M.E. Bradford
The Duke of Wellington was an exemplar of an older England—an England bound by blood, not interest. He affirmed the very English equality of manhood, which comes with honorable service in the line, the rule that he who is with the king on St. Crispin’s Day shall be by him called “brother.”
The Great Duke, by Sir Arthur Bryant (William Morrow and Company, 1972)
Wellington: The Years of the Sword, by Elizabeth Longford (Harper and Row, 1969)
Wellington: The Pillar of State, by Elizabeth Longford (Harper and Row, 1972)
I
For the purposes of intellectual history, it may reasonably be argued that there have been four crucial moments or water sheds in the formation of the Western world as we know it now. In other words, each of these four were “ideological” explosions that made a genuine difference in the configuration of things—a seemingly irreversible difference. And on these surges toward modernity have, turned the fortunes of the race, European and otherwise. But the English Revolution of the 1640s, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, and the Russian Rebellion of 1918 are not best explained as unfolding from the Zeitgeist, pages in an impersonal schematic survey drawn up in the manner of Vico, Marx, or Hegel. For men, as embodiments of personal will, stood at the center of these movements, shaped their course, and finally determined their consequence: Men whose lives, in stark human terms, resonate with and summarize the meaning of their day. As protagonists or antagonists, they make their particular moment concrete. And assuredly Arthur Wellesley, the Iron Duke of Wellington, is one of this special company.
Of course, it is impossible to separate the life of Wellington from that of his great adversary or from the sequence of events which brought that enterprising Corsican to power. For Wellington in the first half of his career successfully opposed Napoleonic France in arms; » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/10/last-great-englishmean-arthur-wellesley-m-e-bradford.html