. Closer to home, I have had full value for my Council Tax payments by making regular use of the reference section in Salisbury City Library and Wiltshire Libraries’ online facilities. Helen Cunliffe has endeared herself as an assiduous school librarian in regularly demonstrating to me the truth that one should never discard old volumes.

As the writing has progressed, Phil Badham has tolerated my technophobia with unfailing patience. In like vein, Sam Cox of Wiltshire Graphic Design has been generous with help and advice for the maps, whilst Melanie Jeffery has promptly answered queries relating to sources in French. I am also grateful to those who have read and criticised part or whole of successive chapter drafts: Isabella Dodkins, David Jones (whose sharp eye and sense of grammar and style have saved me from many infelicities of both), Dr Richard A. Gaunt of Nottingham University, and Professor Mike Clark of Southampton University. I am especially indebted to the latter for several stimulating conversations about methodology and the nature of memory. At a late stage, Dr Rory Muir very generously read the entire text and diplomatically highlighted a number of egregious errors. I regret that the first volume of his monumental biography of Wellington appeared in print too late for me to be able to use.

My children, Susanna and Edmund, have acted as harsh and unrestrained critics, in a way that only one’s offspring can. By far my greatest debt, however, in this project as in life, is to my wife, Michaela. She has accepted, with typical generosity, my unreasonable requests for her to be reader, creator of maps and financial support. She may not believe that I am more consumed by her than with the Duke and his battle, but it is true. The errors and faults of the book are mine; any merits, and the dedication, are hers.

Waterloo Day, 2013.

Introduction

Perceptions and Perspectives

In the parish of North Newton with St Michael Church in Somerset where I grew up, there is a memorial to Sir John Slade (1762–1859). Slade joined the 10th Light Dragoons in 1790. By April 1809 he was a Major-General. Briefly, from January–March 1811, he commanded the cavalry in Wellington’s army in the Peninsular War. Aficionados of that conflict know him by his sobriquet, ‘Black Jack’. Both scholars and writers of historical fiction are agreed that he was ‘as incompetent an officer as ever was placed in command of a brigade of cavalry, and a coward, too, by common consent’. The Duke sent him back to England, a prime example of the sort of officers that frightened him more than they did the enemy. Slade’s memorial in Norton Fitzwarren church says that he ‘descended to the Tomb full of years and universally respected’. The epitaph could only possibly be true because Wellington had predeceased him.1

Slade, consequently, was not with the Duke at Waterloo. He thereby missed being part of an action that many immediately hailed as analogous to being with Henry V at Agincourt almost exactly 400 years before. As soon as he heard the news, Lord Stewart was ‘deeply mortified that my Lot did not lead me to share a part in the splendid triumph that has added new lustre to the British Name’. The passage of years only served to reinforce such feelings for those under arms but not actually at Mont St Jean on 18 June 1815. Major-General Peter Fyers saw fifty-three years’ service in the Royal Artillery and could boast of being known to both Nelson and William IV: when he died in 1845 it was recorded that, ‘to his unceasing regret’ he had missed Waterloo.2 By then, memorials to both Wellington and Waterloo were seemingly ubiquitous, but where the national Waterloo memorial stands, is a moot point. The imagination of posterity has been captured no less forcibly. Google, to take one ephemeral example, lists over 14,000 results for The Wellington Arms and over 15,000 for The Waterloo Inn. Given his frustration over the ill-discipline arising from the evils of drink amongst his men, and his subsequent fear that beer houses were breeding grounds for sedition, the Duke would have been appalled. Neither would he have been impressed that the most common Internet search for Waterloo today is for Waterloo Road, since 2006 a television drama about a challenging Scottish comprehensive school. If nothing else, it affords an example of how the name of a small Belgian town has become an integral part of British culture; or, as Robert Southey put it in 1816:

A little lowly place,

Obscure till now, when it hath risen to fame,

And given the victory its English name.3

Waterloo also triggered an avalanche of writing: in 1815 alone, there were at least seventy titles relating to it. Sir John Fortescue pointed out a century ago that the many accounts since had been ‘more prolific of new conjectures than of new facts’. Despite what he implied, the essence of many of the conjectures too, was in print within two years of the battle having taken place. There was some truth in Wellington’s 1817 complaint that ‘every creature who could afford it, travelled to the field; and almost everyone who could write, wrote an account’.4 Nor, surely, is it coincidental that it was Philip Guedalla, biographer of the Duke and historian of the Hundred Days, who coined the aphorism that, ‘History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.’ In 1986, Donald Horward’s bibliographical study listed over 2,000 books on the campaign and battle. A search of the forty-eight titles comprising the British Library’s nineteenth-century newspapers online website yields 150,000 results for the ‘Duke of Wellington’ and over half a million for ‘Waterloo’.

Why so many? Even in 1815 the broad outlines of an answer to this question were clear. A British commander and his army had first withstood, and then repulsed, one of the greatest commanders and armies of any age. In doing so, they had epitomised the supposed national virtues of endurance and tenacity. Waterloo also, in its decisiveness, provided an appropriately dramatic final scene to the great drama that was the generation of struggle that had followed the French Revolution. One participant in the battle was therefore right to suggest that, ‘Many a battle had been fought in the Peninsula with as much credit and bravery, but there was a combination of circumstances at Waterloo which gave éclat irresistible.’ Victor Hugo memorably called it the hinge of the nineteenth century.5

Contemporaries, as Wellington had noted, consequently wanted to visit the scene of the action. Viscount Palmerston, Secretary at War, stopped off at Quatre Bras and Waterloo en route from Namur to Brussels on 29 October 1818. With a dose of characteristic cynicism, he reported to his sister how:

by the assistance of a good plan and description and some peasants we met on the ground, we satisfied ourselves completely about Waterloo – walked over the position of our army, picked some bullets out of the orchards of La Haie Sainte and Hougoumont, cut a bundle of sticks at the latter enough to beat [c]lothes with during the rest of our lives, bought [a] French sword which probably never [saw] the battle, and came on here b[y] ½ past 8 this evening.6

Maps, guides, and mementoes of doubtful provenance were already, as they remain, established ingredients of the Waterloo tourist industry.

