Hero of
the Battle of Waterloo, & twice British
Prime Minister:
Arthur
Wellesely, the Duke of Wellington (1769
- 1852)
On April 28, 1828, the Duke of
Wellington, then Prime Minister of
Britain, said
during a debate on the removal of the
words "on the true faith
of a Christian, in the
presence of God" in
the oath taken before a man could sit
and vote in Parliament:
I shall oppose the omission of the words. ... the admission of the Jews (to parliament) would be disliked by the country."
On August 1, 1833, the Duke of
Wellington (then just a Member of
Parliament,
part of the Tory opposition to the Whig
Government) said the following in a
Parliamentary debate on the Jewish
Civil Disabilities Repeal Bill:
I cannot advise the Sovereign on the throne to sanction a law to admit them (Jews) to seats in this House and the other House of Parliament, and to all the rights and privileges enjoyed by Christians. ... I see no ground whatever for passing the Bill; and shall, therefore, vote against it.
In
1853, a year after his death, a
biography of the Duke of Wellington was
published by British journalist Jocquim
Stocqueler. In which he wrote:
Upon the discussion of the Jewish disabilities, his Grace vehemently opposed the admission of Jews to seats in Parliament. He deemed it indispensable that, in a Christian legislature none but Christians should be permitted to sit—a doctrine which he maintained to the last hour of his existence.
In
1899, 47 years after the Duke of
Wellington's death, British journalist
and
politician Arnold White,
who'd been in the service of
wealthy Jews, wrote
in his book The
Modern Jew, about the
cause of the Duke's antisemitism:
In the (Russian) wars with the Turks the Jews were accused of having perfidiously supplied the enemy with iron artillery, a charge which strangely enough was repeated by Wellington three centuries later. To the end of his life the Iron Duke barely tolerated the Jews because he believed that Jewish financiers resident in England had furnished Napoleon with ordnance which was used against the English,
The
5th Duke of Wellington, the
great-grandson of the first Duke, blamed
the September 3, 1939, British
declaration of war on Germany on:
"the anti-appeasers and the
fucking Jews."
