were granted without purchase than ought to have been the case, and an applicant’s ability to bring influence to bear was crucial. Control of a family parliamentary seat, support for the ministry in Commons or Lords, past favours or future promises all helped secure an epaulette. Sometimes a young man could make his way by courage alone. Gentleman volunteers attached themselves to a regiment, messing with its officers but serving as private soldiers, hoping to distinguish themselves and gain a free commission.
Promotion beyond lieutenant colonel was by seniority within the army as a whole. An officer who made lieutenant colonel was bound to die a general if he lived long enough, but there was no guarantee that he would be employed as a general even if he gained the rank. There were always more generals than there were jobs, and officers steadily notched their way up from major general to lieutenant general and so to general, even if they never actually served in any of these ranks. Promotion for a man with neither contacts nor particular talent was a mixed blessing: he might find himself a major general, living at home on his half-pay as lieutenant colonel, waiting for a call which never came.
Arthur Wesley had his own call to arms in 1786, when he was sent to the Royal Academy of Equitation in the French town of Angers. The school’s register describes him as ‘Mr Wesley, gentilhomme Irlandais, fils de Mylaidi Mornington.’ With his friends Mr Walsh and Mr Wingfield, sons of Lords Walsh and Powerscourt, the ‘groupe des lords’, Wesley was entertained by local noble families, and made a good impression on M. de Pignerolle, the academy’s director, who described him as ‘an Irish lad of great promise’. Yet he was still noticeably frail and was often not well enough to ride, but spent happy hours on the sofa, playing with his terrier Vick. He was never really fond of dogs, but made an exception for terriers. When in India he had a white terrier called Jack which, badly frightened when a salute was fired, made its own way over a hundred miles home.
Angers taught him three things. He became a good horseman, albeit, despite the Academy’s motto of ‘Grace and Valour’, more practical than he was elegant. His French was in much the same style, because although his vocabulary and grammar were good enough, he tended to take the language by frontal assault: somebody later remarked that he spoke French as he fought them, bravement. His French stood him in good stead in a Europe where French was the language of diplomacy and the arts, and his comparative fluency eluded all too many of his countrymen. In 1814 his senior aide-de-camp, Colin Campbell, was disputing possession of an umbrella with the mayor of Bordeaux after a civic reception. Campbell tugged, bowed, and declared ‘c’est moine’.15 Lastly, in these formative years, Wesley was influenced by gentlemen like M. de Pignerolle; old-style royalists who owed proud allegiance to a notion of absolute monarchy whose days were already numbered. Elizabeth Longford recounts a telling anecdote. In 1840, at a dinner in Apsley House, his London home, the duke gazed at portraits of Louis XVIII and Charles X in all their finery, and said to Lord Mahon: ‘How much better, after all, these two look with their fleurs de lys and Saint-Esprits, than the two corporals behind or the fancy dress in between.’ The corporals were Tsar Alexander I of Russia and King Frederick William III of Prussia in uniform, and the fancy dress was George IV in full Highland fig.16
When Wesley returned to England in late 1786 his mother was astonished at the improvement in ‘my ugly boy Arthur’. But he had to be found a job, and the family was still short of money. His brother Mornington immediately wrote to the Duke of Rutland, lord-lieutenant of Ireland.
Let me remind you of a younger brother of mine, whom you were so kind as to take into your consideration for a commission in the army. He is here at this moment, and perfectly idle. It is a matter of indifference to me what commission he gets, provided he gets it soon.17
Mornington was already a rising man, with a seat in the Westminster parliament and brother William sitting for the family seat of Trim in the Irish Commons: it was in Rutland’s interest to indulge him. A commission in the cavalry or foot guards might have been more than the market would bear, as Mornington must have known. But a junior regiment in India was another matter altogether, and on 7 March 1787, shortly before his eighteenth birthday, Arthur Wesley was gazetted ensign in the 73rd Highland Regiment of Foot. Mornington continued to pluck the harp-strings of patronage: in October that year he induced the new lord-lieutenant, Lord Buckingham, to appoint Arthur one of his aides-de-camp on ten shillings a day (almost twice his daily pay as an ensign), and on Christmas day 1787, he became a lieutenant in the 76th Regiment. An attempt by the secretary at war to economise by putting all aides-de-camp on half-pay caused some fluttering, but the scheme was soon dropped. Arthur now transferred to the 41st Regiment, as the 76th had been designated for service in the unhealthy East Indies. He set off for Ireland in January 1788, and on his way visited those ‘inseparable friends’, the Ladies of Llangollen, who had been told by his excited mother that:
There are so many little things to settle for Arthur who is just got into the army and is to go to Ireland in the capacity of Aid De Camp to Lord Buckingham, and must be set out a little for that, in short I must do everything for him and when you see him you will think him worthy of it, as he really is a very charming young man, never did I see such a change for the better in anybody. He is wonderfully lucky, in six months he has got two steps in the army and appointed Aid De Camp to Lord Buckingham which is ten shillings a day.18
Lady Dungannon accompanied him to see the ladies, one of whom reported on him as: ‘A charming young man. Handsome, fashioned tall, and elegant.’
What charmed rural Wales did not appear to such advantage in more cosmopolitan Dublin, and Lady Buckingham called Arthur and his fellow aides, ‘the awkward squad’. Arthur ordered supper for the vicereine and her ladies, picked up flowers knocked over by a bearish nobleman, was dubbed ‘a mischievous boy’ by an irritated picnic guest, and was abandoned by a beauty at a ball when his small-talk ran dry. He had gambled at Angers, and bet more deeply in Dublin, winning 150 guineas, close to a year’s pay, from ‘Buck’ Whaley by walking from Cornelscourt to Leeson Street in under an hour. He lodged on Lower Ormond Quay, and his landlord, a boot-maker, lent him money when some of his other bets did not turn out as well. In later life he told George Gleig that debt: ‘Makes a slave of a man. I have often known what it was to be in want of money, but I never got helplessly into debt.’19 Gleig deferentially assumed that his hero did not get into debt at all, but it is truer to say that in borrowing, as in war, he never over-extended himself completely (though there were tense moments), and an aide-de-camp’s credit was good in the bright Dublin summer of 1789. Yet news of the French Revolution cast a shadow over the gaiety. ‘A’n’t you sorry for poor dear France,’ wrote his sister Anne, now expediently married to a peer’s son. ‘I shall never see Paris again.’20
Wesley was still not firmly set on his career. Although he spoke of trying to take his new profession seriously, much later in life he rebutted John Wilson Croker’s assertion that it was at the very beginning of his career that he ‘had a private soldier & all his accoutrements & traps separately weighed, to give you some insight into what the man had to do & his power of doing it’.21 He transferred to the 12th Light Dragoons, still as a lieutenant, in June 1789, but far from devoting himself to the intricacies of his new arm, he dipped a reluctant toe into politics. Brother William had been found a seat in Westminster, and Arthur was destined for Trim, the family borough in Ireland. It was not an easy time to venture into Irish politics, for the tide of nationalism was sweeping across the country. The American War and its Declaration of Independence in 1776 had repercussions for Ireland. There were clear similarities between the position of Ireland and England’s colonies in North America, and when France
