He Turns into a Child Butcher

It is said of the Baron Wellesley, one of our better heads of state, that as a child he was blamed for the death of his brother, and that this was, if not the sole, at least a principal cause for his various compulsions. This is only partly true. He did justify his behaviour with childhood tragedies, most of which he had read in books and adapted only later to fit the official histories.

The Baron Wellesley – or Richard, to those he liked – wrought the stories in gold, knowing that they would be unbelievable. He snipped off the edges, as some women do to their faces, and dabbed on the rouge like a Parisienne. None but a few thought his lying abnormal for a man of his station, who had lived in the continent and returned with a troupe of German performers, some of which stayed as his guests.

While there had been a younger Wellesley, named Bertrand and drowned in the bath aged two, nothing suggests that Richard was treated unfairly because of it. His widowed mother loathed him for other reasons, namely that she’d never wanted children at all. But she had married the son of an only son – a titled one at that! One without cousins or sisters or nephews, even an elderly uncle.

Rich in her own right, she had joined a dying house for the prestige, but nobody told her of the fates of those old families, and that the graves would keep on filling.

The cry of War rang clearly to Richard’s father, who had been raised on Homer, guilt, and patriotism. As a young man, enlisting was a duty to the King but more importantly to himself: he was to be a hero. He saw himself before a mirror, adjusting the medals on his chest to achieve the perfect glint. And this was to be due to his own successes. 

No more reaching into his wife’s purse, or beginning conversation with “You knew my father.” He would dine with well-known figures he’d have met in his own right. And he, like those men, would have played a part in history, and be not a flatterer but an equal.

The killing of youths had the least to do with it, in his mind. He was not cruel per se, merely careless: what was it to him if a mother was left childless? That was a problem for the powers, for whoever issued pensions. It could he God’s problem, for all he knew, if God still lived. It did not matter at all as long as some of them survived, themselves rewarded as he thought he would be; as long as England was triumphant and there were spoils to be divided.

He did not survive the year. His feats are unrecorded (did he do anything at all?); his body, cremated in a small French village that, if one were to believe the maps, does not exist.

His widow got the letter not a week before Christmas.