WELLINGTON.
A MILITARY BIOGRAPHY.
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BY WILLIAM DOWE.
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Le tambour d’en Haut a bat le rappel. Soult, Duke of Dalmatia.
There’s a lean fellow beats all conquerors. Dekkar.
The last survivor of those celebrated chieftains who flashed their swords and waved their crests on the great battle-field of Europe in the Napoleonic war, has gone to his place. Half a pound of indigestible venison has done what the hostile bayonets and bullets of the French and the Mahrattas failed to do, in a military career of twenty years. Arthur, Duke of Wellington, born in the same year with the greater Corsican, outlived him over thirty years, and died at Walmer Castle, on the 14th of September last. He witnessed a great many of the most extraordinary doings of the last half century, and was, himself—a great portion of them—quorum pars magna fuit. He hurried on the current of events which led to the fall of the great Mongol throne of Tamerlane and Arungzebe; and his hand gave the last bloody stroke which overthrew that of Napoleon.
Arthur Wesley or Wellesley—for the name seems to have been elongated, as a matter of dignity, like that of Abram of old—was born at Dangan, in Ireland, on the first of May, 1769—a fortnight before Bonaparte saw the light upon the sheet of Gobelin tapestry which represented “the tale of Troy divine.” His grandfather was Garret Wesley, an Irish gentleman of good family, made Baron of Mornington by George II., in 1747. The Wesley family has given the world another great man. It is stated that John Wesley, the preacher, belonged to it; a man whose evangelical renown is as immortal as that of the soldier. The earldom of Mornington was not a wealthy one; and, after the death of her husband, the countess—mother of the British Gracchi (for the Marquis Wellesley was also famous)—brought up her four children, of whom Arthur was the youngest, in very narrow circumstances.
At an early age the latter, not having benefited much from his education, said he would be a soldier, and was sent to Angiers in France, where he studied the science of military engineering, under the famous Pignerol, about the time Napoleon was doing the same at Brienne. Great elements of future storms were at that moment fomenting in the kingdom of France! At the age of eighteen, Arthur Wellesley having returned home, got his ensigncy. By purchase and quick promotion, he was lieutenant-colonel in his twenty-fourth year. The first campaign he engaged in was as disastrous as his last was fortunate. The enemy was the same. In 1794 he joined the army of the Duke of York, then striving to drive the French republicans out of the Netherlands. But his royal highness was driven out himself in 1795. The soft young bishop of Osnaburg was not the man to cope with the fiery generals of the Convention. Thus ended Arthur Wellesley’s first campaign.