One early visitor, James Simpson, rejected the suggestion that he was a tourist. He conceived of himself as a pilgrim, for whom visiting the battlefield was a quasi-religious act: ‘The very ground,’ he wrote, ‘was hallowed and it was trod by us with respect and gratitude.’ Even more, however, he insisted he and his fellow travellers were patriots: ‘Multitudes, impelled by an interest which would unworthily be called mere curiosity, crowded the packets to Belgium, eager to see a field so near and so recent, to learn the tale on the spot and to breathe the very air of a region shining with their country’s glory and resounding with their country’s praise.’7 High-minded in the view of Simpson, such feelings could easily degenerate into a baser national chauvinism. Rees Gronow, in his reminiscences of the battle acknowledged as much, and rather unconvincingly denied ‘any share in the vulgar John Bull exultation which glories in having “licked the confounded French.”’ No British contemporary, however, bettered the surgeon Charles Bell in capturing the contradictory emotions of revulsion and horror that was the reality for so many at Waterloo on the one hand, and the tsunami of relief and exultation that greeted news of the victory at home on the other. Bell spent eight days tending casualties of the battle before visiting the scene of it:

The view of the field [he wrote] the gallant stories, the charges, the individual instances of enterprise and valour, recalled me to the sense which the world has of ‘Victory’ and ‘Waterloo’. But this was transient: a glooming, uncontrollable view of human nature is the inevitable consequence of looking upon the whole as I did – as I was forced to do. It is a misfortune to have our sentiments so at variance with the universal sentiment. But there must ever be associated with the horrors of Waterloo, to my eyes, the most shocking signs of woe – to my ear, accents of entreaty, outcry from the manly beast, interrupted by forcible expressions of the dying – and noisome smells.8

Bell, as he recognised, was decidedly untypical of his countrymen in his balancing of the emotions. Waterloo was, and is, remembered less for the blood than the victory. As the historian Denis Richards wrote with dismissive accuracy during a 1952 spat over casualty numbers during the Battle of Britain: ‘Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo: who remembers the casualties?’9 The fact does much to explain why the balance in the unending struggle between those who would see the battlefield as a site of remembrance and those who see it as a tourist attraction (in stark contrast, it might be noted, to the Great War battlefields), has always lain with the latter.

Waterloo, with the passage of time, would also be remembered as much for what it began as for what it ended. Late in life, a former pupil at Kimbolton School recalled that the severe English and boarding master, George Cole, had ordered a half-holiday when news of the victory reached him: ‘There was no more work that day, and though most of us were too young fully to appreciate the effects of the victory, the joy on everyone’s countenance [was] […] sufficient to impress us with the fact that the event was of great and vital importance to the country.’ What that importance consisted of is a theme of the present study. For Sir Edward Creasy, writing in 1851, only weeks after the Great Exhibition had opened, the salient fact was that, ‘No equal number of years can be found, during which science, commerce, and civilisation have advanced so rapidly and so extensively, as has been the case since 1815.’ He judged the peace that Waterloo heralded as the precondition for what he described. For that reason, he continued, it ‘deserves to be regarded by us, not only with peculiar pride, as one of our greatest national victories, but with peculiar gratitude for the repose which it secured for us, and for the greater part of the human race’. For various reasons, however, as will be seen, the celebrations of a great national victory were about to end. Two centuries on, the sober conclusion of the best modern guide to the battlefield judges merely that Waterloo ‘was a blood-soaked milestone on the long and tortuous road called progress’.10 But even this is debatable. What Waterloo means has evolved with time; it remains elusive and chameleon-like. Perhaps it is still too soon to tell.

That Waterloo was somehow special, if only for those who were there, can surely be agreed. As Sir William Fraser put it nearly seventy-five years later, ‘Waterloo gave a patent of Nobility to all who were present. So long as Britain shall exist, a man who can trace his ancestry to one who fought at Waterloo will have a position of distinction.’ Whilst Wellington was alive, the distinction was commemorated each 18 June at Apsley House by the dinner he gave to surviving officers. Whilst many will be aware of that event, the ways in which Britons generally remembered Waterloo and those who fought in the battle have attracted far less attention. It is something the present study attempts to rectify. Suffice for the moment to say that the nation, though it lauded Waterloo men far more than the veterans of earlier conflicts, fell well short of what Fraser claimed. Returning home, Captain Cavalié Mercer remembered, with some bitterness, that he and his men had first had to endure several hours off Dover harbour because of bad weather before being ferried ashore by a pilot-gig whose ‘fellows charged us a guinea a-head for thus carrying us about 200 yards’. Many thereafter did, it is true, became local celebrities. Corporal John Dickson, the last survivor of the charge of the Scots Greys who settled in Crail, Fifeshire, spent 18 June 1855 in the coffee room of his local inn, clay pipe in hand, ready to recount his Waterloo story to both habitués and visitors. This was not unique ‘for, be it known, “Waterloo Day” was a high day in the village, kept in ripe memory by the flags flying and the procession of school children, decked in summer attire and gay with flowers, to do honour to “mine host”, whose deeds of valour were on every tongue’.11

