Wellington

Soldier, hero, and politician, the Duke of Wellington is one of the best-known figures of nineteenth-century England. From his victory at Waterloo over Napoleon in 1815, he rose to become prime minister of his country. But Peter Sinnema finds equal fascination in Victorian England’s response to the Duke’s death. The Wake of Wellington considers Wellington’s spectacular funeral pageant in the fall of 1852—an unprecedented event that attracted one and a half million spectators to London—as a threshold event against which the life of the soldier-hero and High-Tory statesman could be re-viewed and represented. Canvassing a profuse and dramatically proliferating Wellingtoniana, Sinnema examines the various assumptions behind…

A film charting the life of Arthur Wellesley, better known as the Duke of Wellington, an extraordinary man whose thrilling life on the battlefield was just as interesting off it. Military historian and presenter Professor Richard Holmes tells the story of Britain's greatest-ever soldier. Wellington was a brilliant figure, idealistic in politics, cynical in love yet irresistible to women, a man of enormous personal courage, often sickened by the horror of war.