Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

Of his ten planets, four sit in earth signs and four in water, with one each in fire and air. Earth builds and water registers; the elements that would force a thing or argue it out are down to a planet apiece. The record names Wellington a soldier and a prime minister, and gives Waterloo and then two spells in the office, which is one career followed by another.

The Sun sits at eleven degrees of Taurus with Uranus further back in the same sign, and the Moon answers from Pisces at nine. Taurus holds a position and will not be moved off it, which in a commander is the whole method rather than a disposition. Mars and Saturn sit together in Cancer, drive alongside the planet of limit in the sign that defends what is behind it.

Mars sits in easy contact with Neptune two hundredths of a degree off exact, as close as the arithmetic puts a pair, and makes the same easy contact with Uranus at under three quarters. Venus stands awkwardly against Jupiter at an eighth of a degree. Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets, and nothing here forms a named pattern to hold any of it. In a soldier, drive on easy terms with both the unexpected and the dissolving edge is a reading worth having about a career of campaigns.

He died at Walmer Castle on 14 September 1852, at eighty three. Jupiter stood on its own birth degree within a fifth of a degree and Uranus on its own within two fifths, so two separate returns closed on the day the life did, one of them the circuit most charts never complete at all. Neptune sat directly on his natal Moon within a sixth. The Moon itself was new and unlit, and the Sun had reached Virgo, which returned it to the element of his natal Taurus rather than opposing it.