As a young man, Richard Holmes hero-worshipped Wellington for his military prowess, his "under-stated elegance", his amorous conquests, his mastery of "the crisp aphorism" ("publish and be damned") and his "essential compassion". As he learned more, Holmes realised the picture was more complex, writes Brian Maye.
Wellington: the Iron Duke. By Richard Holmes. HarperCollins, 324 pp. £20 sterling
Nevertheless, having examined the evidence, he feels his boyhood enthusiasm was not misplaced: "Wellington may not always have been good, but he was unquestionably great."
Although Wellington is supposed to have denied his Irishness (horse and stable and all that), Holmes believes the time and place of his birth made him a lonely outsider throughout his long life.
For example, on the eve of Waterloo, he refused to disclose his battle plans to his second-in-command. This seriously compromised the latter's ability to take charge if Wellington was killed. "But, as he once put it in India, he had always 'walked by himself', and he was not about to change the lonely habit of a lifetime that rainy night in Belgium."
Music was his first love, but a dip in family fortunes meant his being withdrawn from university and sent into the army at 16. In the early 1790s, he sat in the Irish House of Commons for the family borough of Trim and worked as a government lackey. He sought Kitty Pakenham's hand in marriage, but was turned down by the Longfords because he was too poor.
Holmes sees this rejection as the turning-point in his life because he laid aside his violins and committed himself to getting on in the army.
His first taste of action was against the armies of revolutionary France in Holland; the campaign was a disaster and Wellington was unimpressed by the headquarters' officers. Promoted to the rank of colonel, he next saw action in India. He came into a position of command there by accident. In the fighting, he showed the "careful logistic preparation that was to become his hallmark". He also led from the front and strongly believed in discipline; soldiers who misbehaved were flogged and some were hanged.
Holmes goes into great detail about Wellington's India campaigns, detail that, unless you're a fan of military history, will bore you, but the morality of what the British were doing in their appropriation of India never seems to strike him at all. Wellington was promoted to major-general and left India in 1805 a wealthy man who had learned much.
Back home, he sought a command in the coalition armies fighting Napoleon, not because he needed the money but because "the prospect of idleness appalled him".
Sidelined and bored for a while, he renewed his pursuit of Kitty Pakenham, this time successfully. The pursuit was carried out via the epistolary rather than the face-to-face route. In fact, the couple didn't meet until their wedding day and his first sight of Kitty in 10 years didn't impress him. "She has grown ugly, by Jove!" he muttered to a confidant.
Holmes describes the marriage as a mistake. Wellington had purged the Pakenham family rejection of him, which had rankled, but took no time to get to know his new wife, assuming she would understand "his own fierce commitment to duty". The relationship was a distant one; he created "in headquarters that happy family life that had eluded him elsewhere".
IN 1808, he was back at his favourite occupation - warfare - this time fighting the French in Spain and Portugal. The years in the Iberian Peninsula saw him raised from viscount to earl to marquess. He took the title Wellington from a town in Somerset, not far from Wellesley.
He certainly had a sense of humour. At times, incompetent officers were foisted on him. On looking through a list of senior officers being sent out to him, he jested darkly that he didn't know what effect their names would have on the enemy but they certainly frightened him.
After his success in Spain, and with Napoleon's abdication, he was made a duke and appointed ambassador to Paris. He was in Vienna at the peace conference when he learned that Napoleon had escaped from Elba.
Appointed commander-in-chief of the British and Dutch forces in Holland, without his Prussian allies he would not have won Waterloo, which was his first direct confrontation with Napoleon. He was glad to embark on a political career after Waterloo, saying he hoped he had fought his last battle.
In 1827, he became prime minister. He persuaded a most reluctant king (and even fought a duel with a peer) to get Catholic emancipation passed and Holmes describes the achievement as "the brightest spot in his political career". His adamant opposition to the reform of parliament clearly was not, and caused his resignation in 1830. But, in 1832, he played a leading if reluctant role in breaking down Tory opposition to the reform bill.
Holmes, whose style is clear and readable, puts it well when he says Wellington was "easy to admire, harder, perhaps, to like". All in all, he strikes me as an unattractive character in his coldness towards his wife and children, his infidelities, his arch-conservatism, his preoccupation with class (he preferred officers with titles to those without), his inability to delegate power and his love of fox- hunting.
On the other hand, there is no disputing his greatness as a military commander, and he had a constructive view of what should follow warfare: "Animosity among nations ought to cease when hostilities come to an end".
It took two horrendous blood-lettings, on a scale unimaginable to Wellington's generation, for Europe to learn that lesson.
Brian Maye is a writer and historian