Wellington (35 page)

I never see and converse with him without reproaching myself for the sort of hostility I feel towards his political conduct, for there are a simplicity, a gaiety and a natural urbanity and good-humour in him, which are remarkably captivating in so great a man.
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The king still refused a mass creation of peers, which would have broken Wellington’s strength in the Lords, and Grey and his colleagues accordingly resigned. Wellington, anxious to protect the king from a wholesale creation, tried to break the stalemate against a backcloth of what many felt to be imminent revolution. Endless discussions at Apsley House revealed that he could not find enough Tories who were prepared to join him in an administration committed to moderate reform, and on 15 May told the king that he could not form a government. The best that he could do was to call off his hounds in the Lords: Grey resumed office, and the Reform Bill became law on 7 June.

The Great Reform Act of 1832 now seems a very moderate measure: after it the 249 electors of Buckingham still returned as many MPs as the 4,172 electors of Leeds, and England, with 54 per cent of Britain’s population, returned 71 per cent of the Commons.
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However, the Whigs were disinclined to go much further, and the main impetus of reform passed from parliamentarians to radicals outside it, as the People’s Charter demanded universal manhood suffrage, a secret ballot, equal electoral districts, the abolition of property qualifications for MPs, payment for MPs, and annual parliaments.

It took time for Wellington’s role in the resistance to the 1832 act to be forgiven. On Waterloo Day that year, he found a mob waiting for him when he emerged from sitting to the painter Pistrucci at the Royal Mint. A magistrate offered his assistance, but the duke told him: ‘You can do nothing. The only thing you can help me in is to tell me exactly the road I am to take to get to Lincoln’s Inn; for the greatest danger would be in my missing my way and having to turn back on the mob.’ He set off down Fen-church Street with his groom. The mob tried to drag him from his horse, but two Chelsea Pensioners appeared (‘that best of all instruments …’) and he asked them to march at each stirrup and face outwards if he had to halt. In Holborn, a coal-cart appeared: ‘Hillo!’ said the duke, ‘here’s the artillery coming up; we must look out’. A brave gentleman drove his Tilbury close up behind to cover the rear, and delighted the duke by ‘never looking to me for any notice’. He gained a little time by diverting through Lincoln’s Inn, and by the time he reached clubland he had more supporters, and rode steadily on up Constitution Hill. The mob swarmed across the Park to hoot him as he clattered into Apsley House, its windows now iron-shuttered against the brickbats. He turned to Lord St Germans, who had accompanied him from Whitehall, and raised his hat: ‘An odd day to choose. Good morning!’
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And yet, slave to duty, he could not stand aside from public life, and agreed to become chancellor of Oxford University. ‘I am the Duke of Wellington,’ he told Croker, and,
bon gré mal gré
must do as the Duke of Wellington doth.’ He looked in on the House of Commons when the new parliament met in February 1833, and declared: ‘I never saw so many shocking bad hats in my life.’
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Greville agreed, for once, muttering about the ‘pretensions, impertinence and self-sufficiency of some of the new members’.
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The duke supported Grey’s government because he saw it as the last line of defence against anarchy, but the worst seemed over, and he had his windows repaired in time for the Waterloo banquet that year. He lost Harriet Arbuthnot in August: the letter telling him of her death fell from his hands, and he flung himself on the sofa in a paroxysm of grief. But duty caught hold again, and he rode off to commiserate with her widower, for he had loved her too.

Yet he was not entirely finished with the flesh. Wellington was a devout but not ostentatiously religious man, and that year he was approached by a pretty orphan, Anna Maria Jenkins, who was determined to give him ‘a new
birth
into righteousness’. When they met, there was an undeniable mutual attraction, with Miss Jenkins struck by the duke’s ‘beautiful silver head’ and the duke, expecting something altogether more spinsterish, suddenly declaring ‘Oh,
how
I
love
you!
How
I
love
you!’ This was not quite the conversion that Miss Jenkins had in mind, but when asked if she was prepared to be a duchess, replied: ‘If it be the will of God.’ The relationship, always most decorous, went on in fits and starts, largely by post. There were occasional Wellingtonian outbursts, one in 1844 when, thinking that she was pressing him for money, the duke declared:

I will give her any reasonable assistance she may require from me; when she will let me know in clear distinct Terms what is the Sum she requires.

