In September, Wellington went up to Manchester for the opening of the Liverpool-Manchester railway, and doubtless to assess the climate in the industrial north and reinforce his own party’s resources there before the new parliamentary session opened in early November. The duke duly enjoyed his first ride on a train, and near Liverpool, when the train stopped to take on water, he was introduced to his old rival Huskisson, the local MP. They had just shaken hands when another engine – George Stephenson’s Rocket – approached on the other track. Huskisson tried to get out of the way, but he was ‘slow and heavy’. The engine knocked him down, and a wheel went over his leg. Although he was carried to a house nearby, there was no hope for him. Greville thought that ‘he died the death of a great man, suffering torments, but always resigned, calm, collected …’ The whole affair was profoundly shocking, with Huskisson ‘crushed to death in sight of his wife and at the feet (as it were) of his great political rival …’41 Wellington was upset, and was only persuaded to continue his journey when told that the mob might turn dangerous if he did not appear. It was clear that Huskisson’s death would have a profound effect on politics, leaving his former followers ‘at liberty to join either the Opposition or the Government’.
Wellington did his best to marshal his forces for the new session, but soon saw that if he included Whigs and Canning-ites he would lose Ultras, and vice-versa. ‘I saw that it was a question of noses,’ he told Lady Salisbury later, ‘that as many as I gained on the one side I should lose on the other.’ And he himself was firmly persuaded that reform was both unnecessary and ‘injurious to … society …’42 He had never been a man for wild charges, but launched one when the new session opened. The opposition leader Lord Grey spoke graciously and moderately, saying that he was not wedded to any particular reform measure, and Wellington, in reply, began as generously. Then the reins slipped through his fingers, and he was carried away:
Under these circumstances I am not prepared to bring forward any measure of the description alluded to by the noble Lord. And I am not only not prepared to bring forward any measure of this nature, but I will at once declare that … I shall always feel it my duty to resist such measures when proposed by others.43
He sat down to a stunned silence, and muttered to Aberdeen, his foreign secretary, ‘I have not said too much, have I?’ The speech, setting his party against any measure of reform, shocked parliament and nation. Wellington immediately found himself receiving assassination threats from ‘Captain Swing’, spectral leader of rioting agricultural labourers, and well-wishers warned him that his life was at risk.
On 15 November the government was defeated in the Commons on a relatively minor matter, and that night Wellington, entertaining the Prince of Orange at a large dinner in Apsley House, was summoned downstairs to meet Peel and two other ministers who told him that he must resign. The cabinet went to St James’s Palace the following morning, and the king received them ‘with the greatest kindness, shed tears, but accepted their resignations without remonstrance’.44
The duke was out of office but not out of work. He was lord-lieutenant of Hampshire, where Captain Swing was hard at his smoky work, and set off ‘for my County, to do what I can to restore order and peace,’ adding that ‘in Parliament, when I can, I will approve; when I cannot, I will dissent, but I will never agree to be the leader of a faction.’45 He also turned his attention to the Tower of London, of which he had been made Constable in 1826, ordering that the noisome moat should be cleared of sewage and that the Tower’s doctor should either do his job or resign. The yeoman warders were to be recruited from former NCOs, ‘a respectable Class of Men’, who richly deserved his patronage. There was the enduring backwash of another family scandal. His nephew William, sacked as an aide-de-camp in the Peninsula, was now, after marriage to an heiress, William Long-Wellesley, but having squandered his wife’s fortune, he decamped with Mrs Helena Bligh who bore him a son and the shock of the news had killed off William’s wife. The duke became guardian of William’s children, but there were still more troubles, ‘poignant commentary’, as Elizabeth Longford puts it, ‘on the fate of a loveless family with a drive towards self-extinction’.46
In the wider world, the duke was uneasy about being in opposition. However, when Lord John Russell rose in the House of Commons on 1 March 1831 and introduced the Reform Bill, he was clear in his mind: he could now see the enemy quite clearly. He declared that ‘from the period of the adoption of that measure will date the downfall of the Constitution.’ Although the bill was carried by the Commons with a majority of one, its fate looked uncertain in the committee stages, and Lord Grey urged the king to dissolve parliament to avoid the bill being defeated. At first William declined to act, but when he heard on 22 April that a Tory peer had tabled a motion that parliament should not be dissolved, he swept down to Westminster – the crown had to be brought from the Tower and his robes from a portrait painter’s – and duly dissolved Parliament.
