London - The Duke of Wellington was the most famous man in Europe. At the Battle of Waterloo, almost 200 years ago in June 1815, he defeated his greatest opponent, Napoleon, and assured Britain’s status as top dog in the world.
He was showered with money, honours — and romantic attentions from the prettiest women in the country.
And, as a new BBC programme showed this week, he accepted with pleasure, indulging his vigorous sexual appetite with a veritable harem of admirers.
Also featured in the programme, starring Richard E. Grant as Wellington, was Kitty Wellington, the Iron Duke’s poor, betrayed wife — almost entirely forgotten by history.
She isn’t forgotten by me, though. I have been moved by her melancholy tale since childhood, when I discovered she was my great-great-great-great aunt.
The story of her ill-matched marriage to Wellington is an intensely sad one. Kitty was born in grand circumstances in Ireland, not far from Wellington’s childhood home. When he first proposed to her, Kitty’s smart family rejected the penniless soldier.
But when the couple married more than a decade later, the tables had turned. Wellington was on the road to becoming the greatest living Englishman.
By then, Kitty had lost her looks — as Wellington cruelly pointed out — and she became a nervous recluse, desperate at not living up to the expectations of her glorious husband.
How heart-breaking it was this week to see the one tiny picture of her in the current Wellington exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.
The show’s centrepiece is a world-famous 1814 portrait of Wellington by the Spanish master, Goya, begun just after Wellington defeated the French in the Peninsular War.
It is only one of dozens of pictures of Britain’s greatest military hero in the exhibition.
A few yards away, in a quiet corner, there is that single sketch, in black and red chalk, of Kitty. It was drawn by Sir Thomas Lawrence in the same year, 1814, as the majestic Goya, but the contrast couldn’t be greater.
Forty-one-year-old Kitty has bags under her eyes, her lips are set in a stern expression and she plays nervously with the ribbons around her neck. A year before Wellington’s stunning victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, it is hard not to diagnose a deep malaise in Kitty’s drawn countenance.
Everything looked so much rosier 20 years earlier, when Wellington met Kitty, the beautiful, young girl. She was then the Honourable Catherine Pakenham, daughter of Lord Longford, of Pakenham Hall, County Westmeath — one of the grandest piles in Ireland, since renamed Tullynally Castle and still lived in by the Pakenhams.
Recent Pakenhams include prison reformer Lord Longford, his wife, Elizabeth Longford, Wellington’s biographer, and the writers, Thomas Pakenham, Lady Antonia Fraser and Lady Rachel Billington.
Thirty miles from Pakenham Hall lies Dangan Castle — now in ruins, but then home to Lord Mornington, elder brother of one Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington. In 1792, when young Arthur courted pretty little Kitty at Pakenham Hall, he was certainly a looker; but his prospects were dim. Dangan Castle was mortgaged to the hilt, and the family were so short of cash that Wellesley was taken out of Eton early.
So, when Wellesley proposed to Kitty in 1793, her family refused. Her brother, the new Lord Longford, didn’t allow the marriage “for prudential motives” — and Arthur and Kitty were forbidden from seeing each other again.
How much better it would have been if Arthur and Kitty had listened to her cautious little brother and given up their blossoming relationship.
Arthur headed off to serve, with dazzling distinction, in India. And, for 12 long years, he cherished a romantic picture of the youthful Kitty.
In 1805, he asked Lord Longford again for her hand in marriage. This time, Longford, impressed by the triumphant general, gave his permission — but disastrously, Arthur hadn’t seen his bride for more than a decade.
“She has grown ugly, by Jove!” Wellington is reported to have said to his brother before the 1806 marriage.
They went through with the wedding but, within six months, Arthur was suffering “domestic annoyances” over Kitty’s mismanagement of the household budget.
“She was supposed to run this household and she had never had one,” says Eliza Pakenham, Kitty’s great-great-great-great niece and the author of her biography, Soldier And Sailor. “It was a household that everyone was watching, a household for someone who was used to running armies, who wanted everything to be tip-top.”
