An Eventful Day
In the early summer after his return from the Helder, York put the Grenadier Guards through a series of manoeuvres in Hyde Park, which were attended by the king. Suddenly, a musket-ball was fired from the centre of the ranks and hit a junior clerk in the navy office, called Ongley, who was standing only six or seven yards from the monarch. It went right through one of his thighs and lodged in the other, near the groin. Surprisingly, despite vigorous investigations, no culprit was identified and the matter was declared to be an accident. Ongley recovered and the authorities made sure that in due course he received a suitable commission in the navy.
That night the king and queen, the Duke and Duchess of York and other members of the royal family attended a first performance of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at Drury Lane. As the king entered the royal box, a contemporary recounted,
… the whole house was thrown into confusion by the discharge of a pistol from the front row of the pit; but though the bullet struck the pilaster just over the head of the King, it providentially did no mischief, owing to the sudden jerk to the hand of the assassin at the moment he was taking his aim. Immediately the perpetrator of this atrocious deed was seized and dragged over the rails of the orchestra into the music room, where Mr Sheridan and the Duke of York soon entered, to attend the examination. On seeing His Royal Highness, the man recognized him instantly and enthusiastically exclaimed, ‘God bless you! I know you: you are the Duke of York under whom I served on the continent.’ Then, turning to the people about him, he went on and said: ‘Ah, he is a good soul: he is the soldier’s friend and love.’1
York remembered the man, whose name was James Hatfield (or Hadfield), because he had been one of the dragoons who formed his personal guard at Famars, back in 1794. Formerly a silversmith, he had fought bravely, but was badly wounded in the head at Lincelles, so that he had to be discharged on a pension. For his attempted assassination of the king he was tried for high treason the following month, before Lord Kenyon in the Court of King’s Bench in Westminster Hall. York was called as a witness. Upon seeing him, Hatfield, who had sat listlessly throughout the trial so far, exclaimed brightly, ‘Ah, God bless His Highness! He is a good soul!’ York explained that his personal guard had been chosen from men of the best character and the court heard several witnesses testify that Hatfield had become deranged as a result of his wounds. Lord Kenyon stopped the trial and committed the prisoner to the Bethlehem Hospital (nicknamed ‘Bedlam’). On one occasion he escaped from there, but was recaptured on the coast of Kent. York made sure that his wife and family received some support, and, it would appear, sometimes called at the hospital to see him.2
George III was a very popular king and this was one of only two attempts to assassinate him in a very long reign. Both would-be assassins were deranged. The first, in 1786, was a woman called Margaret Nicholson, who tried to stab him while he was getting off his horse at St James’s Palace. In the ensuing panic the king remained ‘the only calm and moderate person then present’, according to Fanny Burney. After the Drury Lane incident, the singer Michael Kelly, who was on stage in the role of Don Basilio, wrote later in his memoirs, ‘Never shall I forget His Majesty’s coolness. The whole audience was in an uproar.’ It seems that the king merely got out his opera glass and looked steadily round the theatre. Meanwhile, Richard Sheridan quickly penned another verse for the National Anthem, which was sung from the stage that very night. It ran:
From every latent foe,
From the assassin’s blow,
God Save the King!
O’er him thine arm extend,
For Britain’s sake defend
Our Father, Prince and Friend,
God Save the King!3
The Royal Military College
Resuming his duties as commander-in-chief with the benefit of even more practical experience, York strongly favoured the establishment of a college for the training of army officers. King George II had founded the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in 1741, where about fifty young men, rising to ninety by 1793, lived under a regime similar to that of the public schools except that instead of being taught Latin and Greek, they studied the practical sciences that would equip them for a commission in the Ordnance (the Royal Corps of Artillery and Engineers). The education and training at Woolwich were excellent, probably providing the best grounding in the sciences on offer in Britain at the time, but it was limited to a minority destined for a career in the Ordnance.
When York became commander-in-chief in 1795 it was clear to him that a similar college was needed to train young officers entering the army at large. Hitherto, new officers received very little formal training or education for their profession save what they could pick up from the drill-sergeants in the regiments they joined. Soon after his appointment, York issued instructions that ‘Commanding officers of regiments are equally responsible for the instruction and improvement of the officers under their command as they are for the drill of the men.’4 But any practical training of this sort fell far short of the study of military theory or tactics, for instance, about which there was little available information. Indeed, this was the very reason why Frederick himself had been sent to Prussia as a young man, to study the art of war from experts such as Brunswick and Frederick the Great and to observe the impressive exercises and manoeuvres carried out by the Prussian and Austrian armies. By contrast, the best that the British army could do was to arrange modest ‘field days’ for the Guards in London’s Hyde Park or Phoenix Park in Dublin. This was largely because, despite the dangers of the war, there was still a strong public and political prejudice against the massing of military forces within the UK.
