by Foster, R E
Ewart’s name was presumably unknown to the boy, who, according to the great Radical apostle of free trade, Richard Cobden, had asked his father, when taken to see Siborne’s model of Waterloo, what the battle was about. This was partly the result, with the passage of time, of the ignorance of youth. The Worcester Journal, in 1838, deemed it necessary to explain to ‘our younger readers’ that Wellington’s annual rent for Stratfield Saye consisted of a tricolour flag. For their parents, the fact had long been common knowledge.401 But there is some evidence that the public was losing its appetite for celebrating Waterloo. As early as 1833, in Stockport, it was claimed that the battle’s anniversary had ‘entirely lost its attraction’. Only eighteen tickets were sold for a Waterloo dinner at Nottingham in 1840, whilst the bells of York Minster, in full peal each 18 June since 1815, were not rung in 1849.402 Most such objections to marking the date appear to have been grounded in the seeming glorification of war in general, as opposed to Waterloo in particular. In Leicester, Mr West, a Quaker, protested about the 10 shillings paid to the local bell-ringers each year. ‘It struck him as being a most inconsistent thing that this should be done; and he trusted that, as Christians, they would not retain this celebration.’403 And in 1849, ‘Philo Junius’ maintained that:
the intelligent people of this country ‘want no boast of Waterloo’ – no public commemoration of any such unchristian atrocity. It is by peaceful arts that society advances; and as succeeding generations learn more justly to appreciate achievements that really tend to benefit mankind, the anniversaries celebrated by the country will be those which refer to great discoveries, or inventions, or exertions tending to promote the permanent prosperity and freedom, and the moral and religious welfare of mankind.
The London Peace Society, which had been established in June 1816, enjoyed some popularity during the 1840s: Cobden was a prominent supporter.404
However laudable the sentiments of ‘Philo Junius’, they represented, overwhelmingly, a minority viewpoint. Even organs of the Radical press sympathetic to it had to concede that ‘every Briton’s heart throbs as a feeling of patriotism thrills through it’ at the remembrance of 1815.405 Whilst Wellington lived, British society continued to celebrate Waterloo with him and his veterans. Events ranged from the modest dinner prepared by Mr Tubb at East Tytherley’s Star Inn to the huge fetes at Vauxhall and grand military reviews in London’s St James’s Park or Dublin’s Phoenix Park. By the mid-1830s, it had become an unwritten convention that no new parliamentary business would be transacted on Waterloo Day. In 1836, William Lynn, who owned the Waterloo Hotel in Liverpool, inaugurated a three-day hare coursing event at Great Altcar in Lancashire known as the Waterloo Cup.406 Messrs Rundell and Bridge struck a commemorative medal for the battle’s twenty-fifth anniversary. In 1842 Robert Burford opened a new Waterloo panorama in Leicester Square based on Henry Barker’s original drawings from 1815. In 1844 Wellington himself was amongst those who went to see General Tom Thumb’s impersonation of Napoleon at St Helena in P. T. Barnum’s circus at the Egyptian Hall.407 Musical and dramatic performances about 1815 were common throughout the nation, and staged with a pleasing disregard for health and safety. Early in November 1846, the Garrick Theatre was totally destroyed by a fire started by wadding fired from cannon during a performance of The Battle of Waterloo.408
Thackeray was another who was uneasy at the motivation for Waterloo celebrations: ‘It is a wrong, egotistical, savage, unchristian feeling, and that’s the truth of it.’ Doubtless many base emotions were stirred, but Wellington’s generation, inured to war, was also genuine in its gratitude that Waterloo was followed by a prolonged era of relative peace. In 1836, the Essex Standard claimed that the years since 1815 marked the longest period without war between European states since 1066. A ‘Birmingham Reformer’ reflected approvingly upon the nature of that peace: in 1815 it had seemed as if the forces of reactionary Toryism had prevailed; instead, a new spirit of reform and Liberalism was abroad. And to those who thought likewise, progress was increasingly linked to prosperity. In 1840, the Morning Post estimated that the wealth and industry of Britain had increased by a half.409 It was not coincidental that the first iron ship built on the Clyde was the Iron Duke, with a figurehead of the great man. Railway entrepreneurs, overseeing the greatest revolution in transport during the period, were the most prominent in perceiving a connection between 1815 and the present. Lines frequently opened on Waterloo Day: the 61-mile Newcastle to Carlisle line officially opened on 18 June 1838. One engine, inevitably, was named Wellington. Exactly six years later, the final link in the 303-mile London to Newcastle line was opened. The Duke was toasted at a celebration feast in Newcastle, hosted by the line’s chairman, George Hudson, ‘the railway king’. Thanks to Waterloo, declared the Reverend G. Townsend, over dinner, railways would spread peace, prosperity and civilisation. From 1848, these virtuous expresses would be able to set off from London’s Waterloo Bridge station.410
