Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, first duke of

Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, first duke of (1769–1852), soldier and statesman, who fought in the Indian Campaign (1799–1803), the Peninsular Campaign (1808–14), and was the hero of the battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815) at which Napoleon was decisively defeated. He first became a national figure with the victory of Talavera in 1809, and was created marquess of Douro and duke of Wellington in 1814. He was prime minister 1828–30, and secretary of state for foreign affairs 1834–5. Known as the ‘Iron Duke’, or, more familiarly, as ‘Old Nosey’, he was much portrayed by caricaturists. Although a less romantic figure than Napoleon, his exploits and his phlegmatic utterances (e.g. ‘Publish and be damned’, attributed to him) caught the imagination of contemporary and later writers: the battle of Waterloo is depicted in Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (Canto 3, xxi, ‘There was a sound of revelry by night’) and in Vanity Fair; he inspired much of the Juvenilia of C. Brontë; and he appears in historical novels by A. C. Doyle, Henty, and others. By the queen's wishes he was given the most magnificent state funeral ever accorded to a subject, a pageant commemorated in Tennyson's ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ (1852).