by Peter Snow
Sergeant Landsheit was one of the horsemen who heard Wellesley shout, ‘Now, 20th, now!’ while ‘his staff clapped their hands and gave us a cheer’. Very quickly Landsheit and the 20th were in among the French cavalry ‘cutting and hacking, and upsetting men and horses … till they broke and fled in every direction’. The dragoons then turned on the infantry, their sabres flashing and slicing at the fleeing footsoldiers ‘till our white leather breeches, our hands, arms and swords were all besmeared with blood’. They raced on as the French gave way all around them and suddenly found they had ‘rushed into an enclosure, where to a man we well nigh perished’ because the enemy ‘hastened to take advantage of our blunder’ by immediately closing the door. The 20th’s ‘blunder’ was to allow a successful charge to turn into a reckless pursuit. They simply went too far. Their initial advantage in numbers and momentum was lost once they were deep into the enemy’s ranks and they found themselves surrounded. They were rescued only by the sudden arrival of the 50th, who had pursued the French down the hill and on to the flatter ground below.
The Rifles too were involved in the pursuit, firing at every Frenchman in sight. Some ran out of ammunition; William Brotherwood ended up ramming his razor down his barrel and loosing it off instead. The exhausted cavalry returned, having lost at least a third of their number killed or wounded. Among the dead was Colonel Taylor, who had been killed after he was surrounded and refused to be taken prisoner. Harris, who had fallen over when the British dragoons rushed past, was lucky not to have died beneath their onrushing hooves. He saw Taylor leading the charge and observed that he ‘bore himself like a hero with his sword waving in the air … dashing upon the enemy, and hewing and slashing at them in tremendous style’. He noticed that the colonel did not return. As he got up, he saw he had been lying beside a dying Frenchman. He raised the soldier’s head and gave him a swig from his water flask. One of his companions, a man named Mullins, ‘damned me for a fool for my pains. “Better knock out his brains Harris … he has done us mischief enough.”’
The charge of the 20th at Vimeiro was the first of a number of cavalry actions over the next seven years – including at Waterloo – in which rash over-enthusiasm led to needless losses. For Wellington this failure of his cavalry became an obsession. ‘They gallop at everything,’ he said later, ‘and never consider their situation.’
Although Junot’s troops had been heartily repulsed at Vimeiro Hill, the French general still had a chance of turning Wellesley’s flank at Ventosa. The trouble was that the two flanking brigades he had sent northwards lost touch with each other and failed to attack together. Moreover they did not know of the dreadful carnage that had resulted from French columns meeting British lines on Vimeiro Hill. The same was now to happen to them at Ventosa, at the north-eastern edge of the battle. The first wave of three French battalions in column under Solignac clambered to the top of a hill where they were suddenly confronted by two long British lines. Thomas Todd was in one of them. He was still a comparative novice, and on entering his first lethal combat he felt a ‘breathless sensation’ come over him. But one look along the British line was enough to strengthen him. ‘The steady determined scowl of my companions assured my heart and gave me determination. How unlike the noisy advance of the French! … They came upon us crying and shouting to the very point of our bayonets. Our awful silence and determined advance they could not stand. They put about and fled without much resistance.’
The seventeen-year-old William Lawrence was one of those involved in the fighting at Ventosa. Back in Bryant’s Piddle in Dorset he had been a ploughboy until his father apprenticed him to a builder who bullied him so much that he ran away. After several escapades Lawrence enlisted with the 40th Regiment of Foot, which now found itself pursuing Solignac. He and his comrades advanced with British guns ‘still playing over our heads until we got within a short distance of the enemy’. They drove the French back only after some ‘very severe fighting well kept up for some time on both sides’.
After a few minutes of welcome rest the British switched their attention to the second attack by Brennier’s brigade, which was caught in a crossfire between a number of British units including the 29th, which had taken such punishment at Roliça. So fierce was the fire that the French did not press home their attack and retired eastwards. The Battle of Vimeiro was over. The French had been thwarted on all fronts. They had lost around 1,500 men – twice as many as the British. It was a rude shock for the French Emperor and for the prestige of his army. They were not in the habit of being defeated on land. Only in Egypt at Aboukir seven years earlier and in a minor engagement at Maida in Italy in 1806 had a British army humbled a land army of post-revolutionary France.
