To War with Wellington Read online

  Also by Peter Snow

  Leila’s Hijack War

  Hussein, a Biography

  Battlefield Britain (with Dan Snow)

  Twentieth Century Battlefields (with Dan Snow)

  To War with Wellington

  From the Peninsula to Waterloo

  PETER SNOW

  www.johnmurray.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by John Murray (Publishers)

  An Hachette UK Company

  © Peter Snow 2010

  The right of Peter Snow to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN 978-1-84854-455-0

  Book ISBN 978-1-84854-103-0

  John Murray (Publishers)

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.johnmurray.co.uk

  To my wife, Ann, and Margaret, my sister-in-law, for their constant inspiration

  Contents

  List of Maps

  Introduction

  1. First foothold

  Mondego Bay, August 1808

  2. You must have bribed Junot

  Vimeiro, August 1808

  3. Scum of the earth

  Oporto, 1809

  4. The obstinate old Gentleman

  Talavera, 1809

  5. Damned with might and main

  Retreat, 1809

  6. Unpardonable butchery

  The Côa and Bussaco, 1810

  7. A dangerous hour for England

  Fuentes d’Oñoro, 1811

  8. Now, lads, for the breach

  Ciudad Rodrigo, 1812

  9. The town’s our own. Hurrah!

  Badajoz, 1812

  10. Marmont est perdu

  Salamanca, 1812

  11. One step forward, two steps back

  Madrid and Burgos, 1812

  12. I saw them fall like a pack of cards

  Vitoria, 1813

  13. The finger of God is upon me

  Pyrenees, 1813

  14. Extraordinary news

  Southern France, 1813–1814

  15. In the Elysian Fields

  Paris and Vienna, 1814–1815

  16. Duchess, you may give your ball

  Brussels, 1815

  17. Blücher has had a damn good hiding

  Quatre-Bras, 16 June 1815

  18. Hard pounding

  Waterloo, morning 18 June 1815

  19. Now, Maitland, now’s your time!

  Waterloo, afternoon 18 June 1815

  20. See the Conquering Hero Comes

  Aftermath

  Author’s Note

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Maps

  1. Wellington’s Peninsular War

  2. The Battle of Roliça

  3. The Battle of Vimeiro (1)

  4. The Battle of Vimeiro (2)

  5. Central Portugal

  6. The Battle of Oporto

  7. The Battle of Talavera

  8. The Battle of Bussaco

  9. The Battle of Fuentes d’Oñoro (1)

  10. The Battle of Fuentes d’Oñoro (2)

  11. The Siege of Ciudad Rodrigo

  12. The Siege of Badajoz

  13. The Battle of Salamanca

  14. The Battle of Vitoria

  15. The Siege of San Sebastián

  16. 1813–14 Campaign

  17. 15–18 June 1815

  18. The Battle of Waterloo: Morning

  19. The Battle of Waterloo: 4.00–6.00 p.m.

  20. The Battle of Waterloo: 7.30–8.00 p.m.

  Introduction

  ONE MIDWINTER DAY, in January 1786, during a gap in the seemingly interminable wars between Britain and France, a shy Irish teenager was sent off to a French school to learn to be a soldier. His father had died and his mother had almost despaired of him. ‘I don’t know what I shall do with my awkward son Arthur,’ she grumbled. His father had been an Irish earl, part of that curious Protestant minority known as the Anglo-Irish. They had tried to make something of Arthur by sending him to Eton. But that had been hopeless. The boy was lonely and idle. Just about all he could do was play the violin. He came fifty-fourth out of seventy-nine boys in the fourth form. So when he was seventeen Arthur’s exasperated mother sent him off to the French equestrian school at Angers. The only thing to do with the feckless younger son of an aristocratic family was to try and make him a soldier. France was the place you learned to be a man in those days, and Angers might just give him the skills and the fibre to survive in the army.

  The school in France did a lot more than that. The young Arthur Wesley – the family name would be changed to Wellesley by his ambitious elder brother, Richard – emerged from Angers after just one year’s study of horsemanship, fencing and the humanities with a new self-assurance. He was to build on the knowledge and skills he had gained in France to confront French armies on the battlefield and eventually to destroy the French Emperor Napoleon himself. And Arthur Wellesley would become the Duke of Wellington. This book is the story of how this once unpromising boy led one of the most successful military enterprises in British history through seven years of struggle, from its first small-scale landing in Portugal to the battlefield of Waterloo. It is the story of how this withdrawn but single-minded soldier turned a band of men he described as the ‘scum of the earth’ into one of the world’s finest armies, and how together they helped defeat Napoleon.

