Wellington: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

playing the violin quite well, so it was said, ‘for a gentleman’.¹ There was an organ in the hall of the Wesleys’ country house, Dangan Castle, in the county of Meath, another organ in the chapel there and a harpsichord in the breakfast room. But Richard Colley Wesley had been essentially an amateur, whereas his son, a composer as well as performer from his early youth, had been able to take his place among the virtuosi of Dublin’s musical world and had been appointed Professor of Music at Trinity College. His godmother, Mary Delany, however, while acknowledging Garret Wesley’s musical talents, found him rather deficient in ‘the punctilios of good breeding’, and had consequently been much gratified when he announced that he was to marry Lady Louisa Augusta Lennox, daughter of the second Duke of Richmond. Unfortunately, Lady Louisa had developed other ideas. Confessing that she had conceived ‘an insurmountable dislike’ for her noble suitor, she had accepted instead the hand of a richer young man; and Lord Mornington, whose father had died the year before, married Anne Hill, the eldest daughter of a banker, Arthur Hill, later Hill-Trevor, the first Viscount Dungan-non, a sixteen-year-old girl who, in the opinion of Mrs Delany, was modest and good-natured but, like her husband, rather gauche in manner,² and, according to Mrs Nicolson Calvert, the beautiful Irish wife of an English Member of Parliament, a somewhat ‘commonplace character’.³

      The young couple had appeared to suit each other well. They had lived contentedly in the country at Dangan Castle and in Dublin in a handsome house facing Sefton Street. Their first child, Richard, had been born in 1760 and was styled Viscount Wellesley, that variation of the family name, which his brothers were later to adopt, being preferred as older and more aristocratic than Wesley with its associations of evangelical Methodism. Other children had followed at regular intervals: a second son, Arthur, who did not live long, a third son, William in 1763, then another boy, Francis, who died in childhood, followed in 1768 by a daughter, Anne, and on 29 April the following year by a sixth child who was named, like his little dead brother, Arthur, after his mother’s father. Arthur’s younger brother, Gerald Valerian, was born in 1770, the youngest son, Henry in 1773, and yet another child, Mary Elizabeth, soon afterwards.

      By then the family had left their house in Dublin and moved to London where the children would grow up to speak without the Irish accent which, it was considered, ‘might be a disadvantage’ to them ‘in society hereafter’.⁴ They lived in rented rooms in Knightsbridge, their father by now in debt, struggling, not very successfully, to maintain a household befitting his rank, as well as a coach, on an income of £1,800 a year. His son, Arthur, who had been given his first lessons in a small school in the shadow of Dangan Castle, was sent to Brown’s Seminary, later known more grandly as Oxford House Academy, in King’s Road, Chelsea. He was, by his own admission, a shy, indolent and dreamy little boy who was often to be seen standing silently alone under a walnut tree while the other children played their rowdy games. So he was not sorry when, his eldest brother having mortgaged the family’s estates in Meath on their father’s death, he was sent with Gerald to Eton.⁵

      Eton in 1781 was a school of some three hundred boys. The activities to be seen on the playing fields appeared to the uninitiated to be more like free-for-all fights than games; and so, indeed, they often were.* It was not until halfway through the next century that football rules became sufficiently standardized for public schools to play matches against each other without brawling on the pitch. An unsociable boy, quarrelsome in his reserve, Arthur Wesley seems to have enjoyed neither football nor cricket; nor is there record of his having played any of the other games with which his fellow Etonians passed the hours they spent outside the classroom, fives and hoops, hopscotch, marbles and battledore. In later years he recalled leaping over a wide ditch in the garden of his old house, but he said he could not remember a fight he had evidently had with an older boy, Robert Percy (‘Bobus’) Smith, the ugly, amusing brother of Sydney Smith, the witty Canon of St Paul’s, whom he had provoked by throwing a stone at him when he was bathing.⁶ According to the school’s historian, Arthur Wesley did ‘little else’, other than engage in this fight, ‘to attract the attention of his schoolfellows’.⁷ Certainly he did not look back upon his days at Eton with any pleasure and returned to the school but rarely.†

      As for his work in class, he made very slow progress, labouring gloomily in the Fourth Form, his name appearing in the lists at number fifty-four out of a total of seventy-nine boys, many if not most of them younger than himself. His command of the classics, for all the hours he was required to spend poring over Ovid and Caesar, remained so highly uncertain that in later life he was to pronounce that his two standard rules for public speaking were never to take on subjects he knew nothing about and, whenever possible, to avoid quoting Latin.⁸

      Early in 1784, after his younger brother, Henry, had entered the Lower Remove, it was decided that the family’s finances could no longer be stretched to keep Wesley major at a school whose education seemed to be profiting him so little. So he left Eton and, after a short spell with a tutor, a clergyman in Brighton, he was taken by his mother to Brussels where, it was hoped, she might live more economically and he would progress in French more satisfactorily than he had done in Greek and Latin. He did learn to speak French after a fashion and with a Belgian accent; but his other studies were not pursued with noticeable vigour and he spent much of his time in the lodgings his mother had taken for them in the house of a lawyer, Louis Goubert, playing the violin with patient assiduity and some of the skill of his father: a fellow lodger in the house, the son of a Yorkshire baronet, considered that Wesley played very well, adding that it was the only species of talent that the young man appeared to possess.⁹

      After a few months his mother went home, having talked to him about his future career. His eldest brother, after succeeding his father as Earl of Mornington, had made a name for himself in the Irish House of Lords and been elected to the English House of Commons as Member for Beeralston in Devonshire. His second brother, William, having served for a time in the Navy, had assumed the additional surname of Pole, on becoming heir to the estates of his cousin William Pole of Ballyfin, Queen’s County, and had been elected Member for Trim in the Irish Parliament. Gerald Valerian, who had gone to Eton with Arthur, was destined for the Church and, in due course, for a prebendal stall at Durham. Henry, the youngest of the brothers, was still at Eton and had thoughts of joining the Army. Their mother, a woman now forty-two years old, rather severe in manner, ready to feel pride in her sons’ achievements but incapable of demonstrating much affection for them, considered that Arthur, too, might do worse than become a soldier. Indeed, in her opinion, her ‘ugly boy Arthur’ was ‘food for powder and nothing more’.*¹⁰ He himself was as yet undecided about his future; but he had no objections to going to Angers in western France to enrol in the celebrated Academy there and undergo a training, as much designed for men of fashion as for future officers, which would include fencing, riding and dancing lessons as well as some instruction in French grammar, mathematics and the science of military fortifications.

      It proved to be a not too demanding course. Monsieur Wesley was quite regular in his attendance at the lessons of the dancing and fencing masters and the riding instruction given by the proprietor of the Academy, M. de Pignerolle, whose great-great-grandfather had presided over it in the days of King Louis XIV. Yet the seventeen-year-old Wesley found time to take his dog, a white terrier called Vick†, for walks around the town’s thirteenth-century moated castle, to play cards with M. de Pignerolle’s English and Irish students, known to the French as the groupe des lords, to occupy idle hours by dropping coins from upstairs windows on to the heads of unwary citizens in the streets below, to sit at café tables, in the Academy’s smart uniform of scarlet coat with blue facings and yellow buttons, watching the passing scene, and to accept the invitations which were readily offered to the more presentable of their number by the local noblesse. They were entertained in nearby chateaux by the duc de Brissac, the duc de Praslin and the duchesse de Sabran; and Wesley afterwards related how he met not only the Abbé Siéyès, who was soon to play so prominent a part in the revolutionary deliberations of the Estates General at Versailles, but also François René Chateaubriand, who, having decided he had no vocation for the priesthood,