The Wake of Wellington: Englishness in 1852 (review)

Peter Sinnema makes clear at the beginning of The Wake of Wellington: Englishness in 1852 that biography is not his aim. What he wants to determine is Wellington's imprint on British society and culture. Such reckoning cannot be done until the life is over, and in lives great and small this process often begins at a wake, where the virtues and faults of the deceased are canvassed. Sinnema's book is about a national wake where the consensus was that the Duke of Wellington was the epitome of Englishness—a model for all to emulate.

What takes place at a wake is a dialogue, and from eighteen carefully selected newspapers, periodicals, and books, Sinnema provides us with a genuine dialogue. Thus we learn the opinions of that great pillar of Dissent, Edward Baines of the Leeds Mercury, though surprisingly—and significantly—his opinion of the duke was highly positive. Unexpected too is the attitude of the Irish press. It was certainly not uncritical, but at the same time quite unwilling to give up a claim to some credit for Wellington's greatness.

It would probably have escaped the attention of relatively few that the victor of Waterloo had died. It had a profound impact on the old Chartist, Thomas Cooper, imprisoned only a few years before for sedition and conspiracy. His childhood had been "passed amid the noise of Wellington's battles," and as the duke's funeral procession passed, he mused on the fact that "the great actor in the scenes of the Peninsula and Waterloo—the conqueror of Napoleon— . . . had disappeared"(78). Such reflections provided the solid basis of Wellington's fame among all classes, and proved to be enduring.

Events in the year before the duke's death in 1852 nevertheless added luster to his earlier achievements. In 1851 a new Napoleon emerged, producing anxieties that would only grow as the decade passed. Would there be another Wellington? Not long afterwards, events such as the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny bred fears for Britain's empire, and again thoughts turned to Wellington, whose first triumphs had been in India. As Sinnema demonstrates, he was very much in Thomas Hughes's mind when he wrote Tom Brown's School Days (1857). True, Wellington had no great opinion of public schools, and in his own truncated career at Eton his only recorded interaction with another pupil was throwing stones at a boy who was swimming and beating him up when he got out. Still, the military virtues of courage, honor, and service the duke embodied in later life suited Hughes's purposes well enough.

Had Wellington been merely a great soldier, he would never have come to be recognized as the epitome of Englishness or the model for Victorian gentlemen. He needed other qualities, real or imagined. Sinnema believes Wellington was lacking as a proper model for Victorian men in two areas. One was in the matter of Christian belief, Wellington apparently lacking "evangelical fervor" (88). If Victoria's prime ministers had been put to that test it would have made a clean sweep of them all (though Gladstone had plenty of fervor). No one required them to reveal their innermost beliefs; the proof would have been sought in their public actions, as it was in Wellington's case. The duke's other problem was lack of chasteness in sexual matters. Wellington certainly had not always been chaste, but I cannot share the author's indignation with Sir Herbert Maxwell, whose four-volume biography of Wellington first appeared in 1858, for not having drawn his readers' attention to the Memoirs (1825) of the celebrated courtesan, Harriette Wilson. These were published as an exposé of her elite clientele who defied a polite blackmailing note from her publisher. Among these was Wellington, but her services to him had ended in 1809. The nature of the evidence and the reliability of the witness apart, it would be perfectly legitimate, then and now, for...