Wellington's Dearest Georgy: The Life and Loves of Lady Georgiana Lennox

Two centuries after the Battle of Waterloo, Alice Marie Crossland offers here a new account, based largely on unpublished sources, of the flirtatious friendship that seems to have occupied at least part of the Duke of Wellington’s mind in the hours leading up to the battle. Lady Georgina Lennox met the future Duke soon after his return from India in 1804, when he took up a post as chief secretary to her father. At the time, she was a young, beautiful, and intensely popular young woman, surrounded by suitors, and she and the Duke enjoyed a close, teasingly intimate friendship. As the years went by, it blossomed into a true bond, strengthened by a broader friendship between the two families. The night before the Battle of Waterloo, Lady Lennox’s mother, the Duchess of Richmond, threw a ball for the officers that has become legendary for its glitz and defiance in the face of the coming action. Georgy herself had a front-row seat at the battle, and afterwards she helped tend wounded soldiers in Brussels. Crossland tells the story of Georgy and Wellington brilliantly, then moves beyond it to Lady Lennox’s later life, which saw her marry the future Baron de Ros, who became a spy and later governor of the Tower of London; when she died at ninety-six, none could say she hadn’t lived on a large scale.