Wellington was not in the Lords to see the near-brawl that was afoot, with Lord Mansfield screaming abuse and Lord Londonderry brandishing a whip at Lord Richmond, when the king entered. Kitty was dying and now, with the pillars of the world he understood rocking around him, Wellington wanted to be at her bedside. We cannot tell whether her last illness was cholera or cancer, but its progress brought husband and wife together. Kitty, pale and frail on her bed amidst the trophies of the duke’s glory, still rejoiced in the accomplishments of her hero. And as they held hands, she ran a finger up his sleeve to find if he was still wearing an amulet she had once given him. ‘She found it,’ Wellington told a friend, ‘as she would have found it any time these past twenty years, had she cared to look for it.’ How strange it was, he mused, that people could live together for half a lifetime and only understand one another at the end.47
News of the dissolution brought out an exultant mob that attacked the duke’s home and smashed the windows – it ‘did not care one pin for the poor Duchess being dead in the house’ – and was driven off only when a servant fired blunderbusses over their heads. It deepened Wellington’s distaste for the crowd, ‘the mob run mad, and rotten to the core’. The reformers won a huge election victory, but Wellington was unabashed by parliamentary rout or public hostility. Now, even travelling down to Walmer was risky. George Gleig, behaving more like the subaltern he used to be than the reverend gentleman he had become, accompanied him on the journey and was glad to find:
eight well-mounted men of Kent, who immediately broke into two parties, four riding about 100 yards in front of the carriage, while the others followed. They all carried heavy hunting whips, and were besides armed with pistols, as I found were likewise the duke and his servant. But no enemy appeared. The carriage swept up to the old castle gate, and the voluntary escort, having seen the Duke safe, dispersed without attracting attention.48
If he had lost the Commons, he could still find a majority in the Lords, who voted down a new bill in October. But far from settling the issue, this simply increased the frenzy, and Wellington’s windows were smashed again. This time the duke was at home, working at his writing table, and one stone narrowly missed his head and broke a glass-fronted bookcase behind him. Elsewhere there was serious rioting: half the city centre of Bristol was burnt down, and hundreds died when troops eventually restored order. Wellington told FitzRoy Somerset, still soldiering on as military secretary at Horse Guards, that weak leadership was the problem: ‘Remember (and Bristol is an example) that an Army of Stags with a Lion at its head is better than an army of Lions with a Stag at its Head.’49
Undaunted by the defeat of the previous two measures, on 12 December Russell introduced a third Reform Bill into the Commons, only to see it too voted into oblivion by the Lords on 14 April 1832. Greville disapproved of the duke’s continued resistance, but dined with him in May and recorded that:
I never see and converse with him without reproaching myself for the sort of hostility I feel towards his political conduct, for ther
e are a simplicity, a gaiety and a natural urbanity and good-humour in him, which are remarkably captivating in so great a man.50
The king still refused a mass creation of peers, which would have broken Wellington’s strength in the Lords, and Grey and his colleagues accordingly resigned. Wellington, anxious to protect the king from a wholesale creation, tried to break the stalemate against a backcloth of what many felt to be imminent revolution. Endless discussions at Apsley House revealed that he could not find enough Tories who were prepared to join him in an administration committed to moderate reform, and on 15 May told the king that he could not form a government. The best that he could do was to call off his hounds in the Lords: Grey resumed office, and the Reform Bill became law on 7 June.
The Great Reform Act of 1832 now seems a very moderate measure: after it the 249 electors of Buckingham still returned as many MPs as the 4,172 electors of Leeds, and England, with 54 per cent of Britain’s population, returned 71 per cent of the Commons.51 However, the Whigs were disinclined to go much further, and the main impetus of reform passed from parliamentarians to radicals outside it, as the People’s Charter demanded universal manhood suffrage, a secret ballot, equal electoral districts, the abolition of property qualifications for MPs, payment for MPs, and annual parliaments.
