1818, Wellington was commander-in-chief. As head of the
commission which passed upon the foreign claims for damages
arising from the protracted wars, his fairness again saved France
from her rapacious creditors.

His work on the continent done, Wellington returned to England to
enter the public service as a member of Lord Liverpool's cabinet.
In 1822 he was sent to represent Great Britain at the Congress of
the Powers at Verona, where he frustrated Russia's intention of
interfering in the affairs of Spain. In 1826 he was sent to
Russia on a special mission from Canning to secure the consent of
the new Czar to English intervention in behalf of the insurgent
Greeks. On the death of the King's brother, the Duke of York, he
became commander-in-chief of the army. Disagreement with Canning
led him to withdraw from that premier's cabinet in April, 1827,
but in the following January (1828), he himself became Prime
Minister, with Robert Peel as Home Secretary. With all his Tory
loyalty to the Church his administration broke its ancient
monopoly. In 1828 he allowed the Test and Corporation Acts to
pass, opening the way for Protestant dissenters to hold civil and
military office. In 1829 he concluded that relief of the Roman
Catholics of Ireland from their political disabilities could no
longer be postponed. Peel had been even more reluctant than his
chief--a native of Ireland--to reach this decision, but the
growing power of the "Catholic Association," the popular
organization which the agitator O'Connell had called into
existence, compelled immediate action. The King was reluctantly
brought to see the expediency of the act, which, when proposed by
Pitt a generation before, had so stiffened the neck of his
father, George III. Perhaps no minister whose prestige was less