concluded, on the 27th of July, the treaty of London, whereby France, England and Russia bound themselves to put an end to the conflict in the East and to enforce the conditions of the St Petersburg protocol upon the belligerents. Against this treaty Wellington protested, on the ground that it "specified means of compulsion which were neither more nor less than measures of war." His apprehensions were fulfilled by the battle of Navarino.
Canning died on the 8th of August 1827, and was succeeded as premier by Lord Goderich. The duke was at once again offered the post of commander-in-chief, which he accepted on the 17th of August. On the fall of Lord Goderich’s cabinet five months later Wellington became prime minister. He had declared some time before that it would be an act of madness for him to take this post; but the sense of public duty led him to accept it when it was pressed upon him by the king. His cabinet included at the first Huskisson, Palmerston and other followers of Canning. The repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts having been carried in the House of Commons in the session of 1828, Wellington, to the great disappointment of Tories like Lord Eldon, recommended the House of Lords not to offer further resistance, and the measure was accordingly carried through. Soon afterwards a quarrel between the duke and Huskisson led to the retirement from the ministry of all its more liberal members. It was now hoped by the so-called Protestant party that Wellington, at the head of a more united cabinet, would offer a steady resistance to Catholic emancipation. Never were men more bitterly disappointed. The Clare election and the progress of the Catholic Association convinced both Wellington and Peel that the time had come when Catholic emancipation must be granted; and, submitting when further resistance would have led to civil war, the ministry itself brought in at the beginning of the session of 1829 a bill for the relief of the Catholics. Wellington, who had hitherto always opposed Catholic emancipation, explained and justified his change of front in simple and impressive language. His undoubted seriousness and his immense personal reputation did not, however, save him from the excesses of calumny and misinterpretation; and in order to impose some moderation upon his aspersers the duke thought it necessary to send a challenge to one of the most violent of these, the earl of Winchelsea. No mischief resulted from the encounter.
Catholic emancipation was the great act of Wellington’s ministry; in other respects his tenure of office was not marked by much success. The imagination and the breadth of view necessary to a statesman of the highest order were not part of his endowment, nor had he the power of working harmoniously with his subordinates. His Eastern policy was singularly short-sighted. There might have been good reason, from Wellington’s point of view, for condemning Canning’s treaty of London; but when, in consequence of this treaty, the battle of Navarino had been fought, the Turkish fleet sunk, and the independence of Greece practically established, it was the weakest of all possible courses to withdraw England from its active intervention, arid to leave to Russia the gains of a private and isolated war. This, however, was Wellington’s policy; and, having permitted Russia to go to war alone in 1828, nothing remained for him but to treat Greece as a pawn in Russia’s hands, and to cut down the territory of the Greek kingdom to the narrowest possible limits, as if the restoration to the sultan of an inaccessible mountain-tract, inhabited by the bitterest of his enemies, could permanently add to the strength of the Ottoman empire. The result was the renunciation of the Greek crown by Prince Leopold; and, although, after the fall of Wellington’s ministry, a somewhat better frontier was given to Greece, it was then too late to establish this kingdom in adequate strength, and to make it, as it might have been made, a counterpoise to Russia’s influence in the Levant. Nor was the indulgence shown by the cabinet towards Dom Miguel and the absolutists of Portugal quite worthy of England. That Wellington actively assisted despotic governments against the constitutional movements of the time is not true. He had indeed none of the sympathy with national causes which began to influence British policy under Canning, and which became so powerful under Palmerston; but the rule which he followed in foreign affairs, so far as he considered it possible, was that of non-intervention.
As soon as Catholic emancipation was carried, the demand for parliamentary reform and extension of the franchise agitated Great Britain from end to end. The duke was ill informed as to the real spirit of the nation. He conceived the agitation for reform to be a purely fictitious one, worked up by partisans and men of disorder in their own interest, and expressing no real want on the part of the public at large. Met with a firm Resistance, it would, he believed, vanish away, with no worse result than the possible plunder of a few houses by the city mobs. Wholly unaware of the strength of the forces which he was provoking, the duke, at the opening of the parliament which met after the death of George IV., declared against any parliamentary reform whatever. This declaration led to the immediate fall of his government. Lord Grey, the chief of the new ministry, brought in the Reform Bill, which was resisted by Wellington as long as anything was to be gained by resistance. When the creation of new peers was known to be imminent, however, Wellington was among those who counselled the abandonment of a hopeless struggle. His opposition to reform made him for a while unpopular. He was hooted by the mob on the anniversary of Waterloo, and considered it necessary to protect the windows of Apsley House with iron shutters.
For the next two years the duke was in opposition. On the removal of Lord Althorp to the House of Lords in 1834, William IV. unexpectedly dismissed the Whig ministry and requested Wellington to form a cabinet. The duke, however, recommended that Peel should be at the head of the government, and served under him, during the few months that his ministry lasted, as foreign secretary. On Peel’s later return to power in 1841 Wellington was again in the cabinet, but without departmental office beyond that of commander-in-chief. He supported Peel in his Corn-Law legislation, and throughout all this later period of his life, whether in office or in opposition, gained the admiration of discerning men, and excited the wonder of zealots, by his habitual subordination of party spirit and party connexion to whatever appeared to him the real interest of the nation. On Peel’s defeat in 1846 the duke retired from active public life. He was now nearly eighty. His organization of the military force in London against the Chartists in April 1848, and his letter to Sir John Burgoyne on the defences of the country, proved that the old man had still something of his youth about him. But the general character of Wellington’s last years was rather that of the old age of a great man idealized. To the unbroken splendours of his military career, to his honourable and conscientious labours as a parliamentary statesman, life unusually prolonged added an evening of impressive beauty and calm. The passions excited during the stormy epoch of the Reform Bill had long passed away. Venerated and beloved by the greatest and the lowliest, the old hero entered, as it were, into the immortality of his fame while still among his countrymen. Death came to him at last in its gentlest form. He passed away on the 14th of September 1852, and was buried under the dome of St Paul’s, in a manner worthy both of the nation and of the man. His monument, by Alfred Stevens (q.v.), stands in the nave of the cathedral.
Authorities.—The Wellington Despatches, edited by Gurwood; Supplementary Despatches; and Wellington Despatches, New Series, edited by the second duke of Wellington. Unlike Napoleon’s dispatches and correspondence, everything from Wellington’s pen is absolutely trustworthy: not a word is written for effect, and no fact is misrepresented. Almost all the political memoirs of the period 1830–1850 contain more or less about Wellington in his later life. Those of Greville and Croker have perhaps most of interest. A good deal of information, from the unpublished Russian archives, is given in F. F. de Martens' Recueil des traités conclus par la Russie. See also Sir Herbert Maxwell, Life of Wellington (2 vols., London, 1900), and the literature of the Peninsular War (q.v.), Waterloo Campaign (q.v.)
WELLINGTON, a town of Wellington county. New South Wales, Australia, 248 m. by rail N.W. of Sydney. Pop. (1901) 2988. The river Macquarie is here spanned by a fine railway bridge. There are rich gold-bearing reefs in the vicinity of the