Waterloo veterans, of course, kept 18 June as a day to look backwards rather than forwards. In Bury St Edmunds the preparations were overseen by William Middleditch, formerly of the First Foot Guards, latterly landlord of the Ram Inn. When he died in 1834, six of his former comrades bore him to the grave. The annual veterans’ gathering at the Ram outlived him.411 The grandest dinner outside London was hosted by the civic authorities in Preston. It was rejuvenated in 1846 by the expedient of including Peninsular, not just Waterloo, veterans. ‘There had,’ explained Mr Vallet, ‘naturally been hitherto a little feeling that ought not to exist, and which this would put aside, and shew that the country appreciated both.’ Some ninety-eight Peninsular veterans and fifty-one Waterloo men – some could claim to be both – took part in a two-hour march around the town accompanied by flags and a band before proceeding to dine at the Bull Hotel.412
Preston’s initiative was presumably related to the 5th Duke of Richmond’s campaign to gain greater reward for all soldiers who had fought in the wars since 1793. As Earl of March, he had served as an aide-de-camp at Waterloo before marrying Uxbridge’s daughter, Caroline, in 1817, and succeeding to the title in 1819. His efforts bore fruit in 1847 with the authorisation of the Military General Services Medal. Richmond was not alone in being indignant that society insufficiently recognised its veterans. Thackeray, though impressed by the memorials to officers that he had seen at Waterloo in 1840:
felt very much disappointed at not seeing the names of all the men as well as the officers. Are they to be counted for nought? A few more inches of marble to each monument would have given space for all the names of the men; and the men of that day were the winners of the battle. We have a right to be as grateful individually to any private as to any given officer.413
His sentiments were given added force by the fact that British soldiers were soon to be engaged in both the first Anglo-Afghan war (1839–1842) and two Anglo-Sikh wars (1845–1846, 1848–1849). Some Waterloo veterans, for example Major Baldwin of the 31st Foot, were to fall in these later conflicts. News of these new fatalities prompted MPs once more to consider properly recording the names of all British service personnel who fell in battle. Mr Williams Wynn, the Member who had proposed doing so in 1815, recalled the earlier occasion, and added his amen to the idea. Again it came to naught, let alone the suggestion that, ‘if glorious battles are worth commemorating, the orphans and widows of soldiers and sailors ought to be prominently, if not permanently assisted’.414
Parliament’s inaction was hardly a matter of cost (Thackeray reckoned £500 would suffice for the marble to memorialise the Waterloo fallen by name); it was one of class. One reason why disquiet at the lack of memorials to the common soldier was being voiced in the 1840s was that the decade witnessed the working-class phenomenon that was Chartism. Its press organ, the Northern Star, claimed to have seen a Chelsea Pensioner wearing his Waterloo medal being totally ignored by the crowds gathering to see the comings and goings at Apsley House on Waterloo Day 1845: ‘This is the gratitude of t
he aristocracy! – we turned away with disgust.’ Thackeray agreed that, ‘English glory is too genteel to meddle with those humble fellows. She does not condescend to ask the names of the poor devils whom she kills in her service.’ Thus, whilst the common soldier, ‘when shot down shall be shovelled into a hole […] and so forgotten’, his officer ‘is knighted because the men fought so well’. Mid-nineteenth-century Britain remained overwhelmingly deferential in character.415
The occasion for the Northern Star’s revulsion was, of course, the annual dinner Wellington hosted at Apsley House for his surviving senior officers from the 1815 campaign. This, above all other commemorative events after 1832, was pre-eminent. It was reported in greater detail with each passing year. From the mid-1830s, the nobility were admitted by ticket to view preparations in the Waterloo Gallery. By 1840, the crowds gathering outside were said to be ‘immense’; it was an occasion of European interest. And not just for the masses: at least seven peers were listed amongst the ‘vast number’ who gathered to watch those arriving in 1843. The crowds cheered the arrival of those more easily recognised, Lord Anglesey in particular.416
Royal patronage, not that it needed it, bolstered the event: William IV was a particular devotee of the occasion. As he lay dying on 17 June 1837, he told his physician, Dr Chambers, that, ‘If you do not keep me alive for another day the Duke of Wellington will not be able to hold his annual festival in celebration of the battle of Waterloo.’ For some things, even royalty and the Grim Reaper had to defer. The King died on 20 June and subsequently lay in state in the Waterloo Gallery at Windsor. Prince Albert was privately censured for declining to attend the 1841 dinner, ‘for the invitation was a great compliment, and this is a sort of national commemoration at which he might have felt a pride at being present’.417 He was assiduous in his attendance thereafter.
