by Foster, R E
Greville was exactly right in noting that this idiosyncrasy was ‘not only unprecedented, but quite unnecessary, and I think unwise, although certainly it contributes to his popularity’.429
The Duke was incontrovertibly popular, even revered, during his last years. He was at once infallible sage, benign elder statesman and national treasure. No friend of his politics, the Scotch Reformers’ Gazette was aghast to learn that somebody had taken the reins from the Wellington statue in Glasgow in September 1845. The perpetrator, it thought, should be dragged through the streets on a hurdle and sentenced to hard labour interspersed by thrashings until the next 18 June. At the opening of the Great Exhibition in May 1851, Wellington’s appearance was, said Palmerston, ‘accompanied by an incessant running fire of applause from the men and waving of handkerchiefs and kissing of hands from the women’. When he joined arms with Lord Anglesey, there was virtually a stampede. Nobody seemed to mind that he was upstaging both the royal couple and the raison d’etre of the event: Victoria and Albert had happily christened their son, born on Wellington’s 81st birthday, Arthur. A year before, Wellington’s 80th birthday in 1849 was marked quite widely by public dinners.430 The Duke’s passing in September 1852 would therefore test the nation: how would it deal with Waterloo without Wellington?
6
Victorians Remember: Wellington
and Waterloo Reassessed 1852–1901
‘On this day Arthur, Duke of Wellington, perhaps the greatest man that ever drew breath, departed.’ Thus ran the entry in Lady Shelley’s diary for 14 September 1852. The Duke had died earlier that afternoon at Walmer Castle. His passing triggered a remarkable outpouring of eulogies and other assessments. For a few months, his reputation returned to levels not reached since 1815. Even Waterloo was eclipsed by the shadow of the man. In December 1852, Charles Dickens, who found the phenomenon unseemly, wrote that ‘it strikes me that no topic ever considered since the earth was without form and void, has been so exhausted as the Death of the Duke of Wellington’.431 The debate generated more heat than light, for Britons were already largely agreed who they felt Wellington was and what Waterloo represented. By the century’s close, with more of the real Wellington having been revealed, he could be re-evaluated; and Waterloo would again loom larger than the man with whom it was synonymous. But Waterloo too, by dint of new memoirs and fresh histories, would slowly come to be viewed more dispassionately by Britons. The popular commemorations of 18 June would die with those of the Waterloo generation that outlived the Duke. Even so, the battle lived on in the national consciousness, and continued to inform the unfolding national story.
The Duke received the rare honour of a state funeral and burial in St Paul’s Cathedral.432 First, over 250,000 people filed past his coffin at the Royal Military Hospital, where it lay in state for four days from 13 November. On the night of 17 November it was transferred to Horse Guards, from where the 10,000-strong funeral procession, headed by Prince Albert, set out at 7.15am the following morning. Wellington’s body lay on a huge funeral carriage. Behind it walked his immediate family and closest friends. It was 2.40 p.m. before the service concluded and the coffin could be lowered into the crypt. Inclement weather notwithstanding, the day was judged a success. Even Dickens acknowledged ‘the sincere and deep expression […] of reverence’ shown by the masses. Some 20,000 had crammed inside St Paul’s, whilst 300,000 had secured vantage points in public buildings or on hastily erected stands. An estimated 1½ million were said to have witnessed the procession. This, facilitated by the rapid expansion of the railways, equated to roughly 7 per cent of the population. Queen Victoria’s aspiration ‘that the greatest possible number of her subjects should have an opportunity of joining in it’ would seem to have been realised. For those who did not attend, there were memorial services up and down the country. In a link with the past, the sermon at Preston was preached by a Waterloo veteran, the Reverend Gilmour Robinson.433
Wellington’s funeral was protean. Some have suggested that it was a deliberate attempt to outshine Napoleon’s reburial in Les Invalides in 1840. There is greater force in the thesis that it served a more immediate diplomatic purpose. On 4 November 1852, the French Senate announced that a plebiscite would be held on the question of whether or not Louis Napoleon should be elevated to imperial status: Victoria was privately hopeful that a grand spectacle on 18 November might dissuade her Gallic neighbour against seeking to revive la gloire.434 For ordinary Britons, however, the Duke’s passing was seen more as a time to reflect upon the ending of an era. Thomas Cooper, the former Chartist, put it well when he wrote that Wellington:
was an institution in himself. We all felt as if we lived, now he was dead, in a different England […] I seemed myself to belong now to another generation of men; for my very childhood was passed amid the noise of Wellington’s battles, and his name and existence seemed stamped on every year of our time.435
As such, the funeral was also an opportunity to reflect upon, and celebrate, Englishness: another of Victoria’s aspirations was that the proceedings ‘should be deprived of nothing which could invest it with a thoroughly national character’.
The latter theme was especially apposite since, as the Glasgow Herald put it, Wellington was ‘the most perfect and illustrious impersonation of the English character’.436 In the weeks that followed his death, commentators fell over each other in identifying what more precisely this was. Formal obituaries competed with selections of Wellington anecdotes, examples of his terse written style and citations from the Despatches. Particularly influential were a lecture on Wellington by the Earl of Ellesmere, and Henry Reeve’s obituary of the Duke in The Times. At 47,000 words, more than twice the length of any other in the newspaper that century, it proved so popular that it was republished as a pamphlet.437 But popularity did not equate to originality. The Bristol Mercury had needed no great prescience when it predicted in 1840 that ‘it will be forgotten that the Duke of Wellington belonged to a party, and the nation will write his epitaph as that of a good, great, and honest man’. Specifically, in a speech at Carlisle on 18 September, his former cabinet colleague, Sir James Graham, maintained that ‘devotion to his country, his never-ceasing patriotism, his self-denial, and his love of duty […] were the qualities which made the Duke of Wellington what he was’. Former political opponents did not demur. Lord John Russell exhorted an audience in Stirling to emulate the Duke’s personal qualities, ‘that sincere and unceasing devotion to his country – that honest and proud determination to act for his country on all occasions […] that vigilance in the constant performance of his duty […] that unostentatious piety by which he was distinguished at all times in his life’.438 In what might be termed this dutiful consensus, mention of Waterloo was not, at first, especially prominent. Reeve, for example, wrote soberly that it revealed no new military trait in his subject. He simply listed it as one of Wellington’s great achievements, in the same sentence as crossing the Douro, entering Madrid and passing Catholic Emancipation.
But the Duke’s funeral could never be simply a matter of what Disraeli termed the ‘contemplation of his character’. Part of its purpose was to bring to a culmination the national commemoration of him as no less a hero than Nelson. Spencer Walpole, the Home Secretary, had even suggested that Nelson’s tomb be moved in order that Wellington share centre stage with him beneath the dome of St Paul’s. The point was fully understood by the Poet Laureate. Having already written Morte d’Arthur (there were plenty who saw resonances between the Duke and the legendary king in 1852), Tennyson opted for the more prosaic Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington as the title for his 1,900-word literary tribute. In the sixth stanza he imagines Nelson asking what the commotion of 18 November means and is told that,
this is he
Was great by land as thou by sea …
Worthy of our gorgeous rites,
And worthy to be laid by thee;
For this is England’s greatest son …
If love
of country move thee there at all,
Be glad, because his bones are laid by thine!
The Ode, which first appeared on 16 November, quickly exhausted its first print run of 10,000 copies.439
The comparison with Nelson – ‘His foes were thine’ wrote Tennyson – inevitably took one back to the great struggle with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. And thus, for all the talk of commemorating a virtuous servant of the State in peace and war, it was Wellington the warrior’s achievements that were really being celebrated on 18 November 1852. And the latter were inexorably synonymous with Waterloo. The most common criticism of the funeral was that it had been too martial in character. Dickens thought it ‘a grievous thing – a relapse into semi-barbarous practices […] a pernicious corruption of the popular mind’.440 It was eighty-three Chelsea Pensioners, one for each year of the Duke’s life, not eighty-three Tory Lords, who took part in his funeral procession. That procession also included soldiers from every regiment in the British Army, including over 3,000 infantrymen, eight squadrons of cavalry and three artillery batteries. Lord Anglesey carried Field-Marshal Wellington’s baton. And the most poignant image of the day for many was Wellington’s horse, led by his groom, with the eponymous boots reversed in the stirrups.441 The other memorable image of the day was the 10-ton bronze funeral car. Prince Albert had instructed that it should be ‘a symbol of English military strength and statesmanship’. Cast from cannon captured at Waterloo, with ‘Waterloo’ inscribed above its front right wheel, it amply succeeded in the former without, perhaps, quite conveying the latter. Count Walewski, the French ambassador, was understandably reluctant to attend.
French newspapers also took exception. The Patrie and the Presse declared that the Duke would never be found in a pantheon of liberty. He was ‘a vestige of times which exist no more […] the future owes him nothing; his name will only be for posterity a sonorous word’. The comments provoked a furore from their English counterparts. With the dead Duke yet unburied, the press refought Waterloo, except that this time the Prussians came to nobody’s assistance. Indeed, the German Augsburg Gazette insisted that the British had been losing the battle until the Prussians arrived and ‘expresses […] wonder that Wellington, who was naturally magnanimous, should have uniformly claimed a monopoly of the victory of Waterloo, thus defrauding Blücher of his due share of merit’.442 By way of reply, The Standard published a letter saying that Wellington had never presumed on any Prussian assistance and that the French had effectively been beaten by 5 p.m. The French press in turn denied the latter claim. It did so in such vehement terms that just four days before the funeral, Lloyds Weekly Newspaper included a piece with the ironic heading ‘How the French won Waterloo’. The French, it added, ‘have excited a feeling of hostility which it will take some time to abate’.443
There was no immediate sign, as the above exchange confirms, that Wellington’s death would much alter Britons’ desire to remember the events of 1815. Even before the Duke’s funeral, Mr Burford revived his Waterloo panorama in Leicester Square after a nine-year absence ‘in accordance with the feeling that pervades all classes of society at this moment’. The United Services Institution reopened out of season: Siborne’s model was reported to be exciting much interest.444 As 18 June 1853 approached, local events were scheduled to take place as normal. The Glasgow Wellington Club held its annual dinner; Manchester veterans held their annual banquet at Pomona Gardens. In the theatrical world, Astley’s kept up the good fight by reviving its production of The Battle of Waterloo. Plans were announced for the grand annual military parade in Phoenix Park, Dublin.445 And then, suddenly, these and many similar acts of popular celebration ended, never properly to revive.
The reason for the cessation of festivities was the developing international tension that would escalate into the Crimean War. In this, Britain found itself an ally of the French: the two nations’ fleets rendezvoused in Besika Bay five days before Waterloo Day 1853. The Crown consequently let it be known that public acts of commemoration on 18 June would be unwelcome. Britons mostly deferred. The York Herald was delighted to report that the erstwhile common practice of ringing church bells had virtually ceased as well as ‘other needless demonstrations, offensive to our French neighbours’. In Paris, ‘The determination of the English Government not to celebrate the battle of Waterloo’ was well received as proof of ‘a disposition to cultivate the French alliance’.446
Neither was Queen Victoria’s determination that her people should not be amused on 18 June a one-off gesture to diplomacy. The crowds who turned up in London and Dublin in 1854 anticipating military parades were disappointed. Britain and France had, after all, formally declared war on Russia in March 1854. More than Wellington’s death even, the Crimean War underscored the belief that a former age had passed, that Waterloo was indeed history. Roger Fenton’s images and William Howard Russell’s even more famous despatches to The Times gave the new conflict an immediacy that eclipsed Waterloo. Who would want to read Tennyson’s Ode when they would soon be able to read his Charge of the Light Brigade? Mindful of that sentiment, Sir John Colborne (now Lord Seaton), gave a gratuity of 5 shillings to all veterans in Dublin’s Kilmainham Hospital on Waterloo Day 1855, to demonstrate that ‘their services in days of yore have not been lost sight of in the attachment to ones more recent, but equally sanguinary’. There were others too who, with the war having ended by Waterloo Day 1856, dared question the official line by remarking that, ‘It seems sad and strange that the grandest triumph of British arms should thus be so totally consigned to the silent keeping of history.’447
But Wellington and Waterloo could hardly be kept out of the national debate on the Crimean War; rather they informed it. The Times cautioned, as war loomed in 1853, that the carnage of the Napoleonic Wars offered a salutary reason as to why the country should not enter into conflict. After it did, a Berlin correspondent compared the assistance rendered to the British by the French at Inkerman in November 1854 to the Prussians at Waterloo. And the bloody experiences of both Balaclava and Inkerman, as the Reverend J. O. Daykene, rector of Wolverhampton, reminded his congregation, brought to mind Wellington’s remarks about the tragedy of victory being eclipsed only by that of defeat.448 A sombre House of Commons was presented with the report made by the Army Before Sebastopol Committee on the fortieth anniversary of Waterloo. That same day, with all combatants mindful of the totemic date, Anglo-French forces launched a costly and unsuccessful attack on the defences known as the Redan in front of Sebastopol.449
In the immediate short term, Wellington’s reputation was enhanced by the Crimean War. There was certainly a popular belief that, had he lived, war would have been avoided. Sir William Fraser thought that ‘the Prestige of his own name preserved the Peace of Europe for forty years. He was the Keystone of European Peace. No sooner was he gone than difficulties began; and developed into a bloody, and more or less useless, War.’450 Raglan (formerly FitzRoy Somerset), commander of British forces in the Crimea, certainly appeared devoid of his former chief’s genius. Longer term, one could take a different view. Wellington had, after all, been Commander-in-Chief himself for a decade until shortly before the war. He might, charged Field-Marshal Lord Roberts, have done more to espouse the cause of army reform, the need for which had been cruelly exposed by shortcomings in the Crimea. Instead, as even sympathetic biographers conceded, he was too preoccupied by economy. But even Wellington was only one man. The war was an indictment of the ‘aristocratic system’ in the army, one where officers bought and exchanged commissions irrespective of merit. Events in the Crimea accelerated its demise. Roberts, an example, if not the original, for Gilbert and Sullivan’s model of a modern major-general, could reflect by the 1890s that, ‘The Duke’s objection to the special education of staff officers sounds almost heterodox in these days of intellectual activity and constantly recurring examinations.’451
With the war over by spring 1856, Waterloo commemorations made something of a comeback, if
only because the press felt more at liberty to report them. The presentation of a French tricolour as annual rental for Stratfield Saye by the Wellesley family, for example, was noted in 1858. A few days later, the Queen viewed Siborne’s Waterloo model when she visited the United Services Institution. In 1859 Astley’s revived its Waterloo production for the first time since 1853.452 But most events were a shadow of what they had once been. They consisted primarily of dwindling bands of ageing veterans meeting to dine with each other, in such places as Leicester, Worcester and Bury St Edmunds. Cavalié Mercer kept the day at his Devon home alone. He had been given a lance from a wounded Guardsman on the morrow of Waterloo. Each 18 June he stuck it in his lawn decked with roses and laurel. On his death in 1870, Mercer bequeathed it to a fellow veteran, Dr Hall, an almost literal case of passing on the torch of memory as the 1815 generation faded.453
The most concerted local attempt to defy time was in Preston. It owed everything to the largesse of John Cooper of The Oaks, Penwortham. Married to an officer’s daughter and an obsessive visitor to battlefields ancient and modern, he determined to keep alive the annual parade and dinner to Waterloo and other veterans which had flourished in the town since the mid-1840s. He flouted the calls from on high to suspend celebrations in 1853. Some 150 attended the dinner where he demanded that the State provide a 6d daily pension for all veterans. The following year he criticised the government for, in his view, providing inadequate support to British forces in the Crimea.454 But even the indomitable Mr Cooper had, very reluctantly, to face reality. In 1861 only fifty-seven attended the dinner, and just thirty-eight had been able to parade around the town. Cooper admitted that the occasion had become more a chore than a pleasure for those attending. Given continuing improved relations with France – the Cobden-Chevalier trade treaty was signed in 1861 – he conceded that 18 June ‘has lost much of the interest which used to be concentrated in it’. For the future, he offered veterans the option of either the dinner or half a crown. To his disappointment, three quarters opted for the latter. The 1861 Preston dinner was the last gathering of any size of Britain’s Waterloo veterans.455