Richard Holmes – Wellington: The Iron Duke (страница 3)

The previous year Garrett Wesley had married Anne Hill, eldest daughter of Arthur Hill (later Lord Dungannon), and she duly presented him with a son and heir, Richard Colley Wesley, in 1760; another son, William, in 1763; a daughter, Anne, in 1768; and a third surviving son, Arthur, in 1769. Two younger sons followed, Gerald Valerian in 1770 and Henry in 1773. Arthur Wesley always celebrated his birthday on 1 May, although biographers variously maintain that he was born on 6 March or 3, 29 or 30 April. There is a similar dispute about the place of his birth, with Dangan Castle, Trim, a coach on the Dublin road, and even a packet-boat at sea amongst the many places vying for the honour. His proud parents, however, announced that the birth had taken place in their Dublin house, 6 Merrion Street, where Lady Mornington’s bedroom looked out across a little garden to the charming symmetry of Merrion Square in the comfortable heart of ascendancy Dublin.

Arthur spent his early years in Dublin and at Dangan. Dangan Castle itself is now a shell, with its long, elegant two-storey façade looking out over the green landscape. The ruins behind show that the Georgian house was built on the remnants of something solid and medieval, constructed in an age when security mattered more than appearance.

Arthur was sent to the little diocesan school at Trim, in the shadow of the ruined tower of St Mary’s abbey and just across the Boyne from the great square Norman keep which stands as a stark symbol of the invaders’ power. The family then moved to London, something in the nature of a retreat, because the earl’s finances, weakened by the musical indulgences of Dublin and Dangan, were in decline so that ‘we are not able to appear in any degree as we ought’. While the brilliant Richard shot from Harrow to Eton and then on to Christ Church Oxford, gaining golden opinions as he did so, Arthur was sent to Brown’s seminary in the King’s Road, where, as he admitted, he was ‘a shy, idle lad’. He went on to Eton in 1781, but as he told an early biographer, G. R. Gleig, who served under him as a subaltern in the Peninsula and went on to become a clergyman:

Besides achieving no success as a scholar, he contracted few special intimacies among his contemporaries … His was indeed a solitary life; a life of solitude in a crowd; for he walked generally alone; often bathed alone; and seldom took part in either the cricket matches or boat-races which were then, as they are now, in great vogue among Etonians.⁶

He was a shy young Irishman in England, still an outsider, with parents who were ‘frivolous and careless personages’ and to whom he does not seem to have been particularly close. He could fight if he had to: at Eton he beat Bobus Smith, brother of the wit Sidney Smith, and while staying with his grandmother, Lady Dungannon, in North Wales, was soundly thrashed by a young blacksmith named Hughes, who was proud to relate how he had beaten the man who beat Napoleon, saying that ‘Master Wesley bore him not a pin’s worth of ill-will.’⁷

When Lord Mornington died in May 1781, it became clear that the family finances were worse than anyone had suspected. Richard, the new Lord Mornington, left Oxford without taking his degree, and Arthur was taken away from Eton so that what money remained could be spent on Gerald and Henry, who seemed to offer a better return on the investment. Lady Mornington withdrew to Brussels in 1784 and lodged with a lawyer, Louis Goubert. After some brief tutoring in Brighton, Arthur followed her and studied under their landlord in the company of John Armytage, second son of a rich Yorkshire baronet and family friend. Armytage wrote that young Wesley was ‘extremely fond of music, and played well upon the fiddle, but he never gave any indication of any other species of talent. As far as my memory serves, there was no intention then of sending him into the army; his own wishes, if he had any, were in favour of a civilian’s life.’⁸ But he was fast running out of civilian options. The family’s Irish estates were deeply mortgaged, and lack of money meant that he could not have been maintained at university even if he had had the aptitude to survive there. The witty and ambitious Richard was clearly the hope of the family: Arthur thought him ‘the most wonderful person in the whole world’. He was prepared to use the family’s patronage, stemming from his own seat in the Lords and control of a seat in the Commons, to gain Arthur a free commission in the army, and had already written to ask the lord lieutenant of Ireland (effectively its viceroy) on behalf of the shy sixteen year old. Lady Mornington declared: ‘I vow to God I don’t know what I shall do with my awkward son Arthur. He is food for powder and nothing more.’⁹