Wellesley was now, not surprisingly, eager for a general pursuit of an utterly demoralised enemy. But he was now sharply reminded that he was not in charge. Sir Harry Burrard had finally landed from HMS Brazen to take command. Wellesley urgently put the case to him for a quick pursuit. ‘Sir Harry, now is your time to advance. The enemy are completely beaten, and we shall be in Lisbon in three days.’ Burrard replied that he thought a great deal had been achieved ‘very much to the credit of the troops’, but he did not think it advisable to move off the ground in pursuit of the enemy. Wellesley riposted that the troops were ‘perfectly ready to advance’. They had ‘plenty of provisions ready cooked in their haversacks, and plenty of ammunition’. But Burrard was adamant. It may have been his natural caution.
It may have been jealousy. He was certainly deeply distrustful of a man he saw as a headstrong general trying to go too far too fast. Wellesley emerged from his meeting with Burrard angry and disappointed. He ‘turned his horse’s head and, with a cold and contemptuous bitterness, said aloud to his ADC “You may think about dinner for there is nothing more for soldiers to do this day.”’ The news spread quickly among the troops. They had been eager to exploit their victory. Now they were ordered to halt, wrote James Hale, ‘in the midst of our glory’ and, as his men murmured impatiently, Wellesley rode up and down saying, ‘I have nothing to do with it: I have no command.’
On the battlefield lay thousands of dead and wounded. Todd witnessed the ‘horrible’ sight of the ‘peasantry prowling about more ferocious than the beasts and birds of prey, finishing the work of death and carrying away whatever they thought worthy of their grasp’. The Portuguese took their revenge on the French who had plundered and laid waste their villages. ‘No fallen Frenchman that showed the least sign of life was spared.’ The peasants even seemed to revel in ‘mangling the dead bodies … my sickened fancy felt the same as if it were witnessing a feast of cannibals’.
Looting the dead wasn’t just the preserve of the Portuguese. Harris used his bayonet to rip open the lining of one dead Frenchman’s coat and helped himself to a fistful of coins. Leslie ‘picked up a bill for several hundred francs payable in Paris’. Landsheit had just turned over a dead Frenchman and taken his watch and three Spanish dollars when a badly wounded French grenadier took a shot at him. Landsheit saw he was wounded and shouted that he would spare him if he put aside his weapon. When the Frenchman started to take aim at him again, Landsheit ‘gave him a rap with my sword which put an end to all his pugnacious propensities’. Looting of the dead or even of the wounded was widespread and too common to incur a penalty. But sometimes people overstepped the mark. After a later battle a British soldier couldn’t get a valuable ring off the finger of one of his own dead countrymen, so he slashed off the finger with his knife. He was spotted and earned himself a court martial and 500 lashes.
Another wretched aftershock of battle was the plight of the wounded. Adam Neale, one of Wellesley’s army surgeons, witnessed scenes that would become commonplace in the Peninsula as the fighting intensified. Scores of wounded lay on the ground or, if they were lucky, on makeshift tables in what passed as field hospitals. Many awaited their turn for the crude remedy of amputation that was preferable to the lethal spread of gangrene from a musket wound. Neale
did what he could to lessen the pain of those who were in the greatest agony. ‘To several, a simple inspection of their wounds, with a few words of consolation, or perhaps a little opium, was all that could be done or recommended. Of these brave men the balls had pierced organs essentially connected with life, and in such cases prudence equally forbids the rash interposition of unavailing art and the useless indulgence of delusive hope …’
The final episode in Wellesley’s first, short summer campaign was a controversial ceasefire negotiation that threatened to deliver a fatal blow to his career. The so-called Convention of Cintra was signed nine days after the battle – on 30 August 1808. Its terms caused astonishment and uproar in London. It appeared that Wellesley and his superiors, Burrard and Lieutenant General Sir Hew Dalrymple, who arrived on 22 August, had agreed to a very generous deal for the enemy they had just defeated. The French would evacuate Lisbon, but they would be repatriated to France in British ships and could take with them all their weapons and even the loot they had amassed during their occupation of Portugal. There was such an outcry that Wellesley and the other two generals who had signed the Convention were recalled to appear before a court of inquiry in London later that year.