Not all, however, could boast as distinguished a service record as Dickson. Growing up in Stow-on-the-Wold in the early 1860s, W. J. Rylance remembered a six-foot dragoon called ‘Long Charlie’, whose chief memory of the battle was the ‘unhorsing and killing of a French officer, but [he] was most proud of the watch and money he took from his pockets’. Rylance remembered that after Waterloo, Charlie was ‘hawker or poacher by turns, a regular old reprobate, but to me always a hero’. Waterloo may have set him apart but he hardly lived a life of virtue and, as the following chapters demonstrate, his example was very far from being the worst. Most Waterloo men, however, simply led unremarkable lives, many continuing in the army after 1815. William Thackeray, writing before his novel, Vanity Fair (set against the backdrop of Waterloo), brought him lasting fame, had strong views as to how the latter were neglected by their country. He did not:

know whether to respect them or to wonder at them. They have death, wounds, poverty, hard labour, hard fare, and small thanks […] if they are heroes, heroes they may be, but they remain privates still, handling the old brown-bess, starving on the old twopence a day. They grow grey in battle and victory, and after thirty years of bloody service, a young gentleman of fifteen […] calmly takes the command over our veteran, who obeys him as if God and nature had ordained that so throughout time it should be.12

The better-known Waterloo veterans today were those who aspired to an audience beyond the alehouse by writing about their experiences of the campaign. Far more wrote letters, many in response to William Siborne, who solicited them from surviving officers for the endeavours that were to make him the unofficial doyen of Waterloo studies during Wellington’s lifetime. Such letters reveal an extraordinary range of perceptions about what was going on throughout 18 June. They also exhibit a considerable variation, on the part of those who wrote them, as to how accurate they believed themselves to be. Writing in 1835, for example, Lieutenant-Colonel Dirom said he could remember 1815 ‘as if it had only occurred yesterday’. A fortnight later, Lieutenant William Fricke of the 1st Light Dragoons, King’s German Legion, asked Siborne to ‘excuse me if my description is faulty, to which a 20-year gap contributes greatly’ – quite apart from the practical difficulties of the day which he spelt out with wry irony: ‘An elevation in front of us hindered us completely from taking note of the positions of the French army, because we were unable to see it, except when we charged, but such a moment was not suitable for taking notes.’13 Fricke’s comments are a salutary reminder. The discrepancies and uncertainties in the story of Waterloo have provoked many allegations about personal bias and national posturing: many of them are to be explained by the honest disagreement arising from conflicting testimony.

The latter points can be illustrated by brief reference to the biggest of all Waterloo controversies, the contribution of the Prussians to Wellington’s victory. Stationed on the Duke’s left for much of the battle, Sir Hussey Vivian witnessed something of the impact they were making upon the French rear, and their arrival on the Anglo-Allied left. He was adamant in 1837 that, ‘I care not what any one may say to depreciate the importance of the Prussian aid […] but for that aid our advance never would have taken place […] it’s not fair not to give it its due weight and the Prussians their due credit.’ For ‘FM’ of the Guards, by contrast, writing on Waterloo Day 1866, the perspective had been very different. Positioned on Wellington’s right, he first saw Prussians at about 9 p.m. when the French were in headlong retreat:

Blücher came up at the time above indicated and took the front – not till then, however, as some would have it. I have been told that the Prussians fought side by side with us on that memorable day. Such, however, was not the case. I never saw the Prussians until we had beaten the Invincible Guards. They came up at that time, and not before.14

Then and now, how you see Waterloo depends upon where you stand.

Wellington, the best known British witness, knew where he stood. He said so in his Waterloo Despatch of 19 June. Long experience had made him adept in this most demanding of official forms of communication. As early as June 1809, he had taken strong exception when he heard of alleged remarks made by Samuel Whitbread in Parliament to the effect that he had lied in his accounts of the most recent actions:

I am not in the habit of sending exaggerated accounts of transactions of this kind. In the first place, I don’t see what purpose accounts of that description are to answer; and in the second place, the Army must eventually see them; they are most accurate criticks: I should certainly forfeit their good opinion most justly if I wrote a false account even of their actions, and nothing should induce me to take any step which should with justice deprive me of that advantage.15

But Wellington clearly knew, in modern parlance, how to spin. After the indecisive Battle of Albuera in 1811, he instructed Marshal Beresford to ‘write me down a victory’. He also conceded that some of his despatches contained omissions; brevity was a means to the end of being the soul of discretion. As he told Lord Hatherton in May 1820:

I never told a falsehood in them, but I never told the whole truth, nor anything like it. Either one or the other would have been contradicted by 5,000 officers in my army in their letters to their mothers, wives, brothers or sisters and cousins, all of whom imagined they as well understood what they saw as I did.16

Wellington was clear, however, that those officers’ accounts, let alone those of the men they commanded, must be inferior to his own. In a much repeated metaphor, he reflected that:

The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost; but no individual can recollect the order in which, nor the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance.17

Wellington judged, not without some reason, that if anybody was to attempt such an exercise successfully, it was him. He did, after all, combine experience with the liberty to roam the field, and was served by a staff whose job was to keep him informed as to how events were unfolding.

