Duke of Wellington Biography

Duke of Wellington

(Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington; Dublin, Ireland, 1769-Walmer Castle, Kent, England, 1852) British military and politician.He entered the army in 1787 and years later served in India, where his brother Carlos-the Marquis of Wellesley-was governor (1796-1805).And, also following his brother, he entered politics as a Conservative deputy in the House of Commons in 1805, and served as Secretary for Ireland in 1807.

The Duke of Wellington (detail of a portrait of Goya)

In 1808 he was placed in command of the army that Great Britain sent to Portugal to fight against the French occupation of the Iberian Peninsula.In that same year he had to return to England to answer before a court for having allowed the withdrawal of the French general Jean Junot after defeating him around Lisbon.He was declared innocent and authorized to continue the direction of the Spanish War of Independence (1808-1814), which the English called the Peninsular War.

The fate of the war was unfavorable to him until 1810.But, after containing the French advance towards Lisbon in Torres Vedras (1811), he began a victorious offensive towards the center of the Peninsula, counting on the support of the autochthonous guerrilla, which weakened the military position of the French: took Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz, defeated Auguste Marmont in the battle of the Arapiles, occupied Madrid (1812), persecuted José I Bonaparte towards the north until inflicting two new defeats in Vitoria and San Marcial (1813), he crossed the Pyrenees and, already in French territory, definitively defeated Jean de Dieu Soult in Toulouse (1814).

His advance was simultaneous to that of the German and Russian troops that culminated in the Battle of Leipzig; and both allied successes determined the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons, both in Spain (Ferdinand VII) and in France (Louis XVIII).In 1815, Napoleon's unexpected return to power during the Hundred Days Empire forced his enemies to form a new coalition and send an army under the command of the Duke of Wellington, who finally defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo (1815 ).

His military services to the Crown during the Napoleonic Wars earned him successively the titles of Count, Marquis (1812) and Duke (1814) of Wellington.Later he carried out diplomatic missions; He participated in the Congress of Vienna (1815) and, as a member of the cabinet chaired by Liverpool, in those of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818) and Verona (1822).He was prime minister in 1828-30 and later minister in the governments of Robert Peel (1834-35 and 1841-46).

From those positions and that of commander-in-chief of the army, he had an undeniable influence, all the more so since the young Queen Victoria adored him.His political stance was ultra-conservative, since he considered that the English Constitution was perfect and did not need any reform (that is why he opposed, for example, the electoral reform of 1832).He was the last general to have real political power in the UK.

Comments

The colonial cast of Africa

The colonial cast of Africa by European powers was the product of the imperialism generated after the industrial revolution at the end of the 18th century.The distribution and appropriation of African lands was done, at first in disorder, and then, at the end of the 19th century, arbitrarily. When a little attention is paid to the political map of Africa it is not difficult to feel that there is something strange, something too tidy, in the borderline provision of the countries. The limits determine regions of approximately similar sizes, and in similar ways.The reason for this, it is not a coincidence, or some romantic agreement between the nations that today make up the continent. The political map of Africa , like so many others in the world, is the p roduct of the European colonization .But in the African case, the colonial cast was made without considering any kind of cultural, social, or economic factors of the region. Africa was geographically divide...

Emil fischer Biography

Emil Fischer (Euskirchen, 1852-Berlin, 1919) German chemist, Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1902 for his work on the synthesis of sugars and purines.He studied chemistry at the universities of Bonn and Strasbourg, and was an assistant professor at the latter from 1874 to 1878.In 1875 he worked as an assistant to Adolf von Baeyer in Munich and carried out his doctoral thesis with him.In 1882 he was professor of chemistry at Erlangen, three years later at Würzburg, and in Berlin in 1892, where he succeeded Hofmann in his chair. Emil Fischer His main studies correspond to the molecular structure of various biochemical molecules, especially sugars.In 1876 he discovered phenylhydrazine, a compound that would be very useful later and that caused chronic eczema.His work involved an ordering of carbohydrate chemistry, partly thanks to the use of phenylhydrazine.This research provided the synthesis of a series of sugars; his greatest success was the synthesis of glucose, fructose and mannos...

Edmund halley Biography

Edmund Halley (Edmund or Edmond Halley; London, 1656-Greenwich, Great Britain, 1742) English astronomer.He was the first to catalog the stars in the southern sky, in his work Catalogus stellarum australium .In 1682 he observed and calculated the orbit of the comet that bears his name, and announced his return at the end of 1758, according to a theory of his that defended the existence of elliptical path comets associated with the solar system.In the most important of his works, Synopsis astronomiae cometicae (1705), he applied Newton's laws of motion to all available data on comets.Among other contributions in the field of astronomy, he demonstrated the existence of proper motion in stars, which reduced the validity of the oldest observations, and studied the complete revolution of the Moon over a period of eighteen years.His Astronomical Tables , on which he worked until his death, were valid for many years. Edmund Halley Contributor From Newton in his works on the grav...

Characteristics of the National States

Next we want to talk to you in Overhistory of what are National States, what they mean and how they were formed and what consequences this formation brought to those who are modern states of today. Characteristics of National States During the second half of the 19th century, the National States will be brewing, after a long evolutionary process that dates back to the rise of the Modern States in the 15th and 15th centuries XVI. We will now see what are the main characteristics of these political systems. In the National States, as the name implies, the idea of the "Nation" will be vital. We could describe the "nation" as a large community of individuals "united by a history, a culture, an ethnic composition and a language in common." But, as we explained in the article dedicated to the modern states and the national states , in practice many states included several nations within their borders.In other cases, such as the American count...

