by Foster, R E
The Duke may possibly have sanctioned the anonymous letter himself. If he did, it was unnecessary. By 1818, both press and public had a firmly established view on both Wellington and Waterloo. Lord Anglesey put it neatly, at a grand public reception at Lichfield in Staffordshire to welcome him home, when he said that ‘our troops under any other commander must have failed, and with any other troops under that great chieftain, the struggle must have been unsuccessful’.220 The public too, shared Wellington’s view that the battle had been both horrible and glorious. Little attempt was made to disguise the former. As early as 23 June, French losses were put at 35,000, the allies at 10,000. This was not so very far wrong. Such colossal casualty figures on a battlefield only roughly 4 square miles in size make it comparable to the slaughter of the Somme a century later.221 In terms of casualties sustained per yard, it was arguably worse. Neither did reports confine themselves to impersonal statistics. One soldier’s letter published in September, describing the battlefield on 19 June, confessed that:
I never think upon it but with horror. Death had reaped a plentiful harvest and displayed his ravages in their ugliest forms. Poor mutilated wretches still lay in the agonies of death, calling or making signs for a drop of water. There was none to be had […] here a dead man served for a pillar to his dying companion – others lay, as it were, holding each other in a last embrace.222
Nor, it was made clear, was there much dignity in death. Rare exceptions were Sir Thomas Picton, whose body was brought home, in due course to rest in St Paul’s Cathedral; and Major Frederick Howard’s, whose remains would ultimately find their way to the family mausoleum at Castle Howard.223 The norm, though, as Hope Pattison recalled, was that, ‘Preparations were soon set on foot to bury the dead by digging large trenches, into which they were thrown promiscuously – friend and foe together.’ T. S. Lea, who detoured to Waterloo whilst travelling abroad promoting his carpet making business, reported the further detail that ‘after some difficulty’ the Prussians had forced 4,000 peasants to undertake the gruesome task over a three day period. Two mass graves, each 60 feet long and 9 feet wide, had accounted for the bulk of the corpses, whilst seven or eight smaller graves had been necessary for assorted limbs. On his visit to Waterloo a few weeks later, the Reverend Rudge was shocked by the reality of death at the site of one of the mass graves beside Hougoumont:
The smell was here particularly offensive, and in some places, parts of the human body were distinctly to be recognised. The earth with which they had been covered, had sunk in, and exhibited here and there an arm and a human face, the flesh nearly wasted away, and the features of the countenance hardly distinguishable from the change they had undergone.224
Such was the fate of the fallen. The publication of such details could not but make an impact. Dorothy Wordsworth recorded that, ‘The particulars of the battle of the 18th are dreadful. The joy of victory is indeed an awful thing, and I had no patience with the tinkling of our Ambleside bells upon the occasion.’225
Like her brother, however, Dorothy Wordsworth’s sentiments about Waterloo did not reflect mainstream public opinion. So far as the latter was concerned, any shock and revulsion very rapidly gave way to celebration of what Wellington’s army had achieved. This was true even amongst those who had taken part in the battle (including Wellington himself), and had lost friends. Captain Barlow, for example, lost his ‘two most intimate friends’ but called Waterloo the ‘field of honour’.226 Britons rationalised the slaughter by seeing it in traditional terms. The language and images used were ones of necessary Christian sacrifice for the advancement of national glory. Individuals were not forgotten entirely – Picton and Ponsonby, as the most senior fatalities in a deferential society, were much alluded to – but like all the fallen they were idealised as heroes who had given their lives in a righteous cause. Such were the themes of the outpouring of prose and poetry in the weeks and months after the battle. The 15-year-old RGT’s ‘Thoughts on the Battle of Waterloo at Night’, for instance, took solace in the fact that the fallen heroes who had died to ‘save their country from despotic sway’ would meet in heaven:
Yet, what’s more noble think? Or what’s more brave?
What greater fame or honour doth afford?
