Wellington

Hon Sir John William Fortescue

• Publisher: Wagram Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781786255006
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Napoleonic Wars
• Index: History

SIR JOHN FORTESCUE was the foremost military historian of his day. Librarian at Windsor Castle from 1905 to 1926, he was the author of many notable books, including his famous History of the British Army. Among these, his life of Wellington, described by the Spectator as 'deserving to rank with Southey's Nelson as a national classic', has always been held in special regard. Many biographies of Wellington have been written both before and since, but none show so clearly and concisely how Wellington became the great leader of soldiers that he undoubtedly was.Wellington's military career can be divided roughly into three main phases. First, his command in India and his brilliant conduct of the Mahratta campaign; then the long war of attrition in the Iberian peninsular; and finally the campaign leading to Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. Sir John gives the reader what The Times Literary Supplement called 'a hilltop view' of those years, 'pointing out the great essential features of the landscape... and doing it all so clearly that we know the country better and more intimately than we have ever done before.'This edition makes available again a book that is of interest both to students of military history and to the general reader who wishes to follow the campaigns of a military commander, who was a great patriot and English gentleman.

WELLINGTON

CHAPTER I

THE family of Wellesley appears to trace its origin to Devon, the name having passed from its primitive form of Westleigh through the corruptions of Westley and Wesley before it assumed, little more than a century ago, its present familiar shape. There is evidence that a Wellesley was already in Ireland in the thirteenth century. The family of Colley is conjectured to have come from Gloucestershire; and a branch of it was settled in Ireland early in the sixteenth century. No man bearing either name seems to have attained to any great prominence in the Irish branch until, in 1746, Richard Colley of Castle Carbury, Kildare, was created a peer of Ireland. Having in 1728 succeeded to the estates of his cousin, Garrett Wesley of Dangan and Mornington, in County Meath, he took the additional surname of Wesley, and chose for his title the Barony of Mornington. Upon his death he was succeeded by his son Garrett, who in 1760 was advanced in the peerage by the titles of Earl of Mornington and Viscount Wellesley. He is said to have owed his promotion to his musical talents, which commended him to the favour of George III, himself an enthusiast over music. Undoubtedly he possessed unusual gifts in the most emotional of the arts, and his name survives as the composer of double-chants and of one or two glees to this day.

This musical Lord Mornington married Anne Hill, daughter of Arthur, first Viscount Dungannon, who bore him nine children: Richard, afterwards Marquess Wellesley, born in 1760; William, later Lord Maryborough, born in 1763; two sons, Arthur and Francis, who died in early boyhood; a daughter, Anne, born in 1768; Arthur, the future Duke of Wellington, born on some uncertain day at the very end of April or beginning of May 1769; Gerald, later a prebendary of Durham, born in 1770; a second daughter, Mary, born in 1772, who died in 1794; and Henry, later Lord Cowley, born in 1773.

Lady Mornington is said to have been a cold and austere woman; but, if a portrait of her in old age can be trusted as a guide, she must have been remarkably beautiful, which would be enough to attract any Wellesley, let alone one with a touch of musical genius. In any case, if she spoiled any of her children, it must have been the eldest, a brilliant and beautiful boy: certainly it was not Arthur. We know little of Arthur’s childhood but enough to be sure that it was not happy. He was not very strong physically, and was shy and unsociable. Possibly he was rather overpowered by his elder brothers, and he seems to have received no more sympathy from his sister than from his mother.

He inherited his father’s love of music, and learned to play the violin with some skill; but his father died when the boy was twelve years old, and any kindly influence that may have flowed from him was lost. The lad was driven back upon himself; and the key of his character became self-repression.

In the matter of education Arthur was sent first to a preparatory school at Chelsea and then to Eton; but his mother’s means were too scanty to permit him to stay at Eton after his father’s death, and she took him away with her to Brussels, where he received private tuition. Lady Mornington then decided that her “ ugly boy “ was fit food for powder, and in 1786 she sent him to a military academy, which was principally a riding-school, at Angers. Here he remained for about a year, when, through the interest of his brother, Lord Mornington, he obtained a commission as ensign in the Seventy-third Highlanders, then serving in India. So far he had learned at least to speak and write French, if not with perfect idiomatic correctness, at least with facility and resolution, and to acquire a rather ugly seat on a horse.