To pursue the ballroom metaphor, however, the Duke said nothing about the role of his dancing partners. Were not Napoleon and Blücher as entitled as he was to adjudicate on the course of events? Whilst the present study concerns itself primarily with the British perspective on Waterloo, it is important to remember that there are French and Prussian ones, arguably no less valid. French apologists for their defeat were legion: in 1846, the British press published a sardonic piece entitled ‘What the French say of the Battle of Waterloo’, which adduced no fewer than twelve reasons in mitigation or exculpation, including the militarily-more-than-dubious one that they had not lost! The French, understandably, remain sensitive on the subject: in 1998 a Paris councillor wrote to Tony Blair demanding that Britain rename its Eurostar terminus at Waterloo station. And whilst long-standing Anglo-French rivalries were reinforced by Waterloo, Anglo-German ones over who, precisely, had won the battle were created by it. The marriage of the 8th Duke of Wellington’s heir to a great-granddaughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1977 did at last suggest that a belle alliance between the two sides had finally been reached – though only on a personal level.18

Aspersions denigrating Wellington’s achievement at Waterloo, whether emanating from French or Prussian sources, could be guaranteed to rally Britons to the defence of their most famous living son.19 He was the subject of approximately 1,400 titles during the nineteenth century. He also appears in about 5 per cent of the British Museum’s collection of caricatures, not to mention over 300 paintings and drawings, and 180 published engravings. The Duke, as has been insufficiently acknowledged, was the creation of the media. It could hardly be otherwise for he became famous in absentia. Wellington could not really be said to be living permanently in mainland Britain until the end of 1818. Before then, the public face of Wellington was the product of a blank canvas on which his character had been imagined or, if the sources were his friends, as they wanted it to appear. The public persona was not, of course, entirely divorced from reality, but the real human being that was the Duke was revealed slowly, at first to an elite inner circle, and only really more completely, as will be seen, through them after his death. In life, the person he most resembles in British public life today is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II: forever in the public gaze and at the public service, but hardly a rounded personality: at once both universally known and yet unknown.

The Queen’s reputation rests, in part, on her being set above the political fray. Much the same has been said for Wellington; indeed he claimed it for himself. Whilst the notion is not without some substance, it is also, paradoxically, bogus. Uniquely amongst modern Britons, the Duke chose to follow his exalted military career with an even longer one in the higher reaches of public life. Wellington’s name, therefore, at least as much as that of his most famous battle, carried political connotations for his contemporaries. His second career, as chapters four and five attempt to show, was bound both to inform and colour perceptions of his earlier one. The British public was far less agreed about what it thought of the political as opposed to the military Duke. He was seen as being on the ‘wrong’ side of popular opinion, at least during the Reform Bill era. His longevity was such that he survived the resulting unpopularity to pass his last years as father of the nation, something akin to a mid-nineteenth-century Nelson Mandela. But he was, and remains, political. Just prior to elections for the Scottish Parliament in 2003, one SNP candidate called on Edinburgh City Council to remove the Duke’s statue and replace it with one of Robert Burns, since Wellington’s ‘says nothing distinctive or relevant about Edinburgh and Scotland now’. The call was seen as anti-English and rightly attacked as an insult to those Scots who had fought and died under Wellington.20 Neither side, however, seemed aware that he was Irish.

Another claim made by the Duke, which many modern writers accept, was that he ‘had made it a rule never to read any work whatever bearing on his military career’. He went even further in 1847, when he wrote to J. W. Croker that, ‘It has always been my practice, and is my invariable habit, to say nothing about myself or my own actions.’21 The opposite would be nearer the truth. At the very least, there were those around him, for example Colonel Gurwood, Mrs Arbuthnot and Earl Stanhope (formerly Lord Mahon), who informed him about recent publications and opinions, if only to elicit his response. Stanhope noted that the Duke spent an hour and a half with him in 1836 discussing Robert Southey’s history of the Peninsular War. In December 1851, the last letter Stanhope ever received from Wellington was one thanking him for recommending that he read volume 11 of Thiers’s History of the French Revolution. Within hours he had done so – and reported that it ‘appears to be very interesting’. The evidence that Wellington was a voracious reader about himself, including at Waterloo, is overwhelming; he even annotated some of the books whose perceived falsehoods irritated him most.22

And, contrary to what he wrote to Croker, the Duke was also a great talker. Ellesmere’s daughter recalled hearing how Wellington had attended a dinner at Lord Glenelg’s ‘in company with several young officers, whom after dinner the Duke invited to ask him any questions they pleased as to his old campaigns’. Ellesmere himself was treated to a personal account of Burgos as he drove over from Basingstoke to Stratfield Saye with the Duke in February 1836. Charles Greville, who was one of those at Burghley with the Duke for New Year 1838, recorded that he spoke at length about the Peninsular War when they were out shooting. ‘It is impossible to convey an idea of the zest, eagerness, frankness, and abundance with which he talked, and told of his campaigns, or how interesting it was to hear him.’23

Wellington was not so much lying when he denied reading and talking about his heroic past as making a distinction between official pronouncements and off-the-record conversations. He never presumed that those listening would be so ungentlemanly as to set down the detail of what they remembered him to have said. The present work endeavours, in showing Wellington as he was, as well as how he was perceived to be, to recognise that distinction. This perforce means returning to original sources of information and anecdotes. Too many lives of Wellington, to vulgarise Guedalla’s epigram, simply regurgitate the more familiar tales, citing earlier biographies as their authority. That approach is eschewed here: hence the predominance of contemporary as opposed to secondary sources in the notes. I trust that the latter are not overly burdensome, but as I have frequently discovered in my work on a man who has been the subject of so many stories, there is nothing more irritating than an unreferenced bon mot. The result is a story of Wellington and Waterloo that follows familiar broad outlines, but is told with many less-familiar details.

