Wellington and Waterloo

by Foster, R E

  so congenial to the tastes of all spectators, so unhesitatingly and potently awakening to the mind, so expressive of curiosity, surprise, joy, in their overflowing of heart, that if ever it could be pronounced with certainty of a performance that it would go down to an admiring posterity, this is one of which such a prophecy may unerringly be made.312

  As Hamish Miles says, ‘It is, in effect, a history picture with an invisible hero, the popular joy being in the victory of the nation rather than of a commander.’313 But it did the commander’s reputation no harm. If it was not quite what he originally had in mind when he commissioned it, he must have been more than pleased with the result.

  It has been suggested that Wilkie’s painting was also a response to Wellington’s contemporary political unpopularity. This is plausible, for political controversy was rarely far from Waterloo episodes. General Gourgaud, living for a while in London, is a case in point. The German press presumed that his arrest and deportation at the end of 1818 were directly attributable to Wellington’s pique at being characterised as essentially lucky in Gourgaud’s account of the 1815 campaign. The British press doubted whether the Duke would stoop so low, though it did believe that Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, might. Members of the Opposition sensed enough political mileage in the story to present a petition on Gourgaud’s behalf the following April.314 More mundanely, Tories regularly sought to appropriate Waterloo for themselves. In 1827, the Stockport Loyal Wellington Club dined to celebrate Waterloo Day in a room adorned with laurel, flags and military banners. Its chairman, William Hulton, told those present that they met at a time when people should be ready to come forward and support the throne and ‘the preservation of the rights of the Church and Constitution’. Similarly, the Liberal press was concerned that William IV’s attending Wellington’s 1831 Waterloo dinner would be taken advantage of by their opponents to suggest that it was somehow a mark of royal approbation for the Duke’s stance against Reform.315

  The latter two incidents illustrate well how, after a quieter period during the mid-1820s, Wellington found himself once more at the forefront of partisan controversies. Those controversies were catalysed by the stroke that debilitated Lord Liverpool in February 1827, leading George Canning to succeed him in Downing Street on 10 April. Wellington, who loathed Canning, and was presumed to oppose his support for the granting of civil equality to Roman Catholics, resigned from the cabinet. His decision confirmed him as a leader of the ‘Protestants’. It also brought the charge that he was behaving factiously, for he also chose to resign the bipartisan post of Commander-in-Chief, in which he had only succeeded the Duke of York the previous January.316

  The perception that Wellington was activated by a mixture of personal animosity and party spirit was reinforced in early June. He moved an amendment that succeeded in torpedoing the government’s attempt to liberalise the 1815 Corn Laws – substantially the same measure he had supported just months before as a member of Liverpool’s cabinet. Both in and out of Parliament the fallout was considerable, for the emotive Corn Laws, whose rationale was to protect British farmers by prohibiting foreign grain imports until domestic prices reached 80 shillings a quarter, were understandably viewed by many as a tax on bread. Mrs Arbuthnot recorded that, ‘Sir Rt Wilson says we have had Wellington boots and now we will have a Wellington loaf and make him odious all over the country.’ So it partly proved. In Nottingham, on Waterloo Day, an effigy of the Duke with a small loaf pendant in its buttonhole was paraded and burnt. But Wellington’s amendment had also made him the farmers’ friend: the Holderness Agricultural Society duly made him an honorary member.317 Argument over the question inside Parliament was further fuelled when some of the strongest criticism of Wellington’s amendment fell on 18 June, prompting the Ultra, Sir Edward Knatchbull, to suggest that ‘he thought he should be deemed immaculate on the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo’. Many disagreed. It was an organ of the Canningite press, motivated by the political present, that wrote of the military past on the twelfth anniversary of Waterloo that, ‘As Englishmen we feel no gratification of being reminded of a momentous crisis, at which our commander-in-chief was surprised by his vigilant enemy, dancing at a ball,(!) and of a conflict in which the timely intervention of the Prussian hordes, alone rescued our brave but overmatched troops from utter defeat and destruction.’318

