target for a hostile expedition. Many Irishmen, from the Protestant minority for the most part, joined volunteer military units, and were soon complaining about the commercial restrictions imposed on Ireland and questioning the right of the Westminster parliament to legislate for it.
In Henry Grattan the nationalist movement had an eloquent parliamentary leader, and shortly before the general election of 1789, Wesley was sent to Trim on his first political errand. The little town’s burgesses were in danger of making Grattan a freeman, something Dublin Castle was anxious to avoid. Wesley made his first political speech to an audience of eighty burgesses, reporting that he:
got up and said that the only reasons why Mr Grattan should get the freedom of the corporation was his respectability, that really if we were to admit every man because one of two people said he was respectable, the whole community would belong to the corporation, that he could never be of any use to us and would never attend, and that I would certainly object, however great my respect for him.22
During a break before the vote, Wesley moved about the room rallying his supporters: ‘I told my friends that it was a question of party and they must stick by me.’ Wesley duly carried the day. He then showed great discretion by declining to yield to ‘requests of all kinds’. An elderly voter asked what he proposed to do about £70 owed by Lord Mornington: ‘I would have nothing to do with it,’ replied Wesley, ‘as in the case of a General Election such a transaction would entirely vitiate my return.’
When the election came on 30 April 1790, Wesley was duly elected, and although opponents briefly disputed his return when the house met in July, they failed to proceed with their petition. He found himself sitting in a parliament in which at least two-thirds of the members owed their election to the proprietors of less than a hundred boroughs. A third of members enjoyed salaries or pensions from the government, absorbing an eighth of Irish revenue. A young Protestant barrister, Theobald Wolfe Tone, leader of the United Irishmen, already in 1790 more militant than Grattan, tellingly described the government’s well-fed but silent majority as ‘the common prostitutes of the Treasury Bench’.23 The harp of patronage played on, and in addition to his political role, Wesley became a captain in the 58th Regiment in 1791, slipping sideways into the 18th Light Dragoons the following year.
Yet there was still no clear career ahead of him. He dutifully voted for the government, scuttled about on Castle business, and acted for his brother Mornington in disputes over the mortgaged estate at Dangan. And there were more discreet family tasks. Mornington was living with a French courtesan, Gabrielle Hyacinthe Rolland, who bore him several children, but he had also managed to father a son in Ireland, and Arthur was entrusted with the maintenance of his brother’s ‘friend’ and the education of her son. Lord Westmoreland had replaced Lord Buckingham as viceroy in 1789 and economy did not figure among the ‘few good points’ this nobleman was acknowledged to possess. A captain’s pay did not go far and as aide-de-camp to Westmoreland, Arthur found himself drawing on the family agent for loans, and looking for a way of establishing his finances on a firmer footing: marriage seemed the answer.
There was already more to the relationship between Arthur Wesley and Kitty Pakenham than a young man’s quest for an heiress. The Pakenhams lived at Pakenham Hall, Castlepollard, in County Westmeath, a day’s ride from Dangan. Kitty and Arthur had probably met in Dublin in 1789 or 1790, for her charm and good looks made her a great favourite at the Castle, and Arthur became a frequent visitor to the Rutland Square house of her father, Lord Longford, a naval captain and keen agricultural improver. We cannot be sure what Longford would have made of a match between the couple, who were evidently very fond of one another, because he died in 1792 and was succeeded by his son Tom, who was himself to step up from baron to earl on his grandmother’s death in 1794. Perhaps it was Tom’s ‘incipient ideas of grandeur’ that persuaded Arthur to project himself in the best possible light. He borrowed enough money from Richard to buy a majority in the 33rd Regiment in April 1793. He even began to speak in parliament, seconding the address from the throne, deploring the imprisonment of Louis XVI and the French invasion of the Netherlands, and congratulating the government on its liberal attitude to Catholics.
If he hoped that all this was likely to impress Kitty’s brother, he was sorely mistaken. For if the Wesleys had lost most of their money, with nothing but mortgaged estates to show for it, the Pakenhams were comfortably off, and Kitty’s brother Ned had his majority bought for him when he was only seventeen. It cannot have been easy for Arthur to ask Tom, actually a little younger than he was, for Kitty’s hand in marriage. He was turned down flat. Arthur Wesley was a young man with very poor prospects, and Kitty could do far better.
I believe that the fatal interview took place in the library at Pakenham Hall, now known as Tullynally Castle, and still in the hands of the hospitable Pakenhams. The house is set in a landscaped park with a lake close by and views to distant hills, with treasures scattered casually about the place. A row of swords, hanging unlabelled from coat-hooks, includes slender small-swords, an essential part of a gentleman’s everyday dress until the end of the eighteenth century; a mighty meatcleaver of a light cavalry officer’s sword; a heavy, neo-classical (and quite useless) ceremonial sword of the Order of St Patrick; and an Edwardian sword that must have belonged to Brigadier General Lord Longford, killed commanding a Yeomanry brigade in an impossible attack at Gallipoli in August 1915.
Reading General Sir George Napier’s autobiography in the library at Tullynally Castle, I was struck, yet again, by the Irish contribution to the army of Wellington’s age. The Napier brothers, Charles, George and William, all served in the Peninsula and duly became generals. Such was their courage that they were repeatedly wounded, and in 1812 Wellington began a letter to their mother, Lady Sarah, telling her that George had lost his arm, with the words: ‘Having such sons, I am aware that you expect to hear of those misfortunes which I have more than once had to communicate to you.’24 The problem of balancing conscience and duty in the politics of the period is underlined by the fact that Sarah’s nephew, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who had served as an infantry captain in America, became a leader of the United Irishmen and was mortally wounded resisting arrest on the eve of the Great Rising of 1798.
Ireland’s contribution to the British army cannot be judged simply by the officers it provided, whether from noble families like the Napiers or Pakenhams, or the sons of lesser squireens – men like Ensign Dyas of the 51st Regiment, ‘an Irishman whose only fortune was his sword’, whose exploits were a byword for sheer courage.25 The Ireland of turf-roofed cabins outside the park gates provided the army with a high proportion of its rank and file: 42 per cent of the Royal Artillery towards the end of the eighteenth century, and precisely the same proportion of the whole army by 1830. Although Irish soldiers were concentrated most heavily in ostensibly Irish regiments like the Connaught Rangers, there was scarcely a regiment without them: the 57th (West Middlesex) Regiment was 34 per cent Irish in 1809, and even the 92nd Regiment (Gordon Highlanders) was 6 per cent Irish in 1813.
Lord Longford’s rejection of his suit for Kitty was devastating, and a turning-point for Wesley. His violins, he noted bitterly, ‘took up too much of his time and thoughts’: he burnt them with his own hands soon afterwards, and never played again. He did his best, however, to tease a few more notes from the harp of patronage. Infantry battalions had two flank companies apiece, one of grenadiers and the other of light infantry, and he heard that some of these were to be brigaded together and sent abroad. He begged Mornington to intercede with the prime minister, and to
ask Mr Pitt to desire Lord Westmoreland to send me as Major to one of the flank corps. If they are to go abroad, they will be obliged to take officers from the line, and they may as well take me as anybody else … I think it is both dangerous and improper to remove any part of the army from this country
