| Notes |
- On retiring from the Army in 1968 in the rank of brigadier,the Marquess of Douro (as he then was titled) turned his attention to the family estates. These were in an unsatisfactory state since his father had handed over the running of the main holdings to the government in the hope of preserving them. As a result these became a "parliamentary estate", vested in the Prime Minister, the Speaker of the Commons and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, an arrangement with great disadvantages which was dissolved in 1972.After succeeding as the 8th Duke in the same year, in order to meet estate duties he sold 1,135 acres at Silchester and 230 at Wellington, Somerset (from where the family had originated). Over the following years he sold paintings, drawings and a 120-piece S?vres dessert service made for the Empress Josephine. When it was learned that the buyer of the S?vres was the French government there was a storm of protest in Britain, and an export licence was delayed before it eventually went to the Victoria and Albert Museum for ?450,000. The Iron Duke's papers were dispatched to Southampton University as part of an agreement with the Treasury....
The democratic age sometimes posed a threat to the Wellington properties abroad. In Spain, 500 farmworkers staged a sit-in on the ducal hunting estate near Granada . In Belgium in the 1970s and 1980s, two retired senators (one a descendant of a Napoleonic general) called the Duke's right to an income of ?20,000 a year from the 2,600 acres next to the battlefield of Waterloo a "feudal and medieval annuity".There were other irritations, such as the persistent press interest in his daughter Jane's friendship with the Prince of Wales in the early 1970s; and he could be sure that, wherever he was in the world, nobody would miss the opportunity to serve him Beef Wellington....
He was appointed LVO in 1952, OBE in 1957 and KG in 1990. He was also an officer of the French Legion of Honour, and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael of the Wing in Portugal, and of the Order of Isabel the Catholic in Spain. The Duke's wife died in 2010. The heir to the peerages is the eldest of his four sons, Charles, Marquess of Douro, a former MEP, who was born in 1945 and married Princess Antonia von Preussen, a great-granddaughter of the last German Emperor.
Wellington was twice engaged to Lady Rose Paget, the daughter of Charles Paget, 6th Marquess of Anglesey, who eventually married the Hon. John Francis McLaren.
Titles:
Prince of Waterloo
Duke of Ciudad Rodrigo
Duke of Victoria
Marquess of Wellington
Marquess of Douro
Marquis of Torres Vedras
Count of Vimeiro
Earl of Mornington
Viscount Wellesley
Viscount Wellington
Baron Douro
Baron of Mornington
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1915 - 2014 (99 years)