  Wellington was clearly more a hero of rural than urban and industrial England. He was also more a southern than a northern one. A tour of the north-east in early autumn 1827 was seen by some as a successful attempt to redress this. The Times reported that he was as well received as if his victories had just taken place. His official visits included York, Durham, Ripon and Newcastle. An estimated 20,000 turned out to see him in Sunderland. In the church porch at Kirby, near Tadcaster, a Waterloo veteran was given a sovereign.319 In reality, though, Wellington’s northern progress was primarily an attempt by his host, Lord Londonderry (Castlereagh’s half brother, who, in an earlier incarnation as Charles Stewart had served with Wellington in the Peninsula), to underscore Wellington’s ties to the Ultras and his distance from Canning’s administration. Plenty saw through the ruse. When Londonderry appeared with Wellington at Stockton-on-Tees, the local press rightly doubted that Wellington’s presence ‘was intended to celebrate the battle of Waterloo, but the battle with the Corn Bill, and the cause of the Londonderries’.320

  Circumstances would soon expose the differences between Wellington and the Ultras. Canning died in August. When his successor, the hapless Goderich, resigned in January 1828, George IV asked the Duke to form an administration. His cabinet was an uneasy combination of Protestants and Catholics. Lord John Russell cautioned Wellington’s supporters against appealing to past military glories ‘whenever the duke should propose any very objectionable measure’. He predicted failure because ‘those very habits of command which had been most befitting the noble duke in his military station […] were likely to prove most objectionable and dangerous in the situation of first minister of a free country’. In his Political Register, Cobbett agreed: Wellington ‘must now stand or fall in the eyes of posterity by your actions in this new line of life’.321 The events of the following weeks appeared to substantiate their forebodings. Palmerston, the Canningite Secretary at War, referred to the Premier as the ‘Dictator’ and wrote that, ‘The Duke brings little to his extensive duties but narrow prejudices & an obstinate will to act upon them, but that forms a slender capital upon which to govern a nation.’ Wellington, for his part, was not disappointed when the Canningites resigned en masse in May. Their replacements included Sir George Murray and Sir Henry Hardinge, both of whom had served under him in the Peninsula. They were comparative political lightweights but they were immeasurably more congenial colleagues. The Dumfries Courier was right in its estimation that Wellington would prefer to re-fight the battles of 1815 over again than deal with cabinet in-fighting.322

  The great battle of Wellington’s administration was that to grant Roman Catholic Emancipation. Although he had hitherto opposed it, Wellington’s approach to the question was essentially pragmatic.323 In July 1828, the election of the nationalist leader, Daniel O’Connell, as MP for County Clare, his Catholicism notwithstanding, threatened the spectre of widespread disorder in Ireland if the nettle were not finally grasped. Having convinced a highly reluctant George IV that the measure was essential, Wellington’s cabinet thrashed out the minutiae of a Bill. By mid-April 1829 it was law. The Canningite, Charles Grant, welcomed it as ‘a greater victory than the battle of Waterloo’. Radical critics conceded that only the Duke could have carried the measure in face of royal and political opposition. The Times, hitherto lukewarm at best towards Wellington’s premiership, marked the anniversary of Waterloo by declaring that ‘the greatest warrior of his time was the most zealous tranquillizer of domestic discord’.324

  Not everybody concurred. The Globe, in an imperfect analogy, pointed out that it was the Whigs, not Wellington, who had played the part of Blüch
er in sustaining the long struggle against religious intolerance: ‘they have maintained the position which was essential to make the efforts of reinforcements essential’. But this was as nothing compared to the vitriol hurled at Wellington by the Tory press. His staunchest press ally, The Standard, reflected that Waterloo Day 1829 was the first ‘in which the people of England have felt as a painful burthen their obligation of gratitude to the hero of that day’. Passions ran high. At a parish vestry meeting in The Red Lion near Aylesbury, argument descended into disorder leading to seven arrests for assault, ‘some denouncing his Grace the Duke of Wellington as the assassin of the constitution, and others as its friend and saviour’.325 Most famously, though in the event neither man was hurt, the Earl of Winchilsea fought a duel with Wellington on Battersea Fields on 21 March. The Duke’s attendants were the ever-faithful Dr Hume and Sir Henry Hardinge.326

