ABSTRACT
When he joined the cabinet ministers at the end of 1818 the Duke of Wellington neither entered a company of strangers nor came among them as a political neophyte. A decade before he had served as Chief Secretary for Ireland in the Duke of Portland’s government, and many of his colleagues now had been his colleagues then. The present Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, had been Home Secretary, and later as Secretary of State for War from 1809 to 1812 had been responsible for Wellington’s operations in the Peninsula. Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons, the chief pillar of Liverpool’s ministry and the Duke’s closest political friend, had been at the War Office in Portland’s government. Lord Bathurst, the present Secretary of State for War with whom Wellington had been in practically daily correspondence since 1812, had sat with him in Portland’s cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. In 1818 Lord Eldon still presided over the House of Lords, endeavouring to snare reform in the thickets of the law as Lord Chancellor as he had in Portland’s day; the son of a Newcastle coal merchant, he had even less reason than the Duke to complain of the exclusiveness of the barriers to advancement. George Canning, who had been Foreign Secretary when Wellington went to the Peninsula, was at a low point in his erratic career in 1818, working his way back into favour by way of Indian affairs in the relatively lowly office of President of the Board of Control. Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, was the only principal minister with whom the Duke had not served before; from 1801 to 1804 he had been Prime Minister as George III’s Protestant saviour when Pitt had insisted on Catholic emancipation following the Act of Union with Ireland.
