Daring, dashing, grand, clever, humorous; yes. But academic, intellectual. . . ?

The Duke of Wellington would have laughed at the very notion; and yet he became one of Oxford University’s most popular Chancellors.

The Iron Duke had a curious sort of love-hate relationship with Oxford — until, that is, peace was restored and he took an almost child-like delight in donning the robes and mortar board that went with the top job. Eleven years after leading the British Army to victory at Waterloo, he had fought and lost a less than glamorous battle here in Oxford, one that resulted in his removing both his sons from Christ Church and sending them to Trinity College, Cambridge, instead.

The trouble had started in March 1825 after the Duke of Wellington’s younger son, Charles Wellesley, following a typically extravagant undergraduate dinner in the Christ Church rooms of his elder brother, the Marquis Douro, had taken on a trivial bet and broken out of the college gates after curfew — an action that caused the recently appointed dean, Samuel Smith, to rusticate (suspend) him for a year.

The Great Duke, still smarting from a political confrontation with Foreign Secretary George Canning over the future of Spain’s colonies, reacted with less than his characteristic cool; he fired off a blistering letter to the dean, blaming the indiscretion on the college’s lax approach to discipline and generally accusing the authorities of poor management.

In arguing that the “enormous” punishment definitely did not fit the crime, he perhaps did not take into account that Lord Charles had only weeks before helped paint the dons’ doors red, including the dean’s. In any case, within a fortnight both boys had left Oxford. Douro went up to Cambridge in the autumn and Charles followed in spring 1826.

Reconciliation with Oxford came on January 29, 1834, when the Duke was elected Chancellor. Elizabeth Longford, in her 1972 biography, Wellington: Pillar of State (Weidenfeld and Nicholson), commented: “The Duke was overwhelmed. That the golden plum of academic honour should be offered to him, the backward boy who had been sent by his mother and eldest brother to the barrack square instead of an Oxford quadrangle . . .” He even boasted to his friend, Harriet Arbuthnot, about how well he had understood the Latin at his installation.