A striking example of how this approach can yield fresh insights is an anecdote mentioned in virtually every book on Wellington, his exchange with the artist, Henry Pickersgill, as the latter was painting his portrait:

Finding the Duke getting rather drowsy under the operation, he wished to excite his attention and thus give some expression to his face. He succeeded only too well. Pickersgill said ‘I have often wished to ask your Grace a question.’ The Duke was far too prudent to say ‘What is it?’ ‘Were you really surprised at Waterloo or not?’ The Duke instantly replied ‘No! but I am now.’24

Where modern books provide a citation for the story (usually reduced to the final two sentences), it is invariably to Sir William Fraser’s 1889 Words on Wellington. As Fraser tells it, the story was obtained third hand from Lord Wilton on ‘one occasion’ with the assurance that ‘this version is absolutely correct’. Something akin to it was indeed circulating in the press in 1844 when it was described as having taken place ‘lately’.25 In fact, Pickersgill had been at Stratfield Saye working on his portrait a full decade before in the autumn of 1834. And it was the artist himself who described what had happened only a few months later. It is worth citing in extenso:

availing himself of one of those pauses which invariably succeed the withdrawal of the cloth from an English dining table, the worthy R. A. arose and assuming that solemnity of manner by which he is so peculiarly distinguished, begged leave to propound a query to his grace, obligingly intimating (as a merciful recorder will sometimes do to a culprit at the bar of the Old Bailey) that ‘he need not reply to the question if it was at all disagreeable’. The duke, good-humouredly, begged him to proceed. All eyes were of course directed to the painter whose form appeared to dilate, and whose countenance became pregnant with the mighty secret he expected to fathom.

‘And thrice he cleared his throat and then began.’

‘Pray will your Grace be obliging enough to inform me, if it be really true, as has often been reported, that your grace was taken by surprise at Waterloo!’

So far from resenting this somewhat impertinent inquiry, the duke, as soon as he recovered from the fit of laughter into which it threw him, condescended to satisfy Mr Pickersgill, that he had not been guilty of the unsoldierlike neglect imputed to him, and that he might satisfy his inquiring friends, on his grace’s authority, that he did not achieve the conquest of Waterloo by mistake.26

The earlier account does not alter the substantive point about Waterloo, but it is very different in detail and tone as regards the Duke. There was a Wellington who could be roused to laughter as well as one who could be reduced to fury. Privately, he laughed a lot. The late-Victorian public who read Words on Wellington in large numbers were more familiar with the terse iron persona that Fraser’s book helped to consummate.

The Pickersgill anecdote demonstrates that Wellington, for all his expressed contempt of the media, was mindful of what we now call ‘image’ (though he would have preferred to call it ‘honour’). He was after all, as he felt his critics often forgot, only human. When painting the Duke in 1824, Sir Thomas Lawrence proposed that his subject be depicted holding a pocket watch to signify his waiting for the Prussians. Wellington objected that this might suggest that he was anxious for their arrival and protested, ‘That will never do. I was not waiting for the arrival of the Prussians at Waterloo. Put a telescope in my hand if you please.’ Lawrence, like so many others, deferred to the great man, but his idea had clearly touched a sensitive nerve. Moreover, though he did not speak or write officially about the various controversies relating to his military career, the Duke was not above getting others to do so, on his behalf. He told Stanhope, in May 1834, that one reason he had not yet read Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula was that ‘I might be tempted into contradicting him – into authorizing somebody to answer him for me.’27 Understandably, nothing was more precious to his honour than Waterloo, which apotheosised both himself and his army. In the thirty-seven years following the battle he would defend his chosen position no less doggedly than the one he had assumed on 18 June 1815 – not least because, in the forty-six years leading up to Waterloo, his personal and political battles for recognition had been particularly hard fought.

1

Before Waterloo: Battles for Recognition 1769–1815

Early in 1785, largely in an attempt to reduce living costs, the widowed Countess of Mornington went to live in Brussels. Accompanying her was her third son, the aimless 16-year-old Arthur Wellesley.28 He would surely have spent some leisure time in the Forest of Soignes, nearly 30,000 acres of woodland extending over several miles south-east of the city to the village of Waterloo and beyond. Whether Arthur ventured that far, or further, to the hamlet of Mont St Jean, is uncertain. But since one of the major roads south from Brussels ran through the forest it would seem likely. In April 1815, the boy, now sure of his purpose, returned to Brussels as Duke of Wellington. A little over two months later, the army under his command won the decisive victory of Waterloo. One of the charges Napoleon levelled against his nemesis was that he took a great risk deploying his men in front of what Robert Southey described as, ‘One gloomy, thick, impenetrable shade.’ Wellington denied it. Writing in the 1840s, he claimed that he ‘had a perfect knowledge, having seen it frequently, and of which no knowledge could have been had by any other officer in the Army’. This was surely a cryptic allusion to his sojourn in Brussels. But he did not elucidate. Similarly, he had little to say about his heading a brigade in Flanders in 1794–1795. It was, said The Times a month before Waterloo, ‘a circumstance not generally known’, that Wellington’s first campaign had taken place in the Netherlands.29 Like so much else in the Duke’s early life, as he battled to win recognition, they were episodes that he chose to forget. Critics would charge that selective memory was a lifelong trait, which manifested itself in his last campaign too.

Wellington had been born in Dublin, probably on 1 May 1769. His parents were the unworldly Garret Wellesley, first Earl of Mornington, and Anne Hill, daughter of Viscount Dungannon. The man Victorians revered as the embodiment of Englishness was consequently Irish. Though the family traced its origins to Somerset, they had migrated to Ireland in the thirteenth century. By the eighteenth century, they were unexceptionable members of the Protestant Ascendancy. Yet Wellington never set foot in Ireland after 1809, and in his will of 1807 expressed the desire that his children neither live nor go there.30 This conscious downplaying of his Irish, as opposed to his British, ancestry might be seen by critics as being all of a piece with his subsequent failure to afford due credit to the Prussians for the part they played in the triumph of the British Army in 1815.

