A Model Victory. Malcolm Balen

Siborne had been chosen to build the Model, Lord Hill contacted the Secretary at War, Sir Henry Hardinge, to arrange the necessary financial backing. The Tory government readily paid his first bill of more than sixty pounds, for the survey of the battlefield. Ministers considered it to be money well spent, an appropriate celebration of the Duke’s great triumph. Then, for Siborne, came disaster. Three years after the election of a Whig prime minister, Earl Grey in 1830, and three years into his project, the government decided it no longer wished to fund such a costly enterprise. Over the next twenty years, the Whigs would cut spending on the army by nearly a fifth, and the Model was seen as an unnecessary cost. Added to which, the new men in the War Office, led by Edward Ellice as Secretary at War, had had a number of run-ins with the Duke. It was clear that Ellice would refuse to sanction spending public money on the project and in this he would find ready acceptance from the Whigs, who thought that the Model would glorify the Tory Wellington. It was an irony which was to rule Siborne’s life for the next decade that the public purse was closed to him by the political opponents of the Duke, who were not overly anxious to celebrate his achievements, while the great man’s supporters came separately to the view that work on his Model should be stopped because it did not celebrate him enough.

      Ellice was on safe ground, because he could find no record of the financial agreement Siborne considered he had struck. Siborne was convinced that Sir Henry Hardinge, the previous Secretary at War, had agreed to pay for the whole, completed project, but, curiously for such a meticulous man, Siborne does not seem to have confirmed the deal in writing. The War Office and the Treasury debated the matter between themselves, concluding that Lord Hill had not anticipated the full cost of building the Model, and that Hardinge had only agreed to pay Siborne for the cost of his initial survey. The result was that the government decided to postpone any decision on funding the whole project, leaving Siborne with a deep-felt sense of injustice which would stay with him until his death.

      The great expense of creating the Model was outlined in a memorandum written by Siborne in August 1833. In fourteen months, he said he had spent £217 12s 6d, and ‘the principal expenses, namely the moulding and casting of the figures representing the troops, remain to be incurred.’ Yet, he complained, for four months he had heard nothing from the commander-in-chief’s office, or from the Secretary at War, about his mounting bills. So he had himself taken the decision to continue with the Model ‘upon the supposition that the government would not wish me to abandon the undertaking and thus sacrifice the £400 already laid out upon it.’ Siborne calculated that the cost of creating his toy soldiers would amount to between £600 and £700, and the engraving and painting of them to about £100. There would be, he estimated, other expenses of between £200 and £300 before the Model was completed. In short, he needed to find at least £1000.

      Siborne’s supporter, Sir Hussey Vivian, wrote to the Secretary at War on 10 November 1833 to make a new plea for funding, but also to suggest, if this failed, that there should be a subscription amongst Siborne’s military friends: ‘I speak from having been three times over the Field since the Battle, and to the expression of my own opinion, I can add that of the Marquess of Anglesey, who inspected the Model with me and who in the strongest terms expressed his approbation. As a National Work I consider the Model will be highly valuable.’

      Siborne was not immediately convinced that a public subscription was the right way forward, and feared losing ownership of his project. But the withdrawal of public funding had placed him in an impossible position. Within months, in January 1834, he was so deeply in debt that he acquiesced and formally proposed a subscription. In the draft handbill for the appeal, he revealed the full details of the Model he was trying to build. ‘It may be right to mention,’ he stated, ‘that it will afford an accurate representation of the Battle and its Field, at a particular moment, the Crisis; that the whole of the Troops engaged will be faithfully represented, every corps in its correct position and formation, and that the superficial extent of the Model will occupy a space of about 420 square feet.’

      This final paragraph of the subscription was the key to the saga which was about to unfold. Not the staggering size of the great Model, which was extraordinary in itself, nor the cost at which the government had balked. The problem was Siborne’s intention to display the Crisis of the Battle, the point at which the day was won. For as Siborne recorded the views of the participants in the engagement and allotted due weight to their roles in the day’s proceedings, so he increasingly came into conflict with the Duke of Wellington’s account of the battle.

      Siborne’s revolutionary idea was to allow the participants in the battle to have their say, not in the personal, romantic way in which some of them wrote their own accounts, but by mediating their stories, crosschecking the facts they provided, and weighing up their evidence. In doing so, he flew in the face of the official version of events, and opposed the Duke of Wellington’s desire to control the narrative of the day. Wellington had refused to endorse any of the books which had been written about the battle, even saying they disgusted him. For history, as Wellington put it, was simply what lay in official reports, and he referred authors to his own brief description of the battle, his Waterloo Despatch.

      ‘The people of England may be entitled to a detailed and accurate account of the Battle of Waterloo, and I have no objection to their having it,’ Wellington once declared, disingenuously. ‘But I do object to their being misinformed and misled by those novels called “Relations”, “Impartial Accounts”, etcetera, etcetera, of that transaction, containing the stories which curious travellers have picked up from peasants, private soldiers, individual officers … and have published to the world as truth … there is not one which contains a true representation, or even an idea, of the transaction; and this is because the writers have referred as above quoted, instead of to the official sources and reports.’

      Siborne had failed to predict that he would be in conflict with the official version of events, laid down in the Duke’s own account. In its sweep and compass, and in its devotion to firsthand accounts of the men who actually fought the battle, Siborne’s historical evidence-gathering was far too revolutionary. His project stood to threaten not just the official view of the battle, but the official view of history – that it was a subject which was best left to those in political and military charge of the country: in short, to Wellington himself.

      

      The Duke of Wellington, by virtue of his deeds in the Peninsular War and then his astounding triumph at Waterloo, had found fame and wealth and a status which, even while he was alive, had made him a hero of the century and a bulwark against political instability. Industrialisation and the growth of the big cities had triggered political unrest which the country’s leaders struggled to contain. England felt like a country which, at any point, might lose its balance, and in these circumstances it looked for certainty, and the Duke of Wellington’s glorious victory at Waterloo had provided an anchor. Wellington reflected the country’s standing in the world, both real and imagined. It was an image he was keen to foster once he had fought his last battle, almost as if he was observing detachedly the man he had become: ‘I am the Duke of Wellington,’ he would say, ‘and must do as the Duke of Wellington doth.’ To this extent, he controlled his image as carefully as any modern politician, sitting for many portraits, attending public functions, and keeping a wary eye on the publication of his military despatches. For many years, the Duke held political power too: as prime minister for two years, until 1830, as foreign secretary under Sir Robert Peel (1834–5), and then as a cabinet minister for five years, again under Peel, from 1841. Despite the hostility he attracted because of his opposition to the electoral Reform Bill, he was still, for many, the embodiment of the age, patriotic, modest, honourable, a gentleman hero, and he was understandably anxious to ensure that the image did not prove to be at variance with reality.

      To this end, the Duke had a firm rule when it came to the historical accounts of the battles he had fought: he never read any. Aware that he might be irritated or angered by false comment, he preferred to rise above the storm entirely, to embrace the peace of ignorance and avoid debate or controversy. This, however, was not quite the full story. He was quite prepared to visit the many popular Waterloo entertainments which had become an industry in themselves, and which included vast paintings, theatricals, and even planting trees in public parks in the pattern of troop deployments.

      If