It took time for Wellington’s role in the resistance to the 1832 act to be forgiven. On Waterloo Day that year, he found a mob waiting for him when he emerged from sitting to the painter Pistrucci at the Royal Mint. A magistrate offered his assistance, but the duke told him: ‘You can do nothing. The only thing you can help me in is to tell me exactly the road I am to take to get to Lincoln’s Inn; for the greatest danger would be in my missing my way and having to turn back on the mob.’ He set off down Fen-church Street with his groom. The mob tried to drag him from his horse, but two Chelsea Pensioners appeared (‘that best of all instruments …’) and he asked them to march at each stirrup and face outwards if he had to halt. In Holborn, a coal-cart appeared: ‘Hillo!’ said the duke, ‘here’s the artillery coming up; we must look out’. A brave gentleman drove his Tilbury close up behind to cover the rear, and delighted the duke by ‘never looking to me for any notice’. He gained a little time by diverting through Lincoln’s Inn, and by the time he reached clubland he had more supporters, and rode steadily on up Constitution Hill. The mob swarmed across the Park to hoot him as he clattered into Apsley House, its windows now iron-shuttered against the brickbats. He turned to Lord St Germans, who had accompanied him from Whitehall, and raised his hat: ‘An odd day to choose. Good morning!’52
And yet, slave to duty, he could not stand aside from public life, and agreed to become chancellor of Oxford University. ‘I am the Duke of Wellington,’ he told Croker, and, bon gré mal gré must do as the Duke of Wellington doth.’ He looked in on the House of Commons when the new parliament met in February 1833, and declared: ‘I never saw so many shocking bad hats in my life.’53 Greville agreed, for once, muttering about the ‘pretensions, impertinence and self-sufficiency of some of the new members’.54 The duke supported Grey’s government because he saw it as the last line of defence against anarchy, but the worst seemed over, and he had his windows repaired in time for the Waterloo banquet that year. He lost Harriet Arbuthnot in August: the letter telling him of her death fell from his hands, and he flung himself on the sofa in a paroxysm of grief. But duty caught hold again, and he rode off to commiserate with her widower, for he had loved her too.
Yet he was not entirely finished with the flesh. Wellington was a devout but not ostentatiously religious man, and that year he was approached by a pretty orphan, Anna Maria Jenkins, who was determined to give him ‘a new birth into righteousness’. When they met, there was an undeniable mutual attraction, with Miss Jenkins struck by the duke’s ‘beautiful silver head’ and the duke, expecting something altogether more spinsterish, suddenly declaring ‘Oh, how I love you! How I love you!’ This was not quite the conversion that Miss Jenkins had in mind, but when asked if she was prepared to be a duchess, replied: ‘If it be the will of God.’ The relationship, always most decorous, went on in fits and starts, largely by post. There were occasional Wellingtonian outbursts, one in 1844 when, thinking that she was pressing him for money, the duke declared:
I will give her any reasonable assistance she may require from me; when she will let me know in clear distinct Terms what is the Sum she requires.
But I announce again; that I will never write upon any other Subject.55
But they remained friends, and eight years later she asked her doctor to post a letter on her side-table to the duke, only to be told gently that there was no duke to read it.
