by Foster, R E
In fact, Wellington’s popular standing would fluctuate wildly in the first decade or so following his return to England. Even his devoted admirer, Mrs Arbuthnot, records how as early as September 1820, ‘the Duke told us the people had shouted to him as he went down to the House in the morning, “No hero, We want no hero!!”’ She decided that ‘his unmerited unpopularity did not extend beyond the Radicals of London’. But this was untrue. Though most newspapers ignored or downplayed it, there were, for example, reports of popular dissension when he attended a public dinner in his honour at Winchester in March 1821.248
The increasing public ambivalence towards the Duke was at root the consequence of his decision to become Master-General of the Ordnance in Lord Liverpool’s government. If his objective had been simply the preservation of his heroic status, there would be much truth in Alava’s judgement ‘that the Duke of Wellington ought never to have had anything to do with politicks – that he ought to have remained, not only as the soldier of England, but of Europe, to be ready to appear again at its command whenever his talents and services might be wanted’.249 Wellington believed that he could act as an independent servant of the State, insulated from the excesses of party politics. He made it a condition of accepting office that he would not necessarily be bound by the anyway imperfectly developed doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility: if the government resigned he would not necessarily feel obliged to resign with it. Events quickly exposed the limitations of his premises. His eminence, ability and instinct to fight for causes in which he believed ineluctably dragged him to the forefront of political controversy. He rapidly became identified in the popular mind with the forces of reaction. Whilst the battlefield site, and those who fought at it retained their special allure with most of the nation each Waterloo Day during the 1820s, its victor would increasingly become associated, across the political spectrum, with the French variant of his name, ‘Vilainton’. More accurately perhaps, to risk an unavoidable pun, it might be suggested that a pair of Wellingtons emerged. By 1832, the gulf between the two, one the hero of Waterloo, the other the villain who had destroyed the Protestant constitution whilst, paradoxically, having opposed Parliamentary Reform, would appear to be unbridgeable.
Wellington had hardly been conceived of as a Liberal before 1819. Having attended the Congresses of Vienna and Aix-la-Chapelle he was associated in the popular mind with the Russian, Prussian and Austrian autocracies, which constituted the Holy Alliance. He was also a close friend of the Foreign Secretary, Byron’s bête noire, Lord Castlereagh. But it was the Duke whom Byron likened to the first murderer in Macbeth as ‘the best of cut-throats’, a backhanded compliment if ever there was one, for:
You have repaired Legitimacy’s crutch,
A prop not quite so certain as before.250
Wellington’s true political colours would be confirmed for many by his behaviour during the series of domestic popular agitations of 1819–1821. During the summer of 1819 there were mass meetings across the industrial north, Midlands and western Scotland, demanding a melange of reforms that included universal suffrage, annual parliaments and the repeal of the 1815 Corn Laws. At Blackburn in July, one of the speakers was a Waterloo veteran ‘who begged pardon for having fought in so bad a cause’. The most famous gathering took place on 16 August at St Peter’s Field, Manchester. Sixty thousand assembled to hear Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt address them. Concerned that Hunt would incite disorder, the local authorities ordered the local yeomanry cavalry to assist with his arrest; in the confusion, men from the 15th Hussars joined them. In the ensuing crush hundreds were injured and about a dozen left dead and dying. The latter included 18-year-old John Lees from Oldham. He had survived the French cavalry in 1815 to return to his trade as a cotton spinner. At his inquest, William Harrison testified that his friend had indeed been at Waterloo ‘but never in such danger as there; at Waterloo there was man to man, but there it was downright murder’.251
The Duke joined the rest of the government, however, in defending the actions of the Manchester authorities. Nationwide, the Opposition tried to canalise popular anger over the Peterloo Massacre by trying to organise a series of county meetings to censure its decision. A requisition calling for such a meeting in Wellington’s Hampshire was amongst them. It failed to materialise, owing to a strong counter-requisition, to which the Duke was a signatory. This earned him the opprobrium of the Opposition’s Lord Brougham, who argued, with some logic, that as a member of the government under scrutiny, Wellington should have maintained the political neutrality of which he boasted. It is no surprise to learn that the Duke was one of the principal targets for the Cato Street conspirators, who intended to assassinate the cabinet in February 1820.252
