Wednesday, 10th March.—No more news, and no more mails, and no more time. I am to be asked, it is said, to Rodrigo to the fête there on Saturday. Lord Wellington wants to be very magnificent in his own city, and has said that he wished to give a supper to a hundred and fifty, but is told that it is quite out of the question, as the town and head-quarters would not supply dishes and plates, &c. There is, however, to be a small dinner first before the ball. But this arrangement may be a little disturbed by an event I have this moment heard from General O’Lalor. A Spanish dragoon is come in, with news that the French are moving in the Sierra di Francia; their object, I think likely enough, to rout us up before we are ready. I know no more; General O’Lalor went to Lord Wellington to tell him the news. N.B.—Orders have just come in to prepare charges against nine Polish deserters.
Head-Quarters, Frenada, March 15th, 1813, 9 o’clock at night.—As to Sir Isaac Heard’s coming over here to invest the Marquis with the Garter, doubtless the old Garter king would like it; and at this time of the year, while quiet here, and neither hot nor wet, no mosquitoes, and without baggage, he might do it tolerably well. If you travel without baggage, as Lord Wellington did when he went to Cadiz, with good horses, you get on thirty, forty, and even fifty miles in a day; avoid all the bad places, only stop in towns, get the best accommodation, and only rest where there are English Commissaries, &c. Lord Wellington came from Lisbon here in five days, with relays of horses; the last day he rode fifty miles between breakfast and dinner.
The movements of the French I mentioned in my last came to little or nothing—it was a mere alarm.
I have had a long letter from Sutton in answer to several queries. He agrees with me in every point which I have had to decide; and I am particularly glad to be right in the great one on which Lord Wellington differed with me, and directed me to send home his reasons. Still Lord Wellington is hardly satisfied, but desires me to wait till I hear officially from Sutton about it.
The day before yesterday we had a hard day’s work in the shape of gaiety and amusement. Lord Wellington desired to invest General Cole with the Order of the Bath, in a suitable manner; and as he had never done anything at Ciudad Rodrigo, of which he is Duke, he determined upon this opportunity to give a grand fête in the midst of the ruins—a grand dinner, ball, and supper. All heads of departments, generals, public authorities, Spaniards and English, were invited to dinner, to the amount of sixty-five. In the evening, ladies about forty, and men about a hundred and fifty, came to a ball and supper. The dinner and supper were half cooked at Frenada, and carried over in military waggons and on mules. All the plate at head-quarters was put in requisition, and there was enough to afford a change of silver at dinner. Plenty of claret, champagne, and Lamego, i. e., port, was sent over. A caravan of glass and crockery arrived from the governor of Almeyda, and from a shop just opened there. Almeyda is twenty-five miles from Rodrigo. The whole went off very well, except that it was excessively cold, as a few balls during the siege had knocked in several yards of the roof of the ball-room, and it was a hard frost at the time.
Lord Wellington was the most active man of the party—he prides himself on this; but yet I hear from those about him that he is a little broken down by it. He stayed on business at Frenada until half-past three, and then rode full seventeen miles to Rodrigo in two hours to dinner, dressed in all his orders, &c., was in high glee, danced, stayed supper, and at half-past three in the morning went back to Frenada by moonlight, and arrived here before daybreak at six; so that by twelve he was ready again for business, and I saw him amongst others upon a Court-martial on my return at two the next day. Campbell and General O’Lalor managed the fête. I made cards for every place at dinner, with corresponding ones for each person, with his name, table, and number of his plate, and so there was no bowing and scraping, or pushing for the first table. We got quarters in the ruins. Stables there were none scarcely, and we took over hay and barley for the horses for the night, and our beds to lie down for an hour or two. Several ladies, refugees from Salamanca, were there, and the band of the 52nd.
The house at which the entertainment was given was the best in the town, with some very good rooms; but it had suffered a little by the siege, and had, moreover; only bare walls. Luckily, however, the General O’Lalor discovered that the Intendente of the Palace of St. Ildefonso had brought away the hangings of five or six of the best rooms to save them from the French, and had deposited them at Rodrigo. These were obtained, and the bare walls of the ball-room were hung all over with yellow damask satin with a silver border, with openings at each end in festoons, like a tent, and looked very well. The other supper-rooms were hung with crimson satin and gold from the same palace, and in tolerable condition.
The whole was laid out so as to astonish the inhabitants, and the defects were concealed almost entirely. Near one hole in the floor a man was placed to take care that no one got a leg in, and a mat was put over the whole. The ladies were not very handsome, but two or three good-looking, and several very lady-like in their manners.
I was most pleased with the bolero and fandango dances, which were executed by two Spanish ladies, Chanoinesses as they were called, nieces of two Chanoines, and two Spaniards, one of whom danced very well. The best was the old fellow who was sent for to play on his ornamented paper square tambourine, or rather flat drum, who sang the airs and accompanied himself with great humour, and afterwards gave us a dance in the true style. The enthusiasm of the Spaniards was also amusing, and their eager applause. All the other dances were English country dances, which the ladies execute very well and exactly like ours, except that they waltz the poussets, and generally, therefore, dance waltz tunes, and have that figure. They are also a little more twisted about and handled than our fair ones would like at first; but upon the whole, perhaps our country dances are improved by the change. We had much drinking and toasts given on both sides, at the expense of the French: “Ferdinand the Seventh,” “The next campaign,” “Death to all Frenchmen,” &c. In short, several Spaniards as well as English got very drunk by five o’clock in the morning, and they chaired the Prince of Orange, General Vandeleur, whom they let fall, and several others, as soon as the ladies were gone, and there was nothing else to do. The Spaniards at first began with “vivas,” but soon learnt “hip, hip, hip, hurra!”
With great care a few silver spoons and knives and forks only were missing, and it is said one plate. Henry tells me the servants saw one Spanish officer with a turkey’s leg sticking out of his pocket; but, like our aldermen, they are given to pocket even at Madrid, and have some excuse, for they are paid little, and find everything very dear. Probably a turkey had not been seen there for months: they were, I believe, all brought from thirty or forty miles down the Douro, near Lamego. Besides the Spanish military authorities, there were some civilians of rank, as the Marquis d’Espeja and a few others. Colonel Gordon was the only officer who would return with Lord Wellington; and though he has the best horses here next to those of the chief, he borrowed another horse which had come over earlier, to ride back upon with Lord Wellington, and left his own, which he had ridden on in the morning with his lordship, to come back later in the day.