In 1798 the duke received an offer from an exiled Frenchman, General Francis Jarry, to set up a military school in England. Although he was French, Jarry had served throughout the Seven Years War on the personal staff of Frederick the Great and had been head of the Prussian Military School from 1763 to 1786. After this he went back to France and held a high command under Dumouriez at the victory of Jemappes, although he was subsequently targeted by political extremists in France and eventually moved, in exile, to a large house in High Wycombe. He suggested to York that pupils should be sent to him there and the first thirty young officers, approved by the duke, arrived in May 1799. Unfortunately Jarry spoke only French, so his lectures were not readily understood and his pupils made fun of him. Translators and administrative staff had to be called in, as a result of which the establishment needed a subsidy of £1,000 in its first year.5
In January 1799 Colonel John LeMarchant, who had recently designed a new sword for the British army and was a respected instructor in its use, put to the duke an ambitious plan for the setting up of a new army college. York felt that this would probably founder in the face of public and political hostility to the ‘militarization’ of the UK, so he sent LeMarchant to work with Jarry at High Wycombe in the first instance. From there LeMarchant used his considerable gifts of charm and persuasion, as well as a wide range of military contacts, to win support for his college scheme among the influential colonels of yeomanry regiments across the country. York also arranged for LeMarchant to have access to the cabinet, and eventually Pitt was persuaded to set up a committee to review his scheme, chaired by York and including Sir William Fawcett and Henry Calvert, as well as General David Dundas, all of whom were supporters of officer training.
LeMarchant actually proposed a three-tier structure consisting of a staff college for serving officers, a junior college for training future officers and a school which would provide free education to the sons of NCOs and serving soldiers. A Royal Warrant in June 1801 set up ‘The Royal Military College’, with a board of governors and based at High Wycombe, while another Royal Warrant, in December of the same year, laid down details of the training and curriculum. This was to be essentially a ‘staff college’ and an entrant had to be at least nineteen years old with at least two years of regimental service. The subjects taught included French and German, mathematics and drawing, with practical courses in reconnaissance and the movement of troops.6
A third Royal Warrant early in 1802 founded the junior department of the Royal Military College, based a few miles away at Great Marlow. There were to be a hundred cadets, aged between thirteen and fifteen at entry, thirty of whom would be freely educated as the sons of officers who had died or been maimed on active service. Of the paying cadets, twenty would be the sons of serving officers, thirty the sons of noblemen and twenty the sons of those in the East India Company’s service. The pupils at both colleges behaved badly to begin with and the duke found it necessary to demand enquiries into several quite serious misdemeanours, which were suitably punished. Gradually the new institutions settled down and in 1813 the junior department moved into fine new buildings at Sandhurst, designed by James Wyatt and John Sanders. The senior department of the RMA moved to Sandhurst from High Wycombe a few years later and it has played a highly important part in the training of army officers ever since.7
LeMarchant’s suggested school, although it was not incorporated within the Royal Military College, was nevertheless taken up by York, who in 1801 laid the foundation stone of ‘The Royal Military Asylum for Children of Soldiers of the Regular Army’, which had been set up by Royal Warrant that year as a direct result of his personal initiative. It was housed in another new and impressive classical structure, also designed by John Sanders, standing close to the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, and it was ready to admit the first pupils in 1803. Based on the same principles as the ‘Royal Hibernian Military School’, founded in Dublin in 1769, it was at first intended for the education of children of soldiers killed in the war against France. The first pupils were transferred to Chelsea in August 1803 from a military orphanage in the Isle of Wight and thereafter the school flourished under the watchful eye of the duke and a board of governors drawn from some of his most senior officers at the Horse Guards.
Despite its fine buildings in Chelsea, the asylum was not intended to be a grand school for the privileged but rather a place where the orphaned and destitute children of rank and file soldiers could be educated instead of being sent to the workhouse or relying on other forms of charity. As such, its historians claim, it ‘provided the country with the first large-scale system of education for working-class children’.8 Moreover, it opened its doors to girls as well as boys and by about 1810 it housed 1,500 military orphans, of which 1,000 were boys and 500 were girls. The duke was impressed with the monitorial system of instruction, first introduced by Joseph Lancaster and modified by Dr Andrew Bell, by which older children of thirteen and fourteen would, after initial tuition themselves, give instruction to younger pupils, and this was employed as the general method of basic education. Up to 1815 many of the boys leaving the school were destined for the army but in peacetime they were provided with indentured apprenticeships in a variety of trades. The Asylum was a ground-breaking and enlightened educational development which brought great benefits to its pupils and the nation at large and it would not have seen the light of day without the enthusiastic support of the Duke of York.