In the autumn of 1834, the Houses of Parliament burnt down and, as if taking this for a portent, the government, riven by internal dissent, fell. William IV summoned Wellington, who was at Stratfield Saye about to go hunting, no mean feat for a man aged 65, and invited him to form an administration. But Wellington had learnt his lesson – he suggested that the king should ask Peel. However, as Sir Robert was away in Italy (‘just like him’ muttered the duke), he undertook to set up the government and stand in as prime minister till Peel returned. The government did not survive for long, but it contributed to the restoration of the duke’s authority. He was still capable of speaking well, and the young Disraeli admitted that ‘there is a gruff, husky sort of downright Montaignish naiveté about him, which is quaint, unusual, and tells.’56 And across the political divide, William Gladstone thought that ‘The Duke of Wellington appears to speak little and never for speaking’s sake, but only to convey an idea commonly worth conveying.’57
He was still busy, helping John Gurwood, a half-pay lieutenant colonel who had snatched his captaincy from the breach at Ciudad Rodrigo a lifetime ago, produce that edition of his papers which I have found so useful. And there were more painters to sit to, with B. R. Haydon catching the old eagle’s profile looking out at the Lion Mound at Waterloo which had ‘spoiled my battlefield’. And yet somehow, in peace as in war, he was always there at the crucial spot. When Mrs Fitzherbert died, he swept down with Lord Albemarle and burnt her papers. There was such a blaze that he suggested a pause in operations: ‘I think, my lord, we had better hold our hand for a while, or we shall set the old woman’s chimney on fire.’58
The ashes were scarcely cold in the grate when William IV died. Greville reported him ‘desperately ill’ in early June, and on the 18th, the king declared that ‘I should like to live to see the sun of Waterloo set.’59 The duke saw him that day, and although he attended the annual Waterloo banquet that night by the king’s express command, it was with evident unhappiness. The king expired on the 20th, and the young Queen Victoria played her part so well that Wellington told Greville that if she had been his own daughter, he could not have wished to see her do better. But he was not easily admitted to the new royal circle, and at a banquet at Buckingham House in July he found himself the only Tory present, with a place-card describing him only as ‘Chancellor of Oxford’. He kept it as a curiosity.
That summer he was not well. He swayed on his feet in the Lords, and the emphasis in his speeches was all wrong: then there were fits of giddiness. Miss Jenkins offered her services as a nurse, but the duke would not hear of it. That autumn he seemed a great deal better, however, and when Lord Hill died in December 1842, he was again appointed commander-in-chief. FitzRoy Somerset, still soldiering on as military secretary, found that his old master was as tireless as ever. A letter timed at 6pm told the unlucky Lord FitzRoy, who had clearly left ‘early’, that:
I called at the office on my being up from the House of Lords … Will you be so kind as to let me have at as early an hour as may be convenient tomorrow morning all the … reports on the present operations. As I must read them all before I go to the Cabinet.60
However, Greville reported in 1847 that the duke was behaving increasingly irritably, and there were times when the duke’s daughter-in-law, Lady Douro, had to smooth the path between
Wellington and FitzRoy Somerset. The persistent unrest accompanying Chartist demonstrations induced Wellington to write to the Marquess of Anglesey, (once Paget, then Uxbridge, and now master-general of the ordnance) on a familiar theme: ‘I am very sensible to the danger of our position … My opinion is that we shall have to contend with mobs armed with pikes, and with Fire Arms of all descriptions.’61
He had now become firm friends with the ‘Little Vixen’. He sat beside the queen at a banquet in August 1840 and was delighted to see that she drank wine repeatedly with him. She went to stay at Walmer Castle (where her carriage stuck in the tunnel-like entrance) and at Stratfield Saye. This closeness, for the queen had previously been entranced by the Whig Lord Melbourne, was a positive advantage to the Tory government returned in the 1841 election, and Wellington was leader of the Lords with a seat in the cabinet. When it seemed Peel would be unable to hold his administration together because of his wish to reform the Corn Laws, the queen told the duke that she had ‘a STRONG desire’ to see him remain as commander-in-chief, whatever happened. The queen, however, rejected Peel’s resignation, and Sir Robert told his cabinet that he proposed to continue with or without their support. The duke declared that they should remain in office: ‘It was not a question of measures,’ he said, ‘but of Government, of support for the queen.’62 Good government was more important than the Corn Laws, and Wellington duly helped vote them into oblivion. As he walked from the House in the early hours of 28 May 1846, after the crucial vote, he found workmen crowding around the gate, eager to hear the news. They cheered him, and one shouted. ‘God bless you, Duke!’ Wellington’s opinion of crowds was unaltered. ‘For Heaven’s sake, people,’ he begged, ‘let me get onto my horse.’
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