The title of Peter Sinnema's work alludes both to the aftereffects of Wellington's death upon English identity and the public commemoration of the Iron Duke's passing in the grandiose funeral procession that brought a million and a half spectators to the center of London on 18 November 1852. The loss of Wellington provided an opportunity for his countrymen to celebrate the English virtues he came to embody—simplicity, common sense, and dutiful subjecthood—both in themselves and in their hero. His funeral pageant was the culminating event in a series of concerted attempts over the latter years of the duke's life and in the months of preparation for the procession after his death to fix his role in the collective consciousness of the nation and to reaffirm the national identity that he both exemplified and guaranteed.
The spectacular memorial that marked the end of Wellington's era, an age of England's superiority over the French, industrial preeminence, and imperial puissance, enacted his symbolic importance for a nation at the apogee of self-confidence. In his first two chapters, Sinnema carefully documents how just before his death, the duke's character was recuperated, clearing the way for the magnificent celebration of his life in 1852 and guaranteeing his place among the nation's heroes down to the present day. Although Wellington's reputation had suffered over the years after Waterloo as a result of his profoundly conservative views regarding reform, the early 1850s signaled a change in his public perception. In part, anxieties about the 1848 revolutions and the coincidence of the duke's passing with Napoleon III's rise to power were bound to produce recollections of the nation's great soldier as the defender of law and order, but the continuing recourse to the duke's heroic figure in the years and decades to come suggests to Sinnema that recent continental events set off a host of national tensions that only a reconfigured Wellington could allay. From the retrospective angle of Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), in which Wellington appears as a model of English muscular Christianity and typological savior of his nation, Sinnema traces the ways in which the duke's character becomes increasingly fixed in the years just before and after his death, beginning with his appearance at the Great Exhibition. In his last public function, Wellington as the ranger of Hyde Park oversaw construction and security for the nation's famous celebration of its industrial power. Standing humbly next to Victoria and Albert on opening day, 1 May 1851, Wellington reminded spectators that his dutiful life of public service made such displays of Englishness possible. From that point onward, Sinnema convincingly argues, the duke was reestablished as the preeminent embodiment of English values, a model for the nation in its self-proclaimed excellence as an orderly and civilized people.
The Exhibition solidified Wellington's virtuous character in the eyes of his countrymen; it also rehearsed the combination of spectacle and order that his own funeral exemplified. His death some fifteen months later in the austere and unpretentious surroundings of his one room library-study-bedroom at Walmer Castle left a powerful moral legacy for the English in its wake. The middle chapters of The Wake of Wellington show how quickly the English absorbed the moral imperative of their dead hero in the preparations for the funeral pageant and in the event itself. The lengthy two months’ wait between Wellington's death and his the funeral forced the nation to reflect respectfully on his virtuous life and to consider how such a spectacle might serve the memory of a man whose life was, as the nation deliberately chose to remember it, humble and dutiful. Demonstrating an impressive familiarity with Victorian periodicals, Sinnema chronicles the stages of the duke's immediate postmortem semicanonization as the patron saint of all things English. The duke's glorification was no less a personal triumph than a national one as he crystallized relations between his own eminently sensible and civilized English heroism and the values of the nation he adopted. These connections were furthermore strengthened by the abundance of memorabilia that emerged for public consumption in the months before the funeral—all who wanted a piece of the duke's very English virtue could buy it in the form of commemorative medallions, prints, and statues.
The funeral itself stood as testament to the values that Wellington engendered in his countrymen, yet also registered some of the tensions that tended to be elided in the sanctification of his character. The grand spectacle of the funeral procession, for all of its orderliness, jarred with the gravitas of the interment at St. Paul’s, which itself rather conflicted with the duke's own noncommittal Anglicanism. Yet even these apparent disparities were smoothed over, evincing the power of the preceding months’ plethora of Wellington panegyrics in the popular press. Indeed, Sinnema remarks, asseverations as to the duke's upstanding piety and humility in commentaries on the funeral signaled the assimilation of his particular brand of secular English heroism to the emerging figure of the imperial Christian soldier and ensured that his legacy would inform all later conceptions of the English hero.
In The Wake of Wellington’s final two chapters, Sinnema recounts the press war between English and Irish papers over the duke's nationality and legacy and examines the implications of the erection and subsequent removal of Wyatt's monstrous monument to the duke atop Burton's triumphal arch at Hyde Park Corner. Both narratives catalog the fortunes of the duke's postmortem reputation, reiterating some of the central issues of the previous chapters, as the English assert their moral superiority by laying claim to Wellington's particularly English virtues, much to the irritation of the Irish, and continue to encounter difficulties in commemorating their humble and heroic dead with monuments and spectacles whose grandiosity errs against the very subjects they are meant to dignify.
The success of this book is to remind us of the constructed nature of Wellington's persona as an expression of the exigencies of English national identity. Its only weakness is that, despite Sinnema's obviously extensive knowledge of his subject, there is less here in the way of his own interpretive voice than others’—I am certain he has more, of interest, to say.
