“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;
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 18th-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.
