Wellington by Richard Holmes

Author:Richard Holmes [Holmes, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2003-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

FIVE

TWO RESTORATIONS AND A BATTLE

WELLINGTON WENT to the theatre in Toulouse on the night of 12 April 1814 with the white cockade of the Bourbons on his cocked hat. The play was ‘Richard Coeur de Lion’, but the audience’s mind was elsewhere, for ‘a person in black, attended by many candles, having a paper in his hand’ made his way into a nearby box and read out the terms of the new constitution. Europe had been at war for most of Wellington’s adult life. Looking back at the period from our vantage point nearly two centuries on, with two dreadful wars within living memory, it is easy to forget the destruction caused by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Alan Schom lays much of the blame at Napoleon’s door, declaring that ‘The memory of Genghis Khan paled in comparison’, and estimating war deaths at three million.1 This is probably too low a figure, for France alone had lost 860,000 soldiers killed, half of them below the age of 28.2 Most British contemporaries welcomed the peace and were determined that it should be preserved. But quite how this should be accomplished, and how domestic politics should reflect the new change in emphasis, were different matters altogether.

On 21 April Wellington was visited by Castlereagh’s half-brother, Sir Charles Stewart, who offered him the appointment of British ambassador in Paris. Because Wellington’s brothers had fallen out with Lord Liverpool, he could not join the government, and he accepted the Paris embassy with alacrity. Stewart also told him that he was to be made a duke. The elevation was gazetted on 3 May, and on the 9th, he wrote to acknowledge Liverpool’s kindness and his indebtedness to the Prince Regent. A month later he told Henry almost as an afterthought: ‘I believe I forgot to tell you I was made a Duke.’3 On the journey to Paris he deferred to the Duc d’Angoulême, and General Clausel, calling on his former adversary, was surprised to find that the field marshal opened his own door: there was not an aide-de-camp in sight. He entered Paris on 4 May, riding a white horse but wearing plain clothes – blue frock-coat and top-hat – for he came as an ambassador, not a conqueror. ‘I felt for my own part,’ recalled the radical John Cam Hobhouse, ‘an insatiable desire to see him, and ran many chances of being kicked and trampled down to get near our great man.’4 The Comtesse de Boigne saw him enter a ballroom ‘with his two nieces [daughters of his brother William] hanging on his arm. There were no eyes for anyone else.’5

He was not in Paris for long, for Castlereagh asked him to visit Madrid, ‘in order to try whether I cannot prevail upon all parties to be more moderate, and to adopt a constitution more likely to be practicable …’6 Wellington submitted a long memorandum to the restored King Ferdinand, and gave practical advice on the reconstitution of the Spanish army. He was not optimistic

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