Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, is one of the most significant figures in British history — a man whose military genius decisively shaped the course of European history and whose subsequent political career illustrated both the strengths and limitations of the heroic model of leadership when transplanted from the battlefield to the parliamentary chamber. He was born in Dublin in 1769 to an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family of modest means, educated at Eton without particular distinction, and commissioned into the army in 1787 without obvious indication of the talent that would make him the most celebrated soldier of his age.
Wellington's military reputation was built first in India, where he served from 1797 to 1805, defeating Tipu Sultan of Mysore at the storming of Seringapatam in 1799 and winning a decisive victory over the Maratha Confederacy at Assaye in 1803 — a battle he later described as the hardest fought of all his engagements, including Waterloo. The Indian campaigns gave him the experience of logistics, administration and large-scale command that distinguished him from British generals who had learned their craft only in European warfare.
The Peninsular War of 1808 to 1814, in which Wellington commanded the British and allied forces fighting Napoleon's armies through Portugal and Spain, is where his distinctive style of generalship matured. He was a master of the defensive, using terrain brilliantly, keeping his forces from unnecessary attrition, and choosing his battles with careful calculation. The Lines of Torres Vedras — a massive system of fortifications around Lisbon that he secretly constructed and behind which he withdrew in 1810 to starve the French army of supply — was a strategic masterstroke that secured Portugal and set the conditions for the long advance that eventually drove the French from the Peninsula.
Waterloo in June 1815 was the culmination and the legend. Wellington was not at his best in the opening moves of the Waterloo campaign — he admitted later that Napoleon had humbugged him — but his choice of ground, his management of the defensive battle and his coolness under fire on 18 June itself were characteristic. His famous description of the battle as the nearest run thing I ever saw in my life was not false modesty; the issue was genuinely in doubt for hours before the arrival of Blücher's Prussians and the failure of the Imperial Guard turned the balance irrevocably.
Wellington's political career after Waterloo was less glorious. As Prime Minister from 1828 to 1830, he steered the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 through Parliament — removing the legal disabilities on Catholics that had barred them from public office and Parliament — a reform he personally opposed but recognised as necessary to prevent civil war in Ireland. But his adamantine opposition to parliamentary reform made him one of the most unpopular men in England by 1830. Crowds jeered him, his windows were smashed, and he became the symbol of aristocratic resistance to the tide of democratic change. The Iron Duke, the name given him in admiration, became in those years a term of bitter reproach.
