In the Shadow of the Iron Duke

from the Times Literary Supplement
In the shadow of the Iron Duke


As seen by a descendant of the Duke of Wellington: the secret misfortunes of his family
Jane Ridley

...The first Duke left a glorious legacy; but he also bequeathed a troubled inheritance. Like many public figures, “the greatest man England has known” did not enjoy spending time with his family. Wellesley gives a sympathetic account of Kitty Pakenham, his wife. As a penniless younger son in Ireland, Arthur Wellesley proposed to Kitty and was rejected by her family as not being good enough. When he returned from India fourteen years later, a major-general on the make, he proposed again without even seeing her. “She is grown damned ugly, by Jove!” he allegedly remarked when at last they met. Kitty had grown neurotic and depressive too, and Wellesley relates the story of the Iron Duke’s unforgiving cruelty towards his reclusive but obsessively adoring wife. Towards his children he was equally hard. “My father never showed the least affection for any of us”, recalled his son. Not surprisingly perhaps, the two sons of the great man grew up lacking in confidence.

The grateful nation voted the Iron Duke a house at Stratfield Saye, but there was never quite enough money to support it. The Wellington survival strategy was to marry money. As many as three dukes married heiresses to cotton fortunes. Most unconventional of these heiresses was Wellesley’s grandmother, Dorothy Ashton. She divorced her husband Gerry, later the seventh Duke, when her son Valerian was only seven. Even today Valerian is reluctant to talk about the trauma and disgrace of his parents’ divorce. Only towards the end of the book does Wellesley reveal that Dorothy, who was a friend of W. B. Yeats and herself wrote poetry, belonged to the lesbian coterie that revolved around Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Dorothy's lonely life ended in depression and drink, but her defiance of social convention was “unbearable” for the upper-class Wellesleys, and it led to a family rift. Another blot on the family honour was the fifth Duke, who was a member of the pro-Nazi Right Club.

Jane Wellesley has written this book partly as a tribute to her parents. Because they are both alive she cannot perhaps be quite as candid as she might; she says little about her own childhood, for example. Her father is evidently a good man, a brave soldier and an excellent Duke, but he has survived by locking the skeletons into the family closets. In this sympathetic and enjoyable book, Wellesley invites the ghosts to take their place at the family feast.


Jane Wellesley
WELLINGTON
A journey through my family
384pp. Orion. £20.
978 0 297 85231 5


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