TABLE TALK

The Duke and the Emperor

DENIS BROGAN

Some time ago I complained in this journal that the Oxford University Press had allowed its World's Classics edition of Lord

Stanhope's Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington, 1831-1851 to go out of print. I was informed by two Cambridge booksellers that it had been out of print for eight years. I was annoyed because I thought that some friend had borrowed or stolen my World's Classics edition of the Conversations, and I wanted them for various reasons, one being that they make extremely good reading. Fortunately, in the course of a general clearance, my copy (the third or fourth I have owned) has come to the surface and I have been re-reading it with my usual pleasure and profit. I didn't bother re-reading Philip Guedalla's intro- duction since I think his The Duke is a remarkably bad book. But many things I had forgotten came back into my mind, and one or two anecdotes which I have been accustomed to recount appeared in a different and no doubt sounder form.

The picture painted by the young Lord Mahon is not really that of an Iron Duke. It is, if you like, the picture of a steel Duke, and a very flexible steel Duke, who was capable of great objectivity, who loved playing with children, and was astonishingly generous and unvindictive in his judgments of great public figures and, above all, in his judgment of the greatest of the public figures against whom he is naturally set, Napoleon. We can be sure that young Lord Mahon, later Lord Stanhope, reported faith- fully what he heard the great Duke say, but I have a strong feeling that Lord Stanhope, no doubt a most worthy man and in a minor way a serious historian, must have missed a good deal of the irony which I suspect the Duke was fond of using.

Guedalla talks of him as 'a great English- man', and it is one thing to assert that, in the modern sense, he was not an Irishman, but quite anther to assert that he was an Englishman. He was a devoted member of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy. He was of English origin, as are many Irish people, including some of the most passionate Irish nationalists. But you are not born, brought up, and involved in the politics of Ireland without important effects. Eton could hardly have offset this. He was at Eton for only a short time, and he was very far indeed from being a devoted Etonian. No one was less likely to have said that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, for he firmly refused to subscribe to a fund for rehabilitating some part of the school when he was the most famous of the subjects of Queen Victoria.

Of course, the most important and the most interesting part of the Conversations,

for which Lord Mahon's testimony is totally acceptable, is his discussion of his great rival. Here the Duke was a model of candour. Misled by Waterloo into writing off the Emperor as a mere 'pounder', he did not estimate Napoleon at his true worth as a soldier. It was only when he began to study the campaign of 1814, 'the Campaign of France', that Wellington understood how great was the soldier that he had defeated. For, as he said, Napoleon defeated Austrian, Russian, and Prussian armies separately with the same French army, and that army only a shadow of what it had been before Borodino and before Leipzig.

One of Wellington's great practical qualities was his understanding of the politics of war. Thus, he knew how much he lost by the political incoherence of Spain and, to some extent, of Portugal. Probably he did not estimate highly enough the aid he got from the guerrilla warfare of the Spaniards. But he learned a lesson, which might have been re-learned on the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, that foreigners should keep out of Spanish civil wars, and of Portuguese civil wars, if they could possibly manage it. Thus, he was not, as a Cabinet minister under George IV and William IV, in favour of any of the British interventions in the Peninsula, public or private, for Don Carlos or for Isabella II (who later earned the title of 'Isabella the Too Catholic'). He thought it was lamentable that Ferdinand VII, by altering the Salic Law, should have left the legacy of civil war to his coun- try; but perhaps the Spaniards need a civil war in every generation. At any rate, they have had one in every generation since 1808.

One reason why he misjudged Napoleon's conduct of the campaign of Waterloo was that he thought that if the Emperor had not taken the offensive, but had waited for the Allied armies to move, he could have repeated, with greater resources, the miraculous feats of the campaign of 1814. But this was to ignore the political realities which were in the Emperor's mind and in the minds of all thinking Frenchmen. The Emperor had fallen once. He would very likely fall again. It was not only that Napoleon was by temperament a gambler, but that he felt, I think rightly, that he had to be a gambler in this situation. As was said of the French army in 1815, its officers advanced to battle 'without fear and with- out hope'.

But Wellington had a very high opinion of the French army of 1815, as he had had

of the French army since he first encountered it in 1807 in Portugal. When he was asked whether any serious propor- tion of the French army, so recently the army of the Most Christian King Louis XVIII, might change sides, he said, `No, nobody up to and including colonels. A few Marshals may desert but they don't matter'. (This is not told by Mahon.) But the French army at Waterloo fought as well as it had always fought. And the Duke explained the defeat of the French at Constantine in the Algerian War simply as a falling off in the efficiency of the army: `I am convinced, from everything I hear, that their troops are not half what they were in my time. The reason is plain: the army was then the only profession; it was the sole way to Napoleon's favour. They were most excellent troops. I never on any occasion knew them behave otherwise than well. Their officers too were as good as possible. During the many years I was opposite to them, I never knew one engage in treacherous correspondence with us or

sell us information. The only case that could at all come under that class was a com-

missary, who gave us information, and was at last obliged to cut and run, and come and live at my headquarters.' , Yet despite his victory, Wellington was no boaster. He controlled the illiterate passions of Blucher, of whom he gives a rather comic account, and even defends the unfortunate Dupont who, for the first time in the war of the Empire; surrendered a French army to a foreign enemy, and to a Spanish enemy at that. The Duke's explana- tion was simple. The French at that time did not know how worthless the Spanish army was. A year or two later they would simply have walked through the Spaniards, telling the coquins to clear off. There is. in. fact, in the Duke's attitude to the French army a degree of professionalism which I think is also visible in Napier's great History of the Peninsular War. Both the British and the French armies respected each other. The rank-and-file often broke discipline to exchange tobacco for drinks, but scorned all the allies—Portuguese, Spanish, Polish. Italian, German and the rest.

Wellington thought his most formidable enemy was Mass6na although he greatly admired Soult's ability in organising a campaign and a battle, but the time came when, as the Americans put it, 'the battle was the pay-off'. Then Soult's nerve broke. This is curiously like the judgment of old General Winfield Scott on the Northern generals in the Civil War. Scott, who had remained loyal to the Union although a Virginian, really admired only one of them. the young Philip Sheridan. He alone had `finish', and it is possible that General Scott had General Sherman in mind who was in many ways rather like Soult.

There is a story here of which there is, I think, a superior version elsewhere, perhaps in Croker or Greville. A foolish Duchess asked Wellington who he thought the greater general, Marlborough or Bonaparte? The Duke is reputed to have answered, No one admires the Duke of Marlborough more than I do, Duchess. But after all he never had to face a French army commanded by Bonaparte'. This I have always thought is the most magnificent example of patting one's own back and is perhaps a result of the Hibernian breeding of Arthur Wellesley, ne Wesley.