Arthur Wesley, twenty-five years old, was at last to find this out for himself. The orders for which he had long been waiting had come; and in the middle of June 1794 he disembarked the 33rd Foot on the quayside at Ostend from a ship that had brought them over from Cork. At Ostend he was given command of two other battalions as well as his own and handed orders to take them over post haste to Antwerp to reinforce the Duke of York’s position. But the Duke’s position was not tenable for long; and, as the summer weather gave way to a cold autumn and a freezing winter, the British fell back in slow retreat. The 33rd were briefly in action in September at Boxtel where their Colonel handled them well; and later, in the depths of winter, they fought their way through another small town with bayonets fixed. Yet for most of those weeks officers and men alike struggled merely to keep warm and alive in the dreary, frozen countryside of polder and canal. We turn out once, sometimes twice every night,’ the Colonel reported in a letter to a cousin. ‘The officers and men are harassed to death … I have not had my clothes off my back for a long time; we spend the greater part of the night upon the bank of the river [the Waal] … Although the French annoy us much at night, they are very entertaining during the day time; they are perpetually chattering with our officers and soldiers, and dance the carmagnole upon the opposite bank whenever we desire them; but occasionally the spectators on our side are interrupted in the middle of the dance by a cannon ball from theirs.’2
Utrecht fell; French trees of liberty were set up in Amsterdam; and the ragged British army straggled back, leaving broken carts and dead animals in its wake, towards the Ems and the Weser at Bremen. Colonel Wesley did not wait to see his battalion embark. Leaving a junior officer in charge, he set sail in March for London.
His first campaign had been a most unpleasant experience; but at least, so he comforted himself, he had learned ‘what one ought not to do, and that is always something’.3 He had also learned that, while many of the British regiments were ‘excellent’, the generals had little idea how to manage an army. ‘I was left to myself with my regiment … thirty miles from headquarters which latter was a scene of jollifications,’ he recalled, ‘and I do not think that I was once visited by the Commander-in-Chief.’4 He remembered, too, an occasion when a dispatch was brought in after dinner in the mess. ‘That will keep till tomorrow,’ said the senior officer complacently, returning to the port decanter.5
‘I was on the Waal, I think from October to January,’ Wesley complained, ‘and during all that time I only saw once one General from the headquarters … We had letters from England, and I declare that those letters told us more of what was passing at headquarters than we learned from the headquarters themselves … The real reason why I succeeded in my own campaign is because I was always on the spot – I saw everything and did everything myself.’6
While his battalion went into camp in Essex, Colonel Wesley resumed without enthusiasm his duties as aide-de-camp to the Lord-Lieutenant in Dublin. Before leaving for Ostend, he had done his best to settle his debts, assigning his income to a tradesman who agreed to pay them off by instalments. But he returned to find that they had not yet all been discharged, while his lieutenant-colonel’s pay and his allowances as an aide-de-camp were meagre in the extreme for a man without private fortune who wished to cut a figure in the world. His brother Richard was generous: he did not seek repayment of the sums he had advanced for the purchases in rank from captain to lieutenant-colonel; but there were limits to what he could ask of him and what Richard himself could afford. As it was, Richard was doing all he could to press his brother’s claims to some office of profit under the Crown. He wrote to the Lord-Lieutenant, an appointment now held by the second Earl Camden, proposing that Arthur was ideally qualified to fill the situation of Secretary-at-War which was ‘likely to be opened soon’. Colonel Wesley himself approached Camden to suggest that he might be appointed to fill vacancies on the Revenue or Treasury Boards, or, perhaps, he might be considered for the post of Surveyor-General of the Ordnance for Ireland when the present incumbent resigned. But Camden was not responsive; nor did he show due appreciation when his aide-de-camp, as Member for Trim, rose to answer Henry Grattan and defend the record of Lord Camden’s predecessor as Lord-Lieutenant, the 10th Earl of Westmorland, who had been recalled in 1795 because of his firm opposition to the emancipation of the Roman Catholics.
Despairing of getting any help 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