In a book of biographical essays on heroism, there is an inevitable tendency to write too much on warfare. It must be resisted. There is a case, rather, for a categorical objection to military heroes. That was Dryden’s view: Homer’s heroes were “ungodly mankillers.” Swift, in his Tale of a Tub, argues that “those Ancient Heroes, famous for their Combating so many Giants, and Dragons, and Robbers were in their own Persons a greater Nuisance to Mankind than any of those Monsters they subdued.” Pope denounced generals, conquerors, etc., who were all
Much the same, the point’s agreed,
From Macedonia’s madman to the Swede.
(By these he meant Alexander and Charles XII.) Johnson too often attacked heroic violence as a contradiction in terms and a source of moral evil. He deplored the use of clichés like “bed of honor,” “sinking in death,” “joys of conquest” to cover up the horrors, futility and ugliness of war. But Johnson was also a great believer in majority opinion (as a rule) and he recognized that, in all ages, most people respect proven valor in war: “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.” In a delightful letter to Mrs. Thrale’s daughter, Queenie, on the subject of military camps, he calls them “perhaps the most important scene of human existence, the real scene of heroick life.” He liked the irony of the fact that some of the grandest people in history had passed their lives in tents, “the lowest and most portable accommodation human wit has contrived.” He pointed out to the lucky teenagers—imagine getting a letter at school from Dr. Johnson—that warfare was grim, disgusting, uncomfortable and sordid to a unique degree but also unique in its capacity to bring out the virtues of fortitude, endurance and courage.
In any case, as Johnson argued, whether we like it or not, the heroic soldier or sailor will always attract people’s admiration, more perhaps than any other kind of great man. So this chapter is devoted to three very different examples of the species. I was tempted to include others. Admiral Blake for instance. I am drawn to him because he came from a part of Somerset where I now have my country house, and which I love. One of twelve sons of a Bridg-water merchant, he is assumed to have gone on sea voyages in his youth, though he first came to public notice, in the civil war, as a colonel in the siege of Bristol, later, as the man who took Taunton and then defended it heroically. Considering how late he came to naval warfare, Blake was astonishingly successful at it, even against such superb professionals as Tromp. He was, moreover, modest, unassuming, chivalrous, truthful and unselfish, a truly good man. But hard to write about, since all the anecdotes prove, on investigation, to be spurious, and all the details false.
With Prince Rupert, one of his great opponents, there is quite another difficulty. He is closely associated with my old Oxford College, Magdalen, having spent much of the war there. A Magdalen man, in fact. He also shared with me a passion for drawing and watercolor painting. He was, indeed, most versatile in his gifts, being as much at home as any admiral and any cavalry commander, clever at science, as a mechanic and inventor, hugely attractive to women, the kind of man who, as a prisoner, gets to bed the jailer’s daughter (as he actually did). And yet—there is something about Rupert which makes one unwilling to spend much time in his company. He was saturnine. He exuded gloom. He never seems to have smiled. He was grim even in his cups. He had all the heroic virtues except glamour (and charm). You feel that an evening spent with him listening to his exploits would leave you feeling depressed. So out with Prince Rupert!
Then there is Oliver Cromwell. Carlyle, his biographer, both Homer and Tolstoy (combined) to the hero, rated Cromwell as the ideal man, not only in his Of Heroes and Hero Worship, but in his best book, The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. But that is the trouble. Carlyle made the man his private property. And Carlyle’s prose style is fatally catching. You cannot write about Cromwell without falling into those terrible pseudobiblical cadences, rhetorical apostrophes and ironic name tags. To de-Carlyle Cromwell is not impossible—writers have done it. But it requires the kind of vigilance that I find irksome and which for me spoils the huge pleasure of biography. So out with Cromwell, too!
The three men of war I have selected stand toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, and they participated in the momentous process that ended the ancien régime and launched the modern world. They are all three genuine heroes, unlike the fourth who might have formed with them a quartet: Napoleon. But the last is half hero, half monster, and is best used as a contrast and warning in this context. Washington, Nelson and Wellington make an excellent trio, for the way in which they resembled each other and the many ways in which they differed are alike rich in useful lessons.
George Washington (1732–1799) was a generation older than the other two. By the time Nelson was born in 1758 and Wellington, in 1769, Washington was a senior officer who had been through a world conflict (the Seven Years War) and experienced a shattering defeat as well as victory. He was very much a man of the eighteenth century, an exact contemporary of Haydn and Fragonard. He was unlike Nelson and Wellington in another important respect—he was large, they were small. Size is a key biographical fact, especially in men and above all in fighting men. When I was an office cadet in the British army, the commandant told me: “Beware small generals!” He was a tall man, and he had obviously suffered in his day. The example he obviously had in mind was field marshal Sir Gerald Templar, a small but exceptionally fierce and highly successful general, who won the Malaya war and was the only commander, British, French, American or Russian, to emerge the outright winner in a guerrilla campaign. Small men who emerge at the top of the fighting profession need that extra bit of bellicosity or creative intelligence or sheer courage to compensate for their lack of inches.
Washington was six foot three. That made him enormous in his day. He stood out. He was not particularly burly—not at all bear-like. Elegant, rather, and refined in body, though the Marquis de Lafayette said, “He had the largest pair of hands I have ever seen in a man.” Above all, he was tall. This had a powerful influence on his character as a leader of men. He never needed to strut or posture, to push himself, to pull rank, to insist on his power, to demand respect. He got it automatically. His height gave it to him. He was thus what we would call laid back. He was relaxed. He could take subordination and obedience for granted. Statuesque and formidable by nature, he radiated calm and quiet authority.
He was also very strong, and his strength allowed him to do things other generals would never have done. The painter Charles William Peale remembered a moment at Washington’s house, Mount Vernon, in 1772, when he and other men were pitching a heavy iron bar, then a popular sport. Washington suddenly appeared and, “without taking off his coat,” held out his hand for the missile and hurled it into the air. Peale said “it lost the power of gravitation, and whizzed through the air, striking the ground far, very far beyond our utmost efforts.” Washington said: “When you beat my pitch, young gentlemen, I’ll try again.”
How important that strength and physical superiority was showed itself right at the beginning of his supreme command, when he was with the Continental Army outside Boston. Backcountry regiments from the South for the first time joined the New Englanders in strength, and in Cambridge a regiment of Virginia riflemen, many of them slave owners, dressed “in white linen frocks, ruffled and fringed,” met Glover’s Marblehead Regiment, many of them free blacks, in “round jackets and fisher’s trousers.” There was an instant culture war. Insults led to blows, then a fierce hand-to-hand struggle, with “biting and gouging.” An eyewitness said that in less than five minutes more than a thousand combatants were on the field. Washington’s new army was fighting itself on a scale larger than the battles of Lexington and Concord.
