THE CHAIRMAN’S DISPATCH Friendship, Humanity and Heroism On a cold, blustery day in February I attended a meeting of the Official Waterloo Committee at the National Army Museum in Chelsea. Yes, hard on the heels of the Nelson bicentenaries, the Wellington machine is gearing up to celebrate this famous soldier’s military career, notably his campaigns in the Iberian Peninsula 1808-1814, and its culmination at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Will a ‘Wellington Festival’ overshadow the memory of Nelson? Some of you will recall that during the Club’s Cecil Isaacson Memorial lecture last year, Commander Pongo Blanchford highlighted how, after his state funeral, mention of Nelson in the newspapers fell away almost entirely. Events in the Napoleonic Empire were far more significant, and worrying. Will Nelson’s memory fade 200 years later in the same way? We are familiar with the Iron Duke’s story of how as General Sir Arthur Wellesley he met Nelson on 12 September 2005, just one day before the admiral left London to join the Victory. Unfortunately, we do not have an account from Nelson to sit alongside it. However, we can assume from Wellington’s version that the ‘sudden and complete metamorphosis’ to Nelson’s behaviour from ‘a style so vain and so silly as to surprise and almost disgust me’ to that of ‘a very superior man’, means that Nelson soon recognised he was in the company of a professional fighting man with a remarkable intellect and reputation. One imagines that he was impressed by Wellesley, who at 36 had already acquired a great reputation in India. We should rightly see Wellington as a ‘Great Man’ of his age. Militarily, in the words of an anonymous soldier, he did not ‘know how to lose a battle’, and in the Peninsular shattered the myth of French invincibility. Like Nelson, he was a national hero; the man credited with finally checking Napoléon. Yet, the contrast with Nelson and the significance of Trafalgar compared with Waterloo is revealing, and the lessons of The Trafalgar Festival and SeaBritain 2005 are pathfinding. Combined they will undoubtedly influence the august committee in Chelsea’s choice of ‘values’ to celebrate Wellington’s achievements, and the impact the Waterloo bicentenary will have on the imagination of the country in 2015, and as a result on Nelson’s contemporary legacy. The historical contrasts are considerable. Nelson died at the peak of his career and reputation, with his all-round abilities intact, and crucially in his finest hour. Wellington survived and went on to experience a mixed political career, dying a ‘national treasure’ rather than the embodiment and immediate saviour of his country. Nelson was the last admiral in the Royal Navy to achieve a series of set piece victories, whereas other ‘first generals’ of their age have matched Wellington’s great military ability. Trafalgar saw the annihilation of the Combined French and Spanish Fleet; Waterloo was ‘so nice a thing – so nearly run a thing’! Trafalgar caged Napoléon’s aggrandisement to the confines of Europe and laid the foundations for Britain’s subsequent global maritime supremacy into the 20th century. In retrospect Waterloo was the coda to the Napoleonic era. It was an interruption to the reconstruction of Europe already underway at Vienna, where the Great Powers were laying the foundations for a new Europe whose legacy survives to this day in the guise of the European Union, underpinned, ironically, by the Code Napoléon. The fundamental values chosen for The Trafalgar Festival may be summed up in three words: friendship, humanity and heroism. These are powerful values that served the bicentenary and Nelson well. The strongest of them is humanity. It both recognises the power of the ‘brotherhood of the sea’ - the humanity between former enemies during the great storm after the battle is one of the more distinctive features of Trafalgar - and Nelson’s personal humanity. It was the very essence of the man and a quality that permeated his modern style of leadership. Wellington was humane too, but his acerbic aristocratic character lacked the characteristic ‘Nelson’ warmth, and unlike Nelson his leadership style was far more authoritarian. Wellington believed that his kind were predestined to lead and he did so by stamping his iron will on the men he commanded. After Waterloo thousands of wounded and dying were abandoned to their pity, some enduring the agony for more than a week before they expired. Consequently, where heroism, friendship and leadership may be applied in varying degrees to Waterloo and the Peninsula War, humanity may not. Humanity, friendship and heroism will be at the fore in Great Yarmouth on 31 March at the unveiling of the first memorial in the UK to those who fought at the Battle of Copenhagen 1801. It is now generally agreed that the truce Nelson sent ashore at the climax of the battle was inspired by his sense of humanity, rather than as a ruse de guerre. The wording on the memorial, which is in English and Danish, reads: Page 2 2
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