STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 116
To Thine Own Self Be True
13. To Thine Own Self Be True (8)
It must be confessed that if the King’s political views, or alleged views, were sometimes surprising, the Duke’s expressed opinions occasionally seem astounding to us, looking back as we do over the long Victorian régime that intervenes between our day and his. Some of the things which he defended were indefensible—he spoke out fearlessly on behalf of Rotten Boroughs. “I confess that I see in the members for the thirty Rotten Boroughs men who would preserve the state of property as it is, who would maintain by their votes the Church of England, the Union with Scotland and Ireland, our colonies and possessions, our national honour. I think that it is the presence in Parliament of this sort of man, with the county gentlemen and bankers and great manufacturers, that makes the House of Commons differ from a Foreign Chamber of Deputies. It is by means of the representation of those close boroughs that the great proprietors of England participate in political power. We can’t spare these men, or exchange them for members elected by great towns under an extended franchise.”
Wellington once issued the gnome that all reform is bad and dangerous, because all reform ends by being Radical. He defended the Purchase System in the Army; the lavish use of corporal punishment. He disliked education, opposing at once staff colleges and army schoolmasters. He sometimes spoke of the good of the “landed interest”, where we should speak of the good of the State. All this, I think, came directly or indirectly from the guiding theory which we spoke of before, the notion that the English Revolution was at hand, and that if he could not stop it, he could at any rate support any measure that pushed it into the less-immediate future.
That this was a melancholy outlook, and a depressing scheme of life, I think that Wellington himself would have agreed. The fear of revolution never left him, and in his extreme old age he thought, during the Chartist troubles of 1848, that it was once more growing imminent, and turned all that remained of his faculties to the task of devising a method for dealing with civil war in the streets of London. His plan was excellent, and would no doubt have been effective; but it was never tested. Indeed, we can see now that the danger was not what the men of that day expected it to be.
It is some consolation to the admirers of Wellington that he at least enjoyed a sort of Indian summer in his declining years: he lived to see his fears of immediate chaos, so acute in 1832, die away. He survived to see Conservative ministers in power, and a popular sovereign on the throne which in 1830 had seemed to totter. What probably affected less his Spartan set of mind was that he survived to find himself no longer the much-hated representative of Reaction and the enemy of the mob. He himself never forgot the broken windows of Apsley House: but the rest of the world did; and he figured in the memory of the generation that had grown up since Reform Bill times as a sort of historical monument, absolutely straight and true to type.
He knew what was expected of him: “I am the Duke of Wellington, and must do as the Duke of Wellington doth”, was one of his touches of sardonic humour. But it was also one more indication of the fact that he regarded an inflexible adherence to his own peculiar code of duty as the highest obligation.
But above all, to thine own self be true,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
This marks the end of STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WAR by Sir Charles Oman.
To obtain a deluxe leatherbound edition of STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS, subscribe to Castalia History.
