Wellington: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

frontier, but must stand closer to the sea; and, with this in mind, he and his Chief Engineer had closely inspected the high ground north of Lisbon on either side of Torres Vedras between the river Tagus and the Atlantic Ocean. Here he could make a stand; and here he set his Engineers to work in constructing, with the help of several thousand Portuguese labourers, the extensive fortifications of gun emplacements, earthworks, palisades, fascine-lined trenches, gabions and ravelins which were outlined in memoranda of careful exactitude.⁷

      The French marched on, brushing aside resistance at Tamamès and Ocaña, the incompetently led Spanish forces, in Wellington’s contemptuous words, ‘doing Bonaparte’s business for him as fast as possible’.⁸ At least the Portuguese promised to be better soldiers. Submitting themselves to British discipline under the command of a British officer, William Carr Beresford, a natural son of the Marquess of Waterford, who had learned to speak Portuguese while Governor of Madeira, they underwent training in British drill and British tactics.* Wellington hoped they might even prove a match for the French who would find the going more and more difficult and hunger harder to bear as they marched through the wide plains and black mountains of central Spain towards the Portuguese frontier.

      Occupied and anxious as he was, Wellington found time to spare from his maps and reports and inventories, his letters and reconnaissances. He sought permission to shoot royal coverts beside the Caya; he went hunting red deer around Elvas; he read books about Portugal and warfare in Portugal; he wrote to his mother and sent her a shawl which, ‘bad as it is’, he commented dismissively, ‘is the only manufacture of Spain I have seen’.⁹ He also found time to talk informally to those members of his staff, his ‘family’, with whom he was on intimate terms; and even to perform some of their duties for them.

      One day one of his staff officers returned from an unprofitable visit to the estate of a noble Spaniard to whom he had been sent to procure forage. The General asked him why he had been unable to get any. ‘I was told I would have to bow to the noble owner,’ the officer said, ‘and of course I couldn’t do that.’

      ‘Well I suppose I must get some myself,’ Wellington said.

      Soon carts full of forage were being carried into camp. Wellington was asked how he had managed it.

      ‘Oh,’ he said easily, ‘I just bobbed down.’¹⁰

      Since the departure of his senior aide-de-camp, Major Colin Campbell, to become Assistant Adjutant-General of a division.† most of the officers chosen for staff appointments were of aristocratic birth and three were related to him by marriage. One of these was his wife’s brother, the Hon. Edward Pakenham, who had been a lieutenant in the 92nd Foot at the age of sixteen, had commanded a battalion of the 7th Royal Fusiliers in Denmark when he was nineteen, and, before being given command of the 3rd Division, had served on the staff as Deputy Adjutant-General. Another was the Marquess of Worcester, later seventh Duke of Beaufort, a dashing young man whom Harriette Wilson had hoped to marry and who made a more suitable marriage with one of Wellington’s nieces, Georgiana Frederica Fitzroy, and after her death, with another of his nieces, Emily Frances Smith. The third was Lord Fitzroy Somerset, the fifth Duke of Beaufort’s youngest son, the future first Lord Raglan, who was to marry Lord Wellington’s niece, Emily Harriet, second daughter of the third Earl of Mornington.

      Lord Fitzroy bore so marked a resemblance to his wife’s uncle that, when they had sailed out to Corunna together in the Donegal in July 1808, men had taken them for father and son. Their friendship, formed then, was never to be broken. The General was once asked why he reposed such confidence in Lord Fitzroy whom he appointed his Military Secretary at the age of twenty-two in succession to Colonel James Bathurst whose responsibilities had driven him to a nervous breakdown. Wellington replied that, while Fitzroy Somerset, whom he always addressed as Lord Fitzroy, though he had known him since childhood, certainly had no very exceptional talents, he could always rely upon him to tell the exact truth and to carry out his orders with precision and promptitude.¹¹

      Other favoured members of his staff were Captain the Hon. Alexander Gordon, brother of the fourth Earl of Aberdeen; Lord Burghersh, only son of the tenth Earl of Westmorland, who was one day to be Resident Minister in Berlin; Captain Ulysses Burgh, later second Baron Downes; and Charles, Lord March, son of Wellington’s friend, the fourth Duke of Richmond, whom the General, though painfully bruised in the thigh, was to ride several miles to see when he heard that the young man had been severely wounded. He hobbled out of the patient’s room, supporting himself on two sticks, with ‘tears trickling down his cheeks’.¹²

      Yet while Wellington, ‘in looking for able young men for his personal staff, preferred ability with a title to ability without’¹³ – and, indeed, was ‘all for having gentlemen for officers’¹⁴ since the British Army was what it was ‘because it [was] officered by gentlemen’¹⁵ – he would not tolerate inefficiency in any member of his staff however nobly born and whether related to him or not. His brother William’s only son, also William, an extravagant and dissipated young man, was dismissed and sent home shortly after his appointment to his uncle’s staff, for being ‘lamentably ignorant and idle’ and for ‘doing things he has no right to do’.¹⁶

      Apart from the disreputable and incompetent William Wellesley-Pole and a few other dissidents, Wellington’s young staff officers greatly respected him. So did most of his brigade and divisional commanders, if few could bring themselves to feel that affection for him which he inspired in the inner circle of his ‘family’ and in one or two more senior officers who knew him well such as Galbraith Lowry Cole, Lady Wellington’s former suitor, now in command of the 4th Division, who thought that he had never served any chief he liked so much, apart from Sir John Moore. ‘He has treated me with much more confidence than I had a right or could be expected from anyone,’ Cole went on. ‘Few, I believe, possess a firmer mind or have, as far as I have heard, more the confidence of the Army.’¹⁷

      It could not be said, however, that the army inspired much confidence in Wellington. He was ‘apprehensive of the consequences of trying them in any nice operation before the enemy, for they really forget everything when plunder or wine is within their reach’.¹⁸ The general officers were ‘very bad’; indeed, some of them were ‘a disgrace to the service’. The man who had been sent out as his second-in-command was ‘very unfit for his situation’. All in all, he told his brother William in confidence, ‘I sincerely believe that in every respect, with the exception of the Guards and one or two other Corps, this is the Worst British Army that was ever in the field.’¹⁹

      The most severe punishments could not stop the men plundering, an activity which many of them seemed to. consider part of the natural process of soldiering. Throughout the war in the Peninsula numerous general orders were issued on the lines of the following:

       The Commander of the Forces requests the General officers commanding divisions will take measures to prevent the shameful and unmilitary practice of soldiers shooting pigs in the woods, so close to the camp and to the columns of march as that two dragoons were shot last night … The number of soldiers straggling from their regiments for no reason excepting to plunder, is a disgrace to the army, and affords a strong proof of the degree to which the discipline of the regiments is relaxed, and of the inattention of the commanding and other officers of regiments to their duty, and to the repeated orders of the army … The Commander of the Forces desires that notice may be given to the soldiers that he has this day ordered two men to be hanged who were caught in the fact of shooting pigs.²⁰

      ‘On the other hand’, so the commissary August Schaumann said, ‘Lord Wellington frequently showed himself merciful towards regiments of which he was fond. On one occasion, for instance, he came upon the 1st German Hussars … one of whose men came riding up with a bleating sheep. The moment Lord Wellington saw the man, however, he only smiled, and turning his back on him, pretended not to have noticed anything, although the officers at his side were shuddering with fear.’²¹

      Similarly, it gave Wellington wry pleasure to recount the story of a man he himself caught with a