Washington acted immediately, with his black servant William Lee, both on horseback. They rode straight into the middle of the conflict. Washington,
with the spring of a deer leapt from his saddle, threw the reins of his bridle into the hands of his servant, and rushed into the thickest of the mêlées, with an iron grip seized two tall, brawny, athletic, savage-looking riflemen by the throat, keeping them at arms’ length, alternately shaking and talking to them.
The rest stopped fighting and gazed in amazement. Washington did not need to threaten punishment. He quelled, by sheer decisive strength, a riot that might have been fatal to his army.
Washington’s height and physique made him a natural leader without any positive effort on his part. By this I do not mean he was in any way passive. He was a vigorous and active man, an early riser, about his business all day, and by no means intellectually idle—he accumulated a library of over eight hundred books, large for the day. His ambition as a boy was to be an affluent country gentleman in the English fashion. He admired all things English (except the treatment of the American colonies, which he thought stupid and ignorant as well as immoral). After his early experiences as a militia officer during the wars against France, he would gladly have taken a regular commission in the British army, in which case we would never have heard of him—he would have served, most probably, in India and the Empire. But he lacked the “interest” to secure one. “Interest,” an archetypical eighteenth-century concept, was a word he used often, for he had none. With interest he might have pursued an alternative career, which was proposed to him, in the Royal Navy. Oddly enough this was a possibility also considered by the young Napoleon Bonaparte, born in 1769, in Ajaccio, where he greatly admired the Royal Navy ships he saw visiting Corsican harbors—but he had to reject it for the same reason: lack of “interest.”
Instead Washington took the obvious course of going into surveying, thus making himself useful to the grander members of his ramifying family, theoretical owners of hundreds of thousands of acres, largely unfarmed and most of it unsurveyed. This proved of inestimable value. It taught Washington method; keeping of daily, accurate records; map reading and mapmaking; knowledge of the country, especially the interior beyond the Piedmont and the mountains—at the time of the Revolution, he knew more of America than all but a handful of his fellow revolutionaries—and an overwhelming sense of the potentialities of the country, especially in farming.
By various inheritances of his own, and by the much larger inheritance of his wife (18,000 acres plus cash and property), by purchase and reward for service, Washington in time became one of the largest landowners in Virginia, and by his exertions as a farmer-landowner, one of the half dozen richest men in America (his will shows him owning 96 square miles, valued at $530,000 in land and stock alone). He shared the enlightened interest of the best kind of English landowner in scientific farming, bought books on the subject, experimented on his own account and corresponded with experts across the Atlantic. Agriculture was one of the few topics on which he became eloquent:
I think that the life of a Husbandman is of all others the most delectable. It is honourable. It is amusing. And with Judicious management it is profitable. To see plants rise from the Earth and flourish by the superior skill and bounty of the labourer fills a contemplative mind with ideas which are more easy to be conceived than expressed. The more I am acquainted with agricultural affairs the better I am pleased with them. I can nowhere find so great satisfaction as in those innocent and useful pursuits.
He regarded tidewater farming in Virginia as inefficient and degrading, with no future. It involved slavery. He always owned slaves, and at one time had more than three hundred (mainly belonging to his wife), but he regarded the institution as wrong and incurably wasteful. In the 1760s he farmed over 20,000 acres. Many rich English earls and dukes had no more. Whence the difference in their incomes and his? Because the best English farming was a judicious mixture of arable, pasture and stock raising, all for the market. By contrast Virginia tobacco was bought by London agents, who did the marketing themselves, got the profits and usually had the American planters in their debt. It was a formula for laziness and improvidence. So Washington spent his life switching from planting to scientific farming. He raised wheat, less labor intensive—a skilled plowman could do the work of forty slow-hoeing slaves—but it demanded large numbers of draft animals and they in turn needed large quantities of hay. So he planted corn fodder alongside wheat, raised root crops, forage crops like clover and alfalfa and put out fields to cattle and hogs. They, in turn, and his plow horses, produced manure which he used as fertilizer. He grew peas and potatoes, planted vines and set up fruit and vegetable gardens on all his farms. He detailed seasonal, weekly and daily work procedures, and became expert in tree grafting, sheep shearing, fishing for herring and dragging for sturgeon. He studied with care the markets which America’s expanding and multiplying cities provided for every kind of agricultural product.
I stress this side of Washington’s life, which is often almost ignored, because it helps to explain why he became such an all-around hero for Americans. The country was about “getting on” by hard work, and for most of the first century of independence, the chief way Americans got on was through the land. Washington was exemplary in this respect, as in so many others. His home, Mount Vernon, which he inherited, embellished, enlarged and made perfect, center and cynosure of a prosperous estate in an idyllic situation, epitomized his taste, industry and hard-earned success.
There is another reason for stressing this side of his life. It made him a revolutionary. Oddly enough, he had a great deal in common with George III, six years his junior. The king also had a passion for agriculture, his chief interest in life—he was known as “Farmer George.” Both loved foxhunting. Washington’s favorite sport, however, was baseball. It was George’s too, though he called it, English fashion, “rounders.” (And both were called George after George II.) What Washington chiefly objected to in the proceedings of George III’s ministers was not so much “taxation without representation,” though he thought it unconscionable, as the efforts of the government to confine the colonies to the seaboard and, in the interests of the Indians, to prevent them from exploiting the interior. To Washington, the interior, and especially the Mississippi Valley, the largest river system in the world with the world’s best agricultural land in it, was America’s future. He went to war for America’s future. He was, in a sense, the first believer in Manifest Destiny.
So much for Washington as a heroic American visionary. As a general he was primarily a strategist rather than a battle commander. He was always outnumbered, up to the final showdown at Yorktown. He had to fight with amateurs, against professionals. He was always short of weapons, uniforms, ammunition, supplies, reliable NCOs and responsible officers. So he could never afford to force a battle or, even, often, to fight a full-scale defensive one. Yet his strategy was clear, intelligent, absolutely consistent and maintained with an iron will from start to finish. He believed he represented the legitimate government of the thirteen colonies, whose traditional powers Britain was trying to usurp. The army he commanded was an entirely legal force, defending its sovereign territory. At all costs the army had to be kept intact and coherent, and prevented from degenerating into a guerrilla force. It did not matter how many skirmishes or even battles he lost, or how often he had to withdraw, or how much territory he had to sacrifice, so long as the army held together. This is why he forced his opponents always to address him as “General Washington” and treat him as a lawful opponent rather than a rebel. His success on this point was not the least of his achievements. So Washington fought a war of attrition. It was his belief that, provided he and his army remained in the field, the financial and human cost of the war to Britain would mount, the political opposition to it would increase and the will to continue it would weaken. He also believed old enemies of Britain—France, Spain, the Dutch—would be tempted to exploit her difficulties. All this proved to be true. Washington’s strategy succeeded. And in due course, at Yorktown, the opportunity arose for a decisive stroke. He seized it eagerly and delivered it with speed, resolution and complete success.
