army of Spain encamped on French soil, led it through the passes
again, but the English could not be dislodged. In October an
English general for the first time since Napoleon came to power
stood on French soil at the head of an invading army. Soult,
forced away from Bayonne, fell back on Toulouse, where Wellington
dealt him another blow on April 14, 1814. That blow was the last.
Just one week earlier Napoleon, driven back from the Rhine to
Paris by the allied armies on the northeast, had abdicated the
throne which had cost so much blood and treasure.

Wellington visited Paris and Madrid, and then returned to London.
Five years earlier he had left England as Sir Arthur Wellesley;
he came back Duke of Wellington. His own remark upon his
campaigns contrasts strangely with the spirit of the Frenchman,
whose best generals he had out-manoeuvered and overwhelmed. He
was "a conqueror without ambition," he said. "All the world knew
that I desired nothing but to beat the French out of Spain and
then go home to my own country, leaving the Spaniards to manage
theirs as they pleased." England lavished honors upon the hero of
the Peninsular War. Parliament thanked him, granted him four
hundred thousand pounds. He carried the sword of state on the
occasion of the peace celebration in St. Paul's Cathedral. London
banqueted him in Guildhall.

For a summer and a winter the Duke represented England at Paris
and Vienna where the states of Europe were wrangling over the
restoration of the continent to its antebellum condition. When
Napoleon escaped from Elba and was welcomed to Paris by his
former marshals, Europe turned to Wellington to deliver her from
the new peril. On the 25th of March, 1815, Austria, Russia,