Prehistory: Neolithic societies who, when and where?

We were previously working on the Paleolithic period , in which the societies were characterized by a way of life based on the hunting and the collection. We saw "when and where" these men lived; and also "how they lived".Now we find a new stage of the prehistory , the period Neolithic .Man becomes a farmer, and from this there will be very radical changes in the history of humanity . Illustration representing women working in the agriculture Temporary Location It is considered that the beginning of agriculture was around 10,000 BC at that time, there was a great climate change on Earth.It was the end of the glaciation : removal of ice, rising temperature and rising sea and ocean level. The historical period that is associated with The first farmer societies is the " Neolithic ".This period begins around 8,000 BC and extends until 3,000 BC (when considered ending prehistory ). Spatial Location The transition from ...

Albert I of Belgium Biography

Albert I of Belgium (Brussels, 1875-Marche-les-Dames, 1934) King of Belgium (1909-34), nephew and successor of King Leopold II of Belgium.Son of Philip, Count of Flanders, and Princess Maria de Hohenzollern, from childhood he received a careful education and entered the prestigious École Militaire de Bruxelles.In 1900 he married Princess Isabel de Baviera, with whom he had two children: Leopoldo Felipe Carlos, future King Leopoldo III, and Carlos Teodoro Enrique. Albert I of Belgium That same year he made a long trip through the Belgian Congo in which he examined the hardships and needs that the territory demanded, so that, On his return, he recommended to the government the need to build a railway network in the colony, in addition to demanding a radical change in the treatment of its indigenous inhabitants, treated as slaves. In 1913, already as King of Belgium, Albert I made a diplomatic visit to Berlin, where he was informed by the German Emperor himself, Wilhelm II, of th...

Alexandr Nicholov Protoguerov Biography

Alexandr Nicholov Protoguerov (Buldgaria, 1867-1928) Bulgarian nationalist leader who headed the Macedonian Inner Revolutionary Organization.This organization was created in 1893 to prevent the secession of Macedonia from Bulgaria and carried out a constant terrorist policy against the Turks, who had achieved dominance of Macedonia in the Treaty of Berlin (1878), at the time that Bulgaria consummated its independence. The organization headed by Protoguerov urged the Bulgarian government to enter the First World War, on the side of Germany, with the desire to build Greater Bulgaria, since Bulgaria had already established itself as a kingdom as early as 1908.Defeat in the war led to territorial cuts for Bulgaria and discontent was reflected in the revival of rival Macedonian organizations, led by Protoguerov, Todor Alexandrov and Ivancho Mihailov. These organizations fought openly against each other and dominated the politics of Bulgaria, until they were crushed in 1934.In 1923 Al...

The Church in the Middle Ages: influence and power

In a previous post we talked about Christianity and how I influence during the Middle Ages .Time of greater prominence and both political and economic power.We will tell you what exactly this power consisted of and how it was held ideologically. Index of the article The Middle Ages The Middle Ages is one of the most fascinating stages in history, a period that is strongly characterized by the existence of the Feudal System or Feudalism .A world of nobles, peasants, tributes, vassals, feuds, and weakened monarchies.But beyond this, the medieval world was dominated by the Catholic Church or Christian.that is essential that in order to understand the development of the middle ages, we investigate in depth the importance of Medieval Church . D In fact, we can say that the Catholic church had an influence on all the orders of life of the medieval age, and no sector of society remained oblivious to these influences. Various circumstances explain this extraordinary ecclesi...

Gustav Holst Biography

Gustav Holst (Gustave Theodore von Holst; Cheltenham, 1874-London, 1934) English composer of Swedish origin.A disciple of Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music in London, he became, like his teacher, a passionate folklorist.After having been an orchestral musician for some time, from 1903 he devoted himself to teaching, an activity that he exercised first at Dulwich, later at Morley College, and, finally, as a composition teacher, at the Royal College of Music.. He is the author of one of the most performed and recorded pages in the repertoire: The Planets , which in a certain sense has obscured, if not totally eclipsed, the rest of his production.He showed throughout his life a growing interest in Hindu philosophy and culture, which inspired some of his most important compositions, such as the chamber opera Savitri , which would come to exert a profound influence on the most important composers.young people, with Benjamin Britten at the helm.His daughter Imoge...

The medieval knight in combat

At the beginning of the eleventh century, some warriors on horseback distinguished themselves from the mass of free men.Why? Between the 8th and 9th centuries, the methods of combat had been radically transformed, and only a small number of people knew how to master the select service of weapons and become a knight . If we see in a movie an army full of thousands of thousands of knights, or a man who gets on a horse and automatically fights like a medieval knight , we must never lose sight of the fact that this is pure fiction and, it goes without saying, an insult to the work and education that the Knights of the Middle Ages carried out for years. Being a gentleman was extremely difficult .First of all, it required money.Horses, weapons , and the armors were among the most expensive objects of that time. The cavalry was increasingly taking center stage in the story medieval , was not always made up of powerful warriors and lords. The Carolingian fighter In the time ...

History Today Online

Search This Blog