He could not have pursued this long-term strategy through many wearisome years without a hard inner core of self-confidence. That in turn had to be based on a firm conviction of the justice of his cause. He was a religious man. There is no record of his ever doing anything he knew to be wrong. He had a conscience, and slavery made it uneasy. His will, liberating his slaves and directing that all be freed after his wife’s death, finally relieved him of the burden of guilt on that score. He believed in God, or rather a divine and benevolent Providence. He was not essentially a religious man and took no interest in theology, ritual or clerical matters. He was a Freemason by choice, part of his concern with “interest.” But he thought that a general belief in God and the regular practice of a faith was essential to national well-being. These convictions at all stages strengthened his self-confidence in what he was doing as the commanding general of the revolution.
Washington won the war, and that is his primary claim to heroic status. But it is his conduct afterward which is sublime. The example of Oliver Cromwell had shown how difficult it is for a successful revolutionary general to extricate himself from political responsibilities, or to push ambition firmly down. It is to Cromwell’s credit that he at least refused the crown. Caesar had succumbed to temptation. Soon, Napoleon was to do likewise, plunging Europe into a decade and a half of ruinous war and causing the death of five million people. It is to George III’s credit that he spotted the fresh element of heroism which Washington’s victory opened up for him. He asked the American-born president of the Royal Academy, Benjamin West: “What will General Washington do now?” West said he believed he would go back to his farm. George III: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man on earth.”
In fact the recall to constitutional service was inevitable. The war had taught him the need for a proper constitution and a strong executive. He took a leading part in steps leading up to the constitutional convention, presided over it, and played a decisive (if unobtrusive, even hidden) part in ensuring it was shaped in such a fashion as to secure rapid and overwhelming approval by the states. He was not only the obvious choice for president but essentially the only one. He had no alternative but to accept the task, unanimously assigned to him by the new nation, of making the Constitution work. And he did it very well. The United States of America has been fortunate in many ways, especially in the magnificent endowment of nature. But not the least of its blessings was the man who first led it to victory, then made the new nation that emerged law-abiding, stable and prosperous, as well as free. This double achievement is without parallel in history.
Yet if Washington is a hero on an objective level, he is not exactly a heroic personality. There is nothing glamorous about him, no glitter, no charisma, no sparkle. He had no small talk (like Wellington). There were long silences at his dinner parties, during which he drummed with his fingers or played with his knives and forks. He was at his best, again like Wellington, in intimate conversation with clever women he could trust to be discreet. Some believed him overrated. His successor, John Adams, thought he was a fortunate booby, who did not really know what was going on. But careful examination of the evidence, which is abundant, both state and personal, usually shows him to be well-informed, industrious and in charge.
Indeed, since Washington kept, from the age of fourteen, every scrap of paper belonging to him—diaries, letters sent and received, accurate and often day-to-day transactions—and saw to it they were carefully arranged and preserved; and since for more than a third of his life he worked in the service of his country, and all that he did officially is recorded in the National Archives on a scale no European country could then equal, his life is the best documented of any spent in the entire eighteenth century, anywhere. All the same, he remains elusive. There is something remote and mysterious about him. No man’s mind is so hard to enter and dwell within. It is easy to see that, in achievement, he was a paragon. But a rich or an empty one? A titan of flesh and blood or a clockwork figure programmed to do wisely? I think it is probably best to see him not only as a soldier, or a politician, but as a gentleman farmer, riding about his land from early in the morning to late afternoon, observant, attentive, giving occasional directions, taking notes, doing something he loved and which he knew to be creative.
Thus seen, he was not glamorous. But he was real, solid, comprehensible—and dignified. He was a heavyweight in more ways than one. Benjamin Latrobe put it thus: “He did not speak at any time with remarkable fluency. Perhaps the extreme correctness of his language, which almost seemed studied, prevented that effect.” But: “He had something uncommonly majestic in his walk, his address, his figure and his countenance.” This is echoed by another eyewitness: “His features are regular and placid with all the muscles of his face under perfect control, though flexible and expressive of deep feeling when moved by emotions. In conversation he looks you full in the face, is deliberate, deferential and engaging. His movements and gestures are graceful, his walk majestic and he is a splendid horseman.” “Majestic” is the descriptive word most often used about him. I see him as the Majestic Hero. There we will leave him.
Horatio Nelson (1758–1805) was the epitome of the hero, in its English version. His father was rector of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk and his mother daughter of a Westminster prebendary. In the eighteenth century, church of England clergymen were exceptionally patriotic, and scores of the best naval officers came from clerical families (e.g., two of Jane Austen’s brothers rose to be admirals of the fleet). Moreover, Nelson had “interest.” His maternal uncle, Captain Maurice Suckling, took him onboard the Raisonnable at the age of twelve, saw him made midshipman, secured a variety of useful jobs for him and, as comptroller of the Royal Navy, had him made sublieutenant the day after he passed the examination, at the early age of nineteen. He saw action on a variety of ships, in a wide range of situations, all over the world, and aged twenty-four, in 1782, was introduced by Lord Hood, his fleet commander, to Prince William, afterward William IV, with the words: “If you wish to ask questions relative to naval tactics, Nelson can give you as much information as any officer in the fleet.” Apart from one serious bout of fever, contracted in the attack on San Juan (1780) and four years on half pay (1790–1793), Nelson was in continuous employment all his career, and usually in the thick of things. Given the shortness of his life (he died as vice-admiral at the age of forty-seven), he saw more fighting, on sea, land, upriver, besieging or defending forts, on convoy and escort, on troop landings and evacuations, including four general fleet actions in three of which he was in command, than any other officer in the history of the service.
Given his courage, and insatiable appetite for action, it is amazing he survived as long as he did. He lost an arm and an eye, and sustained wounds or injuries on half a dozen other occasions. He was by nature frail and delicate. He had bouts of seasickness on four occasions we know of. He had a heart condition, Costa’s syndrome. He suffered from intermittent bowel trouble. He had bouts of malaria, dysentery, scurvy, flux, septicemia and rheumatism. He lost a lot of teeth and at times kept a hand in front of his face. He fit in well with the contemporary description by the Regency dandy Sir Walter Eliot in Persuasion, of the usual appearance of naval officers: “They are all knocked about, and exposed to every climate and every weather, until they are not fit to be seen.”
