BOOKS OF THE DAY
Wellington in Civil Life (John Hayward)... ... 308 The Greatness of George Stubbs (Geoffrey Grigson) 309 Danubian Destiny (Richard Freund) ... 310 Value and Capital (Honor Croome) 310 High, Wide and Deep (L. •A. G. Strong) ... 3t1 The Navy from Within (Rear-Admiral H. G. Thursfield) 311 Rejoice in the Lamb (Edmund Blunden) Four Autobiographies (Anthony Powell) ... The Emigrants (C. E. Vulliamy) Crime Marches On (Nicholas Blake) ... Fiction (Forrest Reid) ...
Current Literature ...
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4‘ THE UNPRECEDENTED HERO "
By JOHN HAYWARD
Mucx of the interest in reading another book about the Duke of Wellington arises from the fact that it is now incon- ceivable that there should ever be anyone quite like him again. It was Lady Salisbury who, as a little girl, was one of the many children he loved to have romping round his chair and climbing into his lap, who called him the " unpre- cedented hero." The title would have been appropriate had she intended it to apply, as in fact she did, only to his extraordinary exploits in the field. But its peculiar aptness was not, perhaps, so apparent then as it is in historical per- spective, which enables us to see his career as a whole and to realise that for thirty years or more after the battle of Waterloo he was hotly engaged in the less glorious field of party politics and that for part of that time he was Prime Minister of England. If there had been no one like him before, there has certainly been no great public figure since with whom he can be justly compared, and it is incredible that there ever should be one. The Duke of Wellington was the last Englishman to lead a British Army into battle and to lead a British Government in Parliament.
His great-grand-niece, Miss. Muriel Wellesley, has already devoted a volume to his military career. The present volume, a necessary sequel, is concerned with his civil service from the year 1818, when his active life as a soldier came to an end, until his death in 1852. It is not, so far as Miss Wellesley's share goes, a remarkable biography; the quality of her writing is poor and her taste for the hackneyed phrase and metaphor, deplorable; it is nevertheless a fascinating and eminently readable book, for the simple reason that it is largely made up of quotations from the writings of the Duke and his contemporaries. Miss Wellesley has chosen these well and arranged them neatly in chronological order with a running commentary of her own. To the best of my know- ledge, she has not had access to unpublished material, yet the use she has made of the obvious and familiar sources- Greville, as one would expect, is much quoted—does enable one to imagine how Wellington appeared, as her sub-title suggests, " through the eyes of those who knew him."
Two things stand out and strike one as forcibly today as they did his contemporaries a hundred years ago. The first, his extreme modesty and contempt for fame; the second, his complete lack of factiousness in politics in any crisis where party interests or loyalty conflicted with what he believed to be his first duty—the duty in which he had been trained as a soldier—of service to the Throne.
" It is a great study," Lord Shaftesbury observed, " to be in the society of this wonderful man. He seems to be thoroughly ignorant of his greatness and has all the simplicity of a good-natured man who has done nothing but the mere routine duty of common life." His simplicity and good- nature were a perpetual source of wonder and delight to those who had dealings with him. On an official mission to St. Petersburg he astonished the citizens by strolling about the city in mufti; a workers' representative, who was received at Apsley House and expected short shrift from the stub- bornest of die-hard Tories, left enchanted by his host's sympathetic and comradely manner. Greville, who detested his politics, loved his personality — " the gaiety, natural urbanity and good humour which are," he admitted, " remark- ably captivating in so great a man." And even Cobden, who had attacked him while he lived, spoke after his death of his modesty and honesty. It was characteristic of him that he lVellington in Civil Life. By Muriel Wellesley. (Constable. r8s.)
opened all his letters himself and answered as many of them as he could personally; that he hated fuss as much in private life as in his public, and refused help even when old age and infirmity would have excused it; that he should have been careless and indiscriminating in his charities and con- tinually imposed upon; and that his simplicity sometimes involved him in childish conduct, as in his quarrel with Canning, his prosecution of The Morning Journal, or in his eccentric relations with Miss Jennings.
The part he played in politics cannot be judged by the ordinary standards of statesmanship. He was, it must be remembered, a national hero before he was ever called upon to join an administration. His position, in consequence, was, as Greville says, " eminently singular and exceptional, something between the Royal Family and other subjects." Add to this that, as the child and champion of aristocracy, he despised the mob and was violently opposed to any sug- gestion of parliamentary reform and that he was, by upbringing and position, hopelessly out of touch with the unprivileged classes, and it becomes obvious that he was unfitted for political life. Miss Wellesley, partly through ignorance of the issues involved, partly no doubt from a due sense of family pride, fails to make this sufficiently clear. She does not disguise the fact that the Duke was for a time extremely unpopular—there is an excellent account in her book of the famous ride from The Mint—but she does not probe the significance of the threatening situations in which his reactionary policy involved him.
What saved him and what saved the country, too, from something worse than another Peterloo or a Chartist rising, which he would have been powerless to quell a second time, was, as I have said, his hatred of faction and an ability to see that there are higher interests than those of party. He was not a trimmer; he was aware, though, that Government and Opposition alike were the servants of the people, not their masters, and through the people, servants of the State, and must subserve its interests. Because his personal prestige was so great, and political ambition did not exist for him, he neither sought power nor wished to maintain it for himself or his party when he was faced with defeat. In a period of social revolution and revolutionary reform, he was thus a stabilising force of immense strength and value in the councils of State.
When he finally retired from party politics in the summer of 1846 at the advanced age of 75, a very deaf but still a very active and spirited old man, he had regained all his former popularity and was well on the way to becoming a legend. Whether he was ever really popular may, perhaps, be doubted. Miss Wellesley does not raise the question either in her commentary or in her quotations, though she strongly denies that Wellington was careless of the welfare of his old soldiers after he had left the army or that he lacked tenderness. Yet, when one examines the evidence, it is difficult to imagine him as a popular man among his cronies or as a popular figure in the eyes of the crowd. He was, perhaps, too great an aristocrat to win more than the deep respect, reverence and admiration of ordinary men and women. Certainly no Englishman in modern times has been more widely venerated. But the very simplicity and humility of his nature, which made him the victim of many ladies and the hero of children's games, may easily be mistaken for warmth and affection. The air of aloofness that seems to surround him was not, one feels, altogether thrust upon him by his exalted station.
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