Well, here's a very partial start.
The Queen is most certain that all the Catholics must surely bless the Duke; Peel; and Gladstone for the most worthy efforts made on their behalf – but, oh!, the bigotry and un-Christian hatred of the Protestant factions!
–Victoria RI to Lord Ebrington
The Queen is sure – poor Sir Robert – and the Duke, of course – ought to be blessed by all Catholics for the many and noble ways in which each stands forth to protect and do good for poor Ireland. But the bigotry, the wicked and blind passion it brings forth, is quite dreadful, and the Queen quite blushes for Protestantism!
–Victoria RI to the Prince Consort
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Some writers have described the duke’s concern with Ireland – at once as a source of potential disaffection and as the primary reservoir of soldiers for the Crown – as an obsession. This is hardly fair; nor does it do justice to Wellington’s most primary motives for concerning himself with the Irish Question, Catholic Emancipation, and the repeal of the Corn Laws.
Wellington’s abiding concern for the welfare of Ireland was of a piece with his devotion to the Crown, and was set in stone by events in the Peninsula. The Catholic clergy of Irish extraction who played so dominating a part in the duke’s system of intelligence, in Spain, have a fair claim to be regarded as the godfathers of Irish renewal within the Empire, and Salamanca as the seminary of our political catechism….
–Sir John Mitchel Gavan Duffy MP: A History of Irish Renewal, vol. IV: Conciliation and Constitutional Reform in the Reign of Queen Victoria
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The Duke of Wellington sees Ireland as the source of our soldiery and free trade as the sinews of our strength. Smuggling he regards, not as a fraud upon the Exchequer only, but as an imposition upon the publick, who are taxed largely so as to make up the revenue lost. It is rumoured that there is to be a Bill in the parliament next called, to reform the Civil List and the Estimates in return for an assumption of direct government over the Manx and the Channel Islanders: in the latter case, as I suppose, for better security against the French, but, in the main – all because of a few smugglers, and coast-guards and excise-men who will not do their duties! A more absurd proceeding I have never heard of....
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Maynooth! All depends upon it, to be sure. It is there that the stability of the Throne in Ireland rests, and no exertion can be too great to keep it within the orbit of British loyalties.
–The duke of Wellington, to Mr Gladstone
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It is quite true that Wellington at all times regarded Ireland as a purely military problem. Being the Duke, however, he regarded everything, from free trade to Fenianism to foreign relations, as a purely military problem: as poor Kitty, the Duchess, learnt soon enough.
– Sir Philip Guedalla OM
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One may, by way of example, all too easily imagine the consequences of a disaffected Ireland. Had her firmament’s best and brightest stars been labelled rebels and transported to make some constellation in the Antipodes, or fled to add stars to the American banner, Ireland, Australia, and the United States alike might today be the greatest foes of a merely English ‘Britain’. In the same manner, one might conjecture that a failure to repeal the Corn Laws and to enact Catholic Emancipation – or even the delay of these measures – might have driven Gladstone into the ranks of Whiggery. It is precisely the imagining of such unimaginable dangers and unlikely fates that lends alternative history its frisson; it is in the working out of a plausible series of happenstances, to support such alternatives, that alternative history trains and concentrates the historian’s mind.
– Professor Fergus O’Neill, TCD: ‘Preface’, Had It Happened Otherwise: an Alternative History (ed.)
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... the duke of W––––––n, if rumour is to be credited, is working hard upon Brougham and the Scotch in the Irish & papist cause, w/ what shew of success one cannot imagine. I make certain that this is all of it due to the malign influence of Croker.
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It was typical of Peel that he sought to bind the Irish and indeed the Scots to an increasingly British and Union Crown by chains of gold: jobbery and rotten boroughs had been his forcing-school as a young Member. It was equally characteristic that Gladstone, even as a very junior partner in the enterprise, should have sought to grapple the other nations to England with bands of iron. It was left – to the surprise only of those who knew only the public man – to the Iron Duke to bind Ireland and Scotland more securely to the United Kingdom by bonds of interest, affection and conciliation.
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The Wellesley brothers had regarded their father Mornington’s Irish earldom, and the marquessate later bestowed upon Richard in the peerage of Ireland, as merely ‘gilt potatoes’. Yet as sober – not to say cunning – statesmen, they were well aware that a considerable number of Irishmen, and especially of Catholic Irishmen, were voracious of these staples of the honours system, and that, properly managed, the system of honours and peerages, even of an Irish creation, would feed, sate, and stop the mouths of almost all of those Irishmen lean and hungry for place and preferment: particularly those now freed by Catholic Emancipation to take their seats at table and sup with their Protestant fellows. If the potatoes were gilt, that but sweetened the taste to many. Most of those who might otherwise have agitated for rebellion and Irish secession were thereby rendered somnolent, in a well-fed, unthreatening lethargy of postprandial drowse.
– Sir Philip Guedalla OM
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I, unlike Grant ‘El Bueno’, had not so much to do with the intelligencers who supported the guerilleros. Yet I met with not a few of the Irish in Spain, and I must say that I found them to be, albeit papists and Jesuits, quite gentlemanly and remarkably brave men.
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The escape of the Cardinal Secretary of State, Consalvi, from French captivity, on what appears to have been a sudden, if happy, impulse on the part of the escaping Colquhoun Grant, might easily have led to the death of Pope Pius VII: a second papal martyrdom at the hands of Buonaparte. It was the disasters that befell French arms in 1812 that saved His Holiness. Yet who can now say that Consalvi – the future Pius VIII in succession to his master – acted rashly, let alone wrongly? Pius VII was to assert that Consalvi had acted at all times in accordance with that pope’s policy; and if Consalvi alone, freed from French imprisonment and censorship, could not quite enlist the banner of the subjugated Papal States in the Coalition, he did all that he could do short of that official and formal step. His subsequent election to the papacy, in a bitterly contested conclave in which the backers of Della Gagna were overtly committed to repudiating and reversing the policies of Pius VII, was a godsend to Great Britain and her allies; and his attitude towards Ireland, no less than that he adopted towards Canada and the United States, made the life of successive ministers of the Crown a good deal easier.
– Sir Philip Guedalla OM
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So far as Scotland went, naturally, it was not by the fragile leaves of the Queen’s Highland journal, but by the iron and steam of the railways, that the Tories succeeded in grappling, as Gladstone had dreamt, the constituent nations together with iron and steel. It is a curious monument to poor Huskisson’s efforts, in light of his ironic death.
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That a commander who – as I knew all too well – was willing to move at daybreak and dine upon cold meat in order to defend the liberty of, not his own nation alone, but all Europe, should be equally diligent as a statesman in perseverant conciliation of a long-depressed people, is only what I should have expected of that great man whom I was honoured to call a friend.
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The philanthropy and gracious condescension of England to Ireland was merely an expression of commercial interest, and no more. Behind the charity of a Lady Burdett-Coutts was the predatory capitalism of Coutts & Co., bankers in the Strand.
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The Duke of Wellington’s compliments to Sir Robert Peel, and will Sir Robert dine with the Duke, at Apsley House, on Friday next?
– The letter that began it all
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