With commemorative events for the centenary of the start of the First World War now receiving daily media attention, might not one also reflect upon how the nation celebrated the end of the original Great War a century before? News of Wellington’s great victory at Waterloo precipitated an outpouring of celebration across the United Kingdom. The Iron Duke’s fame was then generally held to have outshone Marlborough’s; his triumph on the slopes of Mont St Jean to have eclipsed even Agincourt.
Celebration and commemoration took many forms. The ringing of church bells was the first and most common. Individuals marked the news in their own way. The Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, went with William Wordsworth and other Lakeland acquaintances to the summit of Skiddaw, where they ate roast beef and plum pudding whilst singing the national anthem. By the end of 1815, there were at least seventy books or pamphlets relating to the battle in print. Byron’s Childe Harold, completed in June 1816, remains a classic. More solid memorials followed. By the end of 1815, from Haworth Parsonage, the Rev Patrick Brontë and his daughters would be able to look across the moors and see the monument surmounting Stoodley Pike. On the Blackdown Hills in Somerset, overlooking the market centre of Wellington, in October 1817, some 10,000 people watched the ceremony to lay the foundation stone for an obelisk to the man who had taken his ducal title from the town. London’s Waterloo Bridge had been officially declared open by the Prince Regent on Waterloo Day earlier that same year. There were countless other tributes in the more mundane forms of road names and pub signs.
Popular celebration each 18 June remained common during Wellington’s lifetime: it was, after all, a convenient midsummer date on which ordinary Britons could meet to eat, drink and make merry. It was only the combination of the Duke’s death, in September 1852, combined with Britain’s allying with France during the Crimean War that brought a relative end to such proceedings. There were, however, plans for a series of international events to mark the centenary. In Britain these were to have focused around an imperial exhibition. Instead, the outbreak of the new Great War in 1914 rendered most projects irrelevant. The failure of the European powers to keep the peace, both before and after 1914, however, and moves towards greater European integration in the years since 1945, have invested both Waterloo and the Vienna settlement with a new relevance as we approach their bicentenary.
Russ Foster is the author of Wellington and Waterloo. Drawing on many under-utilised sources to illuminate some less familiar themes, this timely study offers fresh perspectives on one of Britain’s best-known figures, as well as on the nature of heroism. The reader is also given pause for thought as to appropriate forms of commemoration and how national celebrations are prone to manipulation, for their own purposes, by those in government.