Life
1769-1852; [Arthur Wellesley]; b. Dangan Castle [usually given as Mornington
House, Merrion St. Dublin], son of Lord Mornington; ed. Eton, Brighton,
and Angers France (where he attended a military academy); commissioned
to 73rd Foot, 1783; major 33rd Foot, 1793; MP for Trim in Irish Parliament,
1790-95; supported Catholic Relief but opposed admission to Parliament;
active service in Netherlands with Duke of York, 1794; commanded 33rd
in India, 1797-1085; Governor of Mysore, 1799; major-general, 1802; campaigned
in the second Mahratta War, 1803-05; Richard Wellesley Governor General
in India; Indian Campaigns, Mysore etc.; married Lady Catherine Pakenham,
1806; succeeded Lord Cornwallis as Colonel of the 33rd, Jan. 1806; MP
for Rye, 1806; Secretary for Ireland, 1807; landed Corunna, 1808; new
Peninsular expedition, 1809; constructed lines of Torres Vedras; beat
French army of Soult back to Toulouse; created first Duke of Wellington
(3 May 1814), and granted £400,000 by a grateful Parliament, 1814; Waterloo,
18 June 1815; PM, Jan. 1828, with Robert Peel as Home Secretary; blown
off his horse when wind caught his bearskin surmounted with swan-feather
crest, May 1829; his cabinet firmly opposed to Emancipation of Catholics
and Jews but won royal assent to Emancipation legislation on threat of
resignation following after O’Connell’s victory at Clare; his
house windows at Apsley broken by a liberal mob and defeated in elections
of 1830; PM again briefly in 1834; state procession accorded, in which
twelve horses drew an 18-ton funeral car; the standard life is by Elizabeth
Pakenham Longford [Countess of Wellington] (2 vols., 1969); his military
and political papers have been edited by Anthony Brett-James, and John
Brooke with Julia Gandy respectively. DNB DIB DIH OCIL
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Works
Civil Correspondence and Memoranda 1807-09, ed. by his son
(1859); Speeches in Parliament, 2 vols. 1854).
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Criticism
Elizabeth Pakenham Longford [Countess of Wellington], Wellington,
2 vols. (1969).
Christopher Hibbert, Wellington: A Personal History (London: HarperCollins 1998).
Richard Holmes, Wellington: The Iron Duke (London: HarperCollins 2002), 324pp. See also lives by Gordon Corrigan and Andrew Roberts.
Times Literary Supplement (17 July 1992), review of The Iron Duke: A Military Biography of Wellington.
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Robert Lee Wolff, ed., [John Banim,] The Denounced by the O’Hara Family, 3 vols. [facsimile edn.] (NY: Garland 1978), ded. Wellington; consists of two novels, The Last Baron of Crana, and The Conformists [pl. sic], the latter set near Coleraine and featuring a fanatically anti-Catholic bishop in the historical person of Anthony Dopping, Bishop of Meath (1643-1697) as an example of savage prejudice of Protestant Ulstermen [Wolff]. The novel bears an epigraph from Moore, ‘- bright o’er the flood/Of her tears and her blood,/Let the rainbow of hope be Wellington’s name’. The dedication reads, ‘Addressed to His Grace Arthur, duke of Wellington, these tales most gratefully, and most respectfully, are enscribed.’ The Preface of three pages speaks briefly of the commencement of writing and the ‘old laws ... at that time debated’ which had since ‘became unexpectedly decided’ (p.[v]), and defends the author against "continuing prejudices" and "opening wounds afresh", possibly language used by Wellington. In his introduction, Wolff refers to the dedication in the light of the fact that Wellington was castigated in The Anglo-Irish of the XIXth Century. The implication is that the dedication must be ironically intended, even that The Denounced is none other than Wellington himself. Vide the lines ‘He Said that he was not Our Brother’, occasioned by a ‘ferocious attack provoked by some utterance of Wellington about Ireland’, according to McCarthy (ed., Irish Literature, 1904; cited supra). And note also the occasion when Wellington attacked the Catholic mayor of Kilkenny, as reported in Cabinet [?], who may have been Michael Banim.
Hyland Books (Cat. 224) lists Letters of the Duke of Wellington
to Miss J., 1834-1851 (1st edn. 1889); F. A. Wellesley, ed., The Diary
and Correspondence of Henry Wellesley, First Lord Cowley 1790-1846.
Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica, Irish Worthies (1821), Vol. II, p.422, Garnet Mornington, Earl of Wellington.
Anne Crookshank, Irish Portraits Exhibition (Ulster Mus. 1965), lists port. by John Lucas in the National Portrait Collection (London).
Wilson’s Dublin Directory [contemp. notice]: ‘His Excellency
Marquis Wellesley visited the Theatre Royal when a most disgraceful party
riot took place, and some missiles were thrown at his Excellency’s
box. This occurrence occasioned a serious and protracted enquiry in the
ensuing session of the Imperial Parliament.’
G. B. Shaw remarked on the ‘untheatrical’ Wellington in his Preface to John Bull’s Other Island.
Trim, Co. Meath: The Wellington Monument [var. Column]] was erected Trim, Co. Meath, in 1819; a Wellington Court Hotel stands on the Dublin road. William Bulfin makes mention of the monument to Duke of Wellington at Trim, Co. Meath, erected by ‘gentry of Co. Meath’. (Rambles in Eirinn, 1907).
James Joyce: See the reference in “Gas from a Burner” (1912): ‘Shite and onions! Do you think I'll print/The name of the Wellington Monument. [...].’ In Finnegans Wake, the ‘memorial’ to Wellington in the Phoenix Park becomes the ‘overgrown milestone’ with numerous more phallic associations.
Portraits (inter alia) those by John Lucas in the National Portrait Collection (London); Wellesley by the Comte d’Orsay; profile in The New Irish Magazine and National Advocate (Jan. 1823), pp.244-47; port. of Wellington by Sir Thomas Lawrence at Wellington College, Berkshire; an equestrian statue by Wyatt.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)