1 May 1769 – 14 September 1852 | British Army | Napoleonic Wars
Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, KG, GCB, GCH, PC, FRS, was the soldier who ended Napoleon’s career on the field of Waterloo, and the statesman who then governed Britain as its prime minister. No other British commander of the nineteenth century combined so long a military career with so high a political one. He fought in India and in the Peninsula, held the ridge at Waterloo against the greatest army in Europe, and then spent his last decades as the country’s senior soldier and one of its most powerful political figures. He is remembered by many, in the National Army Museum’s words, as Britain’s greatest general.
The Duke of Wellington in field marshal's uniform, painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence about 1815–16.
Credit: Apsley House / English Heritage.
Early service and India
Wellesley’s first experience of war came in the Low Countries in 1794, during the Flanders campaign against Revolutionary France. He commanded the 33rd Regiment of Foot at the Battle of Boxtel, where his regiment’s steady conduct in covering a retreat earned him notice. The campaign itself was a failure, and the British army withdrew, but Wellesley had learned a lesson he never forgot: that an army’s survival depended on discipline, supply and ground carefully chosen.
In 1796 he sailed for India with the 33rd, and there his reputation was made. He served under his brother Richard, who was Governor-General, and in May 1799 he commanded a division in the siege of Seringapatam, the capital of Tipu Sultan of Mysore. Tipu was killed in the assault, and Wellesley was made governor of Seringapatam and Mysore, where he spent two years learning to administer a conquered territory and to fight the irregular warfare of the region.
His great test in India came on 23 September 1803 at Assaye, during the Second Anglo-Maratha War. With a force of about 4,500 men, many of them Indian sepoys, he attacked a Maratha army many times larger, drawn up across the Kaitna river with a powerful artillery. It was a frontal assault against heavy guns, and it cost his army dearly — more than a third of his men were killed or wounded. But the Maratha line broke, their guns were taken, and the victory secured British control of the Deccan. Wellesley later counted Assaye among the finest actions of his career, and it was the battle that first showed the qualities that would define him: a cold eye for ground, a willingness to accept heavy casualties to win decisively, and an absolute refusal to be beaten.
He returned to England in 1805, a major-general of thirty-six with a reputation for competence, and in 1806 entered Parliament as the Member for Rye. In 1807 he became Chief Secretary for Ireland, the post his father’s family had long held. The same year he commanded a brigade in the expedition to Copenhagen, where his troops defeated the Danes at Køge. It was a brief campaign, but it confirmed him as a commander the government could trust with an independent command. The following year, in the summer of 1808, he was sent to Portugal.
The Peninsular War
Wellesley landed in Portugal in August 1808 and within weeks had defeated the French at Roliça and at Vimeiro. But he was then superseded by two senior generals, and his successor signed the Convention of Cintra, which allowed the defeated French army to sail home with its plunder. The public outcry was fierce, and Wellesley was recalled to London to face a court of inquiry. He was cleared, and his conduct at Vimeiro was praised, but the affair taught him how quickly a reputation could be undone by politics.
In April 1809 he returned to Portugal in command of the British army in the Peninsula, the post he would hold for the next five years. At Talavera, in July 1809, he defeated a French army under Joseph Bonaparte, the king Napoleon had placed on the Spanish throne, and was created Viscount Wellington in recognition. But his Spanish allies failed him, his supplies ran short, and he was forced to withdraw into Portugal. There he spent the winter of 1809–10 building the Lines of Torres Vedras, a great system of fortifications across the Lisbon peninsula, manned by Portuguese militia and British troops, behind which his army could shelter.
The Lines were Wellington’s masterpiece of defensive war. In October 1810 the French commander, Marshal Masséna, advanced on Lisbon and found his way barred. For five months his army starved in front of the Lines while Wellington refused to be drawn out. In March 1811 Masséna withdrew, and Wellington followed him back into Spain. The following year he took the fortress towns of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz by storm — both assaults costly in lives, and both necessary — and then, on 22 July 1812, he won his greatest victory of the Peninsula at Salamanca. Catching the French army stretched out on the march, he smashed its flank in a single afternoon. He entered Madrid in triumph and was created Marquess of Wellington.