Sir Walter would have disliked too Nelson’s “strong Norfolk dialect” and his high-pitched nasal voice. He was always spoken of as “little’: “That foolish little fellow Nelson”—Lord Saint Vincent; “That dear little creature”—Lavinia Spencer, wife of the first lord of the admiralty; “My little hero”—Rear Admiral Duckworth. He often looked frail. People thought he pushed himself too hard. Lavinia Spencer again: “The dear little creature puts me into a fidget about his health.” She said: “He is exactly like the thoroughbred Mail coach horses that one hears of that go on drawing till they drop down dead, having lost shoes, hoofs and everything.” Quite how small he was can never be finally determined. His effigy in Westminster Abbey, supposed to be life-size, is five foot five inches. “Nelson’s Spot,” a height measured in the old Admiralty Board Room, gives five foot four inches. Calculations from surviving uniforms and other clothes give estimates from five foot four to five foot six inches.
At any rate, he was seen as small and delicate. People, and not just women, felt protective toward him. Nelson was vain. He was not vain in Washington’s curious, negative way. His greatest ambition was to be thought unambitious—his vanity was to be believed modest to a fault. Nelson was vain in an old-fashioned way. He liked to wear a beautiful full-dress uniform with all his stars. But then, he knew he was vain. He was not the son of a conscientious clergyman for nothing. He could analyze himself and recognize his faults, and accept misfortune as God’s corrective of them. If he got into difficulties, he never tried to shift the blame to other people. He blamed himself. It was one of his great strengths. A marvelous letter survives in which he describes the worst experience he had in all his naval career, the near loss of his ship Vanguard, off Sardinia:
I ought not to call what has happened to the Vanguard by the cold name of accident. I believe firmly it was the Almighty’s goodness, to check my consummate vanity. I hope it has made me a better officer, as I feel confident it has made me a better Man. I kiss with all humility the rod. Figure to yourself, a vain man, on Sunday evening at sunset, walking in his cabin with a squadron about him, who looked up to their chief to lead them to glory, and in whom this chief placed the firmest reliance, that the proudest ship, in equal numbers, belonging to France, would have bowed their flags; and with a very rich prize lying by him. Figure to yourself this proud, conceited man, when the sun rose on Monday morning, his ship dismasted, his Fleet dispersed, and himself in such distress that the meanest Frigate out of France would have been an unwelcome guest. But it has pleased Almighty God to bring us into a safe port where although we are refused the rights of humanity, yet the Vanguard will in two days get to sea again, as an English Man-of-war.
Nelson’s vanity led him to cut a fine figure in battle, wearing all his decorations, a glittering, unmistakable figure, an easy mark for a French sniper in the crosstrees, as proved fatal at Trafalgar. Wellington would never have done that. He rode all over the battlefield, seeing to things himself. But he did not make the enemy’s work easy. He dressed in ordinary dark clothes, of a military cut to be sure, but without any distinguishing marks of rank, epaulettes, decorations or anything to attract the eye. He was ubiquitous in action, but inconspicuous. Yet there was method in Nelson’s madness. He wanted his sailors to see him exposed, in the hottest center of danger, on his quarterdeck, throughout the action. The willingness of ordinary seamen to give him their all was one of the secrets of the efficiency of his ships. He had risen at the time of the greatest mutiny in British naval history, at the Nore, and the grievances lingered. Sailors were aware of the huge discrepancy between what they received, when a prize was taken—a few shillings—and what senior officers got, above all, admirals, thousands of pounds. An ordinary gunner once remarked, in Nelson’s hearing, that he hoped the likelihood of being hit in action by enemy shot was in the same proportion, as between officers and men, as the distribution of prize money. It was a sobering thought, and Nelson brooded on it. It was his aim to show the men that the danger he ran was at least as great as what they faced—greater, in fact. He was vain of his courage; he wanted to be vain of his courage. And his sailors liked his attitude. They too felt protective toward him—and trembled at his exposure to fire. But it was part of his romantic relationship with them, his love affair with the fleet and all who sailed in it. He was an early romantic, a harbinger of the age of romanticism, which began to surge over the West in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Nelson’s apogee. To Wellington, of course, all this was nonsense. He was a realist. He insisted his men obey him. He cared little if they had feelings about him. He did not even like them to cheer him: “It comes dangerously close to an expression of opinion.” But a navy was not like an army. It was an intimate, highly emotional business, full of sexual analogies, undertones: a ship was “she,” “her.” Nelson was of a character to heighten these emotions and intimacies.
As a captain-commander, he liked his ship to be perfect, operate like clockwork, crew dedicated, officers picked and as superb in their professional expertise as he was. A young officer testified: “The Captain is a worthy, good man, and much lik’d on board—is much of a gentleman—I don’t think there is a ship in the navy better manned throughout.” He took more trouble than any other captain to look after the health of his crew, and when a fleet commander, he went into great detail about ensuring correct diet, exercise, variety and climate change. He was a long way ahead of his time in the use of citrus fruits, onions, vegetables, salads and bathing—all forms of cleanliness indeed. He wrote: “The great thing in all Military Service is health, and it is easier for an officer to keep men healthy, than for a Physician to cure them.” He was paternal to his budding officers: “I make it a rule to introduce my midshipmen to all the good company I can.”
Nelson’s relations with his captains came as near to perfection as it is possible in an imperfect world. He trained them in his methods—“the Nelson touch”—precisely so he could delegate the maximum responsibility to them. They were his “band of brothers,” “my darling children.” His relations with them were romantic—he said his reception by them before Trafalgar was “the sweetest sensation of my life.” His methods of delegation, so that captains instinctively knew his mind in action, and signaling was unnecessary, was the most intelligent thing about him, the product of a great mind which was intuitive. It is important to note that Nelson had the capacity to generate joy. His sentry, John Scott, wrote in 1803:
I have met with no character equal in any degree to his Lordship, his penetration is quick, judgment clear, wisdom great and his decisions correct and decided—nor does he in company appear to bear any weight on his mind, so cheerful and pleasant, that it is a happiness to be about his hand.
