After a few months his mother went home, having talked to him about his future career. His eldest brother, after succeeding his father as Earl of Mornington, had made a name for himself in the Irish House of Lords and been elected to the English House of Commons as Member for Beeralston in Devonshire. His second brother, William, having served for a time in the Navy, had assumed the additional surname of Pole, on becoming heir to the estates of his cousin William Pole of Ballyfin, Queen’s County, and had been elected Member for Trim in the Irish Parliament. Gerald Valerian, who had gone to Eton with Arthur, was destined for the Church and, in due course, for a prebendal stall at Durham. Henry, the youngest of the brothers, was still at Eton and had thoughts of joining the Army. Their mother, a woman now forty-two years old, rather severe in manner, ready to feel pride in her sons’ achievements but incapable of demonstrating much affection for them, considered that Arthur, too, might do worse than become a soldier. Indeed, in her opinion, her ‘ugly boy Arthur’ was ‘food for powder and nothing more’.*10 He himself was as yet undecided about his future; but he had no objections to going to Angers in western France to enrol in the celebrated Academy there and undergo a training, as much designed for men of fashion as for future officers, which would include fencing, riding and dancing lessons as well as some instruction in French grammar, mathematics and the science of military fortifications.
It proved to be a not too demanding course. Monsieur Wesley was quite regular in his attendance at the lessons of the dancing and fencing masters and the riding instruction given by the proprietor of the Academy, M. de Pignerolle, whose great-great-grandfather had presided over it in the days of King Louis XIV. Yet the seventeen-year-old Wesley found time to take his dog, a white terrier called Vick†, for walks around the town’s thirteenth-century moated castle, to play cards with M. de Pignerolle’s English and Irish students, known to the French as the groupe des lords, to occupy idle hours by dropping coins from upstairs windows on to the heads of unwary citizens in the streets below, to sit at café tables, in the Academy’s smart uniform of scarlet coat with blue facings and yellow buttons, watching the passing scene, and to accept the invitations which were readily offered to the more presentable of their number by the local noblesse. They were entertained in nearby chateaux by the duc de Brissac, the duc de Praslin and the duchesse de Sabran; and Wesley afterwards related how he met not only the Abbé Siéyès, who was soon to play so prominent a part in the revolutionary deliberations of the Estates General at Versailles, but also François René Chateaubriand, who, having decided he had no vocation for the priesthood, was then a cavalry officer a few months older than himself.11
By the time he returned home in 1786, fluent now in French, and having impressed M. de Pignerolle as ’an Irish lad of great promise’,12 Wesley decided that he would take his mother’s advice and allow his brother Richard to use his influence, as a junior member of William Pitt’s administration, to obtain a commission for him in the Army.
‘Those who think lightly of that lad are unwise in their generation.’
‘HE IS HERE at this moment, and perfectly idle,’ Lord Mornington wrote on his brother’s behalf. It was, he added, a ‘matter of indifference’ to him what commission his brother got, provided he got it soon and it was not in the artillery which would not suit his rank or intellect.1 Early in March 1787, a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday, the reply came: Arthur Wesley could be offered a commission as ensign in the 73rd (Highland) Regiment of Foot.
His mother was delighted. She thought him much improved upon his return from Angers, she told two friends of hers, Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, who were living together on terms of romantic friendship, totally isolated from society in a cottage at Llangollen in North Wales. These ladies, described by Prince Pückler-Muskau as ‘certainly the most celebrated virgins in Europe’, had already met Arthur Wesley. He had been taken to see them by his grandmother, Lady Dungannon, who lived nearby, while still an Eton schoolboy, and he had been awkward in their company, disturbed by their semi-masculine attire and Lady Eleanor’s top hat. But he was not awkward now, his mother assured them. ‘He really is a charming young man,’ she said. ‘Never did I see such a change for the better in any body.’2
She used her influence with the Marquess of Buckingham, the Duke of Portland’s successor as Lord-Lieutenant in Dublin, to have him appointed to his lordship’s staff as aide-de-camp; and she recorded with satisfaction his promotion to Lieutenant in the 76th (Hindoostan) Regiment of Foot, and then, since this regiment was returning to India, his transfer to the 41st.
He called upon the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’ on his way to take up his duties in Ireland; and they agreed with his mother that the eighteen-year-old boy was now greatly improved and had much to recommend him. He was ‘a charming young man’, Lady Eleanor decided, ‘handsome … and elegant’.3
Not everyone in Dublin concurred with her. One young lady was thankful to be able to escape from his company; another, older woman, Lady Aldborough, having taken him to a picnic in her carriage, declined to have him with her on the return journey because ‘he was so dull’; yet another refused to attend a party if that ‘mischievous boy’ was to be of the company: he had such an irritating habit of flicking up the lace from shirt collars. To the Napier family he gave the impression of being ‘a shallow, saucy stripling’. It had to be conceded, though, that the time spent in dancing classes in Angers had not been wasted, that he rode well even if his seat was a trifle ungainly, and that, while on occasions rather stiff, his manner, when not in one of his prankish moods, was pleasant enough, his conversation interesting, though small talk was never his forte.4
It was quite clear that he enjoyed the company of women and, when at ease with them, was ‘good humoured’ in their company. He also enjoyed the excitement of gambling. Indeed, it was said of him that, like the denizens of White’s club in St James’s, he would bet on anything. On one occasion, for example, he won 150 guineas by getting from Cornelscourt outside Dublin to Leeson Street, a distance of six miles, in under an hour. But he lost as often as he won; and sank ever deeper into debt. He seems not to have kept a mistress as his brother, Richard, did at great expense, having chosen to live with an attractive Frenchwoman of extravagant tastes and philoprogenitive inclinations whom he later married after she had given birth to five children;5 but Arthur does appear to have frequented a brothel, once evidently being fined for an assault upon a fellow customer of the establishment, a Frenchman whose stick he seized and beat him with.6
Yet Arthur Wesley had his serious and ambitious side. He took trouble to exercise his talent with the violin and to improve the quality of his playing. He read a great deal: he was once discovered studying Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The Hon. George Napier who had served on Sir Henry Clinton’s staff in America and was then a captain in the 100th Foot, commented, Those who think lightly of that lad are unwise in their generation: he has in him the makings of a great general.’7
He was already beginning to make a name for himself, as the ambitious Richard had done so quickly. Arthur contrived to get elected at the age of nineteen to the Irish House of Commons for the family seat of Trim, formerly held by his brother William, having first become a Freemason and having publicly declared his opposition to the Corporation of Trim’s decision to confer the freedom of the place upon Henry Grattan, the Irish patriot whose views on Roman Catholic emancipation were not conducive to the peace of mind of Lord Buckingham; and, although he did not speak in the House of Commons for two years, when he did so his maiden speech was quite well received. So were his subsequent interventions, even if, in the opinion of Jonah
