Wake of Wellington: Englishness in 1852

Chapter Five. Obsequies and Sanctification

F i v e Obsequies and Sanctification W’s common sense and supposed love for the simple life were not, in the end, to result in a funeral that reflected the continence of his habits. Once the duke’s body was formally taken into the possession of the Crown, a guard of honor was placed around the coffin as it lay at Walmer, where more than ten thousand people viewed the casket as it awaited conveyance to London for the official lying in state. The coffin was transported to Chelsea on  November by hearse and train in the middle of the night in order to prevent large crowds from gathering to watch the penultimate procession of the hero’s corpse. The Great Hall of Chelsea Hospital was laboriously redecorated, draped from ceiling to floor with shrouds of black cloth that blocked the sun so that the subdued light of enormous candles could create a suitably somber atmosphere. A long, covered passage, lined with banners representing Wellington’s many military victories, led to an anteroom containing officers of the Brigade of Foot Guards, dressed in crepe and holding reversed arms. In the death chamber itself, the coffin was covered with crimson velvet and rested on  You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. a bier mantled in black velvet; at its foot were suspended all of Wellington’s honors (batons, chains, medals, and orders). Around the dais, more guards were stationed on raised platforms. “The whole effect was theatrical, eccentric , powerful and imperially pagan; it compelled admiration” for the two hundred thousand people who filed past the bier.¹ A large colored print of this scene, depicting Queen Victoria’s visit to the lying in state, still hangs in the Great Hall of Chelsea Hospital, a visual testament to the seventeenth-century edifice’s finest moment (figure .). On  and  November, viewing of the coffin was restricted to royalty, peers, members of Parliament, and the military elite. The public was admitted without restriction for five days, from  to  November, although the deaths of two working-class women, Sarah Bean and Charlotte Cook, crushed against barricades erected outside the hospital as overeager crowds surged against the building on the first day of the lying in state, convinced authorities that entrance had to be more carefully monitored and disciplined . Early on the morning of  November, the coffin was removed to  The Wake of Wellington  . The Lying in State of the Late Duke of Wellington, . © The Royal Hospital Chelsea. You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. the parade ground of the Horse Guards near St. James’s Park, the rallying point for the procession. Perched atop a colossal funeral car specially designed for it, the coffin was to become for some hours the ponderously moving nucleus of a ritual that ended with “the funeral service itself in the cathedral church of our city, the centre and navel as it were of that metropolis which is itself the centre of the world” and whose mourners were privileged to witness “the lowering of the hero’s mortal remains to their last resting-place, beneath the central cross of England’s central sanctuary.”² If simplicity was one of Wellington’s most acclaimed traits, centrality became a catchword for the funeral, an elaborate exercise in ideological concentration. Following in the wake of the Great Exhibition, Wellington’s procession and burial guaranteed London’s rank as the hub of the world, at least as far as Londoners themselves were concerned. The temporary focal point of this metropolitan world center was the car itself (figure .). It was designed in the remarkably short period of three weeks by the new Governmental Department of Practical Art, an agency that had been formed to help with the planning of the exhibition. The story of the funeral car, in fact, has several affinities with that of the earlier project. Under the watchful eye of Prince Albert, the services of Henry Cole were again called upon; with the expert help of designers Richard Redgrave and Gottfried Semper, Cole attempted to address Albert ’s recommendation that “the funeral...