Duke of Wellington

Arthur Wellesley was born in Dublin on 1 May 1769, the same year as Napoleon Bonaparte, into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. His father, Garret Wesley, 1st Earl of Mornington, was a professor of music at Trinity College Dublin, and the family divided its time between Dublin and its estate at Dangan in County Meath ^[1]. The family later changed the spelling of its surname from Wesley to Wellesley.

The young Arthur showed little early promise. He attended Eton from 1781 to 1784 but left without distinction after his father's death strained the family finances. His mother, Anne, reportedly despaired of her awkward third surviving son and sent him to a military academy at Angers in France, where he learned French and acquired the polish of a gentleman cadet ^[2]. In 1787 his elder brother Richard secured him a commission as an ensign in the 73rd Regiment of Foot.

Advancement in the eighteenth-century British Army depended heavily on purchase and patronage, and Wellesley used both. He served as an aide-de-camp to two Lords Lieutenant of Ireland and sat in the Irish House of Commons for the family borough of Trim from 1790. By 1793, through a series of purchased promotions, he was lieutenant colonel of the 33rd Regiment of Foot at the age of twenty four ^[1].

Wellesley's first campaign, in Flanders in 1794 and 1795 during the war against revolutionary France, ended in a miserable British retreat. He later said the experience taught him how not to conduct a war, and it convinced him to study his profession seriously. He sold his violins, gave up gambling, and began reading military history and administration with real discipline ^[2].

India made him. He sailed there with the 33rd in 1796, and his prospects improved dramatically when his brother Richard arrived as Governor-General in 1798. Arthur commanded a division in the war against Tipu Sultan of Mysore and, after the storming of Seringapatam in 1799, was appointed governor of the city ^[3]. In 1803, during the Second Anglo-Maratha War, he won the Battle of Assaye, a costly frontal assault against a much larger Maratha army that he later described as the finest thing he ever did in the fighting line ^[3].

He returned to England in 1805 a knighted major general with a fortune in prize money and a reputation as a capable, if colonial, commander. Political office followed: he entered the Westminster Parliament and served as Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1807. Any question about whether a general trained in India could face the French was answered in Portugal. Sent there in 1808, he defeated General Junot at Vimeiro, though the subsequent Convention of Cintra, signed by his superiors, allowed the French army to be evacuated home and provoked outrage in Britain ^[1].

From 1809 Wellesley commanded the British and Portuguese forces in the Iberian Peninsula, the theatre that consumed French strength for five years. He drove the French from Portugal, won the Battle of Talavera in 1809, and was raised to the peerage as Viscount Wellington ^[4]. His defensive masterpiece came in 1810, when he withdrew behind the secretly constructed Lines of Torres Vedras outside Lisbon and let hunger destroy Marshal Massena's invading army.

The balance then turned. Wellington stormed the fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz in early 1812, crushed Marshal Marmont at Salamanca that July, and entered Madrid in August. After a winter setback he launched the 1813 campaign that ended with the decisive victory at Vitoria on 21 June, which broke French power in Spain and prompted Beethoven to compose a piece celebrating the battle ^[4]. He invaded southern France, defeated Marshal Soult at Toulouse in April 1814, and, with Napoleon's abdication, was created Duke of Wellington and appointed ambassador to the restored French court ^[1].

Napoleon's escape from Elba in March 1815 brought the two men to their only direct confrontation. On 18 June 1815, near the Belgian village of Waterloo, Wellington's Anglo-allied army withstood repeated French assaults through a long day of fighting until the arrival of Blucher's Prussians turned defeat into rout ^[5]. Roughly 65,000 men were killed or wounded across the three armies engaged that day, and Wellington called the result the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life, according to accounts of his conversation recorded by Thomas Creevey ^[5]. He commanded the army of occupation in France until 1818.

Wellington entered the cabinet as Master-General of the Ordnance in 1818 and became Commander-in-Chief of the army in 1827. In January 1828, after the collapse of Lord Goderich's short ministry, King George IV asked him to form a government, and the soldier became Prime Minister ^[6].