A Short-lived Peace, 1802–1803
As a result of the Fitzgerald rebellion in 1798, Pitt came round firmly to the view that a full political union with Ireland was necessary. After lavish distribution of bribes to the affected parties an Act of Union, passed by both the British and Irish Parliaments in 1800, established the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’, which came into effect on 1 January 1801. The Irish Parliament in Dublin ceased to meet and a hundred MPs representing Irish constituencies joined the 558 already sitting at Westminster. Far more controversially, Pitt also advocated the granting of concessions to Roman Catholics, who were in the majority in Ireland, yet suffered under serious restrictions concerning religious practice and civil rights. Here Pitt came up against the opposition of George III, who considered that any concessions to Roman Catholics would be a violation of his coronation oath to protect the Church of England. Because of this conflict, Pitt felt obliged to announce his resignation as prime minister in February 1801, but before he could leave office the king suffered another bout of insanity. Pitt had to stay on and begin negotiations with the Prince of Wales about a regency but then the king suddenly recovered in March, blaming his relapse on the strains of the Catholic Emancipation issue. Pitt left office on 14 March and was succeeded by his political ally Henry Addington, the Speaker of the House of Commons. Pitt’s supporters were dismayed: ‘Pitt is to Addington as London is to Paddington,’ they joked.
Addington dropped the contentious issue of Catholic Emancipation (which York, following his father, also strongly opposed) and began to look for an end to hostilities with France. While York had been at the Helder, dramatic events had occurred in Paris. General Bonaparte had been marooned in Egypt as a result of Nelson’s destruction of his fleet in Aboukir Bay in August but after a number of successes against the Turks he abandoned his army and reached Paris in October 1799, aware that the rule of the Directory was unpopular. After a coup in November, he established himself as ‘First Consul’ of France, with a plebiscite which voted overwhelmingly in his favour. He then took an army into Italy and defeated the Austrians at Marengo in June, while General Moreau won another victory at Hohenlinden in December. After these defeats, Austria made peace at Lunéville in February 1801, granting France extensive gains including recognition of the Batavian Republic.
In April 1801 a British fleet under Admirals Parker and Nelson defeated the Danes at Copenhagen and destroyed the ‘League of Armed Neutrality’ that had hampered the British war effort. News then filtered through of the defeat of the remains of Bonaparte’s Egyptian army by Abercromby’s force. To Addington (and also Pitt, who continued to advise him), it seemed sensible to make peace with France under terms which were embodied in the Treaty of Amiens of March 1802. The French agreed to give up Egypt, Naples and the states surrounding Rome, but kept extensive territories on the left bank of the Rhine and remained dominant in the Netherlands and Northern Italy. Britain retained Trinidad and Ceylon but returned all other gains, including Martinique, Minorca, the Cape of Good Hope and Malta, as well as some Dutch settlements in the East and West Indies. Critics thought that Addington had given away too much but in general the peace was well received. Addington grew in confidence and the king showed his pleasure by giving him White Lodge in Richmond Park to use as an official residence.9
In fact, the peace lasted less than fourteen months because on 18 May 1803 Britain again declared war on France, where Napoleon Bonaparte had become First Consul for life. Britain complained that France had abused a generous Treaty at Amiens by occupying the Netherlands and Switzerland, while France countered that Britain had not given up Malta. The reality was that, after Amiens, Napoleon, instead of demobilizing his troops, continued to increase both his army and naval forces to an extent that could only be a serious threat to Britain’s interests and Addington, unlike Chamberlain in 1938, was not an appeaser.
The decision to resume war against France had disastrous consequences for the Electorate of Hanover and the Bishopric of Osnabrück. In March 1803 the Imperial Diet, under pressure from Napoleon, granted the bishopric to the electorate, and in July the electorate was forced to surrender to Napoleon’s army. It was then abolished and occupied by French troops until 1807, when Napoleon incorporated it into a new Kingdom of Westphalia. This meant that from 1803 the Duke of York ceased to be Prince Bishop of Osnabrück and to enjoy its revenues, while his father lost control over Hanover. George III did not recognize the electorate’s dissolution and a body of Hanoverian exiles maintained a theoretical government in London. More effectively, a large body of Hanoverian officers and men came to England after the dissolution of the Hanoverian army and formed the ‘King’s German Legion’. This eventually numbered about 14,000 men and was one of the best-disciplined forces in the British army, fighting with distinction in many campaigns, including the Peninsular War and at Waterloo. Given his knowledge and experience of Hanover, there was a close tie between these men and their new commander-in-chief, the Duke of York.
