ARTHUR WELLESLEY, 1st DUKE of WELLINGTON ~ c.April 29/May 1, 1769 ~ September 14, 1852

Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, KG, KP, GCB, GCH, PC, FRS (c. 29 April/1 May 1769 – 14 September 1852), was an Anglo-Irish soldier and statesman, and one of the leading military and political figures of the nineteenth century.

Born in Ireland to a prominent Ascendancy family, he was commissioned an ensign in the British Army in 1787. Serving in Ireland as aide-de-camp to two successive Lords Lieutenant of Ireland he was also elected as a Member of Parliament in the Irish House of Commons. A colonel by 1796, Wellesley saw action in the Netherlands and later India where he fought in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War at the Battle of Seringapatam. He was later appointed governor of Seringapatam and Mysore.
Wellesley rose to prominence as a general during the Peninsular campaign of the Napoleonic Wars, and was promoted to the rank of field marshal after leading the allied forces to victory against the French at the Battle of Vitoria in 1813. Following Napoleon's exile in 1814, he served as the ambassador to France and was granted a Dukedom. During the Hundred Days in 1815, he commanded the allied army which defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.

An opponent of parliamentary reform, he was given the epithet the "Iron Duke" because of the iron shutters he had fixed to his windows to stop the pro-reform mob from breaking them. He was twice Prime Minister under the Tory party and oversaw the passage of the Catholic Relief Act 1829. He was Prime Minister from 1828–30 and served briefly in 1834. He was unable to prevent the passage of the Reform Act of 1832 and continued as one of the leading figures in the House of Lords until his retirement. He remained Commander-in-Chief of the British Army until his death in 1852.

Image & Text:wikipedia.com

BATTLE OF WATERLOO ~ June 18, 1815

Wellington at Waterloo by Robert Alexander Hillingford

In the Battle of Waterloo (Sunday 18 June 1815 near Waterloo, Belgium) forces of the French Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte and Michel Ney were defeated by those of the Seventh Coalition, including a Prussian army under the command of Gebhard von Blücher and an Anglo-Allied army under the command of the Duke of Wellington. It was the decisive battle of the Waterloo Campaign and Bonaparte's last. The defeat at Waterloo put an end to Napoleon's rule as the French emperor, and marked the end of Napoleon's Hundred Days of return from exile.

Upon Napoleon's return to power in 1815, many states that had opposed him formed the Seventh Coalition and began to mobilise armies. Two large forces under Wellington and von Blücher assembled close to the northeastern border of France. Napoleon chose to attack in the hope of destroying them before they could join in a coordinated invasion of France with other members of the Coalition. The decisive engagement of this three-day Waterloo Campaign (16 June - 19 June 1815) occurred at the Battle of Waterloo. According to Wellington, the battle was "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life."

Napoleon delayed giving battle until noon on 18 June to allow the ground to dry. Wellington's army, positioned across the Brussels road on the Mont St Jean escarpment, withstood repeated attacks by the French, until, in the evening, the Prussians arrived in force and broke through Napoleon's right flank. At that moment, the British counter-attacked and drove the French army in disorder from the field. Pursuing Coalition forces entered France and restored Louis XVIII to the French throne. Napoleon abdicated, surrendering to the British, and was exiled to Saint Helena, where he died in 1821.

The battlefield is in present-day Belgium, about eight miles (12 km) SSE of Brussels, and about a mile (1.6 km) from the town of Waterloo. The site of the battlefield is today dominated by a large mound of earth, the Lion's Hillock. As this mound used earth from the battlefield itself, the original topography has not been preserved.

Image & text:wikipedia.com

I'm not really sure how I first became fascinated with Napoleon Bonaparte. It may have been the movie Desiree, I saw as a very young boy. But I do remember one August at my grandfather's summer house, Zavikon. I sometimes talked and walked in my sleep, and wondered whether I might be able to meet Napoleon... at least in my dreams. I think I was six or seven at the time. Part of the fascination with Napoleon was, and is, that he was a "Great Man" with serious flaws, and almost literally a Prometheus figure: that is, chained to a rock. Of course he wasn't literally chained, but he was stuck there. But think if he had succeeded. There would have been no World War I or II, and Europe would have been unified economically more than it is today, and certainly much sooner. Nevertheless, there was that problem with hubris, and militarism.

I do believe Napoleon was poisoned by his Royalist aide on St. Helena. Supposedly when they exhumed his body more than twenty years later for his re-burial at Les Invalides, his flesh was still uncorrupted. That, I believe, is a symptom of arsenic poisoning. He might still be intact!!

Anyway, before I moved to California, an old lady from my Dad's church invited me over to her apartment and gave me a very handsome bisque bust of Napoleon. She said that I had admired it, and it was for my Napoleon collection. I had never seen it before. I'm acquisitive enough, that if I had seen it, I certainly would have remembered it. But I accepted it graciously. Then my first year in San Francisco, I found my stained glass window of Napoleon, and figured: "O.K. I guess I do have a Napoleon collection." So now I have dozens of books, coins, medals, wine glasses, busts, plaques, and original political cartoons. Who cudda figured?

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June 18th, is also the 63rd birthday of the Kaczyński twins, the late President and the former Prime Minister of Poland. They were both short, absolutist, and both seemed -- and the survivor still seems-- to have a Napoleon complex!