Authors: Richard Holmes
On 14 November, the duke was taken by train to London, and reached Chelsea Hospital at 3.00 on the morning of the 15
th
, where he lay in state in the black-draped Great Hall – once scene of the Cintra enquiry, and now the pensioners’ dining-hall. His sons were at first appalled by a display ‘devoid of taste and feeling’, which they knew he had not wanted, but were soon persuaded of the wisdom of having ‘placed ourselves at the disposition of the country’.
2
The young queen was the first visitor, but ‘so deeply was she affected that she never got beyond the centre of the hall, where her feelings quite overcame her, and whence she was led, weeping bitterly, to her carriage’.
3
Thousands upon thousands followed her, and several were killed in the crush, their bodies passed from hand to hand over the heads of the living.
Wellington’s state funeral took place on 18 November. His body had been transferred, with an escort of Household Cavalry, to his old office at Horse Guards, in what he would have recognised as Burgos weather, cold and rainy. The next morning troops lined the streets all the way to the cathedral, and more were formed up in St James’s Park ready to follow the funeral car as it moved off to the thud of minute-guns. The car itself was widely deemed ‘abominably ugly’, though Prince Albert was delighted by its weighty allegory: ‘no proof of his good taste’, sniped Greville.
4
It was 21 feet long by 12 wide and weighed 18 tons, and its twelve horses were quickly overwhelmed by their task. When the wheels sank deep into the mud opposite the Duke of York’s statue in Pall Mall, sixty police constables helped tug it clear. Well over a million people thronged the streets, 300,000 of them with seats in the stands. The car’s mechanism worked when it had to be lowered to pass beneath Temple Bar, but the horses were utterly exhausted by the time they reached Ludgate Hill and sailors helped pull the car the last of the way. There was a hitch when the machinery which should have lowered the coffin onto the bier at the west door failed to work, and during the pause chilly gusts blew into the packed cathedral. But outside there was ‘a respite, so to speak, in the war of nature’, and Arthur Wellesley made his last journey in bright autumn sunlight. John Colborne, now Field Marshal Lord Seaton, found the long and sonorous reading of the Duke’s titles and the throwing of his broken staff of office into the vault to be ‘inapplicable to the present age’, but when the Death March played as the coffin was lowered (old Anglesey reached out and touched it), he was so much affected that he only just remained standing. Then the guns boomed out from the Tower; trumpets sounded at the West Door, and the troops marched back to barracks as the weather broke.
The nation was widowed. Queen Victoria lamented that ‘we shall soon stand sadly alone; Aberdeen is almost the only personal friend of that kind that we have left. Melbourne, Peel, Liverpool – and now the Duke –
all
gone.’
5
Her husband felt ‘as if in a tissue a particular thread which is worked into every pattern was suddenly withdrawn’.
6
Her niece, little Princess Feo, wondered ‘what will become of the Aunt Victoria?’ FitzRoy Somerset, who had known Wellington, warts and all, for more than half a century, was ‘much affected’ and talked of little else but the ‘dear old Duke’ when dining with the queen at Windsor.
7
The Times
thought that the duke had ‘exhausted nature and exhausted glory’, and that his career was ‘one unclouded longest day’. Even the radical
Spectator
recognised that: ‘As a Counsellor of his Sovereign, the great Duke is not to be replaced.’
8
Disraeli delivered a lavish funeral oration in the Commons, but was ridiculed when a newspaper pointed out that part of it was taken from Adolphe Thiers’ panegyric on Marshal Gouvion St Cyr. Greville found the obituaries in the press ‘admirable’, although there were necessarily aspects on which they were silent: ‘In his younger days he had been much addicted to gallantry … and had been the successful lover of some women of fashion. Overall, thought Greville, his position was ‘eminently singular and exceptional, something between the Royal Family and other subjects’.