No doubt intoxicated by the general enthusiasm for the renewed conflict, the Prince of Wales asked Addington for an army appointment suitable to his rank and dignity. Receiving evasive replies, he appealed directly to the king, who as directly refused permission for him to do anything other than act in the largely ceremonial role of Colonel of the 10th Light Dragoons, an appointment he had received in 1793. Given that all his brothers except one were serving in the armed forces, the prince felt he had a strong case, but from the point of view of the king, he was the heir apparent to the throne and – even more significantly – had had little military training nor shown much interest in it. The prince then turned to his brother Frederick, who as commander-in-chief was, of course, responsible for all military appointments.
In a series of letters which went to and fro between the brothers from 5 to 14 October George became more and more exasperated at York’s explanation that he could not give him a command without the king’s permission, and he ended: ‘Feeling how useless, as well as ungracious, controversy is upon every occasion, and knowing how fatally it operates on human friendship, I must entreat that our correspondence on this subject shall cease here, for nothing could be more distressing to me than to prolong a topic, on which it is now clear to me, my dear brother, that you and I can never agree.’ Relations between the two cooled for a while, but George got over it.10
When Pitt resigned as prime minister, Henry Dundas resigned with him and Addington replaced him as war minister with Lord Hobart, a man almost forgotten now except for having given his name to the capital of Tasmania. Yet he was an able and conscientious minister, who first undertook a moderate demobilization of troops after the Treaty of Amiens and also continued the work of incorporating the Irish Army and Ordnance within the British army, as a result of the Act of Union in 1801. This meant, from the Duke of York’s point of view, that after 1801 he was effectively commander-in-chief of all Irish troops as well as British. Addington can take the credit for not demobilizing too quickly, because when hostilities began again, there were still 50,000 men in the navy, while the army had 132,000 men, three times its normal peacetime strength. Moreover, thanks to York’s reforms, the army was better trained and organized than ever.11
The threat of a French invasion was very real and all the ports from Brest to the Texel were full of French troops, waiting to be shipped over to Britain, though as York wrote early in July 1803, ‘The extent of army which an enemy may land depends not upon his numbers at home, but upon his means of transporting them to this country.’12 Not content with the forces that already existed, Addington’s ministry determined to raise a huge force of militia and in July 1803 passed an Act empowering the government to ‘train every ablebodied man whether he liked it or not’, following the example of the French levée en masse. Ultimately 380,000 ‘volunteers’ were raised in Britain and a further 70,000 in Ireland, creating a demand for firearms which the Ordnance was at first unable to supply. As commander-in-chief, York saw to it that inspecting field officers were appointed to monitor the volunteer militias every month and report back to the Horse Guards.
While Pitt was still a serving MP, very few at Westminster believed that Addington could face the demands of war as well as he could and gradually Addington’s support slipped away and he resigned on 9 May 1804. Pitt returned as prime minister and Henry Dundas, by now Lord Melville, joined the cabinet; Hobart was replaced as war minister by Lord Camden until July 1805, when the post went to the brilliant Lord Castlereagh. That month Castlereagh wrote to York that Britain ‘should be prepared to … menace or attack the enemy on their maritime frontier, and, by compelling them to continue in force on the coast and in Holland, [to] weaken their efforts proportionately in other areas’, a sensible policy that York dutifully pursued by establishing a fully equipped fleet of transports capable of carrying 10,000 men near Cork, Portsmouth and Dover.13
To deal with the very real threat of a French invasion of the south coast, the Duke of York initiated a number of far-reaching measures. In 1794 an army camp had been established on land in Shorncliffe, Kent, which lay only twenty miles from the French coast and in 1803 York made the brilliant appointment of General John Moore (knighted in 1804) to command an army brigade there. Moore was a Scot who had fought with distinction in many theatres of war from American Independence onwards and he was a leader noted for wise and humane treatment of the troops.