The following year brought Wellington no respite from either Brougham or controversy. Brougham was chief attorney to the popular Caroline of Brunswick (sister to the Duke who had been killed at Quatre Bras), the estranged wife of the profligate George IV. When the latter became king in January 1820, the Duke was prominent in his government’s negotiations to reach a settlement with her. When these failed, George insisted that ministers introduce a Bill divorcing her. As Wellington rode from the Lords during the hearings that summer and autumn, he was ‘assailed by every species of noise that by possibility could denote popular disapprobation’. Such was the fear of popular unrest in London by the end of 1820 that it was estimated that there were enough men and guns in the capital to win another Waterloo.253
It was Wellington’s role in the Hampshire public’s response to the Queen Caroline affair that really damaged his political reputation, at least with progressive commentators. On becoming Lord Lieutenant of the county in December 1820, he agreed to present a loyal address to the King signed by the county’s predominantly Tory gentry. Hampshire’s leading Opposition figures, meanwhile, had held a county meeting, attended by some 5,000 freeholders, deprecating the government’s actions against Caroline. Sensing blood, Opposition peers accused the Duke of denying the Hampshire freeholders their voice. Wellington protested his innocence, insisting that as the address, in his view, represented the county’s voice, ‘it was not necessary to go through the farce of a county meeting’. This belittling of a long-accepted constitutional right of assembly was far and away his biggest political gaffe before 1830. Creevey recorded that he ‘was pummelled black and blue’ by the Opposition leadership. As late as 1832, an ironic poem against him included the lines:
I never saw a reason
For heeding those mob-farces miscalled ‘meetings’.254
By early 1821, therefore, any political honeymoon period for the Duke had long since passed. In caricatures, memorably Hone and Cruikshank’s 1819 parody ‘The Political House that Jack Built’, he was ‘Waterloo Man’, Lord Liverpool’s hired assassin. Even The Times thought that he ‘has become less admired and less popular, with every year that he has formed part of the Civil Government, and almost with every vote that he has given on questions of national politics’. ‘Military men,’ the paper concluded, ‘are seldom very sound or generous politicians. Their instinct is so strong on the side of power, that they would […] extend to whole nations the discipline inseparable from an army.’255
Wellington’s waning popularity, accompanied, as the Peterloo sobriquet exemplified, by the resurfacing of popular ambivalences about the army, did not, however, have any discernible impact upon the numbers of people wanting to visit the sites where both had prospered together. The Duke himself was there at least three times during the summer of 1821, in September by royal command, when he acted as guide to George IV. Anglesey too visited at around this time, supposedly dining with his son at the table on which his leg had been amputated. In 1828 he told Creevey that ‘the people of that house have made the Lord knows what by people coming to see the grave of my leg which was buried in the garden!’256 For ordinary mortals, the guide of choice, until his death in the mid-1820s, remained Jean Decoster. In the summer of 1824, he was reported to be living in a roads
ide cottage about a mile from Waterloo church and that ‘so many and constant are his visitors, English and Prussian (but few French), that at this season of the year, long days, his only employment is acting as a guide to the visitors’. The following year a Mr J. Deville and his party were hugely impressed by him, not least because he apparently knew every general officer’s name from the battle, and ‘our feelings were kept alive […] in a manner I never before experienced’. Doubtless, like everybody else, Decoster embellished his account with each retelling – by October 1822 he was insisting that pigeons had not returned to Hougoumont until three weeks after the battle. Suspicions also lingered that his sympathies, like that of many Belgians, had lain with Napoleon. For this reason, Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Hawker labelled him ‘disgraceful’ when he made the obligatory Waterloo visit as part of a European tour in spring 1821. Hawker had nevertheless actively sought him out to act as his guide.257
Hougoumont, with or without pigeons, seems to have remained relatively unaltered for most of the 1820s.258 An 1822 visitor described it as ‘a complete ruin’ except for the chapel containing its fifteenth-century crucifix, the Christ figure charred, some said miraculously, only at its feet. The only ‘addition’ was visitors’ autographs on the walls. Some of these, in particular Sir Walter Scott’s and Lord Byron’s, quickly became attractions in themselves. Only by the end of the decade had new gates been erected to replace those ‘so much disfigured by the shots that they resembled a sieve’. In the orchard, one visitor recounted dining on as many strawberries and cherries as ‘any person could reasonably desire’.