Wellesley arrived back in London on 4 October. ‘I don’t know whether I am to be hanged, drawn and quartered, or roasted alive,’ he wrote with mock nervousness to his brother Richard. He put a bold face on it, trusting to the reputation he had now established for himself with his victory at Vimeiro. But he and his family had to endure a whole barrage of insults. His most vocal political opponents were the Radical MP and rich brewer Samuel Whitbread and the journalist William Cobbett, whose radical views had won him a wide following. They delighted in the humbling of Wellesley and what Cobbett called his ‘damned infernal’ family, which Cobbett believed far too influential.
Press cartoonists had a field day. Wellesley and his two superiors were ridiculed and lampooned. Byron added a special line to his poem Childe Harold: ‘Britannia sickens, Cintra, at thy name.’ The Whig opposition, whose dovish attitude to Napoleon gave them serious doubts about taking the war to Portugal anyway, lambasted Wellesley and his Tory backers. For his part, Wellesley tried to distance himself from the agreement. He claimed that it was the other two generals who had agreed on detailed clauses like the one that allowed the French to keep what they called ‘their possessions’. He told Castlereagh privately that he would like to have made the French generals ‘disgorge the church plate they had stolen’. But he told the court of inquiry that he agreed with the Convention’s main principle that the French should be allowed to evacuate Portugal. Therefore ‘I did not think it proper to refuse to sign the paper on account of my disagreement on the details.’ It wasn’t until 22 December that the whole damaging controversy was finally resolved with the clearing of the three generals by the court of inquiry. The court took refuge in whitewash and pronounced all three of them blameless. Wellesley was lucky: it was a curious lapse on his part. He may have been exasperated by Burrard and Dalrymple, but he should never have agreed to such lax terms.
Cintra apart, Wellesley had left Lisbon for home with some relief. Constrained by generals senior to him, he would have found it intolerable to stay in the Peninsula any longer. He had written to Castlereagh on 30 August: ‘I feel an earnest desire to quit the army. I have been too successful with this army ever to serve with it in a subordinate situation …’ Once the court of inquiry was out of the way, he scored well with the British public and parliament. He received an effusive vote of thanks in the Lords. Vimeiro was seen, rightly, as a significant victory and a striking humiliation for the French. A delighted Duke of Richmond wrote to his friend: ‘You must have bribed him [Junot] to attack you when he did!’ The unfortunate Junot soldiered on until his volatile nature got the better of him, and he committed suicide by throwing himself out of a window in 1813.
Wellesley’s lightning military campaign had been a stunning success. He left behind him an army in the Peninsula which for the most part admired him but hardly loved him. He showed none of the obvious humanity of commanders like Hill and Beckwith. But the men knew that, although Wellesley might regard them with disdain, he provided what they needed – confident leadership and tireless concern for their needs. His deft switching of the units at Vimeiro, his use of dead ground, his obsession with supplies and his tireless presence in all areas of the battlefield marked him out already as an exceptional commander.
3
Scum of the earth
Oporto, 1809
WELLESLEY’S PRIVATE LIFE that winter was as troubled as his public image. His marriage to Kitty Pakenham began to show strains. It was partly his fault. Sensitivity and warmth were qualities he showed only on rare occasions in his long life. But these were the very feelings his gentle, affectionate wife longed for. She obviously adored, almost worshipped him. This irritated him and prompted him to be increasingly cold with her. She complained to her relations that he was neglecting her and as time went on she retreated more and more into self-pity. She made things worse by lending her younger brother, Henry Pakenham, money to pay off a gambling debt. Wellesley was incensed and never forgave her.
It wasn’t long before he strayed into other relationships, one of them with the notorious Harriette Wilson, a London courtesan, whose vitality and sexual charms won her many friends in high places. Whether or not they actually slept together, he later admitted they were close. He revealed he had given her money when she was in debt. And he was not as embarrassed as her other clients when she chose to tell all. Twenty years later, when the publisher of Harriette’s planned autobiography tried to blackmail him, the Duke of Wellington was widely reputed to have fired back, in effect, if not in actual words, ‘Publish and be damned.’ She published accounts of several conversations she said she had had with him, including his farewell as he left for the Peninsula later in 1809. ‘He called to take a hasty leave of me a few hours before his departure. “I am off to Spain directly,” he said. I know not how it was but I grew melancholy … I saw him there perhaps for the last time in my life … I burst into tears … kissing my eyes, he said “God bless you” and hurried away.’
