STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 110

Excessive Honesty and Insufficient Tact

13. Excessive Honesty and Insufficient Tact (2)

The same thing happened with his political subordinates in after-life. Wellington was suspicious, autocratic, sparing of thanks, ruthless in administering snubs and rebukes, possessed of a very long memory for offences, and a very short memory for services. He broke with old political friends (if friends they could be called) in the same callous fashion with which he broke with his own relatives. Every one will remember how he boycotted for nearly twenty years his own brother, Lord Wellesley, the great Viceroy of India, who had given him his first step in the ladder of promotion—the cause of rupture being a purely political difference of opinion. If he had any true friends at all they were either mere personal dependents and satellites, such as Arbuthnot, Croker, or Gurwood, or Gleig, or Alava, or young people of his own entourage, to whom he could play the part of Nestor, or of the benevolent uncle of comedy, such as Lord Stanhope. For those who might have been considered his contemporaries and his equals he had never any real tie of affection.

The reason of this was, as a trenchant critic observed, that the Duke had an intellectual contempt for his social equals, and a social contempt for his intellectual equals. This sounds like a hard saying, but is roughly true. He looked down from the height of his intellectual superiority on the docile peers who followed his odd political changes with puzzled obedience, and grew testy when they persisted in trying to think for themselves on occasion. He acknowledged that “party management”—the art of suffering fools gladly—was not his strong point. In a passing moment of self-recognition he once observed: “When the Duke of Newcastle addressed me a letter on the subject of forming an Administration, I treated him with contempt. No man likes to be treated with contempt. I was wrong.” But such moments of insight came rarely. The Duke was utterly careless of the amour propre of his subordinates. Imagine the feelings of a Marquis, holding a very high official position, on receiving an important document with the endorsement: “This is for your personal information: I do not want any observation or suggestions on it.” Why add the last half-sentence? The topic discussed was entirely within the scope of the Marquis’s sphere of duty. Undoubtedly Wellington was justified in believing that his intellectual powers were superior to those of most of his subordinates—but there was no reason to let them see that he thought so.

This was unwise and tactless. Far more unhappy, however , was his ill-concealed consciousness of social superiority towards intellectual equals. Like Lord Byron he was never able to forget that he was, what he once spoke of himself as being, a “sprig of the nobility”. He had a profound distrust of “new men”, and he looked upon people like Canning or Huskisson as strange leaders for the old aristocratic party. I doubt if he ever forgot that even Sir Robert Peel was but the son of a wholesale manufacturer. Canning was certainly to him an adventurer, of doubtful gentility, who “showed avowed hostility to the landed aristocracy of this country”. Occasionally this class-feeling flashed out in words which even the admiring Gleig cannot but call “lacking in delicacy”, as when in the presence of his whole staff he taunted an unfortunate major of Engineers with being the son of a duke’s butler. But this distressing story should be read in extenso in the narrative of the worthy Chaplain-General.

A comment on it is another obiter dictum, viz. that he could never like officers promoted from the ranks: “their fault always was not being able to resist drink—their low origin then came out, and you never could perfectly trust them, and I have never known an officer raised from the ranks turn out well, nor the system answer”. This unhappy contempt (I can use no other word), intellectual and social, for those with whom he had to work, great and small, would not have been fatal to Wellington’s power as a statesman if he had been more tactful, or as he would have called it, more hypocritical. But his honesty hindered: as he once observed he “hated humbug”, and would never flatter, cajole, or conciliate. His honesty was of the form that ran over the edge of brusqueness into occasional brutality.

When his devoted adherent Croker wrote to him, in great agony of mind, a four-sided letter setting forth his reasons for resigning his seat in Parliament, after the passing of the Reform Bill, the Duke replied in four lines: “I have received your letter. I am very sorry that you do not intend to be again elected to serve in Parliament. I cannot conceive for what reason.” This, when Croker had given him four pages of laboured reasons, could only mean that Wellington regarded these reasons as absurd and unworthy of notice. But even granting this, we must allow that in view of Croker’s past services to the cause and the Duke’s own person, a few sympathetic words were required.

And this omission of the obvious did not come from a dislike to penning long letters. Wellington was the most prolix of correspondents, and would write several pages to advertising doctors who offered him their medicines, or to ladies who sent him trumpery presents. It is true that in inditing such replies he had the opportunity of employing his mordant power of satire. To one doctor he wrote: “As I am attended by the best medical advisers in England, I cannot make use of salves sent me by a gentleman (however respectable) of whom I know nothing, and who knows nothing of my case but what he has read in the newspapers.” The letter to the officious lady ends with: “The Duke desires Miss Fiffe to inform him in what manner her box may be returned to Edinburgh. He gives notice that if he does not receive an answer by return of post, the box and its contents will be thrown into the fire.”

Wellington, obviously, did not understand the use of the waste-paper basket, in dealing with bores and pushing people. He had a high sense of his own dignity—but this was not the way to protect it.

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