It has sometimes been said that Moore initiated the training which led to the emergence of Britain’s first light infantry regiment during his time at Shorncliffe but, according to Richard Glover, ‘the idea that Moore originated any system of light infantry training is … a mistake. The system he taught, like the plan of training whole regiments as light cavalry, was but one thing more provided by the foresight of the commander-in-chief and his staff.’14 As early as 1798 York authorized Baron de Rottenburg, an Austrian in the British service, to circulate his up-to-date manual on the exercise of riflemen and light infantry, in which he provided instruction in weapon-handling, marksmanship and drill, and it was this which Moore used as the basis of his training scheme, together with another manual in the same vein, written by Francis Jarry of the Royal Military College.15
About 1800 York founded the Royal Staff Corps, led by Lieutenant Colonel John Brown, and it was they who built the 28-mile-long Royal Military Canal from Shorncliffe westwards to Rye, effectively making the Dungeness peninsula and the Pett levels into islands. Brown met Pitt and the Duke of York in September 1804 and outlined his plans for the canal, which would defend the Romney marshes from invasion. They both approved the scheme enthusiastically and it was complete by 1809. In February 1794 two British warships had unsuccessfully attacked a defensive tower at Mortella Point in Corsica and it was only captured after a hard-fought land attack led by John Moore. When York appointed Moore to take charge of the defence of the coast from Dover to Dungeness, he urged the building of similar defences, consisting of round ‘Martello’ towers with thick walls, about 40 feet high and housing between fifteen and twenty-five men, with a piece of heavy artillery on the roof. Eventually about 140 of these towers were built in England and Ireland, as well as larger redoubts at Harwich, Dymchurch and Eastbourne.
The immediate threat of a French invasion was drastically reduced when, on 21 October 1805, Admiral Nelson, with twenty-seven ships of the line, engaged the combined French and Spanish fleets of thirty-three ships off Cape Trafalgar and inflicted one of the most crushing blows in naval history, capturing twenty-two enemy vessels and losing none. This success was diminished partly by the death of Nelson himself and also by an exceptionally vicious storm which blew up immediately after the battle, scattering the British fleet and wrecking many of the captured vessels – which had the lamentable effect of greatly reducing the prize money due to British sailors. However, the short-term result of the battle was that a French invasion of Britain was rendered impossible until Napoleon had built another fleet, although he began to make plans for this without delay.
Trafalgar did nothing to prevent French success on land, however. Napoleon, who had become ‘Emperor of the French’ in December 1804, forced the surrender of one Austrian army at Ulm on 19 October 1805 and then on 2 December, in the ‘Battle of the Three Emperors’ at Austerlitz, he soundly defeated an Austro-Russian force, commanded by Francis II and Alexander I in person, with a masterly display of tactical strategy. By the resulting Treaty of Pressburg, Austria recognized French gains in Italy and in 1806 Napoleon created the Confederation of the Rhine, composed of many German states which had formerly been part of the Holy Roman Empire. This outdated anachronism was now dissolved and Francis henceforth ruled as Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary.
It was claimed at the time that the shock of Austerlitz, which destroyed the Third Coalition and Pitt’s entire foreign policy, was a direct cause of his death. Certainly he died less than two months later, at the age of forty-six, worn down with worry and stress after a lifetime of heavy drinking, often in solitude, and probably suffering from peptic ulceration of his stomach or duodenum.16 His former political ally, Lord Grenville, succeeded him as head of a short-lived ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, as the wits called it. The most disastrous aspect of this administration was the appointment of William Windham as war minister. Although charming, well-meaning and a fine speaker, his policies regarding army recruitment were muddled and wrong-headed. He abolished the ballot for the militia, which reduced recruitment drastically and introduced a Training Act which conscripted 200,000 men a year but gave them only twenty-four days of training. He did raise pay by 50 per cent to one shilling and sixpence and introduced pensions for old soldiers, but these measures had no practical effect on recruitment.
Moreover, the Duke of York gave Windham his strong professional advice that he should not abolish the Volunteers, which Windham had criticised in the past for being expensive and ineffective ‘painted cherries which none but simple birds would take for real fruit’. Faced with York’s objections, Windham compromised by retaining the Volunteers but abolishing the inspecting field officers, which York had introduced, and reducing the Volunteers’ days of training and rates of pay. As a result, according to one analyst, ‘he did not save the country the whole expense of maintaining these “painted cherries”, but he did abolish everything calculated to preserve the real usefulness for which the commander-in-chief valued them … This alone is surely enough to justify our calling Windham a national disaster, quite apart from the effect of his policies on the regular army, the fatuity of his Training Act, and his failure to aid his allies.’17
Under the Grenville administration, a ‘Fourth Coalition’ was formed against Napoleon, consisting of England, Sweden, Prussia and Russia. French armies crushed the Prussians at Jena and Auerstadt on 14 October 1806, causing King Frederick William III to flee into Russia. Napoleon entered Berlin and from there inaugurated the ‘Continental System’, by which all European governments were required to wage economic war against Britain through ceasing to trade with her. In February 1807 Napoleon forced the Russians to withdraw after a battle at Eylau and followed this with a decisive victory over them at Friedland in June, after which the Tsar made peace at the Treaty of Tilsit the following month. At this point in his career Napoleon was triumphant everywhere and there was little that Britain could do but look on.
