Just before this he entered Parliament as member for Rye, on the invitation of Lord Grenville. One didn’t need much more than the invitation of a powerful minister to get into Parliament in those days. At Westminster he distinguished himself chiefly as the vindicator of his brother’s policy in India, and, more than this, he used his pen, which was not much addicted to flourishes, but nevertheless wrote good, strong, nervous English, to the same good purpose. There is one sentence in an open letter to his brother which exactly sums up the situation.
“By your firmness and decision you have not only saved, but enlarged and secured the invaluable Empire entrusted to your government at a time when everything else was a wreck, and the existence even of Great Britain was problematic.”
Those are weighty words indeed, coming as they do from the man who won the battle of Assaye and established, let us hope for ever, the British Empire in India.
All the same he doesn’t seem to have liked this talking business in Parliament at all, for in a letter written in July, 1806, he says: “You will have seen that I am in Parliament, and a difficult and most unpleasant game I have had to play in the present extraordinary state of parties.” From this it will be seen that Arthur Wellesley, like any other good man of action and capable Empire-Maker, had a wholesome contempt for the miserable and sordid game which is called party politics.
All the same we find him a few months afterwards as Chief Secretary for Ireland, buying, that is to say bribing and corrupting with open candour and unconcealed disgust, a sufficiency of votes and influence to keep the Ministry in power. He said plainly: “Almost every man of mark in the state has his price.” And when he was taxed with bribery and corruption, he remarked with that marvellous insight of his, that an inquiry into such practices would open up the whole theory of constitutional government.
We are supposed to have improved ourselves out of the venality of buying and selling votes and seats, at any rate for cash down, but we still bribe and we still corrupt. There are still titles for rich men who will spend lavishly to support their party, there are still innumerable advantages for the tradesman, and the contractor who are loyal to their party and their ticket, and so it will be while constitutional government and human nature remain what they are; but for all that we may learn a good deal from a remark like this made by a man who was so absolutely incorruptible that when he was made Captain-General of the Spanish Army, he refused to draw his salary, and who later on when his justly grateful country presented him with an estate, paid the rent of it into the Treasury as long as the war lasted.
It is not often, even among the great ones of the earth, that you meet with an absolutely honest man, but there is no doubt about Wellington.
After a little subordinate foreign service in Denmark, in which he distinguished himself as usual, he went back to the Irish office for about eight months. This particular eight months was a very critical period indeed, and looking back at the facts across a gulf of eighty years, one is inclined to wonder how it was that no better work could be found for the already well-proved genius of Arthur Wellesley than the ordinary routine work which a very much smaller man could have done, if not as well, at least sufficiently well. It will have been noticed more than once by those who have managed to get through the foregoing pages, that one of the greatest and most dangerous faults of British officialism, has been the employment of giants to do the work of pigmies. But officialism would not be official if it were not dull, so I suppose there is no help for it. One of the elements of greatness is the faculty of recognising greatness in others, and officialism is very seldom great.
This was the year 1807, and that is the same thing as saying that it was the period which marked the zenith of Napoleon’s power. The little cadet of Artillery who had been teaching the raw republicans of France how to construct fortifications, and how to knock them down, while Arthur Wellesley was training the 33rd Foot, was now Emperor of the French.
More than that, he was practically master of Europe. From the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural mountains he had not a single foe left in arms. Some he had crushed, others he had over-awed or conciliated, but all the nations of Europe were either his subjects or his forced allies. Nelson, it is true, had made Britain the mistress of the seas, but, saving only these little islands of ours, it must be confessed that Napoleon was master of the land.