There was already the whiff of scandal around the Wellesley family. Charlotte, the wife of Arthur Wellesley’s younger brother William, was cavorting with one of Arthur’s senior military colleagues, and suddenly sparked a blazing public scandal by running off with him. He was Lieutenant General Henry Paget, fast establishing himself as Britain’s most promising cavalry commander. He had been out to Portugal just after Vimeiro and stayed at Wellesley’s house for two days in Lisbon. In a letter to his father, Lord Uxbridge, Paget wrote that he admired Wellesley: ‘I had during that time an opportunity of observing that he [Wellesley] possesses much method and arrangement. He is besides the luckiest dog upon earth, for it is by a sort of miracle … that he has been able to do this by himself.’ He went on to say he regretted that, because he was senior to Wellesley on the list of generals, he could hardly take part in the Peninsular Campaign if Wellesley was to command it. ‘I feel it is a real misfortune to me as a soldier that I am above him on the list for I think there is a good chance of its cutting me from all service.’ When Arthur Wellesley learned that Paget had eloped with his sister-in-law, he was scandalised. One newspaper reported that he punched Paget in the stomach. Charlotte eventually married Paget in 1810, and by 1815 Arthur, then Duke of Wellington, and Henry Paget, then Lord Uxbridge, were sufficiently reconciled to form a winning partnership at Waterloo.
Wellesley was now back in a job he had had before he went to Portugal – the Tory government’s Chief Secretary for Ireland. But his mind was never far from events in the Peninsula where prospects for Britain and its allies had taken a severe turn for the worse. In November 1808 Napoleon decided to visit the Peninsula himself. Exasperated by the French loss of Portugal and by his brother Joseph’s failure to entrench his rule in Spain and stamp out the Spanish rebellion, he led a massively reinforced F
rench army against Spanish resistance forces. He defeated and scattered the rebels wherever he went. Britain’s response was to despatch the army, which Wellesley had commanded, into Spain under the command of Lieutenant General Sir John Moore. Moore was one of the few generals Wellesley respected, but his campaign was a near-disaster. He scored some early successes in December against a few isolated French units. But, seeing his army outnumbered by a force led by Napoleon, he opted for withdrawal. After three weeks of wretched and debilitating retreat, Moore’s army reached Corunna in north-west Spain. Napoleon went home, leaving Marshal Soult to finish off Moore. Only Moore’s tactical skill and exemplary leadership managed to foil Soult’s attempt to eliminate his army. Although Moore himself was fatally wounded, most of the British force escaped. They scrambled aboard a fleet of ships in Corunna harbour and made it safely back to Britain. The core units of Britain’s fast-maturing army thus survived to fight another day. But the army’s departure left the Portuguese with only a small British force to protect Lisbon. They appealed urgently to London to help them boost the size of Portugal’s own army and said they wanted Wellesley to lead it.
The British government was in a quandary. Successive Tory administrations had opposed French expansion – from the one led by William Pitt the Younger that began the fight against revolutionary France in the 1790s to the current government of Lord Portland. The Whigs, mainly in opposition, frequently questioned the need for war and highlighted its cost. The most radical had supported the French Revolution and called for peace with Napoleon. The war’s main proponents were George Canning, the energetic Foreign Secretary, and the War Secretary Lord Castlereagh, Canning’s ally but at the same time his fiercely ambitious political rival. Wellesley’s greatest supporter in the cabinet in the past had been Castlereagh, but now it was Canning who pushed for him to be sent to help the Portuguese while Castlereagh briefly opposed the scheme. He hadn’t turned against Wellington but felt it might be the wrong moment to switch commanders. The outcome, on 15 February 1809, was that Canning persuaded his colleagues to send out a junior and much less distinguished officer, Major General William Carr Beresford, to command the newly emerging Portuguese army. It turned out to be an inspired appointment. Marshal Beresford, as he now became, had only one eye, a poor military record and a reputation for obstinacy. But over the next few years he was to hone the Portuguese troops into a well-drilled fighting force which provided Wellesley with valuable extra manpower.
