Waterloo was the last act of the Napoleonic struggle. The Emperor went into exile at St. Helena to fret against his prison bars and curse his keepers. Wellington had already exhausted his country's sources of honor. All that Parliament could do was to present the fine estate of Strathfieldsaye to him and his heirs on condition of presenting a French tri-color flag to the sovereign at Windsor on each anniversary of the 18th of June. Wellington was above all a soldier, but for the remaining thirty- six years of his lifetime his country had little employment for the sword. Yet the esteem in which he was held, not only for his military achievements, but for his honesty and common sense, made him a conspicuous figure in public affairs for most of his long life. After Waterloo he remained in France, where his moderation saved Paris from the vengeance of the continental commanders. Of the allied army of occupation which remained in France until 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 than that of the hero of Waterloo could have won the consent of the Hanoverian monarch, whose dynasty had been brought to England for the defense of the Protestant faith. The bill for the emancipation of the Catholics slid easily through the Commons,