With all this, he was by far the most aggressive leader in the entire Napoleonic Wars—more aggressive, if possible, than Bonaparte himself. All his instincts were for action, at the earliest opportunity, on the largest scale, until the enemy was “annihilated”—a favorite word of his. He was not in the least bloodthirsty. He was shipthirsty. He wanted to destroy, incapacitate, but above all capture enemy ships. The enormity of his appetite knew no bounds. He wanted to leave Britain’s opponents without a single serviceable warship, leaving her command of the sea absolute. If possible he aimed to blow up enemy ships in port or at anchor, as he had done at the Nile and in Copenhagen, but the next best thing was to grapple, where the huge power of a British broadside and the ferocity of its boarding crews would “do the trick.” Hence one of his axioms: “Outmanoeuvre a Russian (contemptuously). But close with a Frenchman.” The French could not endure close combat, but on equal terms, and must yield.
He inherited his anti-Gallicanism. He said: “My mother hated the French.” From the late 1790s until his death, this hatred personified itself in the frustration of Bonaparte’s plans. He said: “It matters not at all the way I lay this poker on the floor. But if Bonaparte should say it must be placed in this direction, we must instantly insist upon its being laid in some other one.” He was one of the first to recognize that Bonaparte could master continental Europe but could not win the world war if the navy did its duty. If he landed 100,000 professional French troops, or even 50,000, safely on the English shore, he might make short work of England’s amateur forces of volunteers and militia. That meant Britain could not relinquish command of the narrow seas even for a few hours. That in turn meant the only way security could be ensured, on a permanent basis, was by destroying all France’s men-o’-war and those of all her allies. This strategic aim determined his conduct throughout the years leading up to Trafalgar and gave it the obsessive single-mindedness which was its overwhelming characteristic. He was already a hero, but his pursuit of the Franco-Spanish fleet, in the English Channel and the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic and back, and his final “annihilation” of it in the moment of his own death, has a truly heroic quality not often met with in the history of warfare.
It is notable that this lovable, aggressive little man had a way with words. His letters are often outstanding. I like his description of Naples: “A county of fiddlers and poets, of whores and scoundrels”—worthy of his younger contemporary Lord Byron. He had a knack for coining simple phrases which became imperishable: “Kiss me, Hardy.” “England expects this day that every man will do his duty.” As he lay dying: “I have not been a great sinner.” “Don’t throw me overboard.” “Remember me to your father.”
He was obsessive as a commander. So it is not, perhaps, surprising he had an obsessive love affair with Lady Hamilton. There is something pathetic about the burning, insensate love of this frail little man for the overwhelming Emma, a good six inches taller and big in proportion. The word often used about her was “colossal.” “Exceeding embonpoint.” “A tall, imposing figure with the head of a Pallas.” “The fattest woman I ever laid eyes on.” Their affair excited ridicule among the better-born ladies, most of whom had a soft spot for the admiral. Melesina St. George referred to them as “Antony and Moll Cleopatra.” Lady Hardy, having dismissed the widow Nelson married, because he was lonely, as “his commonplace wife,” said of the affair: “Lord Nelson has never been in clever, artful women’s society and was completely humbugged by Lady Hamilton.” She and others did not grasp the nature of her appeal to him. She satisfied his vanity, completely and overwhelmingly. She gave him unequivocal and unrestrained adoration. She had had many men at her feet but made it clear all were nothing compared to the little man. Her adoration reinforced his self-confidence and resolve and so helped to make Trafalgar possible. This should be remembered in considering his weakness. His obsession with her made him behave inexcusably badly to his wife. The details are too painful to recount. On the other hand, the fact that Nelson was a man of weakness, as well as overwhelming strength, adds to his humanity and his ability to inspire affection two hundred years after his death.
It is not easy to conjure up exactly the conduct of a hero in battle, using mere words. A man with descriptive skill is never there at the right time, and those who are tend to be inarticulate. But a certain Lieutenant Parsons was alongside Nelson on the quarterdeck of the Foudroyant when he sighted the Généreux, one of the Nile survivors. It is worth quoting in full (I take my text from Edgar Vincent’s superb biography, Nelson: Love and Fame):
“Ah! An enemy, Mr Stains. I pray God it may be Le Généreux. The signal for a general chase, Sir Ed’ard, [the Nelsonian pronunciation of Edward] make the Foudroyant fly!”
Thus spoke the heroic Nelson; and every exertion that emulation could inspire was used to crowd the squadron with canvas, the Northumberland taking the lead, with the flagship close on her quarter.
“This will not do, Sir Ed’ard; it is certainly Le Généreux, and to my flagship she can alone surrender. Sir Ed’ard, we must and shall beat the Northumberland.”
“I will do my utmost, my lord; get the engines to work on the sails—hang butts of water to the stays—pipe the hammocks down, and each man shot in them—slack the stays, knock up the wedges, and give the masts play—start off the water, Mr James, and pump the ship.
The Foudroyant is drawing a-head, and at last takes the lead in the chase. The Admiral is working his fin [the stump of his right arm], do not cross his hawse I advise you.”
The advice was good, for at that moment Nelson opened furiously on the quartermaster at the conn. “I’ll knock you off your perch, you rascal, if you are so inattentive. Sir Ed’ard, send your best quartermaster to the weather wheel.”
“A strange sail a-head of the chase!” called the look-out man.
“Youngster, to the mast-head. What! Going without your glass, and be d-d to you! Let me know what she is immediately.”
“A sloop of war or frigate, my lord,” shouted the young signal-midshipman.
“Demand her number.”
“The Success, my lord.”
“Captain Peard; signal to cut off the flying enemy—great odds, though—thirty-two small guns to eighty large ones.”
“The Success has hove-to athwart-hawse of the Généreux, and is firing her larboard broadside. The Frenchman has hoisted his tri-colour, with a rear-admirals flag.”
“Bravo—Success, at her again!”
“She has wore round, my lord, and firing her starboard broadside. It has winged her, my lord—her flying kites are flying away altogether. The enemy is close on the Success, who must receive her tremendous broadside.” The Généreux opens her fire on her little enemy, and every person stands aghast, afraid of the consequences. The smoke clears away, and there is the Success, crippled it is true, but, bulldog like, bearing up after the enemy.
“The signal for the Success to discontinue the action, and come under my stern,” said Lord Nelson; “she has done well for her size. Try a shot from the lower deck at her, Sir Ed’ard.”
“It goes over her.”
“Beat to quarters, and fire coolly at her masts and yards.”
Le Généreux at this moment opened her fire on us; and, as a shot passed through the mizzen stay sail, Lord Nelson, patting one of the youngsters on the head, asked him jocularly how he relished the music; and observing something like alarm depicted on his countenance, consoled him with the information that Charles XII ran away from the first shot he heard, though afterwards he was called “The Great,” and deservedly, from his bravery. “I, therefore,” said Lord Nelson, “hope much from you in future.”
