Byron may have remembered the young apprentice from his sittings, of which there were at least four. He is said to have told his great friend the peculiar Lady Blessington - who was said to have transformed herself from an Irish slattern to a lady of quality - of the first man he ever saw wearing pale-lemon coloured gloves, “and devilish well they looked.” Many have attributed the wearing of these to Wainewright and he himself refers to wearing them in one of his essays. Gloves were a particular signifier of the dandy. The foppish Count d’Orsay, part of the scandalous ménage à trois with Lady Blessington and her husband, was
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Wainewright’s short apprenticeship to the fashionable portraitist Thomas Phillips brought him into contact with many of the literary and artistic figures of the day. When Phillips painted Byron, Wainewright did too and his painting still survives at Byron’s ancestral home in Nottinghamshire.
Newstead Abbey
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said to require six pairs of scented gloves to see him through the day.
Wainewright’s ‘Byron’ was auctioned at Christies in 1892 and was bought for 19 guineas by one of the Colnaghi family, the print-sellers, whom Wainewright was to know so well at the height of his literary and artistic success. According to the National Portrait Gallery, the picture was offered to them in 1936 by Lady d’Erlanger, who was disposing of Byron memorabilia, but they refused it because it was a copy, not an original Phillips, so it went to Newstead Abbey, Byron’s ancestral home, in Nottinghamshire, where it still hangs and is said to be one of the very few of Wainewright’s works which survive in Britain.
There was another notable painting in oils from around 1816. It was of Edward Foss, not just his relative and a trustee of the bequest but a childhood friend. Foss would later be the one who sent Wainewright to his downfall.
Apprenticeship in George Street did not suit Wainewright, he had too high an opinion of his own talents. After a few restless months, he cast around for something else to do, something with more excitement than the discipline of learning a profession. He recorded years later: “ever to be whiled away by new and flashy gauds (showy ornamental things), I postponed the pencil to the sword”. He was going to join the army.
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CHAPTER 2
AN OFFICER AND GENTLEMAN
The “new and flashy gauds” were the yellow facings and silver lace of The 16th (the Bedfordshire) Regiment of Foot. It was probably the peacock finery of the young Guards and dragoon officers strutting around London which had attracted Wainewright to the Army. He was once reported as saying airily: “No artist should serve as a soldier unless he is permitted to design his own uniform.”
He no doubt imagined himself as a dashing officer in a fashionable regiment, taking time off from the busy social round to perform feats of arms which could later be recounted at the dinner table. The truth was to be very different.
Coleridge had joined as a private, but Wainewright bought his way in as an officer, or rather, tolerant Uncle George Griffiths had to put up the money - £400 in cash demanded for the lowest rank of officer - as Wainewright had an allowance of only £250 a year.
It must have pained him that Uncle George was not more generous; £400 was the minimum price of a commission, and that in a county infantry regiment. The buying of commissions had gone on since the 17th century - the more you paid, the higher the prestige you enjoyed. It preserved the senior officer class as an exclusive cadre, built on wealth and social privilege, of which Wainewright had neither. He was on the bottom rung as an
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ensign; today’s rank would be a second lieutenant. (The equivalent in a cavalry regiment was a cornet; both ranks were abolished in the army reforms of 1871, as was the purchase of commissions).
With £735 to spare he could have become a cornet in the dragoons (which, in fact, he later hinted he had been) and £1,050 would have bought a coveted cornetcy in the fashionable Horse Guards, according to the table of prices for commissions printed in the Army’s General Regulations and Orders of 1815.
The recruiting agent in London for the 16th Foot was named Brett, his office was in Soho. It was there that Wainewright went with his £400, and his application to join the regiment is still in the National Archives1 with a covering letter from Brett:
Gerrard Street, Soho 11th April 1814
Sir,
I beg leave to enclose for the consideration of His Royal Highness the Commander-in-Chief the enclosed application from Mr T.G. Wainewright for the purchase of an Ensigncy with the 16th Regiment of Foot, and to add that the regulated purchase money has been lodged with me. I have the honour to be, Sir, your most obedient, humble servant.
P. Brett
Wainewright wrote:
Colonel Torren
1. WO 31/ 397
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I beg you will be pleased to obtain for me His Majesty’s permission to purchase an Ensigncy in the 16th Foot.
In case his Majesty shall be graciously pleased to permit me to purchase the said Commission, I do declare and certify, upon the word and honour of an officer and a gentleman that I will not, either now or at any future time give by any means or in any shape whatever, directly, or indirectly, any more than the sum of £400 – being the price limited by His Majesty’s Regulation as the full value of the said commission.
I have the honour to be your most obedient humble servant.
T.G. Wainewright
Officer commanding the 16th Regiment of Foot –
I hereby declare that I verily believe the established Regulation with regard to Price, is intended to be strictly complied with, and that no clandestine bargain subsists between the Parties concerned.
In the absence of Lieutenant General Sir George Prevost Bart
P. Brett
The giving of his word as an “officer and gentleman” was the formality to prevent trafficking in commissions. So, having paid Brett his fee of £4 11s 2s, Wainewright became on April 14, 1814, an instant officer, the ninth ensign in the 16th Foot, replacing one Mahoney, who had been promoted.
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The artistic, dilettante 20-year-old used to fluttering his way around London’s literary salons was now banished to the cold and wet south of Ireland. The regiment had been based for the preceding few months, at Fermoy, a small town on the river Blackwater in County Cork and it had been recruiting hard as it was under-strength.
In its last overseas tour, in Surinam and Barbados, 27 officers and 500 men had died from yellow fever. And the misfortunes had continued. On the way home, the troopship Islam, with a battalion on board, had been wrecked on the Tuskar Rock, off the coast of Ireland, a notorious graveyard for ships. A history of the Regiment says that although only one man, one