The campaign of 1813 was his finest. Advancing from Portugal with a British, Portuguese and Spanish army, he outmanoeuvred the French at every turn and on 21 June 1813 destroyed their army at Vitoria, capturing their baggage, their artillery and Joseph Bonaparte’s treasure. He was promoted to field marshal on the day of the battle. He then drove the French over the Pyrenees and into France itself, fighting a series of hard battles through the winter of 1813–14. At Toulouse, on 10 April 1814, he fought his last battle of the war — unaware that Napoleon had already abdicated. The war in the Peninsula was over. Wellington had driven the French out of Spain and Portugal, and he had done it with an army that was always outnumbered and usually under-supplied. He was created Duke of Wellington in 1814, and sent to Paris as ambassador to France.
The Battle of Waterloo, 18 June 1815, painted by Jan Willem Pieneman in 1824.
Credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Waterloo
When Napoleon escaped from Elba in March 1815 and returned to France, Wellington was in Vienna, attending the Congress that was remaking Europe. He hurried to Brussels to take command of the Anglo-allied army in the Netherlands, alongside the Prussian army under Field Marshal Blücher. Napoleon’s plan was to defeat the two armies separately before they could join. On 16 June he struck the Prussians at Ligny and drove them back, while Wellington held the French at Quatre Bras. Wellington withdrew to a ridge at Mont-Saint-Jean, south of the village of Waterloo, and there, on 18 June 1815, he offered battle.
His army of about 68,000 men — British, Dutch, Belgian and German troops, only about a third of them British — held a ridge a little over two miles long, anchored at the farmhouses of Hougoumont on the right and La Haye Sainte in the centre. Napoleon attacked with some 72,000 men. All day the French assaults came: infantry against Hougoumont, great columns against the centre, and, in the afternoon, wave after wave of cavalry against the squares of British infantry. Wellington rode the line throughout, steadying regiments and feeding in reserves where the pressure was greatest. Sir Thomas Picton, one of his divisional commanders, was killed leading his men against d’Erlon’s attack in the early afternoon. Lord Uxbridge, who commanded the cavalry, lost a leg to a cannonball late in the day.
The battle turned in the late afternoon, when Blücher’s Prussians began to arrive on the French right flank, Bülow’s IV Corps fighting its way into the village of Plancenoit as the evening wore on. Napoleon threw in his last reserve, the Imperial Guard, in a final attack on the centre. The Guard was met by British infantry and repulsed, its columns breaking in confusion. Wellington, seeing the French line wavering, ordered a general advance. The French army broke and fled. That evening Wellington met Blücher at the inn of La Belle Alliance, and the pursuit was left to the Prussians.
In his dispatch of the following day Wellington gave full credit to his ally: “I should not do justice to my own feelings, or to Marshal Blücher and the Prussian army, if I did not attribute the successful result of this arduous day to the cordial and timely assistance I received from them.” To his friend Thomas Creevey, the morning after the battle, he is reported to have called it “a damned serious business” and “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life”. The words are reported speech, not a verbatim record, but they capture what every man on the ridge knew: the battle had been won by hours, and by the arrival of the Prussians. Waterloo ended Napoleon’s rule, and it made Wellington the most famous soldier in Europe.
Wellington and Blücher meet after Waterloo, in Edwin Henry Landseer's A Dialogue at Waterloo.
Credit: National Gallery, London.