Britannia ever mourns a soldier’s grave,
Who falls thus wielding the triumphant sword.227
If such sentiments were unoriginal, the public response to them following Waterloo was unprecedented. The most practical manifestation of this was the Waterloo Fund. This had its origins in two meetings held in London. On 28 June, bankers and merchants gathered at the City of London Tavern to consider a public subscription ‘for the relief of the sufferers in the late glorious battles’. The other, for the same purpose, took place on 11 July at the Thatched House Tavern in Westminster with the Duke of York in the chair.228 Amounts great and small flooded in. The Common Council of London voted £2,000. At Thornton in Yorkshire, the Reverend Patrick Brontë dedicated the collection from his thanksgiving service on 23 July. The fund reached £100,000 by early August. Within a year it approached £300,000. In spring 1817 it was announced that applicants now had until Waterloo Day to apply for its £457,576 1s 9d. Wellington was consulted about how this might most fairly be done.229
There was also Waterloo prize money. This ranged from Wellington’s £61,000 to £2 11s 4d for corporals, drummers and privates. Beyond monetary reward, the War Office announced that all who had served in the campaign would be credited with two years service and be known as ‘Waterloo men’.230 The Duke himself was instrumental in moving for a Waterloo medal, further proof of how special he deemed the achievement. Indeed, his recommendation ‘that we all should have the same medal’ is one of the most egalitarian statements he ever made.231 Some 39,000 were issued in 1816–1817. It was the first time that the British government had issued a medal to all soldiers present at an action.
Other commemorative initiatives followed. The Prince Regent led the way by creating a Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle. An estimated crowd of 20,000 gathered at Portsmouth to witness the launch of the 84-gun Waterloo adorned with a full-length figure of the Duke. Eight miles north, on the old A3 road to London, supposedly because several returning veterans chose to settle at what had been known as Waitland End, Waterlooville was born. Additions to existing settlements to mark the battle were especially common. In Truro, the corporation marked the second anniversary of the battle by laying the foundation stone for a Waterloo Crescent, the principal building in which was Wellington House. Nearly all the properties in London’s newly-completed Waterloo Place had been let by the start of 1818.232 The phenomenon did not escape Jane Austen’s notice. In Sanditon, her unfinished novel of 1817, Mr Parker proudly shows a visitor the fruits of his attempts to turn a Kentish coastal village into a fashionable resort:
You will not think that I have made a bad exchange when we reach Trafalgar House – which by the bye, I almost wish I had not named Trafalgar – for Waterloo is more the thing now. However, Waterloo is in reserve – and if we have encouragement enough this year for a little Crescent to be ventured upon – (as I trust we shall) then, we shall be able to call it Waterloo Crescent.233
Dedicated memorials appeared too. One on the Marquis of Lothian’s estate, standing 100 feet high, was dedicated as early as mid-October. The four sides read respectively ‘Victory’, ‘Waterloo’, Wellington’ and ‘To Wellington and the British Army’.234 The House of Commons petitioned the Prince Regent for a national memorial on 29 June. Members responded warmly to Castlereagh’s proposal that, unusually, it should be dedicated to all those who participated in the campaign since ‘every soldier in the ranks throughout our whole army had behaved during the whole of the action, with the most undaunted courage, and with unexampled coolness, patience and perseverance’. Charles Williams-Wynn went so far as to propose that the names of all the fallen be inscribed on any monument. But Wellington was in no danger of being eclipsed. The Duke of York had already privately
informed him that ‘though the firmness of the troops is beyond all praise yet the success must ever in justice be acknowledged to proceed from your own personal conduct and presence of mind’.235 Wilberforce proposed that only a palace could now fairly reflect the nation’s gratitude to the Duke.
The parliamentary debate of June helped fuel a more general one in the months that followed as to the precise form of a national memorial. Most favoured traditional pillars or arches. With a perspicacity that would not be realised for a generation, The Times thought that a triumphal arch surmounted by an equestrian statue of Wellington at Hyde Park Corner ‘would be a strong and permanent record of national greatness’. One correspondent believed that a sculpture of Wellington delivering the already immortal, ‘Up, guards, and at them!’ would gain public approval. Doubtless with an eye to employment for himself, the architect, James Elmes, suggested creating a 40-acre village in north London with houses named after individual heroes of the campaign.236
Another with a possible eye to self-advancement was Wordsworth. A day before Parliament returned to the question on 5 February 1816, he had overcome his initial reluctance to write about Waterloo by publishing lines intended for inscription on a public memorial:
Heroes! – for instant sacrifice prepared;
Yet filled with ardour and on triumph bent
‘Mid direst shocks of mortal accident –
To you who fell, and you whom slaughter spared
To guard the fallen, and consummate the event,
Your Country rears this sacred Monument!
