repeating orders that the first man caught in the act of plundering should be hanged on the spot.13 But, as he related years later, he was ‘famously taken in on one occasion’:
One day just as we were sitting down to dinner three men were brought to the door of the tent by the prévôt. The case against them was clear, and I had nothing for it but to desire that they should be led away, and hanged in some place where they might be seen by the whole column in its march next day. I had a good many guests with me on that occasion, and among the rest, I think, Lord Nugent. They seemed dreadfully shocked, and could not eat their dinner. I didn’t like it much myself, but, as I told them, I had no time to indulge my feelings, I must do my duty. Well, the dinner went off rather gravely, and next morning, sure enough, three men in uniform were seen hanging from the branches of a tree close to the high road. It was a terrible example, and produced the desired effect … But you may guess my astonishment, when some months afterwards I learned that one of my staff took counsel with Dr Hume, and as three men had just died in hospital, they hung them up, and let the three culprits return to their regiments.14
‘Weren’t you very angry?’ someone asked him. ‘Well, I suppose I was at first,’ he replied. ‘But as I had no wish to take the poor fellows’ lives, and only wanted the example, and as the example had the desired effect, my anger soon died out, and I confess to you that I am very glad now that the three lives were spared.’15
On occasions, however, he made sure that plunderers’ lives were not spared. One of his aides-de-camp recorded an instance of this when two soldiers were found looting a shop and assaulting a woman who was attempting to protect her property. ‘Having satisfied himself as to the guilt of the soldiers, Wellington turned round to the Provost-Marshal, and in that brief expression which ever characterized him, said, “In ten minutes report to me that these two men have been executed”.’ When the French under Junot entered the town, the two bodies were still hanging there. An English surgeon, who had remained behind under a flag of truce to attend to the wounded, was questioned as to the offence for which the soldiers had suffered. ‘“Plundering and violence towards an inhabitant,” responded the surgeon. “Ma foil” exclaimed Junot, shrugging his shoulders, “la discipline anglaise est bien sévère.”’16
It did not altogether surprise Sir Arthur that the soldiers were inveterate plunderers since the army’s commissaries were ‘incompetent to a man’; and to add to his difficulties the Treasury were being more than commonly dilatory in sending him the currency he so urgently needed. He would advance into Spain immediately, he wrote, but he could not ‘venture to stir without money’.17
‘We are terribly distressed for money,’ he wrote on another occasion, voicing a complaint he was often to make in the future. There were other grumbles, too; and he expressed and continued to express them with petulant irritability, complaining that the Cabinet did not ‘repose confidence’ in him, and that he was unable to obtain any ‘specific instructions from the Minister of War’,18 whereas he had earlier expressed satisfaction in being given a free rein, a ‘general object’ which allowed him to consider himself ‘authorized to pursue any other object … likely to conduce to the benefit of the Spanish and Portuguese nations’.19
The Government were, in fact, giving him their full support: George Canning, the Foreign Minister, wrote of Wellesley’s ‘frankness – honesty – quickness – and military Ability’ being ‘not only beyond those of any other military Commander that could be chosen but perhaps possessed by him alone, of all our Commanders, in a degree that qualifies him for great undertakings’.20 Yet Sir Arthur professed unreasonably to ‘suspect that the Ministers in England [were] very indifferent to our operations in this country’. He wrote to complain of their supposed attitude in an angry letter to his brother William who replied, ‘I am perfectly satisfied that you are mistaken in supposing that you do not possess the confidence of ministers. If there is anything like truth in man, there never was more implicit confidence felt in any General officer than is felt by [the First Lord of the Treasury and the Secretary for War] and I firmly believe by all the other members of the Cabinet in you.’21
Sir Arthur was not to be mollified. He continued to suspect strongly that some members at least of the Cabinet were blaming him for allowing Soult to escape into Spain. It was most unreasonable that they should do so, he thought: ‘From the force I had & the force opposed to me what right had they to expect that I should do so much?’ he asked William. After all, he never asked the Government for more than he thought they could reasonably allow him, on one characteristic occasion concluding a request for craft for river crossings with the assurance that he would expect them only if they were not needed elsewhere. Surely he had a right to be rewarded for such moderation.22
He could derive some comfort at least from the unhappy state of the French marshals and generals who were constantly at loggerheads, each going his own way, despite the occasional efforts of King Joseph to impose some common plan and the directives that successively arrived from Napoleon’s camps in Central Europe and from Vienna’s Schönbrunn where the Emperor had installed himself, having entered the city on 12 May after driving the Austrians out of Ratisbon.
Faced by a choice of operations against these French generals, Wellesley decided to move against Marshal Victor, who had given a drubbing to Cuesta’s army at Medellin on the south bank of the Guadiana at the end of March. Indeed, Sir Arthur had already told Castlereagh, ‘I should prefer an attack on Victor, in concert with Cuesta, if Soult were not in possession of a fertile province of this Kingdom, and the favourite town of Oporto.’ Now that Soult had been deprived of Oporto, the attack on Victor in New Castile could begin.
So, on 27 June 1809, Wellesley left Abrantes on the Tagus north-east of Lisbon with some 20,000 men, and having crossed the Spanish frontier on 4 July, he was riding a fortnight later into Oropesa where he joined forces with Cuesta’s army of more than 30,000 men. The old hidalgo, who had broken several bones when his retreating cavalry had ridden over him in one of his various defeats, was lifted from his mule-drawn coach and placed upon a pile of cushions from which he conversed with the British General by means of an English-speaking officer on his staff named O’Donoju.
Sir Arthur proposed that they jointly attack the French the next morning. Marshal Victor had already withdrawn his troops some miles towards Madrid; and it was essential that an attack be launched before they combined forces with King Joseph’s army in and around the capital. Cuesta could not be persuaded to agree. Day by day, he was ‘more and more impracticable’, Wellesley said; it was ‘impossible to do business with him, and very uncertain that any operation’ would succeed in which he had ‘any concern’.23
Eventually, however, he was persuaded to advance; but by then Victor had made a further retreat, and the opportunity to attack him before he joined forces with the King was lost. So Wellesley declined to go with Cuesta. He was bound ‘to get in a scrape’, Wellesley said; any movement by the British army to assist him was ‘quite out of the question’. In any case he had heard that Cuesta’s officers were ‘all dissatisfied with him’ and that there was a movement afoot to have him dismissed from the command.24
Denied the help of his allies the headstrong, gallant and obtuse old man took his men unsupported against the French until, near Toledo, they came upon almost the entire French army in New Castile; and, startled by this unfortunate and unexpected encounter, he brought them scurrying back again towards the Alberche river, furiously pursued by Imperial cavalry.
Deeply concerned as to what might happen to the Spaniards should they be brought to battle with their backs to the Alberche, Wellesley went in search of their commander to ask him to move further back to a stronger position at Talavera. He found him in the middle of the afternoon fast asleep. Stubborn as ever, he declined to retreat any further; Wellesley begged him to do so; he remained adamant. Wellesley, so Cuesta said, went so far as to kneel down in
