The Great Duke and others

Wellington, by Jane Wellesley

There can never be too many biographies of the Duke of Wellington because, like Churchill’s and Nelson’s, his career path is so extraordinary, uplifting, chequered and involving that it reads more like (slightly overwrought) fiction than fact.

The first thing you’d give your mildly implausible hero if you were a novelist or Hollywood screenwriter would be a miserable childhood, a sensitive nature and a sense of burning grievance. That way, the audience would like him, identify with him, and feel all the more happy when he triumphed over adversity.

So it was with young Arthur Wellesley. His cold-hearted mother, Anne, dismissed him with a ‘he’s food for powder and nothing else’; he was given to tears and playing sweetly on the violin; and when he sought the hand of pretty Kitty Pakenham, he was repeatedly rebuffed by her smarter family, who saw little advantage in an alliance with a penniless cavalryman with no obvious prospects.

This is the point when you’d shift a gear and have your hero do a Prince Hal, putting aside youthful fecklessness in order to achieve his true destiny. Wellesley does this job perfectly when he burns his beloved violin — his Rosebud, you might say — starts excelling at his French equestrian school, studies hard, and begins his rapid ascent through the military.

Of course, a certain degree of luck has to be involved: avoiding a posting to the West Indies, where he would surely have died of fever; ending up in India at just the right time. But now we must also get the first signs of awakening genius — coolheadedness and quick tactical thinking at his first engagement, a skirmish in Holland; surprise victory against seemingly overwhelming odds at Plassey; then, of course, his brilliantly conducted cat and mouse game with the numerically superior French — not to mention the grisly Whigs back home who would happily — in the Peninsular War — have surrendered Britain to the Napoleonic empire so long as they got to keep their estates .