Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, was an Anglo-Irish statesman, soldier, and Tory politician who was one of the leading military and political figures of 19th-century Britain, serving twice as prime minister of the United Kingdom. He is among the commanders who won and ended the Napoleonic Wars when the Seventh Coalition defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
Wellesley spent much of his early childhood at his family's ancestral home, Dangan Castle in County Meath, Ireland (engraving, 1842).
Beginning in 1787, Wellesley served at Dublin Castle (pictured) as aide-de-camp to two successive Lords Lieutenant of Ireland
Wellesley as Lieutenant Colonel, aged c. 26, in the 33rd Regiment. Portrait by John Hoppner.
Wellesley in India, wearing his major-general's uniform. Portrait by Robert Home, 1804.
Battle of Waterloo
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The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18 June 1815, near Waterloo, marking the end of the Napoleonic Wars. A French army under the command of Napoleon was defeated by two armies of the Seventh Coalition. One of these was a British-led force with units from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Hanover, Brunswick, and Nassau, under the command of the Duke of Wellington. The other comprised three corps of the Prussian army under Field Marshal Blücher, a fourth corps of this army fought at the Battle of Wavre on the same day. The battle was known contemporarily as the Battle of Mont Saint-Jean in France or La Belle Alliance in Prussia.
The strategic situation in Western Europe in 1815: 250,000 Frenchmen faced about 850,000 allied soldiers on four fronts. In addition, Napoleon was forced to leave 20,000 men in Western France to reduce a royalist insurrection.
The resurgent Napoleon's strategy was to isolate the Anglo-allied and Prussian armies and annihilate each one separately.
Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher commanded the Prussian army, one of the Coalition armies that defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig
Marshal Michel Ney, who exercised tactical control of the greater part of the French forces for most of the battle