His premiership is remembered above all for Catholic Emancipation. Wellington and his Home Secretary Robert Peel had both opposed admitting Catholics to Parliament, but Daniel O'Connell's election for County Clare in 1828 convinced them that refusal risked rebellion in Ireland. Wellington pushed the Roman Catholic Relief Act through in 1829, threatening resignation to overcome the King's resistance, and even fought a bloodless duel with the Earl of Winchilsea, who had accused him of betraying the Protestant constitution ^[6].

Parliamentary reform proved his undoing. In November 1830 he declared that the existing system of representation possessed the full confidence of the country, a statement so out of step with public feeling that his government fell within weeks ^[1]. Crowds attacked Apsley House, his London residence, and he fitted iron shutters to the windows, one origin suggested for his nickname, the Iron Duke. He served again briefly as caretaker Prime Minister in 1834 and then as Foreign Secretary under Peel, whom he loyally supported over the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 ^[6].

In 1806 Wellington married Kitty Pakenham, daughter of the 2nd Baron Longford. He had courted her in Dublin in the early 1790s, when her family rejected him as a poor prospect, and he renewed the engagement by letter after India, reportedly without having seen her for a decade. The marriage was unhappy almost from the start: she was timid and short-sighted, he was impatient and often absent, and they lived largely separate lives until her death in 1831 ^[2]. They had two sons, Arthur and Charles.

Wellington's name was linked with several women, including the courtesan Harriette Wilson, whose publisher's attempt to extract money for omitting him from her memoirs is the traditional source of the retort publish and be damned, though the exact words are not documented in his own hand ^[2]. In later life he formed a close, chaste friendship with the young philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, who proposed marriage to him in 1847; he declined, citing the difference in their ages.

In person he was spare, hook-nosed, and famously terse. He rose early, slept on a narrow camp bed at Walmer Castle, answered an enormous correspondence in his own hand, and distrusted enthusiasm in politics as much as in religion ^[7].

Wellington remained a national institution long after leaving party leadership. He was reappointed Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in 1842 and held the post for the rest of his life. As Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports from 1829 he spent his autumns at Walmer Castle on the Kent coast, and as Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1834 he presided over an institution he had never attended ^[1].

His last significant public service came in 1848, when fear of Chartist demonstrations in London led the government to place him in charge of the capital's defence. He massed troops discreetly out of sight, and the great Kennington Common meeting of 10 April passed without violence ^[6]. By then he was deaf and stooped, but crowds still raised their hats when he rode through London.

Wellington died at Walmer Castle on 14 September 1852, aged 83, after a seizure. He was given a state funeral on 18 November, an honour rarely granted to a subject: around a million and a half people lined the London streets as the funeral car passed to St Paul's Cathedral, where he was buried beside Nelson ^[7]. Tennyson marked the occasion with his Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.

Any Duke of Wellington biography has to reckon with a double achievement. As a soldier he never lost a major battle, and his Peninsular system of careful logistics, defensive positioning on reverse slopes, and disciplined infantry firepower became a model studied in staff colleges long afterward ^[4]. Waterloo ended more than two decades of European war and fixed his place in the continent's memory: the battle's name attaches to railway stations, towns, and streets across the world, and Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, was named for him in 1840.

His political record is more contested, which is part of why the question of who was Duke of Wellington still draws readers to competing interpretations. Critics then and since have called him a reactionary who resisted reform until forced; defenders point out that when he judged the state itself at risk, over Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and again over the Corn Laws in 1846, he put institutional survival ahead of party and personal consistency ^[6]. His stated principle was simple service to the Crown, whatever the cost to his popularity.

Among Duke of Wellington facts that endure in ordinary life, the Wellington boot keeps his name on millions of feet, Beef Wellington carries it into kitchens, and Apsley House, still known by the address Number One London, operates as a museum holding his paintings and trophies ^[7]. Historians led by Elizabeth Longford and Rory Muir have kept the scholarly portrait current, and the sheer range of Duke of Wellington achievements, from Assaye to Catholic Emancipation, explains why his tomb in St Paul's remains one of Britain's most visited monuments ^[3].