Here the Northumberland opened her fire, and down came the tri-coloured ensign, amidst the thunder of our united cannon.
Thus we leave the little Admiral, at work, gobbling a French man-of-war.
Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (1769–1852), is a delight to read and write about because, though a copybook hero, he was devoid of pomposity and punctuated his long career with pungent and pithy remarks which cast brief flashes of intense light on himself and his times. It is a thousand pities he never wrote an autobiography, for his dispatches, clear, orderly, always to the point, show he was a born writer. He was a younger son of the Earl of Mornington, of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, born in Dublin. But he always denied he was Irish: “Sir, because a man is born in a stable it does not make him a horse.”
He went to Eton but made no mark. He never said, “The Battle of Waterloo was won in the playing fields of Eton,” or anything remotely like it. His mother referred to “My awkward son Arthur, food for powder and nothing more”—an odd remark for a mother, even an Irishwoman. So he went to the French royal military school at Angus, wore a blue uniform with red buttons, and learned equitation. Then he served as an ensign in the 73rd Foot, lieutenant in the 76th and 41st, captain in the 58th and in the 18th Light Dragoons, major and half colonel in the 33rd, all in the years 1787–1793. This was achieved by “interest” and purchase money, as well as diligence. At twenty-seven he was a full colonel. He grew up in the shadow of his grandee elder brother, Irish viceroy and governor general of India, created Marquess Wellesley, whom he described as “A very amiable fellow—when he got his own way.” He then had a parallel career in politics, as MP in the old Irish Parliament, and then in three English boroughs, serving as ADC to two Irish viceroys, and as Irish secretary.
His first important active service was in the Low Countries under the Duke of York: “I learnt what one ought not to do—and that is always something.” One lesson: “Officers must never be allowed to bring their private carriages on campaign.” Another: “The ability to read a map is essential.” Wellington became an absolutely reliable map reader: “The secret of success in war is learning what lies on the other side of the hill.” He was not so brilliantly imaginative at long-range map reading as Napoleon, who could plan a whole campaign that way, one of the central reasons for his success. But he never made a mistake by faulty map reading, and managed to din the skill into his senior officers, something Napoleon did not always do—one of the reasons he lost Waterloo was because Grouchy was a poor map reader.
Wellington then went to India, where he served for eight years, becoming a “Sepoy General” (a despised term in both the British and French professional armies), winning six major battles, and dozens of minor ones, and successfully conducting five big sieges. He also led a cavalry charge of four regiments—successfully. “It was the only time I led cavalry…I learned you cannot trust British cavalry. They will always get you into a scrape.” He also learned “the value of long-distance marching. “It is the key to success in India, and anywhere else I believe.” (This view would have been endorsed by Napoleon.) He learned to write a good dispatch, immediately after the battle: “My rule always was, to do the business of the day in the day.” He learned to be a hands-on commander: “I was always on the spot. I saw everything and did everything for myself.” Again: “There is but one way [to run an army]…to do as I did—have a hand of iron. The moment there was the slightest neglect in any department, I was down on them. I learnt to control a battle personally and not to trust to subordinates.” Of the battle of Argaum: “If I had not been there to restore the battle…we should have lost the day.” The battle of Assaye was “the bloodiest for the numbers that I ever saw” (he lost 1,584 killed, wounded and missing, 650 of them Europeans). He was in some very tight corners in India, often pitted against enormously superior numbers. He developed an extraordinary coolness in battle, his most notable and valuable characteristic: “The general was in the thick of the action the whole time…I never saw a man so cool and collected as he was.” Wellington learned from experience, and in those eight years came up against virtually every situation likely to confront a commanding general. He said: “Avoid a night attack if possible.” He said he read, and learned from, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and that he acted “much as Alexander the Great seems to have done.” But most of generalship was “common sense and attention to detail.” He said: “When one is strongly intent on an object, common sense will usually direct me to the right means.”
Like Nelson, he paid enormous attention to the food, cleanliness and health of the men. His rules for hygiene drill survive, and are admirable. He advised officers: “Drink little or no wine.” Indeed, he drank little all his life, usually adding water (the opposite of Alexander). He said: “I cannot tell the difference between good and bad wine.” Drinking port after dinner in mess was an abomination to him. His routine was, the moment dinner was over, to call for coffee, drink it quickly, then leave. He pleaded: “I have writing to do.” (True.) Quite apart from official writing, returns, dispatches, etc., Wellington was a cleanly man. He bathed every day if possible, and always had a thorough wash. He shaved twice a day if engaged in the evening. From the start, he kept his hair unpowdered and short—no pigtail, queue, etc. He was the first “short back and sides” man in the British army, and gradually his approach became standard, much promoted by his own efforts. Indeed, Wellington, who was involved with the army over sixty years, set his stamp on it in many ways still felt to this day. Officers learned to imitate his taciturnity or brevity. When asked a question he did not wish to answer, or unwilling to make an immediate comment on a piece of information, he had a habit of saying, “Ha!” Gladstone, who heard him thus in 1836, noted approvingly that “Ha!” was “a convenient suspensive expression.” Asked for advice, as he often was, he could be unforthcoming: “Sir, you are in a devlish awkward predicament, and must get out of it as best you can.” (But, when you think of it, this is good advice.) He had a golden rule, though he didn’t call it that: “There is only one line to be adopted in opposition to all tricks: that is the steady, straight line of duty, tempered by forebearance, levity, and good nature.” He also said: “Always try to keep in good humour with the world.”
He returned from India in fine fettle, with a knighthood and £43,000 won in prize money. With a principle too: “I have taken the king’s salt, I am chappawallat, and have a duty to serve the crown always.” He often said, thereafter: “I am the king’s indentured servant.” On the voyage home he landed briefly on Saint Helena, which he liked, by a curious coincidence staying at the Brians, a house occupied by Napoleon in 1815 while Longwood, his home in exile, was being prepared for him.
