Mon 5 July 2010
Talk
The Duke of Wellington and Russia
by Mr Ian Roberts
Programme of the GB Russia Society
Language: In English
To book/pay for tickets for this lecture, go to the GB Russia Society booking page
The Duke of Wellington’s relationship with Russia lasted from 1814 until his death in 1852 and can be divided into three parts:
From 1814 to 1818, the Duke’s involvement was with Emperor Alexander I, as a soldier and diplomat, and included his appointment as Ambassador in Paris, attendance at the Congress of Vienna, Waterloo and subsequent appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Occupation Force in France, which included a Russian brigade.
From 1818 to 1825, the Duke became involved in Russian affairs as a politician. In 1826 he was sent to Russia by George Canning.
From 1835 until the Duke’s death in 1852, his involvement with Russia was that of a military and political consultant to Emperor Nicholas I through the agency of the Russian Ambassadors to Britain. In June 1844, he played a prominent part in the tsar’s state visit to Britain. His death was marked by three days of mourning in the Russian court.
In October 1945, Ian Roberts studied French and German at Cambridge, but dropped French for Russian and graduated with first-class honours, having also acquired a basic knowledge of Czech and Serbo-Croat. After two years’ National Service in the RAF (1948–1950) and a post-graduate year at Cambridge, he joined the Foreign Office in October 1951. His postings abroad included Austria, Germany, Hungary, Rwanda and Burundi, Argentina and Norway. After retirement in 1984, he was awarded a Leverhulme Trust research grant for a book on the Russian Intervention in Hungary in 1849, published by Macmillan in 1990 under the auspices of SSEES, where he had learned Hungarian in 1961, before his posting to Budapest. This was followed by The History of SSEES, 1915-1990, published in 1991 to mark the School’s seventy-fifth anniversary the previous year. A second, updated edition to include details of SSEES’s merger with University College, London, was published at the end of 2009.
To book/pay for tickets for this lecture, go to the GB Russia Society booking page