MPs in fact met to discover that their broad unanimity on the question of six months previously had partially evaporated. The euphoria engendered by Waterloo had given way to inter-service rivalry. Castlereagh attempted to defuse this by proposing that the Waterloo memorial proceed alongside one to Nelson, Trafalgar and the navy, since ‘the house would be anxious to hand those exertions down to posterity in a manner that should avoid the indication of any preference, and place both services on a footing of equality’. He was not entirely successful. Was Trafalgar, it was asked, really as significant as Waterloo? Might not a single monument to all who had served in the war – Tierney argued strongly for a church – be more appropriate?237
Castlereagh’s motion for two monuments was eventually carried. The deadline for designs to be lodged with the British Gallery was set for 1 July. In spring 1817 William Wilkins’ design for the Waterloo memorial was chosen from amongst 200 others. Costing £200,000, his proposed 280-foot ornamental tower was to have stood in Portland Place facing Regent’s Park. Like the one to Trafalgar at Greenwich, it was, for reasons not entirely clear, never built.238 The national memorial to Waterloo was instead a bridge. Shortly before the battle’s first anniversary, it was announced that a clause would be added to the Bill for the projected Strand Bridge to rename it. Designed by the Scottish engineer, John Rennie, the Waterloo Bridge Company was empowered to raise half a million pounds for its construction. Its completion provided the focus for the celebrations of the battle’s second anniversary. The Prince Regent, flanked by Wellington and the Duke of York, officially opened it on 18 June 1817. The project was hailed enthusiastically by the press:
No mode of perpetuating great deeds by works of art is more consistent with good taste than where such works combine, in a high degree, what is ornamental with what is useful. Monuments of this kind have stronger claims on public respect than the costly construction of pillars, obelisks, and towers.239
At 2,890 feet in length it was indeed monumental. But it hardly represented the thanks of a grateful nation. The taxpayer had not had to bear the cost. Four toll houses were an integral part of the bridge’s construction, with a penny toll levied on those wanting to use it.
Catalysed by economic hard times, the inevitable waning of public euphoria over Waterloo led to other memorials being less grand than had originally been projected. The same day that Waterloo Bridge was opened, the foundation stone of Robert Smirke’s Irish memorial was laid in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. It was scheduled for completion by 18 June 1819. However, despite the fact that £20,000 had been quickly subscribed, the funds ran out before a statue of Wellington could be added to the 210-foot column. Plans to erect a monument to the Duke and Waterloo on the Blackdown Hills in Somerset had also begun well. Some £1,700 was raised and 10,000 attended the ceremony to lay the foundation stone in October 1817. Six acres of land around the memorial were to be tenanted by three former servicemen, respectively from England, Scotland and Ireland. Their duties included maintaining the 4-acre memorial site and helping to oversee an annual athletics festival on 18 June. But the four Waterloo cannon to decorate the base of the Egyptian-style triangular column never arrived. It was completed, minus a statue of Wellington, only in 1854.240
The Somerset site owed its selection to the fact that it overlooked the town of Wellington, the supposed ancestral home of the Duke’s family. After Waterloo, the question of where his home would be could not be deferred indefinitely. His initial preference was for a Somerset estate, though the media was far more exercised by the question than he was. The architect, Benjamin Dean Wyatt, spent three years investigating possible properties in at least six different counties. His search finally bore fruit in 1817 when Lord Rivers’ Stratfield Saye estate on the Hampshire-Berkshire border came onto the market. The sale was completed for £263,000.241 Most people, Wellington included, assumed that the relatively unimpressive house would be demolished to make way for a grand Waterloo Palace to rival Blenheim. That it did not owed much to the Duke’s being content simply to improve what he had. As was the case with the national memorial, however, the nation had not matched its actions to its words.
