Wellington: The Iron Duke

Richard Holmes is an eminent historian and a splendid TV presenter but, though I found his study of the great Duke of Wellington an enjoyable biography that I couldn't put down until it was finished, I also found myself being irritated on too many of the 303 pages (hardback edition) by mis-spellings and stylistic and punctuation inconsistencies. An example of the latter was the mixed and varying use of inverted commas (quote marks). My own preference is for the end of a phrase or a sentence to appear thus: '................... end,' or '..................... end.' Too often the style was thus '........................ end', or '........................... end'. Mr Holmes ought to have made up his mind which way his work was to appear or his editor ought to have been sacked! Another niggle was that the Duke's Hampshire home was named only once as 'Strathfieldsaye,' with '[sic]' to follow. Mr Holmes should have been aware that that was the original spelling and that 'Stratfield Saye' is the more modern name of the house and estate. I mustn't criticise too much, however, because I learned a lot from a very good book and I recommend it to other lovers of our British history and other admirers of one of the greatest and most courageous Britons ever to have been born.

Richard Holmes's "Wellington - The Iron Duke" is a well-written survey of the active life of the First Duke of Wellington. In just 300 pages, Holmes presents a balanced, even nuanced view of a man who was both the quintessential military professional and a complex human being. Through Holmes' efficient prose, we see Wellington as an extradinarily dedicated soldier who mastered his profession in ways few of his contemporaries did, yet who sometimes paid a price on campaign for his insistence on micromanaging his armies. Wellington comes across as a remarkably honest and duty-bound public servant; as a young man, he was also relentlessly ambitious, and as an older man, sensitive about his military reputation. Holmes provides some useful insights. He suggests that exhaustion and strain were responsible for Wellington's uncharacteristically poor performance at the Siege of Burgos in 1812. Holmes examines the academic dispute over Wellington's relationship with the Prussians during the Waterloo Campaign; he tellingly notes Wellington's responsibilities to his alliance partners and to the British Government and finds that he served both. Holmes acknowledges Wellington's extramaritial activities but resists the urge to obsess over them or to indulge in psycological speculation. Serious students of the Duke and of the Napoleonic Wars will find no new scholarship here; indeed, Holmes readily acknowledges his debt to earlier works such as Elizabeth Longford's exceptional biography and Jac Weller's battlefield narrative trilogy. Holmes has provided an accessible biography for the general reader, supported by well-chosen quotes from the Duke' contemporaries and by a nice selection of illustrations. This book is highly recommended to the general reader with an interest in the man and the era.

This is one of those books that once you take it up, you can't put it down!Its balanced treatment of Wellington the man, the military man and the politican, has meant that this is not just a book about Waterloo.One is left with the impression that Wellington was a great man, with equal weight given to his 'greatness' and his 'humanness'.Very readable and highly recommended.

The book aims to be realistic - the fog ofwar is foggy indeed, and Wellington sometimes makes mistakes. Thecasualties at Waterloo are appalling, and the battle almost lost.Lt.-Col. Trant of "Sharpe's Rangers" fame actually appears, an excellent soldier but "the most drunken dog there ever was" in Wellington's words.Unusual is the emphasis on Wellington's Indian campaign and on thePeninsular War - the period of Sharpe's Rangers is the most important inthe book. The Battle of Waterloo is treated as somewhat of anafterthought, as I suppose it was (if Nap had won it would have been a very different matter, of course). There are a number of good plates,including a daguerrotype of the Iron Duke himself in his mid-70s, lookingbuth shrewd and oddly sympathetic.