Fortunately for the British war effort, Grenville’s ministry fell in March 1807 because the king refused to consider its plans for Catholic Emancipation. Thanks to the work of Pitt’s friend William Wilberforce, however, it did manage to pass one worthwhile measure: the abolition of the slave trade. The king now turned to the elderly and infirm Duke of Portland to form his second ministry, in which Castlereagh returned to the war office, where he was able to concentrate his exceptional ability and energy on restoring the strength and effectiveness of the army, no doubt to the relief of the Duke of York, who had been very unhappy with Windham’s unsatisfactory ‘reforms’. Castlereagh began by encouraging men from the militia to volunteer for the regular army once more and thereby gained nearly all of the 28,000 reinforcements for which he had hoped, while subsequent losses to the militia were filled by a revival of the ballot system.
Spain and Portugal
Throughout the eighteenth century both Spain and Portugal were absolute monarchies, ruled respectively by the royal houses of Bourbon and Braganza. When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, Spain was ruled by King Charles IV and Portugal by Queen Maria I, although in 1792 she was declared insane and her son John ruled as prince regent. Spain and Portugal were both horrified by the progress of the Revolution and after the guillotining of Louis XVI they joined Britain in the First Coalition against France. Spanish and Portuguese armies invaded the French Pyrenees in that year but were driven back by 1795, after which France occupied part of north-east Spain.
After this reverse Spain changed sides and allied with France but, because of the long-standing friendship between Portugal and Britain, cemented by mutually advantageous trading treaties, Portugal declared neutrality. In 1801 France persuaded Spain to take part in a successful invasion of Portugal, which was forced to cede territory to both Spain and France. After this, Prince John’s Spanish wife, egged on by Paris and Madrid, attempted a coup in 1805 to take power herself, although it was not successful. John subsequently refused to join Napoleon’s Continental System and maintained close diplomatic relations with Britain, which secretly pledged to evacuate him to Brazil if the French should invade again.
In November 1807 Napoleon sent Marshal Junot into Portugal with a large army that soon threatened Lisbon. Helped by the British, Prince John decided to abandon his country to the French and embarked in a fleet of ships bound for Brazil, with several thousand Portuguese nobles, civil servants and military personnel. Despite storms, cramped conditions and disease, most of the ships arrived safely and John set up a new capital at Rio de Janeiro. He instructed those remaining in Portugal to cooperate with the French and avoid the destruction of the country.
Meanwhile, in Spain there was conflict between Charles IV and his heir, Prince Ferdinand, who staged an unsuccessful coup against his father in 1807, backed by ‘liberals’. In March 1808 a popular revolt forced Charles to abdicate in favour of his son, who became king as Ferdinand VII, but Charles appealed to Napoleon, who summoned both of them to Bayonne in April 1808 and announced that the Bourbon dynasty in Spain had come to an end. He had appointed his elder brother Joseph Bonaparte King of Naples and Sicily in 1806 and he now declared him to be King of Spain, supported by 100,000 French troops. Although Joseph was able, liberal and well-intentioned, this French upstart, the puppet of his younger brother, had no chance of winning the support of the vast majority of the Spanish people.
On 2 May 1808 Spanish rioters killed 150 French soldiers in Madrid and the following day the French shot hundreds of citizens in retaliation, an event immortalized in Goya’s iconic painting The Third of May. Sporadic rebellions occurred throughout Spain, which were given the name guerillas, or ‘little wars’. By the end of the month nearly all the Spanish provincial governments had repudiated French rule and Joseph was faced with a national revolt. Many of the rebel local governments sent delegations to London requesting assistance and Castlereagh despatched three army officers to Gijon in June to assess the situation. Then, in July, Spanish rebel forces inflicted a significant defeat on the French at Bailen and Castlereagh sent out General Sir James Leith to consider how the north of Spain might be reinforced. In August a British army under Sir Arthur Wellesley landed in Portugal, assured of local support.
The Wellesley Factor
Born in 1769, Wellesley was the third of the five sons of Garret Wesley, Earl of Mornington, an Irish peer living on his estates at Dangan, in County Meath. When Lord Mornington died in 1781, his eldest son Richard inherited the earldom and after a brilliant career at Eton and Cambridge, he seemed destined for greatness. Meanwhile Arthur did not enjoy Eton, left prematurely and attended the French Royal Academy of Equitation at Angers, where he learnt good horsemanship and became fluent in French. Through Richard’s influence he was able to buy a commission in an infantry regiment and was appointed ADC to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Then he became a member of the Irish Parliament for the local constituency of Trim. In September 1793, with money borrowed from his brother, he was able, at the age of twenty-four, to purchase the rank of Lieutenant Colonel of the 33rd Regiment of Foot and in June 1794 he sailed with his men to Flanders to reinforce the Duke of York’s army, which was facing a major French counter-offensive.