9
Wellington’s death marked the passing of an age. He was born when the countryside dominated the town, industry bowed to agriculture, and Britain ruled North America. He was buried, amidst the smoke of busy railways and an accomplished industrial revolution, in a nation which ruled the centre of the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and had begun the long ascent to parliamentary democracy. He ranks, with the Duke of Marlborough, as one of the two greatest generals Britain has produced. It is no accident that both based their success on mastery of logistics, and both were principally commanders within coalitions, always obliged to blend the military with the political, as much strategists as tacticians.
Wellington’s eye for the ground was legendary. When he and Croker were out in his carriage, they amused themselves by guessing what lay beyond the horizon, and the duke was generally right. He told Croker that he had spent most of his life guessing what lay on the other side of the hill, ‘trying to make out from what I saw the shape of the country I did not see’.
10
His military achievements were founded on eighteenth-century qualities of order, discipline, regularity, and a regard for place and precedent: here he was more Jomini with his linearity and slide-rule, than Clausewitz with his conviction that ‘violence and passion’ lay at the heart of war. ‘Animosity amongst nations,’ he declared, ‘ought to cease when hostilities come to an end.’
11
The eighteenth century also formed his political views: he was an oligarch, not a democrat. The French Revolution inspired his hatred of the mob, his experience in Spain reinforced it, and throughout his life he ‘held popularity in great contempt’.
12
When a crowd cheered him outside Apsley House, he pointed ironically at the windows that a previous crowd had broken. The press was little better, and had, moreover, no legitimate interest in much of what it reported. When the queen visited his house in 1845 he denied reporters admission, telling them that ‘he does not see what his house at Strathfieldsaye [sic] has to do with the public press’.
13
Yet if he disdained the crowd, he respected individuals regardless of their station in life. It is often said that no man is a hero to his valet, but Wellington was: both Beckerman, his German soldier-servant, and Kendall, his valet, were devoted to him. He was never able to blind himself to the effect of his actions, political, military, or private, on others, and there was a sense of proportionality in all he did. When a gamekeeper was killed in a fight with poachers on his Hampshire estates, he gave up preserving game because it was not worth the risk to human life. It was, though, important that this station was preserved. At the height of the reform crisis in 1832, he warned Charles Arbuthnot that the ‘lower orders’ … ‘wanted to resort to our private houses, our entertainments; have the run of our kitchens and dance with our wives and daughters. Alternatively, they would invite us to their public houses, to live with them.’
14
But
déclassé
gentlemen were as bad as uppity labourers. When he lost patience with fellow oligarchs, it was because their behaviour traduced the standards he expected his class to conform to: his was a world where rights reflected responsibilties, and duty justified authority. A cavalry officer who sought to transfer into another regiment in order to avoid going on active service was told starkly that: ‘he must sail or sell [his commission]’.
15
The social forms were important because they helped define a structure that had to be preserved: FitzRoy Somerset was always Lord FitzRoy, though occasionally he allowed his daughter-in-law to be ‘My dearest Lady Douro’.
He opposed reform because he believed that parliament should comprise ‘every man noted in the country for his fortune, his talents, his science, his industry, or his influence; the first men of all professions, in all branches of trade and manufacture, connected with our colonies and settlements abroad …’ It would be better for such a parliament to do its duty than to try to bring it ‘to a greater degree under popular influence’.
16
The reform crisis reflected as much a failure of the ruling class to rule decently as the impact of ‘infatuated madmen’ on public opinion. Wellington ultimately gave way on reform because he feared that the authority of the crown, paramount in his political philosophy, would be tainted by a mass creation of peers. The greatest test of a great general, he always said, was to know when to retreat and to have the courage to do it – that applied as much in parliament as in the Peninsula.