Back home, he was spotted by Prime Minister Pitt, before his death, as a winner: “Before appointment, he tells you all the difficulties. Once appointed he says not another word about them.” His career in the Peninsular Wars made him the one general in Europe who was persistently successful against the French. He improved his skills as a strategist and, most important, developed highly effective tactics in dealing with France’s magnificent artillery. The leading one was getting his infantry to lie down on the reverse slope of a slight hill during the bombardment. This made all the difference to casualties and morale. He also trained his infantry to keep steady, close formation, while keeping at a high rate of fire, during charges by the ferocious French cavalry. These tactics served him well in Spain: one by one, he met and beat nearly all Napoleon’s best generals. He was never ashamed to retreat to avoid defeat, and so was never beaten. But some of his Spanish battles were close, and horrifically bloody. He said: “The battle of Talavera was the hardest fight of modern times…lasted for two days and a night.” He said: “I hate battles…you lose your friends and your best men.” He begrudged casualties, contrasting himself with Napoleon:
He could do what he pleased, and no man lost more armies than he did. Now with me the loss of every man told. I could not risk so much. I knew that if I ever lost 500 men without the clearest necessity, I should be brought on my knees to the bar of the House of Commons.
Hence in Spain he fought a war of attrition, designed to exhaust the enemy. He bolstered the Spanish forces and conserved his men. Unlike Bonaparte, he had no grandiose strategy, no talent for blitzkrieg. He was a monument of patience, accumulating small gains. He saw the war for the Peninsula as a long haul, and he was right. It lasted six years and was the most protracted campaign of the whole period. It did Napoleon’s military power huge and cumulative, permanent damage, the disaster in Russia coming as a final blow. Because he was a defensive general, Napoleon grossly underrated him. But Wellington, when the odds were in his favor, was quite capable of carrying out a well-prepared attack. In 1813–1814 he fought an offensive campaign, winning repeated victories on a large scale, breaking into France, and so helping to make Napoleon’s abdication inevitable.
But this time, Wellington was a duke, a national hero, and along with Castlereagh, Britain’s chief negotiator at the Congress of Vienna. In the Peninsula, dealing with the Portuguese and Spanish governments, he had learned a great deal about diplomacy and international politics. He was at one with Castlereagh in seeing peacemaking in severely practical terms, keeping ideological politics out, and judging every settlement by the criterion: Will it last? When Napoleon escaped and raised an army in France, Wellington approved the resolution of the Congress to treat him as an outlaw, and readily signed the text: “By again appearing in France with projects of confusion and disorder [Bonaparte] has placed himself outside the law and rendered himself subject to public vengeance.” Being totally unromantic—he had once played the violin, but burned it as soon as he definitely committed himself to soldiering—Wellington had never found Napoleon in the smallest degree appealing. He was a liar and a thief; promises and human lives meant nothing to him. He summed him up:
His mind was in its details low and ungentlemanlike. I suppose the narrowness of his early prospects and habit stuck to him. What we understand by gentlemanlike feelings he knew nothing at all about. He never seemed himself at his ease, and even in the boldest things he did there was a mixture of apprehension and meanness.
He particularly despised Napoleon’s speeches to his troops, something in which he never indulged. They were “false heroics,” the “stuff of players.”
Waterloo was Wellington’s last battle. The powers that be on the Horse Guards made things as difficult as possible. His well-trained infantry from Spain were all back in England or sent to American operations as part of the senseless War of 1812. Many were killed at the battle of New Orleans. Wellington had to make do with a new army put together in haste, together with Dutch, Flemish, Walloon and German troops. (He had nothing against Germans: his long-serving orderly, Bleckermann, was a German hussar; but he had never commanded them.) He was not allowed to choose his own staff. He would never have picked Lord Uxbridge (“A rash fellow”) to command the cavalry. Napoleon moved very quickly, as usual, and after damaging Blücher’s Prussians, attacked on Wellington’s front sooner than expected: “He has humbugged me!” The duke’s concern was to calm the Brussels population—panic and the roads would be blocked with refugees, preventing more of his own troops from England joining his army. That is why he attended the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, and gave an impression of supreme coolness. (It was held in a big washhouse and was far from sumptuous.)
Though appearing cool, he was working very hard. “I never took so much trouble about any battle.” From Thursday, June 15, 1815, to the end of the day of the actual battle, June 18 (and into the nineteenth), he had only nine hours sleep, and was at work for ninety, most of the time on Copenhagen, his wonderful stallion, grandson of Eclipse, the famous Derby winner. This strong, placid mount had already carried him at the battle of Vitoria, the Pyrenees and Toulouse. The duke ate very little during the four days, mostly tea and toast, and a few cold meat sandwiches. On Waterloo day itself, in eighteen hours, he had a cup of sweet tea given him by Kinkaid of the Rifle Brigade, though he ate supper after it was all over and his dispatch written.
On the field of Waterloo, Wellington deployed 67,661 men and 156 guns, against Napoleon’s 71,947 men and 246 guns. There were about 30,000 horses in all. All this mass was in an area of three square miles. For purposes of comparison, it was eighteen times the area of the actual fighting at Agincourt. But it was still very crowded and this explains the dreadfully heavy casualties.
Wellington benefited quickly from Napoleon’s mistakes. At breakfast, eaten off silver plate, the emperor said the battle would be “facile comme manger le petit déjeuner.” He should have attacked as quickly as possible, but there had been a lot of rain and he delayed the attack several times to allow the ground to dry. It was not until 11:25 AM that the French guns opened up. During all this time fresh troops were reaching Wellington and were deployed instantly; more arrived in the course of the battle. Equally important, the hours lost increased the possibility that Blücher’s advancing Prussians would join the battle, as they did in the late afternoon. Napoleon’s other mistake was to send Grouchy with 33,000 men to head off Blücher. In fact poor map reading meant Grouchy missed Blücher entirely and played no part in the battle.
The duke (unlike Napoleon) was in the thick of the battle throughout, riding backward and forward just behind the front, and giving tactical orders every five minutes or so. At one point, to escape French cavalry, he had to jump Copenhagen into a British square. He gave orders, if possible, verbally, face-to-face with commanders—the safest way. Otherwise they were written on slips of parchment (which could be wiped clean), kept folded in the buttonhole of his waistcoat. (One of them, in pencil, can be seen at Apsley House.)
It is remarkable that Wellington was not hit at Waterloo. “The finger of providence was upon me,” as he said. But then he was always lucky. He was hurt only once, at Orthez, in 1814. A French musket ball hit his sword-belt buckle and bruised his thigh badly. At Salamanca, a bullet made a hole in his cloak and another hit his holster at Talavera. He also lost two horses at Assaye. He was often struck by a spent ball—but that was nothing. A fairly spent cannon shot was another matter: it was such a missile which struck Uxbridge, while he was talking to the duke in the closing stages of Waterloo, and cost him his leg. Napoleon was also lucky, being wounded only once in fifty battles. But he lost a lot of his generals: 8 at Eylau, 12 at Borodino, 16 at Leipzig (plus 102 wounded in these three battles).