But I announce again; that I will never write upon any other Subject.
⁵⁵

But they remained friends, and eight years later she asked her doctor to post a letter on her side-table to the duke, only to be told gently that there was no duke to read it.

In the autumn of 1834, the Houses of Parliament burnt down and, as if taking this for a portent, the government, riven by internal dissent, fell. William IV summoned Wellington, who was at Stratfield Saye about to go hunting, no mean feat for a man aged 65, and invited him to form an administration. But Wellington had learnt his lesson – he suggested that the king should ask Peel. However, as Sir Robert was away in Italy (‘just like him’ muttered the duke), he undertook to set up the government and stand in as prime minister till Peel returned. The government did not survive for long, but it contributed to the restoration of the duke’s authority. He was still capable of speaking well, and the young Disraeli admitted that ‘there is a gruff, husky sort of downright Montaignish naiveté about him, which is quaint, unusual, and tells.’
⁵⁶
And across the political divide, William Gladstone thought that ‘The Duke of Wellington appears to speak little and never for speaking’s sake, but only to convey an idea commonly worth conveying.’
⁵⁷

He was still busy, helping John Gurwood, a half-pay lieutenant colonel who had snatched his captaincy from the breach at Ciudad Rodrigo a lifetime ago, produce that edition of his papers which I have found so useful. And there were more painters to sit to, with B. R. Haydon catching the old eagle’s profile looking out at the Lion Mound at Waterloo which had ‘spoiled my battlefield’. And yet somehow, in peace as in war, he was always there at the crucial spot. When Mrs Fitzherbert died, he swept down with Lord Albemarle and burnt her papers. There was such a blaze that he suggested a pause in operations: ‘I think, my lord, we had better hold our hand for a while, or we shall set the old woman’s chimney on fire.’
⁵⁸

The ashes were scarcely cold in the grate when William IV died. Greville reported him ‘desperately ill’ in early June, and on the 18
^th
, the king declared that ‘I should like to live to see the sun of Waterloo set.’
⁵⁹
The duke saw him that day, and although he attended the annual Waterloo banquet that night by the king’s express command, it was with evident unhappiness. The king expired on the 20
^th
, and the young Queen Victoria played her part so well that Wellington told Greville that if she had been his own daughter, he could not have wished to see her do better. But he was not easily admitted to the new royal circle, and at a banquet at Buckingham House in July he found himself the only Tory present, with a place-card describing him only as ‘Chancellor of Oxford’. He kept it as a curiosity.

That summer he was not well. He swayed on his feet in the Lords, and the emphasis in his speeches was all wrong: then there were fits of giddiness. Miss Jenkins offered her services as a nurse, but the duke would not hear of it. That autumn he seemed a great deal better, however, and when Lord Hill died in December 1842, he was again appointed commander-in-chief. FitzRoy Somerset, still soldiering on as military secretary, found that his old master was as tireless as ever. A letter timed at 6pm told the unlucky Lord FitzRoy, who had clearly left ‘early’, that:

I called at the office on my being up from the House of Lords … Will you be so kind as to let me have at as early an hour as may be convenient tomorrow morning all the … reports on the present operations. As I must read them all before I go to the Cabinet.
⁶⁰