Within six months of donning the red coat, in November 1787, he was appointed aide-de-camp to two Lords-Lieutenant of Ireland, first the Duke of Buckingham and later Lord Westmorland, remaining on that staff until March 1793. Meanwhile, as was the fashion in those days, he passed rapidly from regiment to regiment in the way of promotion. On the 25th of December 1787 he was advanced to a lieutenancy in the Seventy-sixth Foot, which was just coming to birth as one of four new regiments raised for service in India. By this manoeuvre, no doubt, he obtained his lieutenancy without purchase, but, as he had no wish to proceed to India, he exchanged on the 23rd of January 1788 into the Forty-first, then in process of transformation from a corps of Invalids into a regular regiment of the Line, and therefore also containing a few subalterns who had not bought their commissions. Finally, on the 25th of June in the same year, he was transferred to the Twelfth Light Dragoons, whereby he secured the convenience of belonging to a regiment which was, and indeed for nearly seventy years had been, quartered in Ireland. On their muster-rolls he remained for three years, until on the 30th of June 1791 he obtained a company in the Fifty-eighth Foot, once again apparently without purchase and possibly by the favour of the Lord-Lieutenant, for the Fifty-eighth was on the Irish establishment. On the 31st of October 1792 he was transferred to the Eighteenth Light Dragoons, also quartered in Ireland at that time, and so accomplished his sixth change of regiments within five years.

Whether he did regimental duty with any of these corps is extremely doubtful. Some of them perhaps he never joined nor even saw, but he probably presented himself at the depot of the Seventy-third, and he certainly was for a time with the Fifty-eighth. It may have been there that he caused a private to be weighed, with and without his kit and accoutrements, so as to judge of the burden that the soldier was expected to carry.

There, too, he may have mastered his drill before he betook himself to Dublin Castle; but, once within those precincts, it is unlikely that he entered a barrack-yard again. Meanwhile, life on the staff of the Lord-Lieutenant can hardly have been congenial to a shy and sheepish young man. He varied it by entering the Irish Parliament as member for the borough of Trim in 1790, and is said to have won popularity among his constituents by his excellent temper, his firmness, and his amiable manners. The experience was doubtless of value to him; but meanwhile the life was expensive, and his private income did not exceed £125 a year. It is said that he ran into debt, and that his chief, Lord Buckingham, came to his assistance; and it is certain that to the end of his life he showed particular affability to the Grenvilles and to their relations. A more serious matter was that he fell in love with Lady Katherine Pakenham, and became engaged to her, though lack of means upon both sides forbade them to marry. Altogether the five first years of his life as a soldier were passed in a fashion which would by no means commend itself to a modern commanding officer.

And yet it must be said for him that there was little that was attractive in the military profession at that period. For the British soldier, the ten years that intervened between the end of the American rebellion and the beginning of the war of the French Revolution were among the very worst in his history. In the first place, the army had returned from America defeated and discredited. The war had been enormously costly, and the first and most natural economy was to reduce the military forces to the lowest possible strength. This would have signified less if any pains had been taken to maintain their efficiency, whatever their numerical weakness; but, on the contrary, they were allowed to fall absolutely to pieces. The pay of the private soldier was literally insufficient to keep him from starvation, and the result was that recruits could hardly be obtained, or, if beguiled into accepting the shilling, deserted immediately. In Ireland, particularly, the average number of deserters amounted to one-sixth of the whole establishment. Thus, weak though the regiments would have been even if their ranks had been filled, they were weaker still from want of recruits. In other words, the officers had no men to command. It must be remembered, too, that regiments were rarely kept together in those days. In England there were, except in a few fortresses—such as the Tower,—no barracks; and the men were billeted in small bodies, often no more than troops or companies, in the ale-houses of provincial towns. In Ireland there were barracks, but these were mostly small and widely distributed, so as to enable the troops to do the work of police. In either country it might take a colonel a day’s journey to visit the whole of his regiment. Thus there was every facility for slackness on the part of the officers, and every difficulty in the way of a commander who disapproved of such slackness.

Moreover, there were plenty of colonels who gave themselves no trouble about their regiments; and, despite of periodic inspections by generals, it was almost impossible to stir such commanding officers into activity. A colonel was the proprietor of his regiment, having paid hard cash for it, and, within certain limits, did very much what was right in his own eyes. Even in the matter of drill no uniformity was enforced until March 1792. A colonel might be an able and enthusiastic soldier who gave his men training that was far in advance of his time, or he might be a hard-drinking old dullard who was quite content if his battalion could blunder through the prescribed movements somehow. At the best, all that was expected of a battalion or a regiment of cavalry was extreme precision of drill with, in the case of the infantry, very exact performance of the manual and firing exercise. With the old musket the average number of missfires was forty per cent.; and only extraordinary care in loading could keep that average below fifty or sixty per cent. For this reason good commanders worked to make the business of loading a matter of mechanical habit, so that their men should go through it as coolly in the heat of action as on parade; but even so the first volley, which had been loaded carefully before the engagement, was jealously husbanded, for it was bound to be more effective than any that should subsequently be fired.

