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.

Waterloo at 200: Thackeray, on a Vanished ‘Great Game of War’

"His pulse was throbbing and his cheeks flushed: the great game of war was going to be played, and he one of the players. What a fierce excitement of doubt, hope, and pleasure! What tremendous hazards of loss or gain! What were all the games of chance he had ever played compared to this one?"—Captain George Osborne, anticipating the Battle of Waterloo, in William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847).

Today marks the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo, which over the years has acquired reams of significance: as the making of one general (the Duke of Wellington) and the unmaking of another (Napoleon), as the closing of the dreams of one Continental power (France) and the opening of another (Prussia-turned-German), and even of the battle itself as a synonym for definitive disaster (“met his Waterloo”).

My post from five years ago gives the particulars of the battle. But more can be said for the significance of that day. Indeed it was, by William Makepeace Thackeray, in Vanity Fair, his satire published early in the Victorian Era.

Thackeray looked back from the perspective of 30 years with an irony that sounds like it could have come from the 20^th century, or our own.  The viewpoint in the above quote comes not from a general, but from a soldier. George Osborne is a gambler, a spendthrift, a snob and, despite marriage to Amelia, a ladies’ man. His feeling of remorse on the eve of battle, as he senses the possibility that he might leave Amelia a widow, is soon overcome by “a fierce excitement of doubt, hope, and pleasure.”

That rush feeling would be cruelly disabused by a battle where, as British man of letters A.N. Wilson noted in a retrospective for Britain’s Daily Mail, “The scale of the casualties involved is inhumanly shocking — one in four men on the battlefield was killed.” (The aftermath had its own horrors: So many teeth were removed from the corpses to supply the dentures of the living that the phenomenon became known as “Waterloo Teeth.”)

The carnage of the battle even shocked a hardened soldier like Wellington, who wrote afterward: “My heart is broken by the terrible loss I have sustained in my old friends and companions and my poor soldiers. Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.”

But somehow, the grand illusion of war continued half a world away even after Thackeray’s anti-heroic view, for American participants in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. If the romance of war can be said to have died, it was 100 years after Waterloo, in the muddy trenches and gas attacks of WWI.

Not that war itself has died. Oh, no. But nobody will ever be able to rush off to arms again, as George Osborne did, without knowing beforehand that it would involve a grim, nasty business indeed.

(For a fascinating blog post on the battle, see “The Battle of Waterloo in 16 Objects” from the British Library’s “Untold Lives” blog.)

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1998 British miniseries Vanity Fair, with Tom Ward as the doomed and dumb Captain Osborne.)

This Day in Diplomatic History (Xmas Peace ‘Ends’ War of 1812)

Dec. 24, 1814—The “Second War of American Independence” ended on a far less triumphant note than the first, but given all that had happened since the start of hostilities, the United States was fortunate that its five-man delegation, led by John Quincy Adams (pictured here in a portrait by Gilbert Stuart), signed a peace treaty in Ghent, Belgium on the basis of status quo ante bellum (a return to the conditions before war broke out).

I put the word “ends” in quotes in the headline for this reason: because of still comparatively primitive communications, word of the “Christmas Peace” (i.e., the Treaty of Ghent) did not reach New York City until February 11, 1815. The newly two-month lag not only allowed the Battle of New Orleans to occur, but also other smaller engagements before the War of 1812 actually concluded.

It might be said that the British lost at the negotiating table what they had gained on the battlefield. The Americans, particularly Adams and fellow negotiator Henry Clay, might have felt annoyed with each other behind closed doors, but they preserved a united front before the British and held on grimly until circumstances turned more favorable. In addition, they represented a variety of regions and political interests (even a moderate Federalist, James Bayard, was present), and President James Madison gave them more or less maximum freedom to maneuver.

In contrast, the British government handicapped itself even from the start by repeating the same mistake they had done in dealing with Adams’ father and his fellow envoys in peace negotiations to end the American Revolution 30 years before: It sent inexperienced, lackluster negotiators, this time including an admiralty lawyer, an admiral and a young Undersecretary for War and the Colonies). Furthermore, unlike the American team (trusted by Madison by necessity because of the ocean between them), His Majesty’s government insisted that its team consult with them continually before agreeing to any terms.