  The men we meet in these pages were as varied an assortment of characters as ever went to war, from brutish scoundrels to the thoughtful and humane. Wellington was a military genius, his personality a curious mix of aloof intolerance, dry wit and an occasional flash of humanity. It was astonishing how a man so arrogant, so class conscious and so insensitive could become such a national hero by the time he was forty-five. Wellington was to go on, after Waterloo, to dominate British public life for decades, as a conservative prime minister and an opponent of electoral reform. But the reason he remained a legendary figure until the day he died was the debt that Britain and Europe owed him for undermining and finally defeating Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Wellington was, above all, a lucky man. Lucky in that he escaped death so often when many of his senior colleagues and aides were killed or wounded around him. But lucky too in the great advantage the privilege of aristocracy gave him in launching his career. It was an oddity of the age that it wasn’t merit but money and connections that won promotion in the army. His brother Richard, well on the way to high office in London, was to play a vital part in Arthur’s career in the years between his return from Angers and the launch of the great adventure in Portugal.

  Arthur Wellesley came back from Angers a superb horseman, speaking fluent French and with the glint of ambition in his eye. He duly took his turn to be MP for Trim and, with Richard’s help, bought his way to the rank of lieutenant colonel by 1793. Yet when he proposed marriage to the daughter of Lord Longford, Kitty Pakenham, Longford judged him a fellow of such little promise that he made her reject him. Arthur, his pride dented, set his heart on active service. He gave away his violin and set off to join the war against revolutionary France as a commander in the Netherlands just as Napoleon Bonaparte, only thirteen weeks younger than him, became commander of the French artillery at Toulon. In the years after the Revolution of 1789, France had guillotined its aristocrats and was at war with its neighbours. It wo
uldn’t be long before, under Napoleon, it evolved into a rampant imperial power bent on dominating the whole of Europe.

  Then in 1796 Arthur’s career took a turn that was to give him a decisive boost. His regiment – the 33rd Yorkshire West Riding, later to become the Duke of Wellington’s – was posted to India. And by a lucky coincidence his brother Richard was appointed governor general of India a year later. Richard promptly named the fourth of his five brothers, Henry, his private secretary and vowed to do what he could to further the career of Arthur, who had preceded him to the subcontinent as an army colonel. In 1799 Richard (who became Marquess Wellesley at the end of that year) ordered the invasion of the southern state of Mysore on the ground that its ruler Tippoo Sultan was too close to the French. Arthur Wellesley took Tippoo’s capital Seringapatam by storm on 4 May.

  By the summer of 1803 Arthur, now a major general, was commanding the British force of 7,000 that confronted the 44,000-strong army of the Maratha states at Assaye 200 miles north-east of Bombay. He scored a masterly victory. Looking for a way to fight the Marathas on favourable ground, he spotted two villages either side of a river. Rightly guessing that the river would be fordable there, he led his army across and with his Indian troops outflanked and defeated his opponents. One of Arthur’s young lieutenants wrote: ‘The general was in the thick of the action the whole time and had a horse killed under him. No man could have shown a better example to the troops than he did. I never saw a man so cool and collected as he was.’

  By mid-December Arthur had defeated the Marathas again at Argaum. He returned from India in 1805 an accomplished field commander. He had discovered the vital importance of intelligence in establishing the whereabouts and strength of his enemy. He had learned how to use the terrain and understood the importance of keeping his men supplied however unforgiving the countryside. He had seen the value of leading by example and making brisk decisions. He came home determined to fight Napoleon, by now Emperor of France, master of most of Europe and a major threat to Britain. The struggle between the British and French empires for world hegemony was reaching its height. Arthur trusted that his record would propel him to high command. But in the eyes of his military rivals he was still – as Napoleon put it later – only a ‘sepoy general’. The man who had made his name commanding Indian forces so skilfully still had to prove he could lead a substantial British force in the war against the French Empire in Europe.

  Arthur Wellesley also came home with a reputation as a bit of a ladies’ man. He had had one particularly close relationship with the wife of one of his captains. Still smarting at the way his proposal of marriage had been rejected ten years before, he proposed to Kitty again. This time his increased stature induced Lord Longford to change his mind, and Kitty accepted. They married in April 1806. It was a sad mistake on both sides. As time went on, she became deeply introverted and self-absorbed, quite unable to play the wife to someone as renowned and sexually eligible as Arthur. Even before he married her, he let slip the telling aside that he now found that she had grown ugly, and he later told a great friend that that he had been ‘a damned fool’ to marry someone like Kitty. ‘I was not the least in love with her.’

  Wellesley saw some active service in Germany and Denmark in the next two years. But the opportunity that was to change his life – and the course of history – came in 1808. He was sent with a modest force to open a new front against Napoleon on the west coast of Portugal. The men he brought with him were not only about to take the first firm step on Britain’s road to Waterloo. They were also to launch a literary revolution. This was the first campaign in history to give rise to a rich tide of eyewitness accounts by those who fought it. In the post-war years a generation of new readers, with an appetite for stories about what they called the Great War, proved an attractive market for memoirs about the conflict. Growing literacy in early Victorian Britain inspired soldiers, from generals down to privates, to record their accounts of what had happened. Wellington himself wrote copious letters and despatches.