Later life and politics
After Waterloo, Wellington commanded the Army of Occupation in France until 1818, and then moved fully into politics. He had been a Member of Parliament and a minister before the Peninsular War, and he now became one of the leading figures in the Tory party. He served as Commander-in-Chief in 1827–28, and in January 1828 he became prime minister. His government’s great act was Catholic emancipation in 1829, which removed the remaining civil disabilities on Roman Catholics. Wellington pushed it through against the opposition of much of his own party and of King George IV, because he believed that refusing it would risk civil war in Ireland. The cost was the break-up of his party: many Tories never forgave him, and his government fell in 1830 over the question of parliamentary reform, which he opposed.
He was prime minister briefly again in 1834, as a caretaker, and remained a dominant figure in the House of Lords until his retirement from politics in 1846. He was Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1834 until his death, and he returned as Commander-in-Chief in 1842, holding the post for the last ten years of his life. In that role he advised successive governments on the defence of the country, and he remained a formidable presence in Whitehall long after his fighting days were over. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1847, a recognition of a career that had long since passed beyond the battlefield.
Wellington had married Kitty Pakenham, the daughter of the Earl of Longford, in 1806. The marriage was not a happy one, and the couple lived largely separate lives, but they had two sons, Arthur and Charles, both of whom followed their father into public life. In his later years Wellington lived at Apsley House in London and at Stratfield Saye, the estate in Hampshire that Parliament had bought for him in thanks for his victories. He died at Walmer Castle in Kent, where he was Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, on 14 September 1852, aged eighty-three, after a stroke. He was given a state funeral, and he was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, beside Admiral Lord Nelson.
Legacy
Wellington fought in some sixty engagements, and he is often said never to have lost a battle — a claim that holds for the great set-piece battles of his career, from Assaye to Waterloo, though it smooths over the checks and withdrawals that any long campaign contains. His reputation rests on a particular kind of generalship: the defensive battle, fought on ground of his own choosing, with a cool head and a careful eye for supply. He was not a daring commander in the manner of Napoleon, and he knew it. His strength was in making his army hard to beat, and then striking when his enemy had spent himself. Military academies still study his campaigns, and his methods — the reverse slope, the prepared position, the refusal to be drawn — remain part of the language of war.
He is remembered in stone across Britain and Ireland: the Wellington Arch and the statue at Hyde Park Corner, the monument in St Paul’s, and the great column in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. His home at Apsley House, known in his lifetime as Number One, London, still holds his collections and his portraits. But his lasting legacy is simpler than any monument. In 1815 he faced the most feared commander of the age and held his ground until the day was won, and in the decades that followed he showed that a soldier could govern — and govern with a sense of duty that cost him his party and his popularity, and that he never regretted.
Sources
- National Army Museum, Napoleonic Wars — https://www.nam.ac.uk/subjects/napoleonic-wars
- National Army Museum, Battle of Waterloo, 18 June 1815 — https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/battle-waterloo
- National Army Museum, Comparing Commanders: Waterloo vs First World War — https://ww1.nam.ac.uk/1785/news/comparing-commanders-waterloo-vs-first-world-war/
- National Army Museum, Wellington: The Iron Duke — https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/duke-wellington
- The Napoleonic Archive, Battle of Waterloo 1815 — https://napoleonicarchive.com/battles/waterloo
- London Gazette, Waterloo casualty list and Wellington’s dispatch, 19 June 1815 — https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/17028/page/1213
- Sir Thomas Lawrence, Arthur Wellesley (1769–1852), 1st Duke of Wellington, c. 1815–16, Apsley House (WM.1567-1948), via Wikimedia Commons — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sir_Arthur_Wellesley,_1st_Duke_of_Wellington.jpg
- Jan Willem Pieneman, The Battle of Waterloo, 1824, Rijksmuseum (SK-A-1115), via Wikimedia Commons — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:De_Slag_bij_Waterloo_Rijksmuseum_SK-A-1115.jpeg
- Edwin Henry Landseer, A Dialogue at Waterloo, c. 1850, National Gallery (N00415), via Wikimedia Commons — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edwin_Henry_Landseer_(1802-1873)_-_A_Dialogue_at_Waterloo_-_N00415_-_National_Gallery.jpg
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