La Haye Sainte, by contrast, had been repaired and re-inhabited. The same visitor who had dined al fresco at Hougoumont reported arriving there on a feast day and found himself eating amongst young peasants who sang and laughed over a good meal, the garden ‘full of flowers, and redolent of sweets’. Recalling what had passed there a little over a decade before, he reported that ‘Recollections of this kind at dinner do not serve to improve the digestion.’
However young, the feasters can hardly have been ignorant of La Haye Sainte’s role in the battle, for there was a pyramidal memorial to the men that had defended it. Other memorials included the black gothic arrowhead one to the Prussians at Plancenoit, completed in 1818, and another to the Hanoverians, begun in autumn 1826, consisting of a pillar topped with a statue of victory.259 A more implausible ‘memorial’ was a table at La Belle Alliance, said to be the one used by Wellington and Blücher when they met there on the evening of 18 June. Perhaps it provided a resting place for the visitors’ book that was in evidence by 1822. Away from the three famous buildings, however, the general view was, as one 1822 visitor wrote, that farming had ‘entirely obliterated the traces of the dreadful conflict’. In particular, the two mass graves around La Haye Sainte containing an estimated 6,000 bodies had been entirely levelled by ploughing. It looked so ordinary that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who visited the field in 1828, professed to be totally unaffected owing to ‘the total deficiency of memorable places to excite any interest in him unless they possessed some natural beauty’. He was surely being obtuse. William Wordsworth, his travelling companion, ‘keenly inspected the field of battle, insatiably curious after tombstones, and spots where officers had fallen (the Duke of Brunswick, Picton, Ponsonby, etc)’. For him, as on his first visit in 1820, the predominant feeling remained the ‘horror breaking from the silent ground’.260
Wordsworth was largely, one presumes, imagining the horror, but it was still tangible. The anonymous visitor of 1822 recorded that, ‘In traversing the field […] we found several skulls, bones, and musket-bullets, which the plough had recently turned up.’ In 1824 a former colonel in the Portuguese Army noted that the trade in battlefield memorabilia was so profitable that ‘there are a host of young Paysannes accost the visitor […] with shot, grape and musket, which they sell for half a franc a piece’. By the end of the decade, a Monsieur Saintine reported that though ‘great quantities’ of swords and muskets were still being found, their price had been depressed by the rumour ‘that the inhabitants had a regular manufactory for these articles’. By contrast, the verisimilitude of skulls, ‘which are excellently done up’, his guide assured him, was impeccable since ‘whenever we want any bones or skulls we mark the place, [where the ears of rye were darker] go at night, and dig them up’.261
It was not just local peasants who were alleged to have violated the graves of the fallen. The London Observer of 18 November 1822:
estimated that more than a million of bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year from the continent of Europe into the port of Hull. The neighbourhood of […] Waterloo, and of all of the places where, during the late bloody war, the principal battles were fought, have been swept alike of the bones of the hero and of the horse which he rode. Thus collected from every quarter, they have been shipped to the port of Hull, and thence forwarded to the Yorkshire bone-grinders, who have erected steam-engines and powerful machinery, for the purpose of reducing them to a granulary state. In this condition they are sent chiefly to Doncaster, one of the largest agricultural markets in that part of the country, and are there sold to the farmers to manure their lands. The oily substance gradually evolving as the base calcines, makes a more substantial manure than any other substance, particularly human bones. It is now ascertained beyond a doubt, by actual experiment on an extensive scale, that a dead soldier is a most valuable article of commerce; and, for ought known to the contrary, the good farmers of Yorkshire are, in a great measure, indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread. It is certainly a singular fact, that Great Britain should have sent out such multitudes of soldiers to fight the battles of this country upon the continent of Europe, and should then import their bones as an article of commerce to fatten her soil!262
