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The Duke
This classic study of the Duke of Wellington, from the struggle against Napoleon to the post-war attempt to build a new Europe, was widely read by Britain's leaders in World War II. Guedalla's excellent account is particularly noted for his coverage of the large number of quips and witticisms made by Wellington during his campaigns.
523 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1931
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About the author
Philip Guedalla
134 books4 followersPhilip Guedalla was an English barrister, and a popular historical and travel writer and biographer. He was educated at Rugby and at Balliol College in Oxford, where he was the President of the Union. In 1913, he qualified as a barrister and practised for ten years, retiring to stand for Parliament five times as a Liberal candidate (he was never elected, however), and to write a series of travel books and historical biographies, often reflecting his interest in the Empires of both Napoleons. His final book, written at the height of the Second World War, was Mr. Churchill, A Portrait.
His wit and epigrams are well-known. He also was the originator of a now-common theory on Henry James, writing that "The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender".
His wit and epigrams are well-known. He also was the originator of a now-common theory on Henry James, writing that "The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender".
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 28, 2009
I’ll admit to finding myself reluctant to read on after the triumphs of 1815. I didn’t want to meet the postwar Iron Duke, the shrewd diplomatic consigliere and military fixer for Europe’s autocratic status quo that I’d just glimpsed, girding his loins to put down the Chartists, in Wilson’s To the Finland Station (the books one is reading sometimes correspond purposefully). For the soldier Wellington, who mastered irregular counter-insurgency warfare in India, who thrashed the more numerous French in Spain with a meager but mobile cadre of redcoats, who when he met Napoleon for the first time struck him down with one blow, was the focus and hero of much of my youthful reading, reading heavily weighted toward military history until an unlikely alliance of The Scarlett Letter and Native Son-—high school English curricula being nothing if not eclectic—-cast the spell of fiction, of romance. The old romantic, “republican” cult of Bonaparte, however naïve, may seem more acceptable than the one I devoted to this gruff, instinctively feudal, mostly unlikable English aristocrat (think Prince Philip wholly educated at an ancien regime riding academy), who after all never had publicists as good as David and Gros; but in spite of Napoleon-worship seeming more normal, its famous adherent is not the gentle, artistic English liberal Hazlitt, but the (admittedly fictional) axe murderer Raskolkinov in Crime and Punishment. So, you see where Corsican bad-boys and their brooding looks get you? Nihilism, and Russian Nihilism to boot, which is just like Communism, you filthy subversives. But then again Dostoevsky hated the French.
I was afraid the post-1815 “Iron Duke” would enjoin indignation, would appear without the manners that make him so fun to read about. I like reading military histories for the national traits one thinks one sees reflected in different commanders. A nation’s warrior caste is a window into its soul—-but so is the condition of its prisons, and the education of its children, and so are a million other things, they say, so I won’t claim too much and belabor the point except to say that Wellington is the natural warrior at his most casual, sporting, and dry. Some of the French Marshalls Wellington beat came into the field crowded by an entourage, invested with all the pompous panoply of command (gold braid, epaulettes, cockades), and dreamily distracted by the wealth and mistresses they’d accumulated back in Paris. Wellington rode about, scouting lines by himself or with a skeletal staff, wearing a plain gray cloak over a blue frock coat expertly cut to show off his “trim” figure, and white trousers tucked into riding boots. Sober of color, but dashing and elegant in the cut. The tableau of cluttered Gallic vanity versus unfussy but effective Anglo-Saxon austerity is of course banal, but such banality obtains in this case. He was like a fighting Beau Brummell—-he once helped the Beau secure a consular post—-or a sporting gentleman who has transferred the attention of the chase from the fox to the French infantryman. Wellington kept his blood up during Winter Quarters and other lulls by stag hunting with a pack of hounds. And Wellington’s clipped battlefield utterances are gems of comically nerveless English unflappability: “Blucher and I can do the business” (with the Prussians we will defeat the French); “Now, drive those fellows off” (sharpshooters advance and pick off the men straggling back from a repulsed French charge); “Rise, Maitland, now is your time” (Napoleon’s Imperial Guard is panting up the slope of the ridge; spring from cover and shoot them all in the face).