The dinner, lasting two to three hours, had a well-established format by the 1830s. There were toasts to the Crown, the Duke, the memory of the fallen, and the constituent parts of the British Army, each interspersed by an appropriate piece from the band engaged for the occasion. Depending upon which foreign dignitaries were present, a glass might be raised to them as well. In 1845, for example, Wellington alluded to ‘the bravery of the allied forces who assisted at Waterloo’. This was not, as might be supposed, a reference to the Prussians, but chiefly to the Hanoverians, whose minister was present.418 The Prussians, indeed, do not seem to have been represented at the banquet. In his last years, however, Wellington was in the habit of referring to them, though chiefly in the context of thanking Sir Henry Hardinge, his liaison officer with them in 1815. This was particularly the case from 1849 when Hardinge (since 1846 Lord Hardinge) was present in person, having returned from his posting as Governor-General of India. In consequence the Prussian Army was toasted directly that year. The following year, Wellington’s longest speech of the evening was ‘mainly in praise of the Prussian army, and the great service it proved at Waterloo’. Frustratingly, his comments were not recorded. But they are unlikely to have been any more revealing than those he made in 1852 when ‘he always at these meetings was proud to acknowledge the great services rendered by the Prussian army at Waterloo. Indeed, he could not speak too highly of the advantages which followed upon their operations.’419 It was his last public reference to them. But he no more defined the precise nature of the services than he had in his 1815 despatch.
The dinner was, anyway, emphatically a celebration of living British legends. In 1844 the Spectator reflected that half the country’s population had been born since Waterloo and that ‘these old fighting men have almost come to belong to a past generation’. They were ‘relics of a fighting era preserved in an era of peace’.420 And above all, the dinner was an annual reminder of one particular legend, Wellington. It took place in his home, specifically in his Waterloo Gallery, which at 200 feet long and 85 feet wide extended the whole length of Apsley House, ‘the finest specimen of modern taste within the metropolis’. His guests ate off Dresden porcelain depicting scenes of his victories from India to Waterloo. Around them, as the press delighted in describing, the room contained a cornucopia of gold and silver plate, a silver gilt shield from the allied monarchs, three gold candelabra from the corporation of London and a solid gold vase from the English nobility.421 It was the supreme example of how the Duke and a willing media colluded in the twin processes of Wellington’s self-fashioning and Waterloo commemoration.
