On the heights above Boulogne there stands a tall column surmounted by a figure of Napoleon. It was raised to commemorate the assembly of the Grand Army—that army which during the next ten years swept in an irresistible torrent of conquest from one end of Europe to the other. Napoleon’s back is turned on the white cliffs of England. If Nelson had never lived, he might have been facing the other way.
X
WELLINGTON
“THE PRIDE AND THE GENIUS OF HIS COUNTRY.”
—Queen Victoria.
X
WELLINGTON
There is a very considerable amount of uncertainty, and there are also a few somewhat remarkable coincidences associated with the early youth of Arthur Wesley, better known to fame under the expanded form Wellesley, son of Garret, Earl of Mornington, and his wife Ann Hill, one of the daughters of Lord Dungannon.
It is somewhat singular, for instance, that the birthday of a child born in such a position should not be known within a day or two. His mother, who ought to have spoken with authority, said that the future conqueror of the great Napoleon entered the world on May-Day, 1769.
The date on his baptismal certificate is the 30th of May, and twenty-one years later a committee of the Irish House of Commons, to which he had just been elected, investigated the question on a petition which sought to show that he was not of full age, and this committee decided that he was born on or before the 29th of April. With regard to this latter date, however, it has been suggested that with the money and influence that he had behind him there would have been no difficulty in getting the Irish Parliament of those days to make him any age that he pleased.
But these things are only trifles. The fact of moment to the world is that Arthur Wellesley managed to get born into the world some three months before a certain other boy-baby was born at Ajaccio in Corsica. No one, of course, dreamt then that these two babies were going to grow up into Titans whose final struggle for the mastery of Europe was to shake the world forty-six years later.
There is perhaps no more noteworthy coincidence in modern history than the fact that Nelson, Wellington, and Napoleon should all have been born about the same time—for without Nelson’s victories at sea, Napoleon would in all probability have been irresistible on land, while, without Wellington’s splendid conduct of the Peninsular War, the crowning victory of Waterloo would perhaps never have been won, and so at least half the effects of Nelson’s hundred and five fights would have been destroyed.