However, Greville reported in 1847 that the duke was behaving increasingly irritably, and there were times when the duke’s daughter-in-law, Lady Douro, had to smooth the path between Wellington and FitzRoy Somerset. The persistent unrest accompanying Chartist demonstrations induced Wellington to write to the Marquess of Anglesey, (once Paget, then Uxbridge, and now master-general of the ordnance) on a familiar theme: ‘I am very sensible to the danger of our position … My opinion is that we shall have to contend with mobs armed with pikes, and with Fire Arms of all descriptions.’
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He had now become firm friends with the ‘Little Vixen’. He sat beside the queen at a banquet in August 1840 and was delighted to see that she drank wine repeatedly with him. She went to stay at Walmer Castle (where her carriage stuck in the tunnel-like entrance) and at Stratfield Saye. This closeness, for the queen had previously been entranced by the Whig Lord Melbourne, was a positive advantage to the Tory government returned in the 1841 election, and Wellington was leader of the Lords with a seat in the cabinet. When it seemed Peel would be unable to hold his administration together because of his wish to reform the Corn Laws, the queen told the duke that she had ‘a STRONG
desire
’ to see him remain as commander-in-chief, whatever happened. The queen, however, rejected Peel’s resignation, and Sir Robert told his cabinet that he proposed to continue with or without their support. The duke declared that they should remain in office: ‘It was not a question of measures,’ he said, ‘but of Government, of support for the queen.’
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Good government was more important than the Corn Laws, and Wellington duly helped vote them into oblivion. As he walked from the House in the early hours of 28 May 1846, after the crucial vote, he found workmen crowding around the gate, eager to hear the news. They cheered him, and one shouted. ‘God bless you, Duke!’ Wellington’s opinion of crowds was unaltered. ‘For Heaven’s sake, people,’ he begged, ‘let me get onto my horse.’

Although it was his last major political act, Wellington did not ride out of public life that morning, for he retained a profusion of offices and continued to take them all very seriously. When revolution seemed to threaten again in 1848, with a huge Chartist demonstration planned, he made careful preparations, assuring the queen that there was no danger provided he was allowed to continue with them. The rally duly took place on Kennington Common and was much smaller than had been expected: it proved to be the movement’s last revival.

He had long lamented that all creatures, even a costermonger’s donkey, got some rest, but the Duke of Wellington was to have none. The queen still asked his advice. When the giant glasshouse set up in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851 was infested with sparrows, that gruff voice had a solution: ‘Try sparrow-hawks, Ma’am.’
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There were still enthusiastic children. ‘How d’ye do, Duke?’ ‘How d’ye do, Duke?’ ‘I want some tea, Duke’ said one urchin. ‘You shall have it,’ said the great man, ‘if you promise not to slop it over me, as you did yesterday.’
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He was amazed ‘with what a number of Insane persons I am in relation. Mad retired Officers, mad Women …’ He told Prince Albert that he should succeed him at Horse Guards, although not at the moment, for he was only eighty-one. And there was always a sovereign in his waistcoat pocket for a man with a Peninsula or Waterloo medal.

On 13 September 1852, the duke rose at 5.30 to look at the garden, welcomed his son Charles, who arrived at Walmer with his wife and the duke’s grandchildren, played with the children and ate venison for his dinner. He retired to his small bedroom in one of the great turrets, and lay down on his old camp bed. His valet, Kendall, woke him at 6.30 the following morning, but an hour later a maid reported that his grace was making a great deal of noise and must be ill. When Kendall entered, the duke, lying on his bed, asked him to summon an apothecary. Dr Hulke arrived at 9am, and his patient passed his hand across his chest and complained of ‘some derangement’. Kendall asked him if he would like a little tea, and Wellington replied ‘Yes, if you please.’ Drinking it brought on a fit, and the duke was unconscious when Dr Hulke returned with his son: the two of them tried a mustard emetic and a feather to irritate the jaws, and Kendall and another servant applied poultices to the duke’s body and legs. The local doctor arrived to help, but the duke did not regain consciousness. At 2pm, Kendall suggested that he should be lifted into his favourite wing chair, and he slipped away so quietly that Charles Wellesley would not believe he had gone until Dr Hulke’s son held a mirror to his mouth. It came away bright.

W
ELLINGTON WISHED
to remain at Walmer, in the churchyard not far from the castle, for he had often told George Gleig: ‘Where the tree falls, there let it lie.’
¹
But he had become too much a part of the nation to be allowed quiet repose, and he was to be buried, with Nelson, in St Paul’s Cathedral. No sooner was he dead than there was a brisk traffic in the morbid keepsakes so beloved of the Victorians. Lady Douro was given the false teeth he was wearing when he died, and a manservant, sending a lock of hair to a gentleman in Devon, regretted that there was very little but demand had been so great. Queen Victoria herself had a lock, soon to be enclosed in a gold bracelet, snipped from the duke’s head by his valet Kendall moments before the coffin-lid was soldered down over the embalmed body. Local inhabitants filed past it on 9–10 November, 9,000 of them, queuing in a long silent line on the beach.