Quote of the Day (Lord Tennyson, on the Duke of Wellington, ‘The Last Great Englishman’)

“Lead out the pageant: sad and slow,           

As fits an universal woe,        

Let the long long procession go,        

And let the sorrowing crowd about it grow, 

And let the mournful martial music blow;     

The last great Englishman is low.”—English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” (1852)

Alfred Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington (pictured here), died on this date in 1852 in Wilmer Castle on the Channel coast near Dover, at age 83. In the 30 years before his death, the acclaimed victor over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo experienced a tough transition to peacetime as a leader of Britain’s Tory Party. 

As Prime Minister, his obstinacy about extending the franchise to more male voters (eventually enacted in the Reform Act of 1832), as well as his lack of sympathy for workers amid the growing pains of the Industrial Revolution, branded him as a reactionary. (One significant exception: his crucial support of Catholic Emancipation in 1829.)

But by 1852, Britain recalled another Wellington, the defensive genius who had saved his country and the continent from Napoleon—first in the Peninsular Campaign in Spain, then as leader of a multinational force at Waterloo. The Times of London obituary noted, “The actions of his life were extraordinary, but his character was equal to his actions. He was the very type and model of an Englishman.” (The latter observation could not have been more ironic, given his birth in Ireland.) The royal family, then, could capitalize on this widespread sentiment in pushing for a state funeral that, in its pomp and gaudiness, was virtually without precedent.

The outpouring of national mourning for Wellington resembled that later given to Winston Churchill at his death in 1965. If the Duke was, in Tennyson’s words, “the last great Englishman,” then Churchill, another leader in Britain’s hour of national danger, would become (to borrow William Manchester’s title) “The Last Lion.”

Actually, “the last great Englishman” was a memorable phrase fraught with irony (only starting with the fact that this “Englishman” was born in Dublin, Ireland). It summed up near-universal sentiment that Wellington was a throwback to the 18^th-century aristocracy, which its admirers associated with vestigial medieval virtues of courage, loyalty, faith, service, and chivalry. 

But the designation came at a time when England was now just a part of a far larger realm, with aspirations for empire abroad and commercial dominance at home were increasingly called into question. In Ireland, the Potato Famine and the Young Ireland movement were leading more and more people to question the legitimacy of the English-installed Protestant Ascendancy that still held sway. Powerful commercial interests exerted by the East India Company would pave the way to direct control of the subcontinent by 1857. And Charles Dickens was just one of a number of voices raising the alarm about horrible urban conditions stoked by captains of industry.

Only two years before the death of the “Iron Duke,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson had been appointed poet laureate. Many other appointees to that post have received the honor late in their careers, after their creative powers have ebbed, such as Tennyson’s predecessor, William Wordsworth. But Tennyson was in his early 40s and still capable of technical mastery, as the brief snippet above demonstrates. This poem, though produced for an occasion, was no slapdash affair. Tennyson would publish two later versions of this ode after 1852 until he had settled on the one we know today.

When Wellington was laid to rest two months after his death, it was in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. Hundreds of thousands turned out in the streets to watch the procession.  The Duke's coffin was lowered, through a hole in the floor of the cathedral, into the crypt, where it joined a black sarcophagus of another veteran of the Napoleonic Wars: Admiral Horatio Nelson. Indeed, Tennyson has Nelson greet Wellington—like heroes in Valhalla.

The tribute to Wellington would not be the last time that Tennyson would be called upon, as poet laureate, to stress national unity at a time of dissent. Only two years later, after massive bungling by the high command at the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War, he would switch the focus to the gallant foot soldiers who pursued their impossible mission in “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” In Idylls of the King, he retold the story of King Arthur and his knights as a warning of what could happen to a nation even under the wisest of rulers. 

Tennyson’s constant stress on national unity can be read as an underlying questioning of that spirit. “A people’s voice!” he wrote in his “Ode.” “We are a people yet.” The stronger the insistence, the greater the doubt.