  Everything from the fighting itself to the camaraderie and skulduggery of camp life and the mischief the men got up to in the local villages is revealed in these first-hand accounts by those who were there. Some wrote journals at the time, when their memories were fresh – men like George Simmons, who kept three notebooks in his hat. Others, like Rifleman Benjamin Harris, recounted their stories months or even years afterwards. Many exaggerate British prowess and downplay that of the French. But all bring the horror, the suffering, the hopes and the fears of the soldiers alive in strikingly modern language. The men who landed in the Iberian Peninsula with Wellesley were about to make a contribution to the human story of warfare in a detail and a variety that the world had never seen before.

  Wellington’s Peninsular War

  1

  First foothold

  Mondego Bay, August 1808

  IT TOOK THE best part of two weeks to unload the ships. The weather wasn’t the problem. It was fine – hot and sticky by day, crisp and clear at night. The snag was the swell piling in across 3,000 miles of open Atlantic on to Portugal’s unprotected coast. The lumpy transport vessels rolled so much on anchor that the yards at times almost touched the water. Captain Jonathan Leach, a young rifleman who had had to wait six days for the order to disembark, complained that the motion had ‘caused some awful breakages amongst our wine glasses’.

  It was 1 August 1808, the height of summer. George Landmann, an ambitious young engineer, was on the deck of his ship as she slipped into Mondego Bay to join the other seventy British transports and warships bobbing about. Suddenly the boredom of walking around the deck was ‘exchanged for a scene of the utmost activity’. Landmann’s cabin floor was covered in trunks, hats, boots, blankets, greatcoats, saddles and bridles. People were shouting, ‘What do you think I ought to take with me?’ or ‘Do you think we shall be many days away from the ship?’ Officers told their servants to assemble their kit. The servants were ‘tumbling down the companionway’ and knocking each other over, upon which the most ‘expressive epithets were exchanged’. Landmann decided to take as little as possible, and left his greatcoat behind. He was to regret it. He was soon back on deck using his spyglass to look for vessels to take people ashore. The bay was buzzing with activity as boats braved the surf to get men, guns and horses on to the beach. His ship was a mile and a half offshore; most of the others were further in and he could see a busy ferry service going on.

  Charles Leslie and his regiment – the 29th of Foot – transferred into flat-bottomed boats soon after midday. But reaching the beach in the breaking rollers was a dangerous operation. ‘Several boats were upset and one containing a part of our grenadiers lost arms and everything and the men narrowly escaped with their lives.’ James Hale, from Gloucester, had earned himself a bounty of ten guineas twelve months earlier by signing up for seven years as an ordinary private. He and his 9th Regiment of Foot braved the surf on 2 August and they landed in style. The Portuguese, who by now were persuaded that the British troops had come not to invade their country but to rescue it from the French, decided to give them a dry landing. They ‘came running into the water, above their knees, to carry us out of the boats … and young women came flocking around about us with their aprons full of fruit’. Hale and his comrades all landed without getting their feet wet, but ‘one boat load … was upset by the violence of the heavy swell, in crossing the bar at the mouth of the River Mondego and unfortunately several soldiers and sailors were drowned’. It wasn’t unusual in those days for soldiers to be unable to swim.

  The landing at Mondego Bay under Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Wellesley was Britain’s first tentative move in what would develop into a grand design to undermine Napoleon. It was the beginning of seven exhausting years of fighting on land that would bring out the best and the worst in a band of young British men. It would have its moments of gallantry and glory but mostly it was downright savage. Many of those who scrambled ashore that August hadn’t y
et reached their late teens: few were more than thirty. Some were inspired by patriotism, the chance to join the mighty struggle to throw Napoleon out of Europe. Most were there for the adventure and the plunder and the chance to kill a few Frenchmen. Very few would survive the coming battles unscathed: most would die or suffer wounds that would leave them limbless or scarred for life. And disease, heat, cold and thirst would take an even greater toll than battle.

  The small force of 9,000 men which landed with Wellesley was largely untried. Napoleon’s massive army had subdued most of Europe with victories as spectacular as Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland over the Austrians, Prussians and Russians. Compared to the French, the British soldiers piling on to the beach were novices. Few had fought in any major land campaign: if they had, they had been largely unsuccessful. Britain’s army had been neglected since the glorious days of Plassey and Quebec half a century earlier. The money had been spent on the Royal Navy, making Britain the strongest sea-power in the world. The army had played only a small part in the fight with Napoleon so far. But Wellesley’s force of 9,000 men would grow to 90,000 by the end of 1813 and play a decisive role in redrawing the map of Europe. It would plant a host of unforgettable names – of people as well as battles – in the annals of military history. And their leader, Arthur Wellesley, the reluctant choice of some of his masters in London in August 1808, would by 1815 become the world’s most admired soldier.

  Wellesley was watching his troops struggling ashore. He too cursed the swell, but if he was to disembark within reach of his objective, Lisbon, which was occupied by the French, the landing had to be on Portugal’s ‘Iron Coast’, as he called it. There was simply no shelter for a hundred miles north of the Portuguese capital. He was standing on the deck of the fleet’s flagship, HMS Donegal. By an irony she had been captured from the French during their unsuccessful attempt to invade Wellesley’s native Ireland only a decade earlier.