This is a remarkable account. Byron, amongst others, commented on how crops grew best over mass gravesites but those were in situ. If true, this commercialisation of Waterloo heroes is a telling comment on what society thought of, and did for, the ordinary soldier. It was a far cry indeed from the idea, briefly floated by some in 1815, that all the fallen should be memorialised by name. Britons, and their Waterloo allies, still had a long road to travel before the sanctity of battlefields was properly recognised. The idea of Waterloo in the public imagination as a place of heroism, rather than a site of mass slaughter, was ever-increasingly in the ascendant during the 1820s. Wordsworth’s reaction was a minority one. Visitors happily took home human bones, presumably because they viewed them more as trophies of the great national triumph than as human remains deserving of individual respect. Such a mindset would explain the absence of any significant outcry to the London Observer’s report.
One memento Waterloo visitors of the 1820s could no longer take home with them was pieces of the elm near the crossroads, which had been Wellington’s command post. The farmer on whose land it stood complained that he was losing half an acre’s crops annually to the feet of tourists anxious to set their eyes on what contemporaries agreed was the most celebrated tree in British history since Shakespeare’s mulberry. Since, by the autumn of 1818, it was anyway as good as dead – it was reported that the trunk was completely stripped of its bark to at least 3 feet above ground level – he determined to fell it. Serendipitously, on 27 September, the day before the axe was due to fall, one man who visited the scene was John George Children, a Fellow (later President) of the Royal Society and trustee of the British Museum. He persuaded the farmer to sell it to him.263 This did not spare the elm its fate but it did ensure portions of it a more verifiable posterity. Two chairs, fashioned from it by Thomas Chippendale the younger in 1820, were duly presented to the Duke and George IV. The latter kept his at Windsor Castle, perhaps near the snuff box made partly from the same tree, which Sir Walter Scott gave him in 1822. A third chair was created from wood presented to the Duke of Rutland, Children’s friend from university, whose son had served in the 10th Hussars at Waterloo. Port
ions of the remainder were incorporated into a work-table made by William Lovett ‘with a silver plate let into the top stating this’. Lovett, subsequently a founding father of the Chartist movement, detested Wellington’s politics; Lovett the patriot and apprentice craftsman was clearly proud of his vicarious association with Waterloo.264 His is a nice example of someone who could conceptualise two Wellingtons.
The loss of Wellington’s elm was more than compensated for by the creation of the Lion’s Mound, an initiative that would change the topography of the battlefield forever. In 1819, King William I of the Netherlands instructed his chief engineer to produce plans for a memorial on the site where his son, the Prince of Orange (in Wellington’s 1824 description ‘a brave young man but that’s all’), had been wounded at Waterloo shortly before 7 p.m.265 Work was properly under way by spring 1824; 2,000 men with 600 horses and carts were being employed on the project by the summer. In the process of constructing an artificial hill over 130 feet high and 1,700 feet in circumference, they were to move well over 300,000 cubic yards of earth. This came mostly from the ridge at the centre of the Anglo-Allied line, effectively removing the southern bank of Wellington’s sunken road towards La Haye Sainte. Surmounting a pedestal at the top of the mound was a 31-ton cast-iron lion, some 21-feet long and 12-feet high, with a paw resting on a globe. It was formally put in place on 30 October 1826. J. Deville described it as ‘a most stupendous work’ that brought to mind the similarly proportioned Neolithic chalk mound of Silbury Hill near Avebury in Wiltshire.266