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The Duke of Wellington
FIELD MARSHAL ARTHUR WELLESLEY, 1ST DUKE OF WELLINGTON, KG, GCB, GCH, PC, FRS (1 May 1769 - 14 September 1852), was an Anglo-Irish soldier and statesman, and one of the leading military and politic...view moreFIELD MARSHAL ARTHUR WELLESLEY, 1ST DUKE OF WELLINGTON, KG, GCB, GCH, PC, FRS (1 May 1769 - 14 September 1852), was an Anglo-Irish soldier and statesman, and one of the leading military and political figures of 19th-century Britain. His defeat of Napoléon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 put him in the top rank of Britain’s military heroes.
He was commissioned as 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. He was a colonel by 1796, and saw action in the Netherlands and in India, where he fought in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War at the Battle of Seringapatam. He was appointed governor of Seringapatam and Mysore in 1799 and, as a newly appointed major-general, won a decisive victory over the Maratha Confederacy at the Battle of Assaye in 1803.
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 Waterloo, together with a Prussian army under Blücher. Wellesley participated in some 60 battles during the course of his military career. He died in 1852.
LADY BURGHCLERE (2 July 1864 - 28 September 1933) was the daughter of Henry Howard Molyneux Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn Stanhope. She became Baroness Burghclere of Walden on 3 August 1895 owing to her marriage to Herbert Colstoun Gardner, 1st Baron Burghclere PC (1846-1921), a British Liberal politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1885 until he was raised to the peerage in 1895. Lady Burghclere died in 1933 aged 69.view less