But Wellington’s life before 1815 should not be seen as one long inexorable preparation for the slopes of Mont St Jean. He was well into middle age by then, and had already been hailed as one of Britain’s most distinguished warriors by dint of his achievements in the Peninsular War. These too, though, can easily be seen out of context, still more so his earlier years in India. Wellington was not so well known (at least, not so soon or as completely), to his countrymen as the familiar biographical approach might lead us to suppose. Neither were some of his accomplishments universally perceived as victories. This was partly a question of media. Looking back from the vantage point of the early 1860s, Rees Gronow rightly pointed out that:

If the present generation of Englishmen would take the trouble of looking at the newspapers which fifty years ago informed the British public of passing events both at home and abroad, they would, doubtless, marvel at the very limited and imperfect amount of intelligence which the best journals were enabled to place before their readers. The progress of the Peninsular campaign was very imperfectly chronicled.

But there was also an even more important personal and political dimension to Wellington’s story of which contemporaries were only too aware: suspicions lingered as to how far his success was attributable simply to his being the undeserving recipient of favours from his elder brother and a government of which he became a member. The aim of the present chapter is to sketch the broad outlines of that tale, to show when and how the Duke became recognised as a national hero. Without it, the subsequent story of Waterloo is denied its true perspective. It is also, inevitably, the story of the army. An institution which had always had something of an ambivalent standing in the minds of Englishmen, its reputation was not helped by the fact that in Wellington’s youth it had been humiliated in the war against the American colonists. When the Duke’s formidable mother despaired of her son as ‘food for powder and nothing more’, she spoke with a deep sense of frustration.31

Lady Mornington’s frustration suggests that Wellington’s reticence when it came to talking about his formative years stemmed from an embarrassing awareness that his childhood had not lived up to his later standards of success and purpose. His parents clearly invested their greatest hopes in their eldest son, Richard (1760–1842), who distinguished himself at Eton and Oxford. Their other surviving children were William (1763–1845), Anne (1768–1847), Gerald (1770–1848) and Henry (1773–1847). Though Arthur followed his elder brothers to Eton in 1781, his younger sibling, Gerald, quickly outshone him there. Henry’s entering Eton in 1784 was the cue for the undistinguished Arthur to be withdrawn. Stories about him during these early years are very few; several only entered the public domain after his death. One recalled a school holiday when the Wellesley brothers were invited to stay with their aunt, Lady Dungannon, in Shropshire. En route, in order to shock her, they concocted the story that their sister Anne had eloped with a footman. The brothers’ fiction would be echoed later in reality: in March 1809, Henry’s wife, Charlotte, was to elope with the future Lord Uxbridge, Wellington’s cavalry commander at Waterloo.32

Another story circulating widely at the time of the Duke’s death, strangely overlooked by most biographers, is more revealing respectively of Arthur and Richard. It concerned an encounter he and his brother Richard had with David Evans and his sister, whilst staying in North Wales. Wellington, then aged about 12, challenged 8-year-old David to a game with the latter’s marbles. When Wellington made to steal them, David’s 10-year-old sister was enlisted to recover them. Richard, relishing the battle:

incited the two to fight, and mounting himself upon a heap of dirt upon the roadside, dared the girl, to touch Arthur […] and laughed at the fun; but when he beheld his brother Arthur drop his colours, and deliver the marbles, and beat a hasty retreat, the tears fell from his eyes.33

Whilst he lived, Richard, the generous and dominant elder brother, apparently paid for David Evans to receive a weekly newspaper. No less telling, Wellington ‘never shewed any mark of remembrance’ of the episode, except for one brief meeting with Evans soon after Waterloo.34

Richard’s aid was of greater importance in the rise of Arthur than the latter was wont to admit. Following Lord Mornington’s death in May 1781, his embittered widow was left with six children and limited funds. It fell to Richard to assume the role of patriarch. He decided that Arthur might benefit from a year at the Royal Academy of Equitation at Angers in Anjou. The recollections of Alexander Mackenzie, his governor there in 1786, of a sickly Arthur Wellesley who spent most of the time on a sofa playing with a white terrier, do not suggest that the investment reaped an immediate dividend.35 His mother remained unimpressed, for on his return to England she saw him for the first time in a year ‘at the Haymarket Theatre, saying, “I do believe there is my ugly boy Arthur.”’36 Angers did at least confirm that the army would be Arthur’s destination. Brother Richard, second Earl of Mornington, duly smoothed his passage. He spent some £4,000 on Arthur’s behalf, money used to obtain him commissions in seven regiments between March 1787 and April 1793. Though he did not serve with any of them, Arthur rapidly rose from ensign in the 73rd Foot to major in the 33rd.

Just what transformed the dilettante Arthur Wellesley into the soldier who took his profession seriously remains something of an enigma. Undoubtedly the galvanising period was the eighteen months or so that followed the outbreak of war with Revolutionary France in February 1793. The best explanation is that the consequent opportunity to prove himself coincided with the need: he had been courting Lady Catherine (Kitty) Pakenham since autumn 1792 only to have his suit rebuffed in the spring of 1793 by her brother, Lord Longford, on the grounds that he could not adequately provide for her.37 Wellesley responded by taking an active interest in military matters. By September he was the 33rd’s commanding officer with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. A later rare admission was that it was around this time also that he burnt his violin – the facility for music had been inherited from his father – both a symbolic rejection of his frivolous past and a recognition that he must do better. Characteristically, ‘he disliked any mention of the circumstance’.38

Wellesley’s first active service, however, proved inglorious: in June 1794 he landed with his regiment at Ostend as part of the Duke of York’s ill-fated campaign in the Netherlands. He would later rationalise York’s debacle with the wry observation that, ‘I learnt what one ought not to do, and that is always something.’39 Two years later, the 33rd was posted to India. Newly commissioned as Colonel Wellesley, Arthur left Portsmouth to join it. Whether through an awareness of his lack of theoretical knowledge, or the sharp shock his brief practical experience in the Low Countries had administered him, the time on the journey was not wasted. As well as books on Indian affairs, he took with him several hundred volumes covering the art of war from Caesar to Frederick the Great.