But here it must be noted that in respect of musketry the British were far ahead of any army in Europe. During the War of American Independence they had been called upon to meet an elusive enemy, who had carried marksmanship in civil life to a high degree of perfection; and they had been obliged to adapt themselves to that enemy’s tactics. The result had been not only great improvement in shooting, but a definite and far-reaching change in tactical formation. Hitherto the British infantry, even as all the infantry of Europe, had been drawn up three ranks deep for action, the front rank kneeling and the two rear ranks firing over their heads. In America the British soon learned to fight in two ranks only, frequently also loosening their formation to encounter scattered sharp-shooters in woodland fighting. This formation in double rank, though not laid down by regulation, became the rule after the end of the war, and it signified the very important fact that, given an equal number of men, the British front of fire was longer than that of any other nation. The soundness of the lessons learned in America had been tested against French regular troops in St Lucia in 1778. There thirteen hundred British soldiers, fresh from active service in America, repulsed twelve thousand French, inflicting upon them a loss of four hundred killed and twelve hundred wounded. This in itself was a notable performance, but the engagement presented one very remarkable feature. At the height of the action the British ammunition failed, and it was thought best to reserve the one or two rounds left to each man for a final effort. The order was therefore given to cease fire, and it was instantly obeyed. Men who had their muskets to their shoulders and their fingers on the trigger in all the heat of combat, brought their weapons down without hesitation undischarged. I know of no finer example of fire-discipline in all military history; and no doubt it was quoted as such in the army.

This was the supreme achievement of military training over the very rude material of which the British Army was composed. That better material should be obtained under existing conditions was not to be expected. In barracks the men were infamously housed, being huddled together by fours in wooden cribs to sleep, and having only their sleeping-rooms in which to do everything but their drill. They drank hard, as did every class at that time, and they could buy fiery spirits in the barrack-yard; it being judged impossible to prevent them from smuggling liquor into their quarters, and therefore a less evil to permit them to purchase it. There was no encouragement to good behaviour; and one principal punishment, merciless flogging, was inflicted for misconduct. There were, on the other hand, always officers who sought, and with great success, to rule their men with kindness and consideration; but their great difficulty was that they could not afford to rid themselves of bad characters. A soldier was enlisted for life, and, if he were discharged, he must be replaced, which was a matter of expense to the officers, for the country did not grant bounty enough to attract recruits. In 1790, for instance, an alarm of war with Spain led to sudden augmentation of the army. The Treasury offered a bounty of five guineas; but the actual price of recruits rose to fifteen guineas. Hence officers were obliged by sheer penury to keep not only undesirable men, but decrepit old veterans who could hardly stand on their legs and were utterly useless except on parade. It was not that they wilfully defrauded their country, but that the Treasury, by its extreme niggardliness, forced such fraud upon them.

And the officers had other grievances, of which the most serious was that they were wholly under civil control. There was no Commander-in-Chief, only a civilian Secretary at War, who, as was natural, conducted all his business with the main object of securing votes. There were an Adjutant-General and a Quartermaster-General, who, technically, were on the immediate staff of the King; but there was no one to press upon Ministers the grievances and the requirements of officers and men. Apart from the prohibitive expense of recruits, the pay of subalterns of cavalry was, owing to the high price of forage, scarcely equal to the maintenance of their servants and their horses; and the result was that vacant cornetcies could not be filled. The pay of an officer gave him only an absurdly trifling sum over and above the interest on the price of his commission; and it was too much to expect that gentlemen should invest money in a dead loss. The Adjutant-General in vain pressed the hard case both of these subalterns and of the private soldier upon the Chancellor of the Exchequer. But William Pitt, who was busy with the task of putting the finances of the country on a sound basis—in itself a transcendent service,—turned a deaf ear. In 1792 he did improve the position of the private soldier so far as not only to deliver him from starvation, but actually to allow him the munificent sum of a trifle under one penny one farthing a day; but this he did at the cost of leaving the subalterns unrelieved. The general result of Pitt’s parsimony and of civilian control of the army was that discipline among the officers was extremely bad. Colonels could not be hard upon their officers for not keeping the ranks of their companies full, when they literally could not afford to pay the cost of recruits; and a subaltern took little account of his military superiors when, if he were refused leave of absence by them, he could obtain it, through political influence, directly from the Secretary at War.

Such, very briefly, was the state of the army, or rather of the group of self-dependent regiments which was called the army, when Arthur Wellesley joined it, and when the war of the French Revolution and Empire began. By the end of 1792 the revolutionary government of France, having landed the country in bankruptcy, set out to indemnify itself by the plunder of its neighbours; and Holland, rich in money but absolutely effete in government and military efficiency, was their first object. Though Pitt counted upon the destruction of French trade over sea as the surest means of vanquishing France, and, to that end, sent most of the meagre British battalions to the West Indies, he could not refuse a small contingent to join the Austrians in driving the French out of the Austrian Netherlands, and in thus saving not only the bank of Amsterdam but the port of Antwerp from falling into French hands.