As we have seen, the army that York was given was badly provisioned and equipped and had been raised hastily, often from the dregs of society, while many of its officers were young men with little training or experience who had bought their commissions, just as Wesley (as he then was) had done. On 14 September 1794 Wesley saw his first action when his regiment helped to check a French attack at Boxtel and he was later complimented by York for his calm and effective conduct. Wesley expected, as many officers did, that he would be returning home for the winter but the French attacks continued and he remained with his men on the Waal for several months in freezing temperatures. During this time (when York had been recalled home) he was only once visited by a general and when he himself went to headquarters, he was surprised to find it ‘a scene of jollification’. In later life he criticized the allied high command, although not York specifically, for being out of touch in this campaign and put it on record that ‘the reason why I succeeded in my own campaigns is because I was always on the spot – I saw everything and did everything for myself’.18
In 1796 Wesley, by now a full colonel, was sent with his regiment to India, where in 1798 his brother Richard was appointed governor-general, after changing the family name to Wellesley. Arthur was part of General Harris’s force that defeated Tipu Sultan at Seringapatam and he was then appointed Governor of Mysore in 1801 and promoted major-general in 1802. In 1803 he won his first battle as an army commander, against the Marathas at Assaye, a decisive victory during which he remained in the thick of the action. He followed this with two further victories, leading to the ultimate defeat of the enemy. He was knighted in 1804 and returned with his brother (who had been created Marquess Wellesley) to England in 1805. During Richard’s period of office the influence of France had been destroyed in India, and the often haphazard rule of the East India Company had been transformed into the makings of a new British empire. Inevitably, Richard had promoted his brother over the heads of more senior officers and this caused a good deal of ill-feeling in some quarters. He was a leading Whig and the Tories sought to discredit him by demanding an enquiry into his Indian administration, which subsequently found no fault.
Arthur Wellesley, meanwhile, became MP for Rye in 1806 and was soon appointed chief secretary for Ireland and a privy councillor. However, he relinquished these appointments in order to command an infantry brigade on an attack on Copenhagen in 1807, which captured the Danish fleet and prevented it from falling into the hands of Napoleon. It was after this success that he was promoted lieutenant-general and received orders to command a modest force which would be sent to oppose the French in Portugal.
Arriving there in August, he won a tentative victory at Rolica, immediately after which reinforcements from England arrived off the coast, commanded by Sir Harry Burrard, a more senior general with orders to supersede Wellesley. Before the new troops could fully disembark the French attacked Wellesley, who beat them off with great success at Vimeiro on 21 August. Wellesley then urged Burrard to take the offensive, but he refused. The following day Sir Hew Dalrymple arrived from Britain to take overall command and he also refused to sanction Wellesley’s plan for an offensive, which inevitably caused friction between them.
At this point, and unexpectedly, Junot concluded that his position was untenable and he asked for an armistice, under which his army could be safely evacuated from Portugal. Discussing the details between themselves, the three British generals formulated the Convention of Cintra, which allowed the French army, along with ‘their arms and baggage, with their personal property of every kind’, to be transported in ships of the Royal Navy to the French port of Rochefort. All three generals signed the Convention, which caused public outrage at home when its details became known. Wellesley was very unhappy with it, especially when he saw how much loot the French were taking with them and he resigned his command, allegedly to resume office as chief secretary in Ireland. Soon afterwards, Dalrymple and Burrard were recalled to England, when the government, under pressure from the opposition, announced an official enquiry in November.19
Inevitably, the Duke of York was closely involved with many of these important events and decisions. He was aware of Wellesley as a young officer because he had noted his steady conduct at Boxtel, but he formed an unfavourable impression of him subsequently, probably because he had acquired rapid promotion through the influence of his Irish aristocratic family, especially his elder brother, and the system of purchasing commissions, which York had tried so hard to dismantle. York made clear his disapproval of the fact that in India General Harris had given Wellesley the Mysore command in preference to more senior officers and he was very suspicious about the fact that Wellesley had political as well as military ambitions. At this point he considered him less than trustworthy and together with the king he opposed Wellesley’s initial appointment to command the expeditionary force to Portugal on the grounds that he was too junior in the service, and he was very influential in the decision to send out Burrard and Dalrymple to supersede him.20
York and his duchess were no strangers to the Wellesley family because one of Richard and Arthur’s sisters, Lady Anne, was first lady of the bedchamber to Frederica. They had clearly known each other well for several years because the daughter of Anne’s first marriage had been christened Georgiana Frederica. After the death of her first husband Anne married the 24-year-old Charles Culling-Smith in 1799 and York appointed him a personal equerry and favoured the couple by becoming godfather to their son, who was named Frederick after him. Seemingly the Culling-Smiths were close friends of the duke and duchess, but an entry in the journal of the politician and diarist Lord Glenbervie, dated 12 February 1804, runs: ‘According to gossip the Duke of York returned to Oatlands unexpectedly one day and actually surprised the Duchess and Mr Smith in the very fact. Violent fury. The king said “I am very sorry for it, Frederick. It is an infamous business, but it must be hushed up.”’21
This episode seems out of character for Frederica, but if Glenbervie was not just passing on malicious rumour, all parties concerned followed the king’s instructions because nothing more came of it and the duke, no doubt reflecting that he was by no means an innocent himself in such matters, evidently decided to forgive and forget. In 1805 Charles Culling-Smith and his wife built a fashionable gothic-style house in Virginia Water, Surrey, which they called Wentworths, and Charles served briefly as under-secretary of state for foreign affairs as well as remaining an equerry to the duke until Frederick’s death in 1827. Wentworths, together with 200 surrounding acres, was bought in 1920 by George Tarrant, who made it into the famous golf course.