Wellington also wanted Kitty to be a society hostess and media darling. Nothing could have horrified Kitty more. She had been brought up by her Calvinist mother to think any showing-off was wrong.
“It was a misfortune to be paired with the man of the century,” says Eliza Pakenham, “It was a bit like Lady Di and Prince Charles. Kitty thought being in the public eye was almost sinful.”
It didn’t help that Kitty was wonderfully unvain. She wore the same clothes for years on end. When a friend congratulated her on a false story about her being dressed in diamonds and feathers, Kitty said: “My diamonds are yet in the mine and my hummingbirds yet wear their feathers.”
The handsome Duke — with his growing pile of military honours and titles after the victories in Spain and at Waterloo — was not averse to the deserved splendour that came with such triumphs. He complained that Kitty looked more like a shepherdess than a duchess, in her white muslin, a basket dangling off her arm.
“Could you not do with a wig?” he asked her once, lifting up her greying hair. Kitty refused. And, at the grand dinners at Stratfield Saye — the Hampshire mansion given to Wellington by a grateful nation — she preferred to sit with the children’s tutor, says Eliza Pakenham.
“If she’d been with someone less impatient, less sure of himself, more tolerant, she wouldn’t have become so nervous and irritating to Wellington.”
Motherhood didn’t help the marriage. Their sons, Arthur and Charles, were born just before Wellington left to fight in the Peninsular War — for three months in 1808, and then from 1809 until 1814.
For five years, Kitty was in a little unit of three with her beloved boys. When Wellington returned, he insisted the children should go to boarding school.
Kitty, says Eliza Pakenham, “was in floods of tears” when her children went to Eton. “He found her too interested and over-anxious about children.
“And the children were frightened of him. It wasn’t what she was used to: Kitty had grown up in a close family, devoted to her siblings.”
To make things worse, one of those siblings, Sir Edward Pakenham, who served under Wellington in the Peninsular War, was killed in 1815 at the Battle of New Orleans, only months before Waterloo. When Wellington beat Napoleon at Waterloo, Kitty was still mourning her beloved baby brother.
And then there were the women . . . Wellington was reputed to have had affairs before and after their marriage, in India and during the Peninsular War.
As British Ambassador in Paris in 1814 — when that drawing of Kitty was done — Wellington was reputed to behave like a rutting stag. He caroused with a singer, Giuseppina Grassini, and an actress, Marguerite Weimer, known as Mademoiselle Georges — both previously Napoleon’s mistresses!
There was talk of Wellington having liaisons with society beauties Lady Frances Wedderburn-Webster and Lady Charlotte Greville. He also formed a romantic friendship with Harriet Arbuthnot, the Treasury Secretary’s wife.
In letters to her, he deeply regretted marrying Kitty. ‘Is it not the most extraordinary thing you ever heard of!’ he said, “Would you have believed that anybody could have been such a damned fool? I was not the least in love with her. I married her because they asked me to do it & I did not know myself.
“I thought I should never care for anybody again, & that I shd be with the army, &, in short I was a fool.”
There were rumours, too, that Wellington had an affair with the steamy London courtesan, Harriette Wilson.
A Cruikshank cartoon in the National Portrait Gallery show displays Wilson to best effect, with a low-cut gown revealing her generous bust.
When a publisher threatened to print her racy memoirs in 1825, exposing the affair, unless Wellington paid him off, the Duke coined the memorable line: “Publish and be damned.”
Loyal, betrayed Kitty stuck by Wellington until she died, probably from stomach cancer, in 1831, at 58.
Still, there was time for one last, heart-stopping reconciliation. On her deathbed, she ran her fingers up Wellington’s arm to see if he still wore an armlet she had given him years before.
“She found it,” Wellington said to Mrs Arbuthnot, “as she would have found it any time these 20 years, had she cared to look.
“It is a strange thing that two people can live together for half a lifetime and only understand one another at the very end.”
Forty years after Arthur and Kitty had courted so happily in County Westmeath, they rediscovered the spark of a love that went so heart-breakingly wrong.
* Wellington: The Iron Duke Unmasked, BBC2, is available on bbc iplayer.
Daily Mail