Britain had been the dominant European force in India since Clive’s 1757 victory at Plassey. Its affairs there were overseen by the East India Company, in turn supervised by a six-man Board of Control in London. The Company, whose headquarters at Fort William, just outside Calcutta, was generally content to maintain its trading monopoly through a series of alliances and agreements aimed at preserving a rough equilibrium amongst the indigenous peoples. Notionally, the most important were those who comprised the Maratha Confederacy headed by the Peshwa in Poona. Outside the Confederacy, the Nizam of Hyderabad was the most important figure in central India, with Mysore the dominant state in the south. Inevitably, the Company judged that force was sometimes necessary to preserve its position. If he did not already know it, Colonel Wellesley’s autodidactic voyage presumably taught him that there had already been three wars against Mysore and one against the Marathas.

Wellesley’s first months in India passed quietly enough. Then, unexpectedly in October 1797, it was announced that his brother Richard was to be Governor-General. The latter had put his brains and connections to good use, having been an MP since 1784 and a member of the Board of Control since 1793. At once brilliant, charismatic, vain and condescending, and frustrated in what he believed to be his legitimate political ambitions at home, the new Governor-General believed that a more aggressive policy in India was the way forward both for himself and Britain. Arthur, for good and ill, was destined to have his own reputation tied to, and determined by, that of his elder brother for the foreseeable future.40

Mysore, ruled by its Sultan, Tipu, with ambitions to extend his influence in southern India at Britain’s expense, was on an obvious collision course with the Governor-General. The outcome was a foregone conclusion: Tipu died during the brief and bloody storming of his capital, Seringapatam, in May 1799. Arthur, commanding a division, played only a limited part in the military operation. Even so, it would prove contentious. Ordered by his superior, Lieutenant-General Harris, to take a defensive outpost known as the Sultanpettah Tope, during the night of 5 April, a failure to reconnoitre properly meant that he initially failed. It was surely only the fact that his brother was the Governor-General that saw him advanced, ahead of more senior claimants, to the governorship of Mysore. Sympathetic Wellington biographers tend to draw a veil over the episode, or cite his determination to learn from a rare military reverse. The sequence of events, however, would live long in the memory of Wellington’s detractors. Twenty years later, Lady Shelley noted, ‘murmurs’ persisted that ‘his appointment was due to family interest’. A full decade after that, in 1829, when the Duke was Prime Minister, a hostile press reminded readers that ‘it required years of victory entirely to wipe away the impressions then received’. Even Wellington himself later had the good grace to admit, in private, that it was a pivotal moment: the less-than-deserved ‘command afforded me the opportunities for distinction, and thus opened the road to fame’.41

Wellington in India

The distinction to which Wellington referred came in the Second Maratha War. The Peshwa of the Maratha Confederacy, rightly surmising that other Maratha chiefs desired his overthrow, sought protection by an alliance with the Company in December 1802. But the very fact of British interference only succeeded in provoking further unrest within the Confederation, spearheaded by Scindiah of Gwalior. In the early afternoon of 23 September 1803, Major-General Wellesley encountered Scindiah and – unexpectedly – his entire army of 50,000 at the confluence of the rivers Kaitna and Juah near the village of Assaye. As a position it was ‘confoundedly strong and difficult of access’.42 Wellesley’s own force numbered barely 7,000, of whom only 1,800 were British. Presuming that with two villages on opposite sides of the river it must therefore be fordable, he nevertheless pressed on. An impressive but hard-fought victory ensued. By the end of the year, Scindiah and his allies had sued for peace.43

Assaye was a significant victory, far eclipsing anything he had hitherto achieved. In later life Wellington was apt to regard it, even more than Waterloo, as his finest action. It prefigured his experience at Waterloo in two important ways. One was his personal bravery under fire. Colin Campbell of the 78th recalled that, ‘The General was in the thick of the action the whole time […] I never saw a man so cool and collected as he was […] though I can assure you, till our troops got the orders to advance the fate of the day seemed doubtful.’ The other was his reaction once the heat of the action had passed: he was much affected by the fact that 1,600 of his men became casualties in face of unexpectedly stout enemy resistance.44 But some at home were less impressed. This was partly a case of the spectacular victory against superior odds being rendered necessary only because Wellington had not anticipated engaging Scindiah in such large numbers. ‘It is obvious,’ concluded the Morning Chronicle, ‘that a bad General may by possibility gain a name merely through the intrepidity of his army in retrieving his blunders.’ Even more though, as the newspaper continued with undisguised racial arrogance, it was a case of Wellington’s army’s bravery being bound to prevail as ‘in no place is this more likely than in India, where European troops are brought in competition with the natives’. The latter feeling was widespread. Just weeks before Waterloo, an anonymous veteran complained bitterly that whilst Britain was celebrating its Peninsular War heroes, it was forgetting its Indian ones:

The heroes (and they deserve that name) of the Peninsula must not laugh at the battles fought against the native Princes of Asia; for the Duke of Wellington will tell them, that neither in Portugal, Spain or France, did he fight harder or stand in greater peril than against the Mahrattas, at Assaye: and his loss on that occasion, in proportion to his numbers, was as severe as any of his battles in the Peninsula.45

Napoleon was not alone in thinking on the morning of Waterloo, that his adversary was merely a Sepoy general.

