from Lord Camden, Colonel Wesley sought leave of absence from Dublin and returned to England to his battalion which was now stationed near Southampton under orders to sail for the West Indies. He wrote to say that he intended to set out with his men; but, if he hoped to receive some opposition to this plan, he was disappointed. Lord Camden was ‘very sorry to lose him’ but quite approved of his decision to go to the West Indies, being ‘convinced that a profession once embraced should not be given up’. ‘I shall be very glad if I can make some arrangement satisfactory to you against you come back, but if a vacancy should happen in the Revenue Board I fear the Speaker’s son must have the first.’7
So, all hopes of employment in Ireland or England abandoned, Wesley prepared to sail. He was not feeling at all well. As a boy he had repeatedly suffered from minor illnesses, colds and low fever; and his recent campaigning on the Continent had exacerbated what his doctor called his ‘aguish complaint’. He was advised to take calomel and cinnamon, opium and quassia, camphorated spirit of wine and tincture of cantharides.8 Doubtless wary of these prescriptions, he consulted another doctor but this physician also seems to have been unable to effect a cure, while finding his patient a remarkable personality. ‘I have been attending a young man whose conversation is the most extraordinary I have ever listened to,’ he is said to have observed. ‘If he lives he must one day be Prime Minister.’9
The chances that he would at least live were much improved when fortune decided that he was not, after all, to go to the West Indies, the graveyard of so many British soldiers.
Twice the ships of the convoy were swept back by winter gales, on the second occasion after tossing for seven weeks in seas so heavy that one of them was sent scudding helplessly through the Strait of Gibraltar and on to the Spanish coast, while others were scattered across the Atlantic or into the Solent.
‘In person he was about 5 feet 7 inches with a long pale face, a remarkably large aquiline nose, a clear blue eye and the blackest beard I ever saw.’
COLONEL WESLEY was aboard one of the ships that were blown home. He stepped ashore in poorer health than ever in January 1796. He went to see his doctor again when he returned to Dublin to settle his affairs there before taking the 33rd on their next tour of duty, this time in the East Indies rather than the West.
There was much to do before they sailed: he had to instruct his successor in the duties of the Lieutenant-General’s aide-de-camp, to write a paper for the guidance of the man who was to take over as Member of Parliament for Trim, to give instructions to the agent who was managing the family’s estates in Meath which had not been sold with the castle, to make such arrangements as he could about the liquidation of his debts, which now stood at over £1,000. He was still busy in Dublin when the 33rd were on the point of sailing for India by way of the Cape of Good Hope. He let them go without him. The voyage would take several weeks and, if he sailed after them in a fast frigate, he would be able to catch them up before they got into the Arabian Sea.
He left Dublin for London in June and, taking rooms at 3 Savile Row, he set out for the shops to equip himself for what might prove to be a long absence in the East. There were clothes to buy and, equally important, there were books. For these he went to Faulders, the booksellers and book-binders in Bond Street, and from here and other shops he came away with a library that could surely not have been packed in its entirety in the trunk, complete with ‘Cord Etc.’, which he bought from Mr Faulder for £1 11s 6d. There were histories of warfare, sieges and military campaigns, an account of the topography of the Indian sub-continent, a copy of the Bengal Army List, books about Egypt and the East India Company, maps and German, Arabic and Persian grammars and dictionaries, as well as two volumes of Richardson’s Persian dictionary costing the extraordinarily large sum of twelve guineas. There were three volumes of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, four of the works of Lord Bolingbroke and of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, five of the theological expositions of William Paley, six of Plutarch’s lives, nine of the philosophical works of John Locke, thirteen of David Hume’s History of England, fifteen volumes by Frederick the Great and, for lighter reading, twenty-four volumes of the works of Jonathan Swift. There were books by Voltaire, Crébillon and Rousseau, Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and the memoirs of Marshal Saxe. Listed between books by Smollett and the licentious Amours du Chevalier de Fauhlas were nine volumes of Women of Pleasure. Between a history of France and Cambridge’s War in India was a medical treatise on venereal disease.1
With these and many other books safely corded in their trunks, Wesley, by now a full colonel, sailed from Portsmouth when the wind was sufficiently fresh and rejoined the 33rd at the Cape. Here he also found two young ladies, not long out of their schoolroom, on their way to India. The elder of the two, Jemima Smith, was described by a young officer who met them at this time as ‘a most incorrigible flirt, very clever, very satirical, and aiming at universal conquest. Her sister, Henrietta [aged seventeen] was more retiring, and I think more admired … with her pretty little figure and lovely neck [that was to say bosom] … She made a conquest of Colonel Arthur Wesley who had arrived at the Cape with the 33rd Regiment.’*2
Certainly in the company of these two girls, the Colonel, so studious in the frigate on her long passage down the west coast of Africa, became lively and entertaining, ‘all life and spirits’. A captain in the 12th Regiment, Maria Edgeworth’s cousin, George Elers, who had recently arrived at the Cape, provided this sketch of him:
In person he was about 5 feet 7 inches [actually more like 5 feet 8 or 9 inches] with a long pale face, a remarkably large aquiline nose, a clear blue eye and the blackest beard I ever saw … I have known him shave twice in one day, which I believe was his constant practice … He was remarkably clean in his person …
His features always reminded me of [the tragedian] John Philip Kemble, and, what is more remarkable I also observed the great likeness between him and the performer, Mr Charles Young, which he told me he had often heard remarked. He spoke at this time remarkably quickly, with a very, very slight lisp. He had very narrow jaw bones, and there was a great peculiarity in his ear, which I never observed but in one other person, the late Lord Byron – the lobe of the ear uniting to the cheek. He had a particular way, when pleased, of pursing up his mouth. I have often observed it when he has been thinking abstractedly.3
Colonel Wesley was not detained at the Cape for long: in the middle of February 1797, at the age of twenty-seven, almost eight months after leaving England, he went ashore at Calcutta after a more than commonly tedious passage across the Indian Ocean and up the Bay of Bengal in an East Indiaman, named after Princess Charlotte, King George Ill’s eldest daughter. As soon as he could he called upon the Governor-General, Sir John Shore, a schoolfellow of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan at Harrow, who had started his career as a writer in the service of the East India Company by which his father had also been employed as a supercargo. Shore was a conscientious and hard-working though unremarkable man and ‘as cold as a greyhound’s nose’; but he was astute enough to recognize in Colonel Wesley a promising young man of strong common sense who might well one day be a person of distinction.4
The Colonel, Shore added, also had about him an air of ‘boyish playfulness’; and it was this quality which struck William Hickey, the memoirist, then practising as an attorney in Calcutta and a popular and highly hospitable member of the British community there. Hickey saw him first at a St Patrick’s Day dinner in Calcutta at which the Colonel had been asked to take the chair, a duty which he performed ‘with peculiar credit to himself’.5
‘On the 20th of