War was declared on the 7th of February 1793, and by the end of March two weak brigades, one of the Guards, the other of the Line, had been landed in Holland, to serve, together with a contingent of Hanoverians and hired Hessians, under the Duke of York, subject to the supreme direction of an Austrian Commander-in-Chief.

In that same month of March Arthur Wellesley begged his elder brother, Mornington, to advance him the money for purchase of a majority in the Thirty-third. Mornington did so, afterwards refusing to accept repayment; and Arthur, having become major on the 30th of April, was further promoted lieutenant-colonel, with command of the regiment, on the 30th of September. As to the condition of the Thirty-third at the time we know nothing, but, if it were not weak in numbers, it must have been full, in common with all other regiments, of bad recruits. Meanwhile, the campaign of 1793 in the Low Countries had been wrecked by the failure of the Duke of York’s siege of Dunkirk, a fatuous operation which had been forced upon him by Ministers in the hope of making the war popular. The campaign of 1794, after a brilliant little success or two, went even worse. The Austrians deliberately exposed the Duke of York’s troops to certain defeat at the Battle of Tourcoing (18th of May) in order to give themselves an excuse for evacuating the Netherlands. By the middle of June they had already left the British contingent in isolation on the Scheldt; and the British war minister, whose one idea of conducting operations was to hold on tightly to the port of Ostend, hurried thither three regiments from Ireland, the Thirty-third among them, together with eight more battalions and a large body of drafts—in all, about ten thousand men—under Lord Moira. The first batch of these reinforcements reached Ostend on the 21st of June; on the 25th the Thirty-third disembarked after a passage of nineteen days from Cork; and on the 26th arrived the remainder of the troops, together with Moira himself.

These must have been some of the strangest British soldiers ever seen. The drafts arrived without arms or military appointments of any kind; and it was only through the accident of a fog at sea, which delayed the sailing of some of the transports, that a complete battalion was not landed in precisely the same condition. All of Moira’s regiments had been skimmed to fill the empty ranks of other corps which had been sent to man the fleet, or to the West Indies; and six of them, including the Thirty-third, had been stripped of their finest men by the detachment of their flank companies upon another service. Pitt, moreover, had resorted to a vile expedient of his father’s to raise men, by offering rank in the army to any young man of means who undertook to produce a given number of recruits, so many for an ensigncy, so many for a lieutenancy, and so forth. There was a perfect rush for these commissions. Army-brokers, who carried on a most scandalous traffic for their purchase and exchange, contrived to raise not only schoolboys but gambling-house keepers and other most undesirable characters to the rank of field-officers. Arthur Wellesley had just sufficient seniority to escape the degradation of being subjected to the command of these worthless creatures; but other deserving old officers were not so fortunate, and found themselves suddenly, and through no fault of their own, subordinate to men undistinguished by birth or intellect, and totally ignorant of their profession. And the new recruits were as bad as the new officers. They were the offscourings of the nation, who could be purchased at a cheap rate by the crimps—criminals, decrepit old men, raw boys, the half-witted, the feeble-minded, and even downright lunatics. All of them were untrained, and not a few untrainable. “Many of them do not know one end of a firelock from the other,” wrote the Duke of York’s chief staff officer, “and will never know it.”

With regiments composed of such men under such officers, Lord Moira was expected to hold Ostend, an indefensible place, against a greatly superior force of French, the advanced guard of which lay only four miles away. Happily the enemy made no immediate attempt to molest him, and he slipped off to Ghent, joining the Duke of York on the 6th of July a few miles farther to the east. Three weeks later the Austrians finally parted from the Duke, who thereupon retired into Holland with some forty thousand men, twenty-five thousand of them British, that were left to him. The French numbered about one hundred and fifty thousand; and the task set to the Duke was to manoeuvre over a wide front to hold an army four times as great as his own in check. We have seen something of the officers and men of the Duke’s force, and it remains to say a few words of the higher command and of the departments. The Duke himself, though later he proved himself an excellent administrator at home, was useless in the field, though he had a very competent adviser in Colonel James Craig. There were only four generals, including those on the staff. Transport and supply was the business of the Commissariat, a department of the Treasury, and was carried on chiefly through contractors. There was also a newly raised transport-corps called the Royal Waggon Train. But the officials of the Treasury naturally knew nothing about supplying an army in the field; and the Waggon Train, whose nickname in the army was the “ Newgate Blues,” was composed chiefly of convicts. To complicate the matter of transport, the new officers, in order to make themselves comfortable, hired innumerable private waggons under the charge of insubordinate drivers, which swelled the baggage columns to unmanageable dimensions. The medical department was perhaps worst of all, the staff being made up, for economy’s sake, of drunken apothecaries, broken-down practitioners, and every description of rogue; and the sick and wounded were infamously treated. The hospitals were known in the army as the “shambles”; and wounded men were sent back to England in the depth of winter on the bar...