The ogre of reaction never really emerges from Guedella’s pages. Perhaps this is because Geudalla declares in his preface that the example of Wellington’s reticence is something salutary. And how could a war hero and statesman, a bad speaker who was averse to crowds, even when they cheered him, as Wellington was, not recommend himself to a biographer writing in the 1930s, when the newsreels showed so plainly that the ascendant political style was menacing demagogic buffoonery? Guedalla’s style and method—-the style and method of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, more mellow and less sneering than the earlier Eminent Victorians-—may also explain why the postwar Duke looks so good: the biographer reveals a subject’s ironies and quirks through a novelistic collage of interpersonal scenes and humane anecdote, supplemented by generous portions of personal correspondence. Such a style and method, so intimate and oblique, does not lend itself to a broad account of the economic forces and global political trends that situate, but ultimately fail to fully reveal, hieratically masked personages like the Duke of Wellington or Queen Victoria. It fits that Wellington appears more attractive when he is portrayed complexly, as a man, than as the caricature of an era or a class. Even ridiculous or odious reputations like Custer’s have benefited from this treatment; in Son of the Morning Star, Evan S. Connell excavates a man who is far more interesting and complex than either myth—-pro or con, Victorian Leonidas or Yosemite Sam—-would lead us to believe.
And was his political record so bad, I ask in ignorance of the big political picture? He deployed his enormous pull with European heads of state toward one end: peace. Normally nothing if not composed, he broke down when shown the “butcher’s bill,” the casualty list of Waterloo, and resolved that it would be his last battle. Perhaps he had learned—-fifty years before the American Civil War taught the perceptive and a century before World War One awoke the dull—-that the princely formalities of feudal war were gone forever, and that Total War—-industrial, ideological, mobilizing whole populations—-was to define a nightmarish future of Gettysburgs, Verduns, Stalingrads. As Prime Minister he pushed through Catholic Emancipation, and even fought a duel with Lord Winchilsea after that Peer denounced him before the House of Lords as a traitor to Protestantism. He supported the repeal of the Corn Laws that were enriching landowners at the expense of urban workers (and their bourgeois bosses). And counter-intuitively, his inflexible royalism seems to have made him a flexible, disinterested politician: horrified at the thought of actively opposing the King’s wishes (“the loyal Opposition” was an oxymoron to him), Wellington declined to head Opposition parties of intransigent old Tories when reformist Whigs won control of the Cabinet. If the King in his wisdom has a reformist cabinet, by God even then you don’t subvert the King with opposition!! Such veneration of the Crown is not what we think of as “cool,” but it preserved Wellington from ever assuming the obstructive potential his fame and prestige seemed to grant. Put him up there with Cincinnatus and Washington as a Generalissimo who wielded his acclaim humbly and cautiously.
All in all, I guess I don’t mind the political Wellington that much. He was such a dinosaur anyway, almost quaint. He’s harmless, and his aristocratic faith has no chance of dethroning the sacrosanct democratic ideology to which we and our rulers pay such fulsome lip service. In fact it’s rather touching to read of his fearful conviction that the expansion of the vote risked the empowerment of peasants and proles and spelled the end of unequally concentrated private property. Ha! Sure, French aristocrats lost property in the Revolution, and England’s landed class saw its primacy ebb as the century went on, but democracies in the wake of the French Revolution and into our own time protect private property as doggedly as the eighteenth century aristocracy did, differences in taxation notwithstanding. Wellington should have had faith that any society worth the description will produce a ruling class, and that the French Revolution, in the long run, meant the permeability of the upper classes to the bourgeoisie; it was a modification of masters—-or a violent downfall of the old families, if you like—-but not eternal expropriative anarchy. Revolutions start as brief festivals of insolence, but such carnival license will be slowly suppressed as powers centralize once more. The State abides. Even with universal suffrage, governments remain, in Santayana's sagely summary, “private societies pitted against one another in the international arena and giving meantime at home exhibitions of eloquence and more rarely of enterprise.”
I enjoyment I get from reading about great feats of soldiering performed with a high chivalric demeanor and told in Guedalla’s sonorous prose
The past receded now—-the legendary past, where Nelson walked his quarter-deck and Mr. Pitt, sharp-nosed among the candles of Guildhall, urged England to save Europe, and a trim frock-coated figure cantered along the lines to lift a low cocked hat and point through the thinning smoke towards the French.
is a Quixote-ish indulgence I’ll allow myself. The feudalism of Wellington’s world is bracing; there’s a majesty to it, but it’s a terrifying majesty—-which I suppose is the whole point. He came from Anglo-Irish landowners, part of a class that ruled Ireland with forms and airs that Guedalla compares to those of the planters of the American South. Wellington didn’t even pretend that Great Britain and its empire belonged to anyone but the monied, landed and commercial classes. He was of that old noble view of “the lower orders” as barely human, and capable of nothing really fine unless they were first molded into shape and directed toward achievement by army discipline, by religious training, and by the wisdom of people like him (all political systems, even our democracies, share the same flaw, the rarity of good leaders; with aristocratic privilege comes responsibility and an ideal of virtue, and though Wellington looked down on his men he never cynically wasted their lives or glorified war, as do decadent aristocrats and decadent democrats alike). You know how sportsman and pretentious hunters used to commission paintings of their favorite hounds and horses? Hunters today still display, on the walls of their humble dens, mass-produced sentimental representations of hunting dogs. Wellington did a something like this to fondly commemorate his troops, hooligans when wine and plunder were within reach, but steady, superb soldiers under fire, under him. (Think of those tight squares of British battalions at Waterloo, bristling with bayonets, breaking wave after wave of charging French cavalry.) After parting with the victorious army he had led in Portugal, in Spain and on to Paris, one of his first calls in London was to the painter Wilkie, from whom the Duke commissioned a quaint, idealized genre scene, for the walls of Apsley House, of old army pensioners lounging outside a pub and playing skittles, smoking pipes and sipping ale, telling jokes and chattering over the newspaper. They were his instruments, his hounds.
