Wellington: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

someday.’¹⁶

      August Schaumann remarked how different he appeared on one of his hunting days when compared with his demeanour in times of stress in battle when, although always in control of his emotions, he ‘seemed like an angry God under whose threatening glance every one trembled’. By contrast, on his hunting days, when Schaumann ‘often used to meet him with his entourage and a magnificent pack of English hounds’, he was ‘in the best of spirits, genial and sans cérémonie; in fact, just like a genuine country squire. No one would have suspected at such moments that he was the Field-Marshal of three nations.’¹⁷

      He was liable at such times to dash off at any moment, even in the middle of a conversation. The Spanish General Castaños was once much surprised to have an ‘earnest conversation’ with him interrupted in this way when a ‘brace of greyhounds in pursuit of a hare’ passed close to them as they rode along together ‘under a fire of artillery and accompanied by a numerous staff’. The instant Wellington observed the hare and greyhounds, he ‘gave the view hallo and went after them at full speed, to the utter astonishment of his foreign accompaniments. Nor did he stop until he saw the hare killed; when he returned and resumed the commander-in-chief as if nothing had happened.’¹⁸

      The air of informality which pervaded headquarters was deceptive. The General worked hard, unwilling to leave much to his second-in-command – an appointment he chose not to recognize – though more willing to do so when Sir Brent Spencer went home and was succeeded by the more trustworthy Sir Thomas Graham, the future Lord Lyne-doch. He kept himself fit and expected his hardworking staff to keep fit too. He needed little sleep and grew impatient with those who pleaded the necessity of more. He was up at six o’clock, having been in bed for no more than six hours, sometimes for only three. He was at his desk writing until nine o’clock when he had breakfast, a spare, plain meal as all his meals usually were since he had such scant interest in food and was little concerned if he passed twenty-four hours without eating anything at all other than the crust and boiled egg he sometimes stuffed in his pocket when riding out of a morning.*¹⁹

      The Duke’s abstinence often upset the Spanish aide-de-camp at his headquarters, Miguel Ricardo de Alava y Esquivel, later Spanish Ambassador in London, who, as he confessed, grew to dread those days when the General was asked what time the staff were to set off in the morning and what they were to have for dinner, since Alava knew that ‘the Peer’ would reply, as he never failed to do, ‘At daylight. Cold meat.’ The Spaniard held those four words ‘en horreur’.20

      After breakfast the General received in turn the heads of the various departments of the army, making it clear that he preferred them to speak without recourse to notes, since hesitation while they were looking at them clearly annoyed him and made him ‘fidgetty’.²¹ He then mounted one of his horses, upon which he expended large sums of mopey, and rode off to inspect an outpost or to see a divisional commander. At six he dined, ‘never alone, nor with members of his personal staff exclusively about him’, wrote the Rev. G.R. Gleig, son of the Bishop of Brechin, at that time an officer in the 85th. ‘Everybody recommended to his notice [who happened to be passing through] was sure to receive an invitation … The conversation was most interesting and lively. The Duke himself spoke out upon all subjects with an absence of reserve which sometimes surprised his guests … He was rich in anecdote, most of them taking a ludicrous turn, and without any apparent effort put the company very much at their ease.’²²

      About nine o’clock he would order coffee which was accepted as a signal for breaking up; and he then returned to his writing table where he studied papers and resumed his correspondence, remaining at work far into the night.

      Occasionally there were performances in a makeshift theatre and evenings of great jollity.²³ On one memorable occasion, during a lull in fighting, a grand party was given to celebrate Lowry Cole’s investiture with the Order of the Bath. Wellington lent his plate for the dinner which was followed by a dance attended by forty ladies and 200 officers and other gentlemen guests. The band of the 52nd played tirelessly. The wine ‘both at dinner and supper having circulated freely’, at about two o’clock in the morning ‘a number of Spanish officers insisted upon carrying Lord Wellington round the room in a chair. He suggested that they should begin with the person of highest rank present, and named the Prince of Orange [one of his aides-de-camp]. The Prince was immediately seized, and General [Sir John Ormsby] Vandeleur, coming up to remonstrate, was seized in like manner. Each was placed in an arm-chair, and hoisted on the shoulders of four bearers. The inevitable consequence soon followed. The bearers had not taken many steps before they with their burdens came down.’²⁴

      The Advocate-General thought that there were rather too many of these parties. ‘Great dinners’ were held on the anniversaries of victories and on the birthdays of members of the Royal Family, indeed on any occasion considered worthy of celebration. ‘The Commander-in-Chief’s victories and successes will soon ruin him in wine and eating,’ Larpent thought, ‘and if he goes on as he has, he had better keep open house at once every day, and his calendar of feasts will be as full as the Romish one with red letter days.’²⁵

      Many of the papers which Wellington studied in those early morning hours in his room or tent at headquarters were orders written by Napoleon to his marshals in Spain and sent on to the Inglese by the guerrillas who kept careful watch upon the roads that led to France, pouncing down by night on horsemen and convoys with sharp knives in strong brown hands. Their contribution to the Spanish cause Wellington valued more highly than that of the Spanish levies.²⁶ He listened with admiration, if sometimes with a frisson of horror, to stories of their exploits, of the achievements of such guerrilla leaders as one known as Moreno who was said to have once killed seven French soldiers with a single shot from his huge blunderbuss, the recoil of which dislocated his shoulder, and who, in presenting some captured silver to the town of his birth, arranged upon one of the pieces a selection of French ears. ‘It is probable,’ Wellington had written to Spencer Perceval at the beginning of 1810, ‘that, although the [Spanish] armies may be lost and the principal Juntas and authorities of the provinces may be dispersed, the war of partizans may continue.’²⁷

      It had continued. So had the dangerous work and intelligence activities of Wellington’s scouts and spies who cooperated with the guerrillas, of men like Sir John Waters, who could ‘assume the character of Spaniards of every degree and station’, and Patrick Curtis, Rector of the Irish College at Salamanca, Professor of Astronomy there and future Archbishop of Armagh, who was arrested by the French in 1811, and John Grant, known as a ‘master of disguise’, and his namesake, Colquhoun Grant, a brilliant linguist (unlike his other namesake, the arrogant Hussar), one of those ‘exploring officers’ of whom Wellington said ‘no army in the world ever produced the like’, adding, ‘Grant was worth a brigade to me.’²⁸

      The Imperial commands which, intercepted by guerrillas, were handed to these ‘exploring officers’, were almost invariably impracticable and sometimes absurd, based upon faulty intelligence and misconceptions as to the nature of the Spanish terrain. They ignored the fact that the British now held the initiative in the Peninsula, and that the French, with limited supplies and transport in the bleak terrain of western Spain, could not possibly seize Lisbon, as Napoleon so insistently demanded.

      Wellington, however, was free to move against the French; and in January 1812 he did so, marching towards Ciudad Rodrigo, digging trenches in front of it and, on the 19th of the month, after a most hastily conducted siege, storming it.²⁹ The assaulting troops charged into what one of them called ‘an inferno of fire’. The Connaught Rangers were sent forward by the gruff Welsh commander of the 3rd Division, Thomas Picton, with the order, ‘It is not my intention to spend any powder this evening. We’ll do this with the cold iron.’³⁰

      Their Colonel, Henry Mackinnon, was blown up and killed by a mine. Other officers fell around him: the fiery-tempered General Craufurd of the Light Division was wounded in the back; Colonel John Colborne of the 52nd, tall and patrician with a nose like Wellington’s, was shot through the shoulder; Lieutenant John Gurwood, one day to be Wellington’s private secretary, was severely wounded in the skull;