  A sub-plot of the Emancipation story was the falling out between Wellington and Anglesey. The latter was confirmed as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in Wellington’s administration but infuriated his chief by making public his support for Emancipation in the summer of 1828. Wellington ordered his recall in December. Anglesey in turn vented his anger at the Duke for his dismissal by clashing with him in the Lords. According to Mrs Arbuthnot, he also wrote to the Swedish minister and ‘complained of the Duke most bitterly, said he had conferred the greatest obligations!!! On the Duke, that by his charges of cavalry he had gained for him the battle of Waterloo!!!’ Mrs Arbuthnot was nearer the mark in judging that ‘if anything could have lost the battle of Waterloo, it wd have been Ld Anglesey’s management of our cavalry’. Anglesey was also seen as having had the worst of their parliamentary encounter, leading to the inevitable joke that, ‘At the clubs they say that he has no longer a leg to stand upon, for that he lost one at Waterloo & the other in the H. of Lords.’327

  Outside Parliament during 1829, as some struggling Waterloo veterans could have testified, bread-and-butter issues replaced constitutional ones. In February 1829 the journeyman weavers of Waterloo Town in Bethnal Green had met to petition Wellington about the fact that 7,000 looms lay idle. Cobbett told Wellington that ‘there are great numbers of your admirers upon the point of starvation, and they cannot eat and drink the word “Waterloo”’. Wellington did not deny that distress existed, but on 4 February 1830 both doubted its extent and the ability of the legislature to remedy it. His remarks were not well received. Cobbett observed that he needed some Waterloo luck now. Luck, as it turned out, was in short supply. George IV’s death in June triggered a general election that marginally weakened Wellington’s parliamentary position. News of revolution abroad, particularly the fall of the Bourbons in July, added to rising popular excitement. As one irreverent individual added a pipe to the Achilles statue, ‘Reform’ became the watchword of the day.328

  Beleaguered but defiant, the Prime Minister used the occasion of the debate on the King’s Speech on 2 November to tell their Lordships in unambiguous terms ‘that the Legislature and system of representation possessed the full and entire confidence of the country’. Not only would he not introduce Reform but ‘he should always feel it his duty to resist such measures when proposed by others’. His comments surpassed in ineptitude those about county meetings in 1821. As Greville put it, Wellington’s speech ‘at once destroyed what little popularity the Duke had left, and lowered him in public estimation’.329 Popular excitement reached new heights. Even Wellington conceded that the threat to public order made it politic to cancel the Lord Mayor’s procession and banquet scheduled for 9 November at the Guildhall, something he later improbably described as the ‘crisis in my military life [that] cost me […] the most anxious consideration’. It was to little avail. His government lost a vote on 15 November and resigned the next day. Many professed to believe that only this averted a popular uprising and that ‘his defeat is a greater triumph for the country than was the battle of Waterloo’.330

  Wellington compared his 1829 struggle to carry Emancipation to Waterloo. The analogy would have been more apt for his rearguard over Parliamentary Reform during 1831–1832. Grey’s Whig-dominated government, formed in November 1830, staked its existence on the passage of the Reform proposals it introduced in March 1831. This placed the Duke in the not unfamiliar position of conducting a defence of what he conceived as the forces of order against those of revolution. He genuinely believed that the popular pressure for Reform was transitory; consequently confident that he could defeat the measure by marshalling the Lords to hold out long enough for the people to come to their senses.331 In the event he was not even to monopolise the Waterloo metaphor, let alone win the battle of the Reform Bill.

