LITMIR.BIZ

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In its details it was, indeed, an extraordinary document, although Wellesley afterwards admitted that in substance it was defensible. It provided for the evacuation of the French from Portugal; but they were to be taken home in British ships with all their stores and all that they had acquired in the country which they had invaded, including, in the event, much plunder, some of it melted-down plate from Spanish churches.

      Anxious to escape from Sir Hew Dalrymple’s jurisdiction as soon as possible, Wellesley made it clear in letters to London that he wanted to go home without delay. He would stay if the Government wished it; but he was ‘sick of all’ that was going on in Portugal and heartily wished he had never left home. Were he to serve in the Peninsula with Sir John Moore, that would be a different matter altogether, even though, as he told Castlereagh, he had ‘been too successful with this army ever to serve with it in a subordinate position’.²⁴ Moore had followed up a warm letter of congratulation to Sir Arthur on his victory at Vimeiro with an offer to ‘waive all pretensions as senior’ and ‘take any part’ that might be offered him ‘for the good of the service’. Sir Arthur himself had no doubt that Moore ought to succeed Dalrymple in command and he offered to write to the Cabinet to say so. But Moore would not allow this: it smacked too much of intrigue.²⁵

      So Sir Arthur was more than ever determined to go home. ‘It is quite impossible for me to continue any longer with this army,’ he told Lord Castlereagh; ‘and I wish, therefore, that you would allow me to return home and resume the duties of my office, if I should still be in office, and it is convenient for the Government that I should retain it; or if not, that I should remain upon the Staff in England; or, if that should not be practicable, that I should remain without employment.’ In effect, he would do anything rather than remain in Portugal under the command of generals whom he described in a private letter as being of ‘stupid incapacity’.²⁶

      He could certainly not look forward to a hero’s welcome in England, however. His victory at Vimeiro had been heavily overcast by what was seen in England as the subsequent disgrace of the Convention of Cintra to which he had been a party.

      ‘I arrived here this day, and I don’t know whether I am to be hanged drawn & quartered, or roasted alive,’ he wrote to his brother Richard from Harley Street on 4 October, having landed at Plymouth a few hours before. ‘However I shall not allow the Mob of London to deprive me of my temper or my spirits; or of the satisfaction which I feel in the consciousness that I acted right.’²⁷

      It was not only the displeasure of the London mob, however, that he had cause to apprehend. The many enemies of his too successful family were making the most of their opportunity to blacken the Wellesley name. The Duke of Richmond told Sir Arthur not to bother about the ‘whispers of those who dislike the name of Wellesley’; but it was difficult to ignore the barbs of such men as Samuel Whitbread, the rich brewer and Radical Member for Bedford, who rejoiced ‘to see the Wellesley pride a little lowered’,²⁸ and William Cobbett, that other leading Radical, a former sergeant-major in the Army and publisher of the influential Weekly Political Register, who confessed himself to be delighted to have the ‘rascals on the hip’. It was evident, Cobbett wrote, that Sir Arthur Wellesley was ’the prime cause – the only cause – of all the mischief, and that from the motive of thwarting everything after he was superseded. Thus do we pay for the arrogance of that damned infernal family.’²⁹

      In the columns of his Weekly Political Register, Cobbett went so far as to declare that Sir Arthur Wellesley had come home ‘for the purpose of avoiding another meeting’ with the French.

      Sir Arthur Wellesley claimed that he read the abuse of himself ‘with as much indifference as [he did] that of the great General’, Sir Hew Dalrymple. But his brothers did not hide their distress at the charges and insults to which the family was being subjected. William spent his time ‘cursing and swearing’; Henry fell ill; Richard at first wept, then, in Arthur’s words, took to whoring.* Even Arthur, indifferent to previous insults as he had contrived to appear, was stung painfully enough by Cobbett’s charges of cowardice to threaten suing him for libel.³⁰ He also appears to have followed Richard’s example and, censorious of Richard’s ‘whoring’ as he was in his letters to William, to have sought relief in his agitation in the arms of Harriette Wilson. At least Harriette Wilson maintained that this was so; and, if it was, he surely found her body more exciting than she claimed to have found his conversation:

       ‘Do you know,’ said I to him one day,’ do you know the world talks about hanging you?’

       ‘Eh?’

       ‘They say you will be hanged in spite of all your brother Wellesley can say in your defence.’

       ‘Ha!!’ said [he] very seriously, ‘What paper do you read?’

       ‘It is the common talk of the day,’ I replied …

       He called on me the next morning before I had finished my breakfast. I tried him on every subject I could muster. On all, he was most impenetrably taciturn. At last he started an original idea of his own.

       ‘I wonder you do not get married, Harriette!’

       (By the by, ignorant people are always wondering.)

       ‘Why so?’

       He however, gives no reason for anything unconnected with fighting, at least since the convention of Cintra; and he, therefore, again became silent. Another burst of attic sentiment blazed forth.

       ‘I was thinking of you last night, after I got into bed.’

       ‘How very polite to [Lady Wellesley],’ I observed. ‘Apropos to marriage, how do you like it?’

       [Sir Arthur] who seems to make a point of never answering one, continued, ‘I was thinking – I was thinking that you will get into some scrape.’

       ‘Nothing so serious as marriage neither, I hope!’

       ‘I must come again tomorrow, to give you a little advice.’

       ‘Oh, let us have it all out now, and have done with it.’

       ‘I cannot,’ he said putting on his gloves and taking a hasty leave of me.

       I am glad he is off, thought I, for this is indeed very uphill work. This is worse than Lord Craven.³¹

13 Board of Enquiry

       1808

       ‘This is Sir Arthur (whose valour and skill, began so well but ended so ill).’

      TO ADD TO Sir Arthur’s other worries, there was talk of an enquiry into the Convention of Cintra being set up by a Board of General Officers who were to examine General Wellesley’s part in formulating it. So long as the verdict of the Board was unknown, Lord Castlereagh doubted the wisdom of Sir Arthur’s attending the levee at St James’s Palace; and when the General asked the Secretary for War if he would drive him there, Castlereagh ‘hemmed & hawed, and said that there was so much ill-humour in the public mind that it might produce inconvenience, and, in short, he advised me not to go.’¹

      But Sir Arthur was determined to go. He had intended to do so as ‘a matter of respect and duty to the King’ and he was not the kind of man to shrink from showing his face on account of ‘ill-humour in the public mind’. He now looked upon his attendance as a ‘matter of self-respect and duty’ to his own character. ‘I therefore insist on knowing whether this advice proceeds in any degree from His Majesty,’ he replied to Castlereagh’s letter, ‘and I wish you distinctly to understand that I will go to the levee tomorrow, or I never will go to [another] levee in my life.’²

      He did go and the King was perfectly amicable. His Majesty was not in favour of a public enquiry into the Convention of Cintra and when such a tribunal was first suggested he rejected the proposal out of hand. He was eventually

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