ABSTRACT
The passage of the Reform Bill, the failure of his friends to support his heroic attempt to temper and control parliamentary change when it had become inevitable, and the reaction from the intense political activity of the last six years, plunged the Duke of Wellington into a depression from which he did not easily recover. ‘It is terrible how all our friends croak,’ Charles Arbuthnot told his son almost a year later:
Between ourselves, no one is worse than the Duke. To hear him, there is no hope of our being saved from revolution. I trust he is wrong: but wrong or right, the hearing from morn till night that we are going fast the way the French went 40 yrs. ago is very painful, & it makes me very much wish to live at Woodford.