Young Wesley was destined for an army that was close to the nadir of its fortunes. The regular army, established in 1661, exhibited a familiar pattern of growing to face the challenges of major wars and shrinking rapidly afterwards, with surplus soldiers being discharged to the civilian life from which they had often been anxious to escape in the first place, and officers being sent home on half-pay. Although it had emerged victorious from the Seven Years War (1756–63), it had been beaten in the American War of Independence. Frustratingly, it had won most of the battles but had somehow lost the war, with humiliating surrenders at Saratoga in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781. Matters were not improved by the fact that a growing number of Englishmen sympathised with the colonists. When Major General Sir William Howe, MP for Nottingham, was sent out to North America in 1775, an aggrieved constituent told him: ‘I don’t wish you to fall, as many do, but I cannot say I wish success to the undertaking.’¹⁰

The low regard in which the army was held stemmed partly from the fact that, in the absence of a police force, it was frequently called upon to preserve order in a harsh and brutal society. We connect to the Georgian age through its surviving artefacts, and it is easy to forget that, just as a classical front with its long windows and smart portico had often been stuck onto an altogether less elegant building (Dangan Castle is a good example), so old, ugly undercurrents rippled on through the eighteenth century and often into the nineteenth. Executions were held in public throughout Wellington’s lifetime. Traitors were hanged, drawn and quartered: partly strangled, then cut down alive to be castrated and disembowelled before their entrails were burnt and their bodies cut into four. There was, however, growing resistance to such savagery. After the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, victims of this ghastly punishment were revived after hanging to be ‘bowelled alive and seeing’, but after the 1745 rebellion they were hanged till they were dead, or knifed by the executioner before the butchery began. Those involved in the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820, who had planned the murder the cabinet, of which Wellington was a member, were merely beheaded after death, and the mood of the crowd grew ugly as the executioner sawed away at spines and sinews.

Even straightforward hanging did not guarantee a quick death, and the victim’s friends would often rush forward to pull on his legs and hasten death. Bodies were usually sent to the surgeon’s hall for dissection, although they might be gibbeted in some appropriate place as a warning to others: the body of Maria Phipoe, a murderess hanged in 1797, was displayed outside the Old Bailey. There was an odd democracy to the business. In 1760 Earl Ferrers, convicted of murder by the House of Lords, was duly hanged and then dissected, but he went to Tyburn in a landau drawn by six horses rather than the common cart, and died so well that the mob, fickle as ever, showed more sympathy than anger.¹¹

Many popular ‘sports’ were dangerous and brutal. Bull- and bear-baiting were popular, and noblemen jostled with kitchen-porters in drunken, sweaty cockpits where fighting cocks, their natural talons reinforced with spurs wrought in the best of Georgian taste, fought to the death. A French visitor, César de Saussure, observed that the populace enjoyed ‘throwing dead dogs and cats and mud at passers-by’ as well as playing football, in the process of which ‘they will break panes of glass and smash the windows of coaches and also knock you down without the smallest compunction …’¹²

As the eighteenth century wore on, there was a growing number of violent reactions to economic fluctuations: a depression in the textile industry triggered rioting in Spitalfields in 1719, and there were very serious food riots in Somerset and Wiltshire in 1766–67. But as the country faced a sequence of economic recessions with the transition from war to peace at the end of the Seven Years War and the War of American Independence, rioting became more serious and the ruling elite increasingly saw it as a threat to its hold on power.

The climax came in 1780 when the unsteady anti-Catholic Lord George Gordon gained widespread support, much of it from the ‘middling sort’ of men who coincidentally also favoured political reform, in his demand for the repeal of an act of 1778 which had removed some of the restraints on Catholics. When parliament rejected his petition, there was an outbreak of violent disorder. It began with attacks on Catholic chapels attached to foreign embassies (the only ones legally allowed), and then, more seriously, went on to take in all the law’s visible manifestations like the houses of prominent judges and magistrates and Newgate prison itself. This was evidently an assault on the establishment, and the government brought over 11,000 regular soldiers into the capital. Almost 300 rioters were shot, another 25 were hanged. Not only was the government badly rattled by the sheer scale of the violence, but many middle-class radicals who had supported Gordon (himself cleared of high treason), were so frightened by the spectre of the mob that they shied away from reform thereafter.