you would rubricate the aggressive and unmannerly Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, "not a great man", would you?

His contemporaries did. His war record didn't stop him becoming the most despised public figure in Britain by 1830. (They named a bridge in Edinburgh after him in 1815, but he was so universally loathed they changed it first to the Regent Bridge and then the Waterloo Bridge within a few years).