The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (51 page)

The first day of the lying-in-state was quiet, probably because potential visitors feared massive crowds; when none manifested,
everyone
came the following day. By seven in the morning, it was estimated that there were
100,000 people waiting. The actor Fred Belton commented, ‘Barriers had been erected, and as soon as the first barrier was withdrawn another mob were [sic] admitted; then the shrieks, cries, and yells, were terrific. I felt that to stumble or fall would be death...When we entered by the hall ... my wife’s dress [was] in ribbons.’ Even as this crowd was funnelled through the single narrow exit, packed steamers continued to drop off more and more passengers at Cadogan Pier, pressing the growing multitudes into the railings. Some people were saved only by being lifted over the high wrought-iron railings by Life Guards; two died.

Those who were to take part in the actual funeral procession were instructed on appropriate dress: ‘in mourning, without weepers, but with mourning swords’. Those who had seats in St Paul’s were to wear ‘mourning frock dress’, while their ‘Servants (not in mourning) attending the carriages’ should still have silk or crape hatbands and black gloves. Even those watching were advised as to appropriate dress: according to the
Post
, there had been ‘considerable doubt’ whether women were expected to continue to wear general mourning in the street after the funeral (it went without saying that mourning was expected on the day itself ). Now, the editorial went on, ‘we are in a position to state, upon the highest authority’, that mourning should be worn for the single day, while ‘The introduction of crape as a prominent feature of dress’ could be ‘left to the discretion’ of each wearer, while ‘velvet, we are informed, may be worn in cloaks’.

The buildings along the funeral route were equally carefully adorned for the occasion, with banners appearing, embroidered with ‘
Non sibi, sed Patriae
’ (‘Not for himself, but for his country’). Along Pall Mall and St James’s, clubs draped their façades in black cloth and other appropriate decorations: the Oxford and Cambridge Club’s balconies were ‘tastefully hung with black cloth, festooned with silver lace, the letter “W.” enclosed in laurel wreaths, being inserted in temporary hatchments’. Other clubs, as well as some of the mansions of the rich in this area, did not meet public expectations, with only a ‘few mean and scanty black cloths...shabbily decorated’. That could not be said of Temple Bar: both sides of the stone gateway were ‘covered with black cotton velvet, which was decorated with appropriate fringes. Each side was arranged with Roman cornices and frieze,
in imitation of silver. On the summit was an immense funeral urn (of silver gilt), surrounded with 12 flambeaux of funeral torches. At each corner...was a funeral urn...somewhat smaller than ... the central one...O n the drapery were several monograms, with the initials “W.A.”,’ for Arthur Wellesley, together with shields and flags of the countries that had made the duke an honorary officer, with orders suspended from them. The whole was lit from 6 a.m. on the morning of the funeral by gas lighting that had been specially piped in.

At St Paul’s, the great building contractor William Cubitt had been commissioned to build an interior grandstand to seat the thousands of mourners, as well as hanging the galleries and walls with mourning draperies. The City Corporation had laid down three large gas mains to ensure that the nave, the cornice and the Whispering Gallery above would be suitably lit: nearly 7,000 lamps were installed. St Paul’s – as it had with Nelson, and as the newspapers had warned – had become a tourist site: Greville went to take a look two days before the funeral. He judged that the effect of the lights was very good ‘but it was like a great rout [ball]; all London was there strolling and staring about in the midst of a thousand workmen going on with their business ... all the fine ladies [were] scrambling over vast masses of timber, or ducking to avoid the great beams that were constantly sweeping along’.

On 17 November, the duke’s remains were taken from Chelsea Hospital to the Audience Room at Horse Guards, the starting place for the funeral procession. The police had barred all traffic from the parade ground, and on the 18th the roads around St James’s and Green Park were closed from 7 a.m. Those with tickets for St Paul’s were permitted to drive through until fixed times, graded by their proximity to the cathedral. Everyone else in London had to walk that day. Sophia Beale and her family in central London ate breakfast at five to be in their places at Ludgate Hill before the barriers came down at eight.