If Sir Arthur Wellesley, as he became in 1804, really wanted to make his reputation, it was clear that he would have to return home. He finally did so in 1805. India had provided him with invaluable training, both as a soldier and an administrator. Most of all, India made Wellesley rich. The £42,000 he took home was more than sufficient to provide for Catherine Pakenham. They married in April 1806. India did not, however, as reactions to Assaye exemplify, win him much by way of public recognition. News from India appeared intermittently in British newspapers, but without much comment. Between 1797 and 1801 moreover, the public could be forgiven for focusing on the possibility that the country might be invaded: the War of the Second Coalition began only weeks before the invasion of Mysore. The fear of invasion revived after Britain declared war on France in May 1803; it persisted for the duration of the Second Maratha War. India was a distant sideshow compared to events unfolding in Europe. Above all, Sir Arthur Wellesley continued to live in his brother’s shadow. Before 1808, such references as there are in the British press to ‘Wellesley’ are overwhelmingly to Richard, ennobled as Marquis Wellesley in 1799. Sir Arthur was, understandably, perceived primarily as the military instrument of Richard’s ambitions. When the former met Nelson at the Colonial Office on 12 September, the Admiral needed no introduction; Nelson, by contrast, had to ask an official for the identity of the soldier waiting to see Lord Castlereagh.46

The next three years would both reinforce the impression that the Wellesleys were a family cabal in which Richard was king, and confirm them as a political faction of consequence. Made increasingly uneasy by the style and substance of Richard’s actions, the Board of Control recalled him; by 1806 he was facing charges of misgovernment and corruption. To help defend him, Sir Arthur was found a seat in Parliament. His interventions were few and mercifully brief: it must be considered doubtful whether many parted with the shilling needed to purchase his speech to a committee of the House on East India Company finances. Perhaps the aim was to bore his brother’s critics to death. The case quickly collapsed, not least because the Wellesleys enjoyed informal support from the government.47 And in March 1807 Sir Arthur joined the government (his brothers Henry and William also accepted appointments), when he agreed to serve as Portland’s Chief Secretary for Ireland. As Thompson says, ‘His military engagements in India may not have been fully understood or appreciated at home but his reputation was sufficient for him to be accepted into the high political circle in which his brother had moved before leaving.’48 Improbable as it might now seem, it looked distinctly possible then that Sir Arthur would abandon his military career for one in politics. Not for the last time, however, Napoleon took steps that would shape Sir Arthur’s destiny. France invaded Portugal in November 1807 and Spain in February 1808. When the popular Ferdinand VII of Spain was deposed by Napoleon in May, the Spaniards rose in revolt. English popular sentiment demanded action. It took the form of an expeditionary force of 9,000 men, which set sail from Cork, on 12 July, with Sir Arthur Wellesley at its head. Controversy thereupon replaced consensus. Why, ranted William Cobbett, with 291 generals available, had Wellesley been chosen? It seemed all too obvious to him that it owed everything to political jobbery.49

Of more immediate concern to Wellesley, as he disembarked at Mondego Bay, was the news that General Junot’s force in Lisbon was larger than had been presumed. This was offset by tidings that an additional 15,000 men had been despatched from Britain, including Sir Hew Dalrymple, who would take overall command from Wellesley with Sir Harry Burrard as his deputy. Before they arrived, however, Wellesley gained a limited victory over part of the French army at Roliça on 17 August. Four days later, he scored an altogether more satisfying one, as Burrard looked on, when Junot attacked him at Vimeiro.

Wellesley’s success initially played well at home. The Morning Post carried an early, if idealised, account of him in action:

since landing in Portugal Sir Arthur never went under cover at night, but always slept on the ground in the open air; he was the first up and the last down of the whole camp, sleeping constantly in his clothes […] he was cheerful, affable, and easy of access – enduring every privation himself, he was attentive to the wants of all, and ever active to obviate or remedy them […] In personal bravery he has been never excelled […] he was constantly in the hottest part of the action; wherever a corps was to be led on […] Sir Arthur was on the spot to head it […] Is it wondrous that such a man should be the idol of his soldiers, and the admiration of his brother Officers?50

Further recognition came with his first appearance in caricature.51 But the caprice of press and public were never more evident than in the aftermath of Vimeiro. Sir Harry Burrard declined Wellesley’s request to pursue Junot; Dalrymple, who arrived the day after Vimeiro, endorsed his deputy’s caution. By the end of the month, they had brokered the Cintra Convention with Junot. The French agreed to leave Portugal, their transportation provided by the British. At home, this news transformed celebration into uproar. Ben Sydenham, an admirer of Wellesley, wrote that, ‘It has excited universal indignation, such a ferment has never existed.’52

Whilst it was Dalrymple who had negotiated the armistice, it was Wellesley who bore the brunt of the indignation. This was partly because his superiors had ordered him to sign the Convention – the essentials of which he endorsed – but more because he remained a member of the government. Anti-government press organs, notably the Morning Chronicle, speculated openly about his generalship, insisting that his reputation rested on the too-narrow basis of Assaye. Speaking at a county meeting in Hampshire, William Cobbett, who detested both the government and ‘that infernal family’, smelt conspiracy. Why, he wanted to know, had part of the Convention only been published in French? ‘My neighbours do not understand French; God forbid they ever should.’53 Demands for an inquiry proved irresistible. They also allowed the Opposition to continue its attack: ‘What a happy thing it is,’ fulminated The Times, ‘to possess rank and connection, and the means of patronizing friends and of serving dependants.’