I was afraid the post-1815 “Iron Duke” would enjoin indignation, would appear without the manners that make him so fun to read about. I like reading military histories for the national traits one thinks one sees reflected in different commanders. A nation’s warrior caste is a window into its soul—-but so is the condition of its prisons, and the education of its children, and so are a million other things, they say, so I won’t claim too much and belabor the point except to say that Wellington is the natural warrior at his most casual, sporting, and dry. Some of the French Marshalls Wellington beat came into the field crowded by an entourage, invested with all the pompous panoply of command (gold braid, epaulettes, cockades), and dreamily distracted by the wealth and mistresses they’d accumulated back in Paris. Wellington rode about, scouting lines by himself or with a skeletal staff, wearing a plain gray cloak over a blue frock coat expertly cut to show off his “trim” figure, and white trousers tucked into riding boots. Sober of color, but dashing and elegant in the cut. The tableau of cluttered Gallic vanity versus unfussy but effective Anglo-Saxon austerity is of course banal, but such banality obtains in this case. He was like a fighting Beau Brummell—-he once helped the Beau secure a consular post—-or a sporting gentleman who has transferred the attention of the chase from the fox to the French infantryman. Wellington kept his blood up during Winter Quarters and other lulls by stag hunting with a pack of hounds. And Wellington’s clipped battlefield utterances are gems of comically nerveless English unflappability: “Blucher and I can do the business” (with the Prussians we will defeat the French); “Now, drive those fellows off” (sharpshooters advance and pick off the men straggling back from a repulsed French charge); “Rise, Maitland, now is your time” (Napoleon’s Imperial Guard is panting up the slope of the ridge; spring from cover and shoot them all in the face).
The ogre of reaction never really emerges from Guedella’s pages. Perhaps this is because Geudalla declares in his preface that the example of Wellington’s reticence is something salutary. And how could a war hero and statesman, a bad speaker who was averse to crowds, even when they cheered him, as Wellington was, not recommend himself to a biographer writing in the 1930s, when the newsreels showed so plainly that the ascendant political style was menacing demagogic buffoonery? Guedalla’s style and method—-the style and method of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, more mellow and less sneering than the earlier Eminent Victorians-—may also explain why the postwar Duke looks so good: the biographer reveals a subject’s ironies and quirks through a novelistic collage of interpersonal scenes and humane anecdote, supplemented by generous portions of personal correspondence. Such a style and method, so intimate and oblique, does not lend itself to a broad account of the economic forces and global political trends that situate, but ultimately fail to fully reveal, hieratically masked personages like the Duke of Wellington or Queen Victoria. It fits that Wellington appears more attractive when he is portrayed complexly, as a man, than as the caricature of an era or a class. Even ridiculous or odious reputations like Custer’s have benefited from this treatment; in Son of the Morning Star, Evan S. Connell excavates a man who is far more interesting and complex than either myth—-pro or con, Victorian Leonidas or Yosemite Sam—-would lead us to believe.
And was his political record so bad, I ask in ignorance of the big political picture? He deployed his enormous pull with European heads of state toward one end: peace. Normally nothing if not composed, he broke down when shown the “butcher’s bill,” the casualty list of Waterloo, and resolved that it would be his last battle. Perhaps he had learned—-fifty years before the American Civil War taught the perceptive and a century before World War One awoke the dull—-that the princely formalities of feudal war were gone forever, and that Total War—-industrial, ideological, mobilizing whole populations—-was to define a nightmarish future of Gettysburgs, Verduns, Stalingrads. As Prime Minister he pushed through Catholic Emancipation, and even fought a duel with Lord Winchilsea after that Peer denounced him before the House of Lords as a traitor to Protestantism. He supported the repeal of the Corn Laws that were enriching landowners at the expense of urban workers (and their bourgeois bosses). And counter-intuitively, his inflexible royalism seems to have made him a flexible, disinterested politician: horrified at the thought of actively opposing the King’s wishes (“the loyal Opposition” was an oxymoron to him), Wellington declined to head Opposition parties of intransigent old Tories when reformist Whigs won control of the Cabinet. If the King in his wisdom has a reformist cabinet, by God even then you don’t subvert the King with opposition!! Such veneration of the Crown is not what we think of as “cool,” but it preserved Wellington from ever assuming the obstructive potential his fame and prestige seemed to grant. Put him up there with Cincinnatus and Washington as a Generalissimo who wielded his acclaim humbly and cautiously.
