Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington” c.1815 by Sir Thomas LAWRENCE (1769-1830)
(Picture: English Heritage)The first, unworthy thought that most of us will have about an exhibition billed as Wellington, Women and Friendship is that it will be about the Duke’s mistresses. Well, shame on us. This small exhibition – one drawing room, plus the downstairs exhibition space – robustly asserts that the great man in fact set a great deal of store by women as friends. Alas, that didn’t include his poor wife.
As for the mistresses, the curator Josephine Oxley says robustly that we simply don’t know whether his close friendships with women were sexual; the evidence simply isn’t there. Well, certainly the cartoonists and gossips thought otherwise. The exception is the celebrated courtesan Harriet Wilson, whom the young Wellington did in fact visit before his marriage. And it was the prospect of the publication of her memoirs, including her gentleman friends, that elicited his celebrated observation: “Publish and be damned”. She did and she may have been, but Wellington emerges from those memoirs as a bit of a dud in that particular context.