His religious views were shaped by the same process, and were as much political as theological. He told Lord John Russell that George Gleig, ‘as most other good clergymen of the Church of England, [was] a zealous Conservative politician …’
17
The rise of Methodism in the army concerned him because it was likely to end in Methodist NCOs lecturing wayward officers on their moral responsibility. A gentleman should recognise his own responsibility, and allowing others to point it out could only undermine order. He kept the Bible, the prayer book, Jeremy Taylor’s
Holy Living and Dying
and Caesar’s
Commentaries
by his bedside, and Gleig observed that they bore the marks that came from frequent use. His courage was the product of a fusion between this belief and his obdurate sense of duty. His staff at Waterloo suffered a casualty rate of 30 per cent, higher than that incurred by the fighting troops. When he said that he felt the finger of God upon him that day, he was reflecting a deep-seated conviction that his survival was determined by more than his famous luck.
His nickname, the Iron Duke, probably coined by
Punch
in 1845 – though Carlyle had termed him ‘the cast-metal man’ in 1832 – was entirely fitting. He had a quality of inner strength as visible on the retreat from Burgos as on the ride back from the Mint with the mob behind him. One of the consequences of this was that, as Greville maintained, he ‘was a good-natured, but not an amiable man; he had no tenderness in his dispositions …’
18
Much of this may stem, as his descendent Muriel Wellesley suggested, from that ‘lonely little boy’ who grew up denied affection. There were moments when the iron cracked, as it did at Badajoz and Waterloo, and, more regularly, in the company of children. But for most of his life Wellington was as stern with himself as he was with others: he is easy to admire, harder, perhaps, to like.
Now that I have followed him from Ireland to India, from the Peninsula to Waterloo, and finally from Walmer Castle to St Paul’s Cathedral, I admire him more than I ever have. I know that he would no more welcome my admiration than he would resent my censure: the most I can expect, if I meet him on the other side of a celestial hill, will be two conjoined fingers raised to a tall hat, and perhaps a suggestion that he was right, all along, about the impossibility of writing military history. I admire his courage and his determination, his modesty and his honesty. He was built on a grand scale, and I see little sign of such figures in our own landscape: he was indeed a great man.
1
Philip Guedalla
The Duke
(London 1940) p. 443.
2
John Wilson Croker
The Croker Papers: The Correspondence and Diaries of John Wilson Croker, Secretary to the Admiralty from 1809 to 1830
(3 vols, London 1885) vol. III p. 28.
3
Elizabeth Longford
Wellington: Pillar of the State
(London 1972) p. 148.
4
Elizabeth Longford
Wellington: Years of the Sword
(London 1969) p. 166.
5
Guedalla op. cit., pp. 221–2.
6
Charles Oman (ed)
Adventures with the Connaught Rangers 1809–1814 by William Grattan Esq late Lieutenant Connaught Rangers
(London 1902) p. 200.
7
Ian Fletcher (ed)
For King and Country: The Letters and Diaries of John Mills, Coldstream Guards, 1811–14
(Staplehurst, Kent 1995) p. 46.
8
Paddy Griffith (ed)
Wellington: Commander
(Chichester 1984) p. 20.
9
Ibid., p. 14.
10
Guedalla op. cit., p. 464.
1
Guedalla op. cit., p. 1.
2
T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin (eds)
The Course of Irish History
(Cork 1984) p. 155.
3
R. F. Foster
Modern Ireland 1600–1972
(London 1988) p. 170.
4
Daniel Corkery quoted ibid., p. 195.
5
Guedalla op. cit., p. 5.
6
George Robert
The Life of Arthur Duke of Wellington
(London 1875) P. 4.
7
Ibid., p. 5.
8
Ibid., p. 6.
9
Longford
Sword
op. cit., p. 19.
10
Bellamy Partridge Sir
Billy Howe
(London 1932) p. 6.
11
Frank McLynn
Crime and Punishment in Georgian England
(Oxford 1991) pp. 150–1.
12
Liza Picard
Dr Johnson’s London
(London 2000) p. 126.
13
McLynn op. cit., p. 231.
14
See Ian Fletcher
Galloping at Everything: British Cavalry in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo
(London 2000).
15
Literally ‘it is monk’. Field-Marshal Sir John French, who commanded the British army in France in 1914–15, was given to similar franglais, translating footman as ‘piedhomme’.
16
Longford
Sword
op. cit., p. 21.