ABSTRACT
After his departure from office, Mrs Arbuthnot was delighted to find her friend enjoying his freedom and ‘the power of sitting in the dolce far niente.’ She thought he would never be bored for he read a great deal, had bought hunters and was busy setting his own county to rights: ‘Time does not hang the least upon his hands.’ 1 But the amusements of country life, the satisfaction of dealing with the rioters in Hampshire and the solace of the printed page were no substitute for the great affairs to which he was accustomed. He told Croker that he was ‘essentially, and by his position and his duty, a public man, and will continue so long as life and intellect last.’ Unlike Peel, who was professing a desire to retire to private life, the Duke saw it as his essential task to ‘keep the party together; not to oppose – nay, to support – the King’s Government in all that may tend to the public safety, but to observe them, and if they attempt any thing hostile to our institutions, to oppose.’ 2 At a banquet for the fifty odd members of his administration at Apsley House, he expressed the hope that those who had turned him out would soon rally behind him once more. When the Duke of Gordon, proposing his health, looked forward to the command, ‘As you were!’, Wellington replied: ‘No, not as you were, but much better!’ 3