Wellington’s indifference to the failure of a palace to materialise in Hampshire is also to be explained in terms of how his life unfolded. Stratfield Saye would prove to be less a palatial home than a comfortable winter hunting retreat. His principal residence would be 149 Piccadilly, better known to contemporaries as No. 1, London or Apsley House. The Duke bought this on generous terms in 1817 from his financially-embarrassed elder brother, the Marquis Wellesley. It provided him with a London base for what he must have already decided would be a busy public life, not a sedate and glorious retirement, on his return to Britain.242
Wellington was not permanently absent from Britain in the two to three years after 1815. His visits were nevertheless brief and sporadic: in summer 1816 when his return included a visit to Cheltenham; most extensively, when he was present for the 1817 Waterloo anniversary celebrations.243 Most of his time, however, was passed either at his base in Cambrai or in Paris, interlaced with regular visits to the Low Countries. As Commander-in-Chief of the 150,000-strong allied army of occupation in France, the British press occasionally mentioned his whereabouts, but generally regarded his activities as unexceptional. The chief instances before 1818 when this was not true were the execution of Marshal Ney by firing squad in December 1815, and a libel trial brought against the St James Chronicle in February 1816 following articles alleging that Wellington had conducted an adulterous relationship with Lady Frances Webster. Neither episode noticeably damaged the Duke’s reputation with most Britons. The consensus was, as the Duke insisted, that Ney’s fate was an internal French matter. Meanwhile, the libel case ended with the newspaper having £2,000 damages awarded against it. Some might even have agreed with Wellington’s barrister’s line that his client ‘might be looked up to by Christendom as the tutelar saint of the moral world’.244
These exceptions apart, Wellington was arguably less of a fixture in the national consciousness after 1815 than at any time since 1809. His virtual disappearance from political caricature between Waterloo and 1819 is one measure of this. The year 1818, however, did mark something of a return to prominence for him. This was triggered, literally, when a pistol was discharged at the Duke as he returned to his apartment on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées during the night of 11 February by a fanatical Napoleonic veteran,
André Cantillon. The allied press was outraged. As the Austrian Observer put it, ‘The man whom he attempted to assassinate does not appear here in his own individual character: he belongs to Europe – nay, to the human race.’ A fortnight after the event, normality of sorts appeared to have returned for ‘the Duke of Wellington is remembered only as a personage who now and then gives a dinner, has an audience at Court, and hires Grassini to sing for him’. In fact, Cantillon’s arrest and trial filled inches of column space for most of the year.245 By then, Wellington had long since been focused on other matters. He had come to the conclusion that the intended five-year term for the army of occupation was not only unnecessary but counter-productive in that it helped fuel French revanchist sentiment. His argument that the force both be reduced in size and withdrawn early proved persuasive. By November 1818 the last troops had left. For someone who had spent almost all of the previous decade away from his native land, it was news indeed when the Paris papers reported that Wellington was leaving too, adding that, ‘It is said that he will not revisit the Continent for a considerable time.’ Before the year was out, the British press was able to confirm rumours that he would join the government. On New Year’s Eve it was reported that the Duke had started work as Master-General of the Ordnance.246 The Hero of Waterloo, hitherto a quasi-mythical figure, so far as the British public was concerned, would now become real.
4
Heroes and Villains: Wellington,
Waterloo and other Battles 1819–1832
Sir William Fraser was one of many who believed that Wellington’s reputation rose after Waterloo. Large crowds regularly gathered to see him. On 28 September 1819, when he received the freedom of Plymouth, untold numbers pressed for ‘a transient view of the deliverer of Europe’. Four days later, in Exeter, he was reported to have shaken hundreds of hands in fifteen minutes. When he stayed with the Duke of Buckingham in 1827, a 450-pound Wellington pudding was prepared for children on the Stowe estate. A Mr Makepeace, who claimed to have lost his nose and part of his face to the last cannon shot fired by the retreating French at Waterloo, was especially keen to see him. In the same year a Wellington autograph from 1814 was sold for £1 6s. The Duke was even reported to be popular in China, an approximation of his name in Chinese suggesting that he was ‘perhaps descended in a direct line from the five-clawed dragon, who, it seems, is the guardian saint of the Celestial Empire’.247