  As with Waterloo, so the battle of 1831–1832 is best narrated in stages. The Reform Bill having passed the Commons by a whisker on 22 March, Grey secured the dissolution of Parliament. During the ensuing election campaign of April–May, at least one pro-Reform pamphlet argued that a Reformed Parliament would have rendered Waterloo unnecessary, since abler and more responsive ministers would have been in office during the Peninsular War. Thus it was contended, ‘can any one doubt that the Duke of Wellington would have been enabled to take much more decided steps for the expulsion of the French from the Peninsula, and that the contest might have been brought to a much earlier termination?’ This was debatable logic; the Reformers nevertheless won a landslide. The Bill, now guaranteed a majority in the Commons, went to the Lords. Their Lordships duly rejected it in October by 199–158, not least, it was noted, because 21 bishops had voted with the majority. Popular uproar ensued. Apsley House was stoned by a mob on 12 October.332 Meanwhile, at a county meeting in Hampshire, Sir James MacDonald MP likened the bishops to Blücher’s forces reaching Mont St Jean. ‘The arrival of the Prussians at the close of the battle of Waterloo was not less looked for by the enemy than was the array of prelates, who thought fit to take the Government in the flank and thus lose them the day.’333

  In the months that followed, sufficient peers were persuaded to compromise that a revised Reform Bill passed the Lords in April 1832. But Wellington had continued to speak and vote against it. The battle was not yet quite lost. On 7 May the government was unexpectedly defeated in the Lords on an amendment to postpone consideration of the disfranchisement of small boroughs. Grey resigned on 9 May; Wellington accepted William IV’s commission to replace him. It was an unequal struggle. In Edinburgh alone, 38,000 signed a petition for the Reform Bill; in London, Daniel Wakefield warned that a Wellington government would mean ‘an attempt would be instantly made to coerce the people, and establish a military government in support of the aristocracy’. Unable to construct a viable ministry, Wellington resigned on 15 May. Creevey reflected that what came to be known as the May Days had been the critical moment: ‘The conqueror of Waterloo had great luck on that day […] but at last comes his own false move, which has destroyed himself and his Tory high-flying association for ever.’334

  Against this backdrop, Waterloo Day 1832 proved to be the most memorable of Wellington’s lifetime. Local celebrations took place as usual. Detachments of the Scots Greys, for example, celebrated in Birmingham, which had been at the heart of the provincial struggle for Reform. Upwards of seventy attended Wellington’s Waterloo banquet. Earlier that day, however, the Duke had returned home from the Tower only to be assailed by a mob, at first verbally and then by various missiles. In Fenchurch Street, attempts were made to drag him from his horse before police intervened to rescue him. He had to be escorted all the way to Apsley House. On arriving there, he simply touched his hat ‘and quietly said, “An odd day to choose! [Waterloo day] Good morning.”’335

  Thomas Carlyle thought that Wellington had become the most unpopular man in England by spring 1832: his effigy was being burnt in all market towns. In Edinburgh, a figure of ‘Dukey’ bearing the legend ‘So perish all tyrants’ suffered the further indignity of being grabbed by policemen ‘who reached the Duke’s unmentionables, and these they captured nobly, while
his upper parts were drawn up by some boys into an office’.336 The popular celebrations that followed the Reform Act’s passage on 7 June brought Wellington renewed abuse. In his native Hampshire, a prominent Radical, Richard Hinxman, even went so far as to suggest that the country had nothing whatsoever to thank him for. This was untypical but there was something approaching a consensus that his career was over. In London, Lord Yarborough was reported as having said that ‘Wellington had ceased politically to exist’ – and in circumstances that had irreparably damaged his previous reputation. As The Times put it, ‘Under any contingency, the Duke of Wellington has earned for himself a load of distrust, which we apprehend – and it is not without regret we say so, “that enough of life scarcely remains to enable His Grace to shake off.”’337 Time would prove otherwise.

  5

  Wellington and Waterloo

  Despatched 1832–1852?

  As he left the House of Lords on 30 April 1839, the eve of his 70th birthday, Wellington ‘was grossly insulted by a blackguard in the crowd’. A coal-heaver:

  seized hold of the ruffian, shook him almost to death, and hurled him to the ground amid the cheers of the spectators who surrounded the Duke and followed him all the way to Apsley House. He was advised to mount his horse; ‘no,’ said he ‘I’ll lead them on foot,’ and away they went, he at their head, and the crowds increasing at every corner.338