More substantially, Wellington was also being commemorated in statues. A crowd of 20,000 turned up in October 1844 to witness the inauguration of Carlo Marochetti’s equestrian bronze in front of Glasgow’s Royal Exchange. Its success quickly confounded the opposition of The Times, which held that awarding the commission to an Italian would be ‘quite out of keeping with the character of the nation; one with a British name and a foreign spirit, a sort of military harlequin, all start and stare with his clothes in a flutter, and his horse mad. They will obtain this at the expense of patriotism and justice.’422 Less controversial were those executed by Francis Chantrey for the City of London, inaugurated on Waterloo Day the same year, and Sir John Steell’s in front of Edinburgh’s Register House. The latter was officially unveiled on 18 June 1852 with the irresistible billing of ‘the Iron Duke in bronze by Steell’.423
Huge controversy, however, surrounded what was meant to serve as the nation’s official memorial statue of the Duke. Queen Victoria agreed to the project in May 1838; by Waterloo Day 1841, some 2,300 people had contributed over £25,000 towards realising it. But protracted arguments over aesthetics and location meant that it was September 1846 before Matthew Cotes Wyatt’s 30-foot-high statue cast from 40 tons of Waterloo cannon was hoisted onto Decimus Burton’s victory arch at Hyde Park Corner opposite Apsley House. Lord Francis Egerton spoke for many in calling it ‘a bad thing in a bad place’.424 The arguments have obscured the rather more important point that a generation on, the nation was seeking to honour equally the Duke and Nelson and their most famous victories. Queen Victoria, symbolically, sent 500 guineas simultaneously in 1838 to the committees responsible for the two commemorative projects. The Duke himself contributed £200 to the latter enterprise and was in the chair at the London Tavern meeting of August 1838 that confirmed the sanctioning of the site for what would become Trafalgar Square.425
Wellington also remained involved in more consequential affairs. The Conservatives’ return to power in 1841 saw him resume cabinet office as minister without portfolio; he also continued as leader of the party in the Lords. Much of the day-to-day burden of the latter role was shouldered by Lord Stanley from 1844. Before then, in August 1842, Wellington had returned to his old post at the Horse Guards as Commander-in-Chief. From there he was able to give voice to his concerns about the state of the nation’s defences and, in April 1848, prepare for the possibility of popular unrest in the capital in the event of Chartist unrest. Neither invasion nor insurrection materialised.
Waterloo allusions, so common in political discourse during the 1830s, diminished in frequency as the Duke assumed a lower political profile. The one notable exception was the issue of free trade. The Manchester Times would facetiously dub its London namesake ‘the Blücher of the press’ for having converted to the cause only when the battle was ‘well nigh won’. The Conservative Party, though, was popularly presumed to have pledged itself to upholding the Corn Laws at the 1841 election. Sir John Tyrell, MP for North Essex, told electors that he knew from private sources that Wellington was prouder of his part in framing the Corn Laws than he was of Waterloo.426 His sources would fail him. Peel, in face of pressure from Cobden’s Anti-Corn Law League and the humanitarian crisis triggered by the failure of the 1845 Irish potato crop, decided that the Corn Laws must go. Tyrell assured fellow Protectionists at Chelmsford in December 1845 that though Peel had deserted them, Wellington would not. They could have the same confidence in him that his men had when winning at Waterloo. Tyrell was not alone in calling on the Duke to lead. Wellingt
on, it is true, was unconvinced by the merits of free trade. But he did admire Peel’s determination to provide strong government and thus ‘he set about doing his duty, and preparing for battle’. Without Wellington’s support, the House of Lords may well have rejected the Repeal measure. Once more a constitutional clash was averted. It was a final political victory. When Peel’s government fell in June 1846, Wellington effectively retired from politics.427
Wellington’s part in helping resolve the crisis over the Corn Laws contributed to the ongoing ‘softening’ of his public image that is apparent from the late 1830s onwards. Punch, the satirical magazine that first appeared in 1841, also played a significant part in it. Gentler in the treatment of its subjects than political caricaturists of the previous generation, Wellington’s hooked nose made him irresistible to that periodical’s cartoonists. Punch was also responsible for popularising the ‘Iron Duke’ sobriquet, one of the many names he was being called by 1838.428 Increasingly, it was meant respectfully, denoting the perceived Wellingtonian virtues of determination and resolution; not the competing connotations of a cold and uncaring figure. Punch, like others, further delighted in reproducing (and mimicking) the Duke’s famously terse – and often amusing – replies to correspondents. For all that he complained about his voluminous postbag, Wellington seems to have been more or less addicted to answering the myriad of inquiries that reached him. In 1846 one newspaper included Wellington’s ostensible views on marriage, corns and lotteries. On the latter:
F. M. Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to Messrs. Heine, and in answer to their letter, never dabbles in lotteries. He thinks them a swindle upon the public, and begs they may send him no more letters. As for the prizes, he never won one, and never heard of anybody who did. They are a fiction – a snare – a take-in.