All in all, I guess I don’t mind the political Wellington that much. He was such a dinosaur anyway, almost quaint. He’s harmless, and his aristocratic faith has no chance of dethroning the sacrosanct democratic ideology to which we and our rulers pay such fulsome lip service. In fact it’s rather touching to read of his fearful conviction that the expansion of the vote risked the empowerment of peasants and proles and spelled the end of unequally concentrated private property. Ha! Sure, French aristocrats lost property in the Revolution, and England’s landed class saw its primacy ebb as the century went on, but democracies in the wake of the French Revolution and into our own time protect private property as doggedly as the eighteenth century aristocracy did, differences in taxation notwithstanding. Wellington should have had faith that any society worth the description will produce a ruling class, and that the French Revolution, in the long run, meant the permeability of the upper classes to the bourgeoisie; it was a modification of masters—-or a violent downfall of the old families, if you like—-but not eternal expropriative anarchy. Revolutions start as brief festivals of insolence, but such carnival license will be slowly suppressed as powers centralize once more. The State abides. Even with universal suffrage, governments remain, in Santayana's sagely summary, “private societies pitted against one another in the international arena and giving meantime at home exhibitions of eloquence and more rarely of enterprise.”
I enjoyment I get from reading about great feats of soldiering performed with a high chivalric demeanor and told in Guedalla’s sonorous prose
The past receded now—-the legendary past, where Nelson walked his quarter-deck and Mr. Pitt, sharp-nosed among the candles of Guildhall, urged England to save Europe, and a trim frock-coated figure cantered along the lines to lift a low cocked hat and point through the thinning smoke towards the French.
is a Quixote-ish indulgence I’ll allow myself. The feudalism of Wellington’s world is bracing; there’s a majesty to it, but it’s a terrifying majesty—-which I suppose is the whole point. He came from Anglo-Irish landowners, part of a class that ruled Ireland with forms and airs that Guedalla compares to those of the planters of the American South. Wellington didn’t even pretend that Great Britain and its empire belonged to anyone but the monied, landed and commercial classes. He was of that old noble view of “the lower orders” as barely human, and capable of nothing really fine unless they were first molded into shape and directed toward achievement by army discipline, by religious training, and by the wisdom of people like him (all political systems, even our democracies, share the same flaw, the rarity of good leaders; with aristocratic privilege comes responsibility and an ideal of virtue, and though Wellington looked down on his men he never cynically wasted their lives or glorified war, as do decadent aristocrats and decadent democrats alike). You know how sportsman and pretentious hunters used to commission paintings of their favorite hounds and horses? Hunters today still display, on the walls of their humble dens, mass-produced sentimental representations of hunting dogs. Wellington did a something like this to fondly commemorate his troops, hooligans when wine and plunder were within reach, but steady, superb soldiers under fire, under him. (Think of those tight squares of British battalions at Waterloo, bristling with bayonets, breaking wave after wave of charging French cavalry.) After parting with the victorious army he had led in Portugal, in Spain and on to Paris, one of his first calls in London was to the painter Wilkie, from whom the Duke commissioned a quaint, idealized genre scene, for the walls of Apsley House, of old army pensioners lounging outside a pub and playing skittles, smoking pipes and sipping ale, telling jokes and chattering over the newspaper. They were his instruments, his hounds.
January 7, 2023
Flowery archaic language with ponderous sentences. An entertaining read & the author obviously has knowledge but it doesn’t come fully to the fore. More anecdotal than analytical.
January 17, 2018
Rather disappointing biography. The language is somewhat archaic and flowery. Greatest contribution is to highlight logistics as such a vital part of Wellington's success story
November 26, 2007
Although Wellington is known chiefly as a military man, this biography devotes more attention to his political career before and after his military exploits. Even when discussing the military period, there are no detailed accounts of battles. General principles of military logistics and strategy are more discussed than actual fighting. It contains a lot of mildly amusing anecdotes of Wellington the man but very little on Wellington the general.
May 17, 2016
This book is a dreadfully boring, rambling and confusing attempt to explain the life of the Duke of Wellington. I read the kindle version that had a ridiculous number of typos in the text. This book is written in a style which is dull as ditch water. I really struggled to complete the book - but am glad I did as only now can I advise readers to avoid this boring book like the plague. Possibly the worst history book I have read. Appalling.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews