Wellington and Waterloo

by Foster, R E

  Wellington’s memory had been invariably toasted at the Preston dinners. He was also the subject of more permanent memorials during the 1850s. In Manchester in August 1856, a crowd of 100,000 watched a procession by Waterloo veterans to mark the unveiling of a 13-feet bronze of him at the edge of Piccadilly Gardens. It depicted the Duke, controversially, not in familiar equestrian pose but in a frock coat speaking in the Lords.456 The same year, the Queen laid the foundation stone for Wellington College at Crowthorne near Stratfield Saye, a school for the sons of deceased army officers. She returned for the official opening in January 1859. It was meant to serve as a national memorial to the Duke. Succeeding dukes, the Prince of Wales, Prince Arthur of Connaught and the Reverend G. R. Gleig were amongst the dignitaries at the College’s Speech Day, which always fell on or around 18 June. The occasion was fully reported in the national press until well into the next century.457

  Remembering the Duke in civilian guise and a Berkshire school was, perhaps, part of the wider attempt during the 1850s to avoid offending French sensibilities. That decade was also to give birth to one of the most famous of Wellington sayings, that ‘the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton’. He never said it. The aphorism was probably coined by the Comte de Montalembert in 1855. Montalembert possibly interpolated it from Wellington’s more general words to Brougham that ‘The schoolmaster is abroad’. Brougham denied the precise wording, but the two had enjoyed a light-hearted encounter in the Lords in 1835 when Brougham inadvertently proposed moving some educational clauses on 18 June. Realising his faux pas, ‘he begged pardon; he would not let the schoolmaster come in competition with the hero on that day’. It matters little. The extraordinary fact is that the phrase embedded itself so rapidly in the national consciousness. It was being cited in a speech in Ireland early in 1857, from the election hustings in Yorkshire in 1865, and by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1885. By 1900, only the Duke’s assessment of Waterloo as a ‘close run thing’ was a more familiar piece of Wellingtoniana. It is most plausibly to be explained by British society’s increasing preoccupation with the importance of education and a consequently understandable desire to give it the Duke’s retrospective celebrity endorsement.458

  Wellington College owed more to the Prince Consort than the Duke’s supposed interest in education. Albert’s Germanic hand is also evident in the choice of scene to adorn one wall of the Royal Gallery when Westminster Palace was rebuilt following the fire of 1834. The popular favourite amongst the submissions to adorn the prominent palatial thoroughfare was one by Sidney Cooper showing the repulse of the French cavalry at Waterloo. Instead, the Prince opted for two scenes by Daniel Maclise. One depicted Nelson’s death at Trafalgar; the other, Wellington’s greeting Blücher at La Belle Alliance. Had he still been alive, it is hard to believe that Wellington would have allowed this symbolic image to grace the mother of parliaments. Neither would he have appreciated the irony that the press reported it to have been finished on what would have been his 94th birthday. Nearly half a century after the battle, Prussia’s perspective on Waterloo had at last been endorsed in Britain’s corridors of power.459

  One might have expected Waterloo’s fiftieth anniversary to have been deemed worthy of celebration. Britain’s 1815 allies certainly thought so. Eleven hundred people attended a dinner in Brunswick; 20,000 dollars was distributed between surviving veterans in Hanover; Rotterdam’s programme of events lasted a fortnight. In Belgium, meanwhile, a committee was formed to invite representatives from all the allied nations to join with them in an international festival culminating with a grand procession to the Lion’s Mound.460 The British government declined the invitation. This was partly because its 18 June commemorations had generally always been more low-key than those of their former comrades-in-arms. There was also some resentment that those comrades did not afford the role of the British Army at Waterloo greater prominence in those celebrations. But it owed most to Britain’s continuing entente with France. Just days before the fiftieth anniversary, Napoleon III suggested that the former adversaries’ fleets make courtesy calls to each other’s shores. More than one commentator compared the ‘savage spirit’ existing between the two powers in 1815 with the ‘mild and brotherly feelings of 1865’. France was now ‘the closest ally, the most reliable, and, at the same time, the most valuable one, England has’. The Times ridiculed events in the Low Countries where, ‘The fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo has been celebrated with an enthusiasm which, in many cases, approximated to patriotism run mad.’461 Britain’s celebrations were consequently scarcely different from those of any other recent year. They included fifteen veterans dining at the Crown Inn in Wainsgate, Yorkshire, with twenty-one veterans attending a similar event in Halifax. In Preston, true to his word since 1861, John Cooper distributed 31 half crowns from his office in Winckley Street and hoisted a Union flag there, as well as outside his home.462

  The dearth of commemorative events in Britain on 18 June 1865 also reflected some unease about what should be celebrated. For many, the case for Waterloo was summed up for the enlightenment of his grandchildren by Frederick Hope Pattison, erstwhile of the 33rd Foot:

  That campaign, as you are aware, spread an imperishable lustre over the British army, dethroned Napoleon, and secured an uninterrupted peace to Europe for over forty years. During all the interval we have been reaping the fruits of it. Men have had time to solve those problems in science, and to make those discoveries in art, which have been of unparalleled importance to the human race. Distance has been almost annihilated; materials are transported from one place to another with as great rapidity almost as the flight of the bird; and thought is conveyed from continent to continent across land and sea with the speed of lightning. And thus all peoples and nations are fast becoming united in those bonds of social communion which forbid war, and prepare the way for the arrival of the happy time foretold in Scripture, when ‘The righteous shall flourish, and abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth.’463

  There had also been at least an undercurrent, however, that what was being remembered was a Tory victory. And Whig-Liberal governments were the norm in Britain after 1832. Amongst their supporters, it had never been entirely clear that the cause of 1815 was a good one, or even the right one. In a widely-reproduced editorial to mark Waterloo’s fiftieth anniversary, The Times judged that whilst the battle might be said to have ended the French Revolution, it had not proved politically decisive. As subsequent French history testified, it had neither saved the Bourbon monarchy nor ended the rule of a Bonaparte:

  Instead of stemming and turning a mighty current, it set up nothing but a little porous dam which was washed away by the stream before a dozen years were out […] what we fought against then was simply what we regard without objection now […] we think the celebration of Waterloo might as well be discontinued. The victory was a splendid military achievement, but the policy which the war expressed was no enduring or successful policy. The battle was a battle which soldiers may well remember, but it decided nothing which younger generations need be at the pains to commemorate.464

  This, of course, was highly tendentious. It all rather depended upon one’s view of Napoleon. If one saw him as a despot, the British cause was just enough. But not everyone did. ‘We must read into Waterloo,’ wrote Victor Hugo in Les Misérables, ‘no more than it truly represented. There was no intention of liberty.’ For him, Waterloo was a battle between the ideas of liberty and the divine right of kings; the French Revolution was essentially about ‘progress’. If one accepted his thesis, there was much in the Emperor’s cause with which British Liberals could find sympathy. The Times’ editorial was tacitly acknowledging his case. What is remarkable is that the latter provoked far more agreement than controversy. That was surely in part because it fell short of endorsing Hugo, as champion of the oppressed, in taunting the English for still cherishing ‘their feudal illusions. They believe in heredity and hierarchy. They are a people
unsurpassed in power and glory, but they still think of themselves as a nation, not as people. As people they willingly subordinate themselves, accepting a lord as leader.’465 To follow Hugo on this would have been an abnegation of patriotism and a denial both of the genius of Wellington and the fortitude of his troops. The Times was as vehement as any British newspaper in denouncing Hugo’s analysis of the battle in strictly military terms.

  The generation after 1865 witnessed the final passing of Wellington’s Waterloo veterans. Of the best known senior figures who outlived the Duke, Anglesey had been reunited with his leg when he died in 1854; Raglan succumbed to dysentery in the Crimea in 1855; and Hardinge died shortly after resigning as Commander-in-Chief in 1856. But there were still 137 men above the rank of lieutenant alive on Waterloo Day 1864. By 1875 their numbers had thinned to seventy-four, which in turn had reduced further to sixteen in 1880 and seven by 1885.466 They included Barton Parker Browne of the 11th Dragoons, who died at Bath, aged 92, two days before Waterloo Day 1889. Another was the 6th Earl of Albemarle, who as the 16-year-old Ensign George Thomas Keppel had carried the colours of the 14th Foot in 1815. The Prince of Wales visited him around Waterloo Day 1887, perhaps to partake in the tea he was in the habit of hosting each 18 June. Albemarle eventually died in February 1891. Lieutenant-Colonel William Hewett of the 14th Foot was the last British Waterloo officer to die when he passed away in Southampton in October 1891, aged 96.467

  No similar attempt was made to follow the fortunes of surviving rank and file veterans in the decades following Wellington’s death. Corporal Shaw of the Life Guards, who had died at Waterloo, remained the best known. In 1867, Liverpool’s New Adelphi Theatre staged The Battle of Waterloo and the Death of Shaw; in 1885 he was the subject of a biography. Somehow, what purported to be his skull went first from Sir Walter Scott’s library to public display at the Royal United Services Institute. It was returned to his native Nottinghamshire for burial on 21 June 1898. Twenty-one years before, several hundred had gathered to witness the unveiling of a memorial to him and two others from the small village of Cossall who had served in the campaign.468

  By comparison, only months after the Duke’s grand funeral, James Farnfield, discharged from the 95th after Waterloo and now aged 70, faced the prospect of having to enter the workhouse, ‘from which melancholy abode the spirits of many of the gallant though humble companions in arms of the late Duke will take their flight. Should this be,’ asked an anonymous officer’s widow, ‘when England is anxious to perpetuate the memory of his victories?’ Another unfortunate was Samuel Brown, former Coldstream Guardsman and weaver. He died of heart failure in Leicester County Jail in June 1855, where he had been sent for unpaid debts of £2 8d. Amongst the more fortunate of those who survived the battle, the last Waterloo horse to die outlived the man who had ridden him in the battle, Sir Charles Colville. His steed was said to be at least 47 when he died in 1857.469 Mr Stovey of Milborne Port’s good fortune allied longevity with fecundity. He fought at Waterloo on his 25th birthday. Fifty-two years later he could boast having fathered ten children by each of his three wives and, even more remarkably, that all thirty of his offspring were still alive. What might be termed the last sensationalised story involving a Waterloo veteran (turned tailor), occurred in 1870. Joseph Constantine, aged 74, happily admitted to the attempted murder of his wife in Manchester. Twenty years his junior, he alleged that she was being unfaithful. More widely reported was the passing of the Reverend Henry Bellairs on 17 March 1872. He had joined the navy, aged 13, and was twice wounded at Trafalgar before serving with the 15th Hussars at Waterloo. He was the only Briton to see action in both engagements.470

  Although the Birmingham Daily News estimated that only one person in a hundred would have been aware of the significance of the day by 18 June 1870, a few veterans still continued to gather. Triumvirates met in Sheffield and Leicester in 1872. In Preston the following year, 91-year-old Mark Myres of the 45th was still alive to claim John Cooper’s annual half crown. In 1879 Cooper delegated a friend the task of paying the two widows who turned up at his office, whilst he paid his respects at Wellington’s tomb in St Paul’s. If Cooper judged the time for annual commemorations to be over, it probably was.471

  A few veterans nevertheless continued to be active. William Williams, who served in the 44th at Waterloo, was, aged 84 and going blind, reported to be working on the roads at Monnington-on-Wye in 1871 at the rate of 3d per 14 yards ‘and may amount to a daily 6d when fine weather and respite from rheumatism permit him to labour’. In 1874, James Jenner, an 80-year-old labourer at Wadhurst, had a Waterloo musket ball extracted from his hand. Another veteran, ‘said to be 96 years old, in his stained uniform and quaint side-whiskers […] sat selling programmes’ outside a new panorama of Waterloo, which opened in London in 1880. Ambrose Miller was repairing the roads near Newbury until 1882, a year before he died aged 87. He was trumped by John Scott. In 1889, aged 85, he was working in a forge at Elswick, albeit in the hardly arduous job of ringing a bell. His life thereby attained a sort of symmetry. Son of a father in the Black Watch, he had, as a boy at Waterloo, been stationed in an infantry square tasked with playing a triangle and shouting, ‘Scotland for ever’.472

  But the last bells duly tolled. The London Stereoscopic Company showed an awareness of a vanishing past when it published a photograph of the five surviving Waterloo veterans in Chelsea Hospital on the battle’s sixty-fifth anniversary. Others, as the officer’s widow had foretold, died in the workhouse. James Lambourn of the 14th Foot died, aged 94, in 1885 in the Nunhead workhouse. In death he was treated to four horses, a gun carriage and the Union flag. William Henson of the 16th Foot passed the last eight years of his life in the Barrow-on-Soar workhouse until his death in 1889, aged 93.473 The fictional last survivor was Sergeant Gregory Brewster, a forgotten hero fallen on hard times, and subject of the 1894 play A story of Waterloo by Arthur Conan Doyle. In reality, though his claims cannot absolutely be verified, Britain’s last Waterloo veteran was possibly John Hopwood of Whitchurch in Shropshire. He died in December 1900, aged 101.474

  As Waterloo faded from living memory, some voiced concern that it might soon be forgotten altogether. Astley’s revived its grand theatrical re-enactment of Waterloo in 1869 to coincide with the centenary of Wellington’s birth, but it enjoyed only a short run. Siborne’s models, it was suggested in 1872, were ‘doomed to destruction’. Waterloo panoramas, once seemingly ubiquitous, certainly declined in number. Mr J. S. Laurie complained in 1884 that he knew of young adults who thought that it was Nelson who had won Waterloo.475 But some of this is to be explained by changing popular tastes. How Bill Adams won the Battle of Waterloo, a music hall comic recitation by a garrulous and bragging soldier, remained sufficiently well-known that it was being alluded to on the floor of the House of Commons until well into the twentieth century.476 Waterloo could still capture the imagination. Robert Alexander Hillingford produced a series of popular and acclaimed canvases with a Waterloo theme over more than three decades down to his death in 1904. Now better remembered, Lady Butler’s 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras (1875), captured in oils as well as anybody would the stoicism of the British soldier in defence. Six years later, in her most famous canvas, she would further consummate one of the most iconic moments of 18 June, the charge of the Scots Greys, in her Scotland for Ever.477

  The battle’s seventy-fifth anniversary, whilst hardly replicating the fervour of past celebrations, did not therefore go unnoticed. A new panorama opened behind the Army and Navy Stores in London’s Victoria Street. G. A. Henty, prolific author of boys’ action stories, doubtless mindful of the year, chose 1890 to tell the 1815 saga to a new generation in One of the 28th: A Tale of Waterloo. The most significant act, however, was the unveiling, on 26 August, of a British national memorial in Belgium at the Cimetière de Bruxelles in the municipality of Evere. Plans for it had been catalysed some years before by the announcement that it was intended to close two Brussels cemeteries and depo
sit their remains in a mass grave. These would have included Waterloo luminaries such as Sir William De Lancey and Sir Alexander Gordon. That this did not happen owed most to the efforts of Lord Vivian, British minister in Brussels and grandson of Sir Hussey Vivian, who had commanded a brigade of light cavalry in 1815. By 1887 he had secured a plot at Evere, which would serve as both mausoleum and memorial. There remained the issue of cost, for the British government would provide only £500 of the £2,000 necessary to construct the figure of a mournful Britannia. Vivian, rightly pointing out that ‘England has hitherto done nothing to perpetuate the memory of her soldiers who fell in 1815, and [that] the breaking up of their last resting place offers a favourable opportunity to repair this neglect’, spearheaded an appeal for the shortfall.478 With endorsement and support from, among others, the Duke of Cambridge (then Commander-in-Chief), and the 2nd Duke of Wellington, the money was finally raised.

  Reporting the inauguration of the Evere memorial, The Times said that ‘continual bands of pilgrims’ would flock to it. Evere certainly attracted public interest in 1890. Hitherto, the closest approximation to a British memorial in Belgium was the one in Waterloo church paid for by surviving officers in 1858. By contrast, the one at Evere is generally regarded as the first major British war memorial anywhere to commemorate all the dead of a campaign as opposed to ones lauding individuals or celebrating a victory. One must doubt, however, that this unprecedentedly democratic act of remembrance would have happened, as and when it did, had it not been for the imminent threat to some well-known graves. In the event some sixteen sets of remains were to join those of Gordon and De Lancey in the crypt of the new monument, with one exception those of officers. They included 17-year-old Lord Hay, killed at Quatre Bras, and Sergeant-Major Cotton, who was exhumed from his first resting place in the garden at Hougoumont.479 The modern observer cannot help but conclude that it was too little too late. Contrary to what The Times predicted, the monument attracted little notice once the fanfare surrounding its opening had died down. Despite the care now afforded it by the Royal British Legion, it remains relatively unknown and little visited. Above all, it was located in the wrong place. British soldiers fought and died to the south of Brussels; their memorial lies, incongruously, in the north-eastern part of the city.