Richard Holmes - Wellington - The Iron Duke

The army fell back to Bremen, whence it was to be evacuated by the navy, in appalling circumstances.

Far as the eye could reach over the whitened plain were scattered gun-limbers, wagons full of baggage, of stores, of sick men, sutlers’ carts and private carriages. Beside them lay the horses, dead; around them scores and hundreds of soldiers, dead; here a straggler who had staggered onto the bivouac and dropped to sleep in the arms of the frost; there a group of British and Germans around an empty rum-cask; here forty English Guardsmen huddled together around a plundered wagon; there a pack-horse with a woman lying alongside it, and a baby, swathed in rags, peeping out of the pack, with its mother’s milk turned to ice upon its lips – one and all stark, frozen, dead. 35

Wesley sailed for England in March 1795, with his regiment close behind. The campaign marked the nadir of British fortunes. It embodied the characteristics often seen in the British army at the beginning of long conflicts: all the strains caused by rapid expansion, and commanders who failed to appreciate that the nature of war had changed. That dreadful winter in Holland taught Wesley much about war. It may not have told him what to do, but, as he observed later, he had ‘learnt what not to do, and that is always something’.

It was less than clear what the returning hero should do with himself, for pay as lieutenant colonel and aide-de-camp brought in only £500 a year and creditors abounded. Leaving his regiment encamped in Essex, he set off for Dublin in search of money and preferment. Trim dutifully returned him as its MP once more, and he laid siege to the new lord-lieutenant, Lord Camden, with supporting fire provided by his brother Mornington. He first hoped to be made secretary at war in the Irish government, which would have tripled his income at a stroke, but was soon forced to admit to Camden that: ‘I see the manner in which the Military Offices are filled and I don’t wish to ask for that which I know you can’t give me.’ This being the case, he changed his line of attack, now aiming for a civil office in the Treasury or Revenue boards, with the hand-wringing assurance that ‘nothing but the circumstances under which I labour would induce me to trouble Your Excellency’s Government’. 36 When this assault also failed, Mornington proposed him as surveyor-general of the ordnance, an unhelpful shot as the post was already held by Kitty’s uncle, Captain Thomas Pakenham. Camden actually offered Wesley the post, and although he felt obliged to turn it down, the Pakenhams were not best pleased.

Firmly rebuffed, Wesley returned to his regiment, now at Southampton under orders to sail for the West Indies. He was pursued by a well-meaning letter from Lord Camden, who would be sorry to lose him but:

approve of your determination to accompany your reg’t to the West Indies, as I am convinced that a profession once embraced should not be given up. I shall be very glad if I can make some satisfactory arrangement for you against your come back, but if a vacancy should happen in the Revenue Board I fear the Speaker’s son must have the first. 37

The 33 rdembarked for the West Indies but a providential storm drove the fleet back to port after seven unpleasant weeks. Wesley was first quartered in Poole, but then went to convalesce in Dublin as his old agues returned. In the meantime, in the spring of 1796 with one of those sudden changes for which Whitehall is not unknown, the 33 rdwas sent, not to the West Indies, but to India.

Wesley, promoted colonel by seniority with effect from 3 May 1796, was determined to follow it, but there were arrangements to be made first. He resigned his seat and left advice on its management for his successor; received an assurance from Dublin Castle that it ‘should be very happy to relieve his mind from the embarrassment it feels on account of some pecuniary arrangements which he was obliged to leave unsettled’; but was pressed by his agent to ensure that Lord Mornington would deal with the £955 4s 8d of outstanding bills if something unpleasant happened. His future adversary Napoleon, now a général de division and just appointed to command the army of Italy, always rated luck as a great military virtue, and there is no doubt that Wesley was lucky that spring. He had escaped a voyage to the West Indies and an unhappy destiny in a yellow fever cemetery, and fortunate in leaving Ireland when he did. For, even in 1796, there was rebellion in the air: Grattan felt it ‘creeping in like a mist at the heels of the countryman’. The rebellion of 1798 was to be, as Thomas Pakenham has written, ‘the most violent and tragic event in Irish history between the Jacobite wars and the Great Famine’. 38 The ‘Year of Liberty’ cost perhaps 30,000 men and women their lives, and in its aftermath Britain imposed on Ireland a union whose troubled legacy still persists. It was a good time to leave.

THE INDIA for which Colonel Wesley set sail from Portsmouth in June 1796 was not yet a British possession, though his efforts were to help make it one. In 1600, Elizabeth I had given a royal charter to ‘The Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’, and eight years later some of its merchants established a trading post at Surat, 150 miles north of modern Bombay. Over the next century the Company’s fortunes ebbed and flowed, with occasional conflict with the Dutch, Portuguese and French, who had their own mercantile interests in the subcontinent. It continued to jockey for favour with the Moghul emperor in his capital, first in Agra and then in Delhi, as well as with local rulers whose dependence on the emperor was often little more than nominal.

Madras was settled by the Company in 1639; in 1687 Bombay superseded Surat as the Company’s headquarters in western India; and in 1690 one of its agents founded the future city of Calcutta. These three great trading bases, termed presidencies, were run by a governor and council answerable to the Company’s court of directors in London, backed by locally recruited soldiers stiffened with British redcoats. It was a short step from defending trading bases to extending British power into the hinterland, and in 1757 Robert Clive defeated the ruler of Bengal at Plassey, a battle in which the deft bribery of opponents was at least as important as firepower. After Plassey the East India Company was a major political power in India, and in 1773 the Regulating Act acknowledged the fact by instituting a governing council in Calcutta, with three of its five members nominated by the British government. The council was presided over by a governor-general, who enjoyed ill-defined authority in both Madras and Bombay. It was indicative of the vast riches to be gained in India that the first governor-general, Warren Hastings, amassed a personal fortune of perhaps £200,000 at a time when a prosperous merchant in England might house and feed his family and servants for £350 a year. 1

Not all young men who took the passage to India hoped to do quite as well as Hastings, but it was easy for a junior clerk to turn a small investment into a huge fortune without much effort and to return home as a nabob, a figure pilloried by playwrights and novelists as vulgar, corrupt and obscenely wealthy. Sir Philip Francis won £20,000 at cards at a single sitting, and a Mr Barwell lost a staggering £40,000. In 1777 William Hickey, an engaging young rake sent to India to make his fortune, complained that no man worked harder than he did, staying at his desk from eight in the morning till one in the afternoon with only half an hour off for breakfast. Although he was not a rich man by Calcutta standards, he maintained sixty-three servants, as well as ‘a handsome phaeton and a beautiful pair of horses, and also two Arabian saddle horses, my whole establishment being of the best and most expensive kind’. 2 Charles Danvers died in 1720 after only three years in India at a salary of £5 a year, but left enough money to have a lavish funeral. He modestly asked the governor ‘that I may have as many great guns fired as I am years old, which is now almost twenty-one’ and the rest of his estate was to be spent on rice, distributed daily to the poor at his burial place. 3