Whether the Culling-Smith episode had any bearing on York’s opinion of Arthur Wellesley or not, it was widely thought at the time that he would have liked the supreme command in Portugal for himself. Many in opposition to the government were strongly against this, partly because of York’s mixed fortunes as a commander in the past and partly because he was becoming, as we shall see, the centre of a major scandal. A popular caricature of September 1808 depicted the duke on Horse Guards, surrounded by his wife Frederica, a woman called ‘Eliza’, George Canning (the foreign secretary), and a group of Guards officers. The duchess is saying: ‘I will return and bury my cat. If he go or stay, I will have his presence equally. He always turns a dead side to me. Oatlands for me.’ Meanwhile the duke says to ‘Eliza’ (presumably his mistress, Mary Anne Clarke), ‘Eliza adieu … I am yours, but my country calls. Canning is an insolent upstart. Holland and Dunkirk indeed! Popular clamour! Lost confidence! … Not go? When Sir Hew expects me?’ Canning meanwhile is saying: ‘He shall not go … I will resign first … No, No, … death to his hopes or my countrymen.’ Finally, the group of officers say: ‘Aye, turn him out – go out yourself – go, go, go. We could do without you.’22
As was often the case, this caricature was politically motivated. It was common knowledge that the duke had kept several mistresses, while Canning’s hostility stemmed from rivalry between himself as foreign secretary and the war minister Castlereagh, who was an ally of York. The suggested attitude of the officers is less credible, unless they represented men disappointed of promotion or appointments. In fact, the Portuguese command went to Sir John Moore, who had worked closely with the Duke of York on the defence of the south coast and whose abilities he valued highly. Meanwhile, it was York’s responsibility to appoint seven senior generals, chaired by Sir David Dundas, as the board of inquiry into the Convention of Cintra and they met in the great hall of Chelsea Hospital in November. Dalrymple, Burrard and Wellesley all presented their own points of view and the board eventually absolved them of blame, deciding that although an unconditional surrender of the French would have been preferable, the Convention had served a useful purpose.
Taking up his command in Portugal in September 1808, Sir John Moore left 10,000 men in Lisbon and marched another 20,000 as far as Salamanca, hoping to unite with further British reinforcements under Generals Hope and Baird, as well as a large Spanish army. But Napoleon himself had invaded Spain with 160,000 men, driving back the Spanish and entering Madrid on 4 December. Moore and Baird together attacked a French army under Soult with some success but were pursued by Napoleon with his main army. Moore was forced to retreat 200 miles over the mountains in a harsh winter to Corunna, with despondency and lack of discipline ever-present in his ranks. The disorganized force reached Corunna on 11 January 1809 and began evacuating in British ships two days later. On the 16th Soult attacked and was beaten back, but Moore was hit by a cannon ball that mangled his left shoulder and arm. He died that evening, while the rest of his army was evacuated under the cover of darkness. Nine days later some 28,000 men, including about 6,000 sick and wounded, arrived in a very bedraggled state in Portsmouth harbour. Moore’s valiant death and the successful evacuation of most of his army tempered what was really a tactical disaster, with the British expelled from the Peninsula, and the French once more in control.
On 1 February 1809 the Duke of York issued a general order praising Moore. ‘During the seasons of repose’, it ran, ‘his time was devoted to the care and instruction of the officers and soldiers. In war he courted service in every quarter of the globe … his virtues live in the recollections of his associates, and his fame remains the strongest incentive to great and glorious action.’23 Yet by 18 March, as a result of a scandal which had riveted the attention of the nation for the past two months, York himself felt obliged to inform the king of his decision to resign as commander-in-chief.