As one of the chiefs of the Allied occupation of France, Wellington did have a chance to meet several of the Napoleonic marshalate. He met Massena later during peacetime in the house of Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult. Wellington relayed the conversation as such to his companion Phillip Henry:

Massena was much excited at first seeing me, made a great noise and greeted me very cordially. Ah Monsier le Marechal, que vous m'avaz fait passer des momens! And he declared to me that I had not left him with a black hair on his body; he had turned grey, he said, all over. I answered that I thought we had been pretty even- things nearly balanced between us. No, he said, how near you were taking me two or three times.

He would also relate to Henry an anecdote about Soult. When he first encountered the French marshal after Waterloo in the outskirts of Paris, the British general was asleep in his carriage. While the Frenchman was curious as to the Duke's appearance, Wellington was well-used to spying the French general in the Peninsula battlefields. So when formally introduced, Wellington knew the exact details of his counterpart's appearance already.

One prominent personal meeting between Wellington and Marshal Soult was during the coronation of Queen Victoria on 28 June 1838. Although the latter had rallied to Napoleon in the Hundred Days and suffered a brief period of exile, he had managed to return to the good graces of the French government and wisely sided with the Orleanist faction in the Revolution of 1830. He served as both Minister of War and Prime Minister for the Orleanist government. The French state appointed Soult as the extraordinary ambassador for the King of the French.

The British attitude towards their former foe was relatively magnanimous. The Gentleman's Magazine noted with approval that Soult's carriage was magnificently appointed and The Mirror tartly observed that "the carriage received the most marked admiration of the people; we mean, over and above the interest displayed to its illustrious occupant." One joke that made the rounds relayed by the American Samuel Griswold Goodrich was that Soult's stirrups had broken at an inopportune time and he had to send to the Ordnance bureau for a new pair, for which they supplied him a pair of stirrups captured from Napoleon's personal collection.

The sight of a former foe paying his respects was an opportunity for British commentators to celebrate the magnanimity of the British people, which at times drifted into a smug patriotism. Charles Gregory Sharpley poem "Coronation," celebrated the meeting of Soult with the illustrious Duke:

Illustrious Soult, behold a nation bow/ To thy own worth, that bent not to thy sword;/ How must those shouts have thrilled, ne'er heard till now/ Save when they waited on the conqueror's word. What mixt sensations through thy breast would run,/ Regretful part, and part of proud delight,/When glance to glance with Victory's favorite Son,/ Ne'er met till now, save in the shock of fight.

Perhaps the most serious breach of diplomatic protocol was the release of an article in Quarterly Review covering the Duke's defeat of Soult at Toulouse. Wellington had asked that J. W. Croker hold off on this publication until after the coronation and the Duke had already delayed the publication of his relevant Dispatches to avoid a diplomatic gaffe. The Quarterly Review concluded Its coverage of the later Peninsula War with a rather passive-aggressive note about the coronation and Soult:

But, after all, Marshal Soult will find that the English deserve a better character than he gave them, while smarting under the defeat of Orthez. They are naturally a good-humoured and generous people, and will visit on him neither the pardonable intemperance of his Tarbes proclamation, nor the recent indiscretions of his partisans and his Government. Nay, we are satisfied that he will be received in London with more punctilious courtesy by the higher orders and more cockney cordiality by the multitude, from the very recollection of the splendid and consummate talents, courage, and perseverance, with which, during their arduous struggle, he impeded- though he could not arrest- the victorious career of his illustrious antagonist. England, we confidently hope will show more tact in the reception - than France has done in the selection- of the Ambassador Extraordinary! [Emphasis original]

Wellington himself apologized for the Quarterly Review's intemperate article, telling the French Marshal that:

I am a very clever man, a very clever man indeed, except when any gentleman happens to differ in opinion with me on any point – and then I am not a clever man at all.

Other commentators noted though that behind the public proclamations of support, the two soldiers did not seem to strike up much of a rapport. Part of this was likely due to the Duke's advancing age. The diarist Charles Greville noted Wellington

is much deafer than he was, he is whiter, his head is bent, his shoulders are raised, and there are muscular twitches in his face, not altogether new, but of a more marked character.

The Iron Duke could be quite taciturn at times and it would appear that despite the paeans to his magnanimity towards the French, the encounter between the two men was cordial, but not especially warm.