there having been so impersonal, so Henry Wellesley said, that they could have been read aloud at Charing Cross.11
When Sir Arthur called at the Horse Guards his reception by the Duke of York was even more off-hand than that accorded to him by his mother. He had never felt at ease with the Duke in the way that he did with Castlereagh and Camden. It rankled with him that his promotion to major-general in the East India Company’s service had not immediately been confirmed in London; and he believed that the Duke had wanted General Baird to have the command at Seringapatam rather than himself. Captain Elers heard that the Duke of York made this plain enough when General Harris returned from India and attended a reception at the Horse Guards. ‘Harris, who was not very quick in a difficulty, was asked suddenly by the Duke, ‘Pray, General Harris what reason had you for superseding General Baird in the command at Seringapatam and giving it to a junior officer?’ Poor Harris stammered and the Duke turned his back on him and began a conversation with some officers.’*12
General Wellesley got on much better with the Prime Minister than he did with the Commander-in-Chief and went to see Pitt more than once at his house in Putney. He also had opportunities of talking to other ministers at Camden Place, Lord Camden’s house at Chislehurst in Kent. They all found the young General sensible and extremely well informed, Pitt deciding that he wisely stated every difficulty before performing any service, though none once he had undertaken it, a complimentary view Sir Arthur felt incapable of returning since the fault of the Prime Minister’s character was being ‘too sanguine’: he conceived a project and then imagined it was done, and did not enter enough into the details.13
The General on the contrary was now well known for his close attention to detail; and it became recognized by the Cabinet that his clear, succinct and well-considered opinions were well worth seeking when any new stroke against the French was in contemplation. When asked, for example, what he thought of a plan, favoured by the Prime Minister, of urging the Prussians to attack the French in rear, he said on reflection that it would be at least three months before a sufficient force could be raised and equipped and be in position on the Danube.
As it happened, in the middle of October the French overwhelmed an Austrian army under Karl Mack at Ulm. But on the day after Ulm’s surrender, Nelson, mortally wounded during the battle, destroyed the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar. The ailing Prime Minister, so cast down by news of Ulm that Lord Malmesbury believed his death to be imminent, was given fresh hope by the news of Trafalgar; and on 9 November, at the Lord Mayor’s banquet at Guildhall, he was observed to be in good spirits. Sir Arthur Wellesley was among the guests who heard him respond modestly to the toast, ‘The Saviour of the Nation’, with the memorable words, ‘Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions; and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.’14
‘That was all,’ Sir Arthur commented admiringly. ‘He was scarcely up two minutes; yet nothing could be more perfect.’15
After being so well received by members of the Government, it came as all the more of a disappointment to General Wellesley when in December he was told what was to be his own contribution to Europe’s salvation: he was to be given command of a brigade to be sent to Hanover. After three weeks in rough seas, including Christmas Day in a gale off Heligoland, his brigade was landed at Bremen where he endured a further six weeks of cold, rain and inactivity before being ordered home again.
By the time of his return, Napoleon had won his greatest victory over the combined Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz; and Pitt had been even more distressed by this than by Mack’s defeat at Ulm. He had been brought home from Bath on 9 January 1806 to his house at Putney where, glancing at a map of Europe on the wall, he is said, perhaps apocryphally, to have given voice to the most quoted of all his utterances, ‘Roll up that map. It will not be wanted these ten years.’16 He died a fortnight later, to be succeeded as First Lord of the Treasury in the so-called ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, by his cousin, Lord Grenville, with Charles James Fox as Foreign Secretary, and William Windham as Lord Castlereagh’s successor at the Colonial Office.
After the abortive expedition to Bremen, General Wellesley, for all the confidence that Pitt’s ministers had appeared to have reposed in him, was found no employment more responsible by the new Government than the command of a brigade at Hastings. Here, conscientious as always, he studied the problems of the Rye inundations and examined the possibilities of Winchelsea Castle being strengthened as a military fortress. ‘We are not actually in opposition,’ he wrote to a friend in India, ‘but we have no power.’17 He did, though, now have a wife.
‘She has grown ugly by Jove!’
HE HAD first set eyes on the Hon. Catherine Dorothea Sarah Pakenham, daughter of the second Baron Longford, years before in Ireland where her father, a post-captain in the Royal Navy, had, for a few months before he had come into the family title, been Member for County Longford. Arthur Wesley had often called at the Longfords’ house in Rutland Square in Dublin and had made his feelings for Kitty known. She was a small, slim, vivacious and generous girl, indiscreet in her gossipy talk, much given to condemning the failings of others and to making dogmatic statements on matters which her knowledge of them did not justify. She read a great deal, sermons and books on religious matters as well as popular novels. An occasionally haughty manner concealed an inner uncertainty; but she was a well-liked young figure in Dublin society.1
Her parents had not at that time taken kindly to Arthur Wesley’s interest in their daughter. A younger son in a large family, his prospects had not then seemed bright and his reputation, like his eldest brother’s, was far from unblemished. This was the attitude also of Kitty’s brother, Thomas, who became the third Baron Longford upon their father’s death at the age of forty-nine in 1792.
So all thoughts of marriage had to be abandoned; but Arthur Wesley assured Kitty that, should those prospects become more certain, and her brother become more, kindly disposed towards him, his own mind would ‘remain the same’, a promise that he afterwards felt to be binding upon an honourable man. The years passed. He seemed almost to have forgotten her; certainly he never once wrote to her from India; none of the shoes he bought were destined for her feet, nor jewels for her throat, nor shawls for her shoulders. But she evidently had been thinking of him as she later admitted one day to Queen Charlotte at court. ‘I am happy to see you at my court, so bright an example of constancy,’ the Queen said to her, according to Kitty’s own account given to her friend, Maria Edgeworth. ‘If anybody in this world deserves to be happy, you do. But did you really never write one letter to Sir Arthur Wellesley during his long absence?’
‘No, never, madam.’
‘And did you never think of him?’
“Yes, madam, very often.’2
Yet there had been a time, when, hearing nothing from him, so Kitty told her best friend, the Hon. Olivia Sparrow, the wife of a rich, elderly soldier, General Bernard Sparrow, she had begun to suppose ‘the business over’. Another officer, Galbraith Lowry Cole, second son of the Earl of Enniskillen and three years younger than Arthur Wellesley, had fallen in love with her and had asked her to marry him. She had hesitantly accepted him. But then she was given to understand by her friend, Mrs Sparrow, who was in correspondence with him in India, that Arthur Wellesley was still attached to her. He had written to Mrs Sparrow to say that notwithstanding his good fortune and ‘the perpetual activity’ of his life in India the disappointment he had met with eight years before, and ‘the object of it and the circumstances’ were still as fresh in his mind ‘as if they happened only yesterday’. When you see your friend,’ he had added, ‘do me the favour to remember me to her in the kindest manner.’3
When told of this letter, Kitty replied, ‘Olivia, you know my heart … and can imagine what gratitude I feel, (indeed