Wellington lost a lot of his friends at Waterloo. Their deaths sickened him. He said: “There is nothing so bad as a battle won except a battle lost.” And: “It was a close thing. I was never so near being beat in my life. It would not have done had I not been there.” A month later, talking to Lady Shelley, he summed up his whole unheroic attitude to warfare. She said “his eye [was] glistening and his voice broken as he spoke of the losses,” and his words were solemn:
I hope to God I have fought my last battle. It is a bad thing always to be fighting. While I am in the thick of it I am too much occupied to feel anything. But it is wretched just after. It is quite impossible to think of glory. Both mind and feelings are exhausted. I am wretched even at the moment of victory, and I always say that next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained. Not only do you lose those dear friends with whom you have been living, but you are forced to leave the wounded behind you. To be sure one tries to do the best for them, but how little that is! At such moments every feeling in your breast is deadened. I am now just beginning to regain my natural spirits, but I never wish for any more fighting.
Wellington was forty-six at Waterloo and had thirty-seven years to live, during which he was the most famous man in Europe. He was obliged to answer endless questions about his campaign and battles but never introduced such subjects. He thought descriptions of battles futile and sure to be misleading: “A battle is like a ball. Everybody sees something. Nobody sees everything.” He rejected plans to build him, at public expense, a palace, on the scale of Marlborough’s Blenheim: “An absurd idea.” Stratfieldsay, a modest and unpretentious country house, was bought instead. He acquired Apsley House, which until recently rejoiced in the address Number One, London. This has a fine room where the annual Waterloo dinners of old comrades were held. It also displayed (and still does) his trophies. These included a number of masterpieces from the Spanish royal collection. They were looted by Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s elder brother, whom he made king of Spain. When his regime collapsed he tried to take them back to France but his coach—part of a cavalcade the duke described as “a travelling brothel”—fell into English hands after the battle of Vitoria. Wellington asked the legimate king of Spain, Ferdinand VII, where he wanted them sent. The king replied that, in view of the duke’s incomparable services to Spain, he insisted he keep them. So they are at Apsley House today, and include Velazquez’s finest painting, The Water Seller.
Another painting from this batch, Van Eyck’s so-called Arnolfini Wedding Picture, was privately looted by a British cavalry captain. It hung for many years in a private Mayfair house without attracting the slightest attention. Then in 1840 the captain sold it to the National Gallery, London, for £600. If Wellington had known at the time about the theft, he would have had the captain shot. He hesitated a long time before accepting Ferdinand’s pictures because he was terrified of being accused of receiving booty. If there was one thing he hated, it was military looting. During the Peninsular War he shot or hanged fifty-two British and twenty-eight non-British soldiers, in nearly every case for looting, compounded (usually) by murder.
Wellington spent many years in the cabinet. In 1828–1830 he was prime minister. He decided, in the winter of 1828–1829, that Catholic emancipation could no longer be safely resisted, and brought in a bill accordingly, carrying it with some difficulty. This was a characteristic piece of realism—to be repeated when he helped Peel to get rid of the Corn Laws in 1846. When the Earl of Winchelsea, a booby, said that Wellington’s emancipation of the Catholics was the prelude to reintroducing popery, the duke called him out, and a bloodless duel was fought in Battersea Park. This was his only experience of dueling, another custom he detested. The duke was not a first-class prime minister because he could not delegate. He destroyed his own government in November 1830 by making an intemperate speech, without consulting his colleagues, flatly rejecting parliamentary reform. For three weeks in 1834, when the Whig government was thrown out, and while awaiting the return of Peel from abroad, he conducted the entire government single-handedly, a performance never before or since equaled.
Wellington had a classically unhappy home life. His wife, Kitty Pakenham, who came from the same ascendancy class, “does not understand me.” He quarreled with his eldest son too. He did his best to give good advice to the foolish George IV, and got the reply: “Hold your tongue, Sir!”—the only occasion when anyone was ever deliberately rude to the duke. He also resented George IV calling him “Arthur,” and claiming, when drunk, to have led a cavalry charge at Waterloo. When the king added, “Was it not so, Arthur?” the duke answered, “As Your Majesty has so frequently observed.” He hated boasting, especially on military matters. When Wilkie painted his famous picture Chelsea Pensioners Listening to the Waterloo Dispatch, Wellington was told he was expected to buy it so it could hang in the collection at Apsley House. He reluctantly agreed, and was appalled when told it would cost him 1,200 guineas. He paid Wilkie in gold. The painter said: “Quite unnecessary, Your Grace, a cheque will be quite sufficient.” “What! And let those young clerks at Coote’s Bank know what a damned fool I am?”
Wellington’s chief pleasure was the company of clever women (like Washington). His best friend was Harriet Arbuthnot, wife of the head of Woods and Forests, a decent man known as “Gosh!” Harriet was two years older, and exactly the same height, five foot nine, as a sketch of the two some six days before her death from cholera in 1834 clearly shows. They argued on politics, not about aims but tactics, and often quarreled fiercely, then made up. He called her “La Tyranna”; she sometimes called him “The Slave.” It was a relationship not wholly unlike Dr. Johnson’s with Mrs. Piozzi. Wellington also called her “Black Cap.” The relationship was wholly asexual; General Ayala, close to the duke, called it “la liaison la plus pure au monde.” Sometimes they rowed in public: they were heard shouting at each other in the Mall. How the passersby stared! He told Lady Shelley: “I am…more a slave than ever, and La Tyranna more tyrannical.” Her death devastated him and he never quite replaced her—though he was friends with the heiress Mrs. Burdett-Coutts, who wanted to marry him after his wife died. But he declined her audacious proposal. He lived simply to the last. Ayala, who traveled back and forth to Vienna with him, said: “The two English phrases I got to hate most were ‘early start tomorrow’ and ‘cold meat.’” His favorite place was Walmer Castle, his “tied cottage” a warden of the Cinque Ports. In his simple room, still shown just as he left it, is the iron camp bed in which he always slept.
All three of these heroes were painted many times. The results are mixed. The best likeness of Nelson, according to Emma Hamilton, is a life-size waxwork, which has miraculously survived. His column in Trafalgar Square is the most famous monument in the world. North Carolina, wanting a statue of Washington for its capital in Raleigh, commissioned Canova, but he refused to do the president in anything but a toga. The original of this weird effigy was destroyed, but there is a plaster copy in the Canova Museum in Porragno. Of course Washington’s colossal head is the first in the line on Mount Rushmore. Wellington has nothing like that. But he was painted, brilliantly, by a great master, Goya. And his monument by Alfred Stevens, under an arch in the north aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral, is a superlative piece of architectural sculpture. It is little known and rarely visited.