At seven o’clock on the morning of the funeral, the ceremonial gilded coach of the Speaker of the House of Commons, together with six carriages of state each pulled by five horses, drew into Horse Guards to represent the royal family. At 7.45, ‘the seventeen minute guns, which were the military
salute due to the remains of the Duke of Wellington from his rank as a fieldmarshal, began to be fired’. Church bells throughout the city started to toll, as they would once every minute for the rest of the morning. The funeral car was uncovered, and its twelve horses harnessed three abreast. The catafalque itself was astonishing. Of solid bronze, it measured twenty-seven feet long and ten feet wide, with a carved and gilded canopy seventeen feet high, the sides of which carried the names of Wellington’s victories, with replicas of some of his battle trophies and his coronet. On the car itself rested the bier, covered by a ‘magnificent pall, with a silver fringe, six inches deep, and powdered with ornaments in the same metal’, on which had been placed the coffin, covered with scarlet velvet, on which lay the duke’s sword and cap. A silver and gold cloth formed a canopy above, supported by halberds. In even the most laudatory images, the car looks like a mobile shop window, gaudy and overstuffed, with the coffin diminished by the size of the car into a tiny little bump on the top of an excess of plush. One foreign correspondent merely wrote, ‘I will not speak of it out of respect for him it carried.’

As the sides of the catafalque were drawn up to show the bier, the soldiers presented and then reversed their arms to a roll of muffled drums. Finally, at eight o’clock the procession began to move. The band of the Rifle Brigade, playing the ‘Dead March’ from Handel’s
Saul
, went first, with troops following in sections eight deep with their arms reversed, followed in turn by ‘13 trumpets and kettle drums, two pursuivants-at-arms in a mourning coach’, then by the long line of mourning coaches of the public bodies, ambassadors and state officials. The procession was so extensive that it was nearly an hour and a half before the funeral car itself moved out of Horse Guards, followed by the new Duke of Wellington and other family members, as well as Wellington’s own horse, led riderless, saddled and with the duke’s boots reversed in the stirrups. As more soldiers fell in behind, the procession moved slowly and steadily until it reached the Mall, where the funeral car became bogged down in a rut in the street. (It took ten minutes of the ‘active exertions’ by the police and soldiers on duty to extricate it and get on the move again.)

The nearby parks – St James’s and Green Park – were relatively empty, having been kept locked, reserved for the use of grandees. In the grounds
of St James’s Palace, scaffolding had been erected to create seating for the families and friends of the royal family, while the grounds of Marlborough House were filled with ‘rows of seats...extending from the gate to Pallmall back to the Chapel Royal’. At Stafford House, the family and friends of the Duke of Sutherland, ‘dressed in deep mourning, watched...from an enclosed building raised at the bottom of the garden’. Before eight o’clock, Queen Victoria, in deep mourning, had emerged onto the central balcony of Buckingham Palace to stand with Prince Albert, their children and other foreign royals. She remained there as the procession passed – nearly two hours from start to finish – but after the mourning coaches had passed the Prince Consort and some of the other men in the party left to join in the procession themselves. After it had continued into Green Park, the queen and her family went to St James’s Palace, to take up a new viewing position.

At Constitution Hill, the hordes of onlookers watched the procession appear just as the sun came out. At the Wellington Arch, the cavalcade paused; then, as the funeral car moved past Apsley House, someone in the throng shouted, ‘Hats off!’ and all the men in the vast crowd removed their hats, ‘except in cases where the pressure [of people] did not permit the spectators to use their hands’. After another pause, soon after ten, the cortège moved slowly down Piccadilly, where possibly as many as 30,000 people had crammed themselves, having waited all night despite torrential rain and icy winds. In several of the mansions the blinds were drawn out of respect, but for the most part the windows and rooftops all along the route swarmed with spectators; many of the great mansions had built in extra viewing space. The many clubs in St James’s and Pall Mall had placed tiers of seats in the windows, and some had even built platforms on their roofs, providing viewing spaces for their members, their families and friends: some clubs offered seating for 2,000 people. Only the Carlton had made no special provision: the duke had been a founder member, and it felt that strict mourning precluded spectators.

