Global Challenges

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, is to be richly congratulated on the title of his debate, even if it smacks of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. We have one and a quarter minutes on each of their four horses—terrorism, conflict, climate change and mass migration—although that may be pushing it a bit. It is also an awesome privilege to follow a former Permanent Under-Secretary at the FCO in a debate of this scope. Before I move away from the mover of the Motion, I concur on the significance of the Congress of Vienna—the subject of Henry Kissinger’s notable book—and likewise on the role of Castlereagh.

I do not possess ministerial experience akin to that of my noble friends Lord Howell and Lord King at the FCO and MoD respectively. When last night I surveyed the rich package of material provided by the Library in anticipation of this debate, I realised that the night would not be long enough profitably to absorb it all. I therefore went back two-thirds of a century to an earlier life as an amateur classicist and that agreeably Delphic device, the Sortes Vergilianae, whereby if confronted by a dilemma you first put your finger on a random page in Virgil and then put a pin into a random line on that page, hoping that the line serves you with guidance. Given that the Battle of Waterloo was precisely 200 years and one week ago, and was an heroic moment when we were nationally flying high, I have transferred from Virgil to the Duke of Wellington, who was not only the conqueror of Bonaparte at Waterloo but later a Conservative Prime Minister, and was still serving in the Conservative Cabinet 30 years after Waterloo. Linnaeus might well have regarded Sortes Wellingtonianae as a subspecies of tree but the range of his career up to this summer’s bicentennial should offer some guidance.

Somewhat telegraphically and with occasional quotation, I will offer random career experiences and accomplishments of the great Duke in broadly chronological order. When he was still what Bonaparte called a “sepoy general”, having commanded armies of 40,000 men in the field, received the thanks of Parliament for his victories and been made a Knight of the Bath, he was reduced to the command of a brigade of infantry. He replied to a sympathiser:

“I have ate the king’s salt; and therefore I conceive it to be my duty to serve, with unhesitating zeal and cheerfulness, when and wherever the king or his government may think proper to employ me”.

On the other hand, he was never a pushover. There is his later famous reply to a political master:

“My Lord, if I attempted to answer the mass of futile correspondence that surrounds me, I should be debarred from all serious business of campaigning. I must remind your Lordship—for the last time—that so long as I retain an independent position, I shall see that no officer under my Command is debarred by attending to … mere quill driving in your Lordship’s Office—from attending to his first duty—which is, and always has been, so to train the private men under his Command that they may, without question, beat any force opposed to them in the field. I am, My Lord, Your Obedient Servant, Wellington”.

There is a passage in Spain in 1809 when he showed rich Irish common sense relating to the attendance of Catholics in his army at Mass—I declare a Protestant interest of being three-eighths Irish—and another in 1811 when he responded equally imaginatively when it had come to his notice that Methodism was spreading very quickly in the Army. Colonel Stanhope’s Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington does not imply a dietary discipline similar to Bonaparte’s—eight minutes for lunch and 12 for dinner—for Stanhope asserted:

“You little know what you are going to meet with. You will often have no dinner at all; I mean … literally no dinners, and not merely roughing it on a beefsteak or a bottle of port wine”.

Again in the peninsula, the Duke wrote:

“It is very necessary to attend to all this detail, and to trace a biscuit from Lisbon into the man’s mouth on the frontier, and to provide for its removal from place to place, by land or by water, or no military operations can be carried on”.

Likewise in the peninsula, he opined in 1809 about his Spanish allies:

“I am sure I don’t know what we are to do with these people. Put them behind stone walls, and I dare say they would defend them; but to manoeuvre with such rabble under fire is impossible”.

But by 1813 he wrote that the French were beaten back,

“in the most gallant style, by the Spanish troops, whose conduct was equal to that of any troops that I have seen engaged”.

All these characteristics and beliefs came together in his legendary remark on the very morrow of Waterloo, quoted by Creevey:

“It has been a damned nice thing—the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life”.

His impact on others can be derived from his nickname among his troops of Old Nosey. In the words of John Kincaid, who, as some have a good war, had a good battle two centuries ago last week:

“The sight of his long nose among us on a battle morning was worth 10,000 men any day of the week”.

Your Lordships may ask in what respect all this is about the subject of the debate. The great Duke’s Anglo-Irish qualities and values are still what this country is all about. To adapt from Shakespeare, if we are true to our own selves, we could not then be false to any man.