WELLINGTON may, or may not, have spoken the much quoted words "one torn in a stable cannot be called a horse" about his own Irishness. Yet Irish he was, or Anglo Irish as a later generation would have called him, the first and possibly the greatest in the line of Anglo Irish generals in British service which runs dawn to Montgomery and Alexander and Alanbrooke. Born in Dublin as one of the five sons of a musical peer, Lord Mornington, he was at first called plain Arthur Wesley, but at a later date the family returned to the original version of their name, Wellesley.
They were not wealthy, so when Arthur made rather a poor showing as a schoolboy at Etan, his mother decided that he might be suited best to a military career. After a spell in Brussels and prerevolutionary France, where he learned to speak French well, at 18 he obtained a commission as a lieutenant, serving as an aide to the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin. A few years later, with Europe now convulsed in war, he took part in the "grand old" Duke of York's abortive expedition to Walcheren, yet found it frustratingly hard to make his mark as a soldier or politician even though he had been elected member for Trim in the old Irish Parliament.
It was not until he was posted to India that he showed his mettle, though only after a night operation at Seringapatam had badly miscarried; he quickly wiped out this stain with the first of his many victories, against the Mahiattas at Aigaum and Assaye. From the start, young Wellesley showed energy and a head for administration, mastering a mass of detail without being enslaved by it and working long hours into the night. He was studious too, and took cases of books with him wherever he travelled - history, topography, politics, even philosophy. This seriousness set him apart from his aristocratic fellow officers, whose interests rarely went beyond horses, hounds and women. He liked those things too, but Wellesley - slender, hook nosed, always nattily dressed - was determined to be something more than a ballroom ornament or a boon companion at smart drinking parties.
When he went back to Dublin it was as Chief Secretary, but though he worked hard in that capacity he yearned for another military command. In his official role he distrusted the "native" Irish, who he felt were disaffected to the British Government." By this time he had married Catherine Pakenham, daughter of Lord Longford, whom he did not love but had courted some years before, and so felt duty compelled to make his wife. They had two sons, but Kitty proved a mental lightweight, a poor housekeeper and without charm or social savoir faire.
Wellesley was generally glad to get away from home and from her; he had numerous affairs, flirtations and infatuations over the years, yet to the end of his life he yearned for the home comforts which he felt his wife (who predeceased him) had failed to create.
He was nearly 40 when he stepped outside this relatively narrow area at war and politics and became a European figure. Sent to command an English army in Portugal, he won the first at his Peninsular victories against the French by beating Marshal Junot at Vimeiro and drove him out of the country. The resulting Convention of Cintra was denounced back in London and for a time Wellesley was under a cloud politically, but he soon returned to the Peninsula to fight the campaign, or series of campaigns, which brought about his elevation to Duke and made him world famous as "Wellington". Moving rapidly about the wide spaces of Spain, striking at one French force while dodging another, tying dawn many thousands of troops, he showed the offensive defensive mastery which was his hallmark as a commander.
Looking at the obelisk in the Phoenix Park, with the names of his battles set into the sides, you may be given the impression that Wellington's war in Spain was an unbroken succession of victories. In fact, many or most of these were hard fought affairs with no clearcut verdict, and Wellington's prime object was not to beat the French in the field, but to harass them and drain their strength while they came under increasing pressure in the main theatres of war - Germany and Russia. An exception was his rout of Marshal Marmont at Salamanca, but without the aid of the native guerrilleros as he himself admitted he could not have won the campaign, or even survived for long in Spain.
AFTER Napoleon's 1812 disaster in Russia and his defeat at the Volkerschlacht of Leipzig, French power and French morale were on the decline; so faintly Wellington took the offensive won the decisive battle of Victoria, and drove them out at Spain and across the Pyrenees. He and his veteran army were already deep into France when Napolean's abdication put an end to the war. Not for long, however; the following year (1815) while the Allies sat haggling at the Congress of Vienna, Napoleon returned for the Hundred Days, and Wellington found himself in Brussels gathering a new, polyglot army to meet him.
The Battle of Waterloo has generally been regarded as the climacteric of his whole career, yet in this brief campaign Wellington made more mistakes than he probably had in all the years in Spain, and was lucky to emerge victorious. To begin with, he had wrongly calculated the direction of Napoleon's advance; he was caught napping in Brussels (at the Duchess of Richmond's famous ball) and at QuatreBras he was largely saved by a Belgian general who disobeyed his orders; while at Waterloo itself he should by rights have been beaten. The tactical blunders of Marshal Ney were mainly responsible for Wellington's backs to the wall survival over that fateful June day (a Sunday), until Blucher and his Prussians at last came up on the French right and converted imminent defeat into total victory.
That was effectively an end to his soldiering, and the death or wounding of many friends (including most of his personal staff) in the battle affected him deeply. Back in England, he took up a career in politics, carrying out various diplomatic missions including one to Russia, serving as Foreign Secretary and the apex of his public career - for a few years as Prime Minister. He had an edgy relationship with George IV and an even edgier one with some of his Tory colleagues, particularly Canning; and though Wellington was as energetic as ever in administration, he "tried to do everything himself" and was often tactless and impatient in his dealings with those under him. When he fell from power, it seems to have been a personal relief as much as a disappointment. But he lived on until 1852, a favourite with Queen Victoria, and his funeral was a grandiose affair celebrated in Tennyson's once familiar ode.
ON the whole, Wellington was a reactionary figure, opposing the Reform Bill and quelling popular disturbances quite autocratically, even brutally at times. It was a troubled time in Britain, with the Old Order challenged by the new industrial one, widespread popular unrest, the issue of Catholic Emancipation, and the unpopularity of the monarchy. For a time Wellington even went in danger of his life, though as social tensions slackened he lived to see himself become the "Great Duke," a living monolith. He belonged implicitly to the aristocratic world of Castlereagh and Metternich, with its inbuilt privileges and hereditary caste system, and did not or would not see that the rise of a liberal minded, commercial bourgeoisie was rapidly undermining that world.
He also left a bad legacy to the British Army by virtually restricting the upper levels of command to aristocratic officers - something which had baleful results in the Crimean campaign a few years after his death (Christopher Hibbert, though generally sensible and balanced, virtually ignores this aspect). Against that, though rather a clumsy politician at home he was undoubtedly the most successful British soldier on the Continent since Marlborough, as well as a respected voice in councils and courts abroad, and as such he helped to underwrite the Pax Britannia which lasted for a hundred years. This is a popular biography rather than a scholarly one, and almost inevitably it is written very much from an English, viewpoint, but Old Nosey would not have disapproved of that.