By the time the head of the procession reached Trafalgar Square, it was estimated that 10,000 people had squeezed into the space, filling the windows of all the surrounding buildings with crowds on the roof of the National
Gallery and even St Martin-in-the-Fields. (‘One poor fellow, clinging to a chimney-pot, fell from a terrific height.’) As the cortège neared, then passed interminably, ‘whispered murmurs of “here comes the Duke!” met our ear’, but ‘no emotion was shown’ until ‘his favourite horse, led by his favourite groom, appeared, with the heads both of horse and men bent as if in deep grief, and the saddle to which were appended his boots ... Then sobs, sighs, silent tears.’ Here eighty-three Chelsea Pensioners, one for each year of the duke’s life, were drawn up in formation between Nelson’s Column and the statue of Charles I. As the long cavalcade marched by, the Pensioners fell in, joining their more active colleagues for the rest of the route.

With the exception of the house windows, the Strand was, curiously, the least crowded section, with people lining the pavements no more than two or three deep, although most of the buildings had additional seating on scaffolding. The procession slowed once more as the head of it reached Temple Bar: the soldiers, who had been marching six abreast, had to re-form into a double file to fit through the gateway; the canopy of the catafalque, too, had to be lowered to pass under the arch. (The week before, the car, suitably weighted to represent the real thing, had been taken on a trial run.) As the procession crossed the boundary into the City, the Lord Mayor joined it, together with members of the Common Council. At Ludgate Hill there was an involuntary pause once more: the steepness of the hill slowed the horses pulling the carriages and the catafalque, while the dense crowds, too, spilt over into the road, slowing things further. Nevertheless, the funeral car arrived at St Paul’s exactly at noon and was immediately moved into a temporary shed ‘where means had been supplied to move the ponderous bier into the body of the cathedral’. Meanwhile a blue light was flashed out from the dome of the cathedral, ‘for the purpose of informing the Tower authorities when to begin the firing of the minute guns’.

The congregation had been instructed to arrive at St Paul’s at 6 a.m., but the builders were then still frantically finishing, and it was eight o’clock before the doors opened; many people had been waiting outside for more than two hours in the rain. Once inside, the temporary tiers provided seats for 6,000, with another 7,000 squeezed in under the dome and more spaces
found in the transepts and galleries – altogether, room for about 17,000 had been created.
¹²³

Around the coffin stood Prince Albert, bearing the duke’s field marshal’s baton; the Marquess of Anglesey, who had lost his leg at Waterloo and was himself eighty-four, carrying his marshal’s baton; and the pall-bearers, all officers who had served under Wellington. Apart from Austria, every country for which the duke had held a marshal’s baton had sent a representative: thirty-seven years after Waterloo the allies against Napoleon were reunited.
¹²⁴
After the funeral service, the coffin was lowered into its tomb beneath the cathedral floor, forty trumpeters sounded a dirge at the west entrance to the cathedral, and the troops began to disperse, followed by the funeral car, Prince Albert, the foreign dignitaries and then the crowds. By five o’clock, the hundreds of thousands of spectators had vanished and only the black fabric remained, hanging damply across the buildings.

Soon, all trace of the spectacle was gone, but the man himself would continue to be remembered:

Let the sound of those he wrought for,

And the feet of those he fought for,

Echo round his bones for evermore.

There, in St Paul’s, instead of Westminster Abbey, usually the home of dead heroes, Wellington was placed for ever at the heart of the city, belonging to the people rather than the government, perhaps a suitable end for the man who rejected both Reform and the common people, but always did his duty for them nonetheless.

13.

NIGHT ENTERTAINMENT

There were thousands of places to go and be amused, on and off the street, in early- and mid-Victorian London – thousands of places, that is, if one happened to be a man. Public places for women’s amusement were less easy to find and, for middle- and upper-class women, they verged on the non-existent. Clubs were, of course, entirely male. So were the coffee shops, chophouses and other public eating spaces; low-cost cookshops did a busy trade with working-class women, coming and going with their families’ dinners, but eating there, although possible, was less common. Many West End theatres seated women in the boxes as well as in what later became known as the dress circle (for the prosperous) and the gallery (for the poor), but the pit and other low-priced areas were for men. Theatres in the East End and south of the river confined working-class women to the galleries and middle-class women to the boxes, although Astley’s Amphitheatre, where hippodramas were staged, was an entirely family entertainment. Any woman anywhere in the Alhambra Music Hall, apart from working-class women in the gallery, was automatically assumed to have a dubious reputation, or none. The same went for most other nightspots of the city.