For much of the five-month period of the negotiations, Madison was probably sorry that he had not gone back to Congress in 1812 and asked it to rescind its declaration of war once news reached it that one of the stated war causes, interference with American trade with France, had been eliminated as a result of Britain ending its Orders in Council curbing neutrals’ shipping to France and its continental allies. Thereafter, much of the war had gone badly indeed for the Americans—particularly on land, where the British had captured Detroit and, in late August 1814, even invaded Washington and burned the White House.

As a result, the British were initially in no mood to give anything away. In fact, their backs stiffened considerably, as they demanded territory in northern Maine, demilitarization of the Great Lakes and navigation rights on the Mississippi.

The reserved, intense Adams might have been dismayed by Clay’s late-night carousing, but one of the Kentuckian’s pastimes, gambling, proved helpful in the talks. As an aficionado of the game “Brag,” Clay excelled at bluffing. And so, at a particularly thorny point in the negotiations, he let it be known that he would be packing his bags and going home. The British team’s tone then moderated, at least somewhat.

What strengthened the American position the most, however, as I noted in a prior post, was Thomas Macdonough’s victory at Plattsburgh in September, which forced an end to the invasion of New York. That, coupled with Americans’ unexpectedly staff resistance at Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, led the British to contemplate with growing dismay the prospect of a war thousands of miles away that would increasingly drain the treasury’s coffers.

The turning point on the British side came when the government asked for the advice of its victor in the Peninsular campaign in Spain against Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington. Though the “Iron Duke” would later show, as Prime Minister, his reactionary tendencies, on this occasion his military background allowed him to speak credibly and realistically. He not only expressed reluctance to lead a strengthened military force in Canada when the British couldn’t even control the Great Lakes, but pointed out that the British government could not insist on its stance of uti possidetis (right of possession of what was taken in battle): “You can get no territory; indeed, the state of your military operations, however creditable, does not entitle you to demand any.”

At that point, the British agreed to the American terms of status quo ante bellum. In the end, both the Americans and the British (with their Canadian colonists) could claim to have gotten something, though it hardly justified the lives lost to this point. 

The British and the Canadians had turned back American attempts to seize Canada and could now concentrate on repairing the damage left by the Napoleonic Wars (along with stamping out the French emperor’s return to power by finally defeating him at Waterloo the following year). The Americans had not won a single concession on any of the stated war causes—including the impressment of U.S. sailors and the rights of neutral U.S. vessels—but they retained the Great Lakes, allowing them to continue their expansion into the Midwest and their rise as a continental power, with the threat of any future British resort to force now removed. Moreover, the U.S. had extricated itself from a conflict that one of the negotiators, Albert Gallatin, had recently been forced to tell Madison would have to be continued without any financial assistance from any European power.

The one group that lost at the negotiating table were Britain's Native-American allies. Even before the final phase of the talks, one British negotiator, Henry Goulburn, indicated that they were “but a secondary object…As the Allies of Great Britain she must include them in the peace…But when the boundary [for Britain’s proposed buffer state along the Great Lakes] is once defined it is immaterial whether Indians are upon it or not.  Let it be a desert.  But we shall know that you cannot come upon us to attack us without crossing it.”

 

But Clay, the leader of the trans-Allegheny faction that had formed the backbone of the Congressional “war hawks,” dug in his heels on ceding any part of the Northwest Territories. In the end, all that the Native-Americans could come away with in the treaty was language entitling them to “all possessions, rights and privileges which they may have enjoyed, or been entitled to in 1811”—a clause that was nonenforceable without a clearly-drawn map of their land reserves. 

 

The Massachusetts Historical Society is in the midst of an extraordinary project: putting on Twitter the voluminous diaries of Adams. I have used those Twitter posts to recreate the account by perhaps the greatest diplomat in American history of how the treaty was concluded:

“Peace, between the United States and Great Britain, signed at the house of the British Plenipotentiaries. A few mistakes in the Copies were rectified & then the six Copies were signed and sealed by the… British & the… American Plenipotentiaries. Lord Gambier delivered to me the three British Copies [of the treaty]… which he said he hoped would be permanent; and I told him [Lord Gambier] I hoped it would be the last Treaty of Peace between Great-Britain and the United States.”

And so it has been.