“Sceptre and crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.”
Thus wrote dramatist James Shirley in 1658, reiterating a motif in popular discourse that death renders all lives, irrespective of status, wealth or achievement, equal.[1] But how far is death the great equaliser? Historians, whose work often concerns dead people, are well placed to recognise that, through memory, the idea of a person always outlasts their material reality. In their legacies, people are not unified in the way Shirley suggests, rather they are subject to disparate remembrances directly related to their lived existence. Whether a person’s memory fades within generations of their demise is largely thanks to the significance or insignificance of this lived existence.
There are caveats to this rule, of course. (Seemingly) one such exception is a grave: the physical monument dedicated to deceased people as an enduring memorial to their lives. Graves appear something of an equaliser in memorialisation. Today everyone can be afforded their own monument in the socially encompassing space of the cemetery. However, graves serve as more nuanced historical sources than this line of reasoning suggests. Employing methods from history concerning memory and heritage, this essay takes the grave of a nineteenth-century soldier to explore this nuance in the context of the memorialisation of the Napoleonic period in Britain. Thus, the grave becomes a point-of-departure to glean insights into the relationship between physical memorialisation, heritage and history.
John Clement Wallington (1790-1872) is buried in Leamington Spa Cemetery, Warwickshire. His grave is a rectangular low monument carved from granite. It has a convex top and a hipped base, measuring approximately 0.9 × 2.2 m. The inscription reads:
SACRED
TO THE MEMORY OF
GENERAL C. A. G. WALLINGTON
OF HER MAJESTY’S INDIAN ARMY
WHO DIED 28th FEBRUARY 1867 AGED 82 YEARS.
MORS JANUA VITAE
ALSO IN
AFFECTIONATE REMEMBRANCE OF
LIEUT. COLONEL JOHN CLEMENT WALLINGTON
OF THE 10th ROYAL HUSSARS
WHO DIED 25th AUGUST 1872 AGED 72 YEARS.
THE ANGEL OF THE LORD TARRIETH
ROUND ABOUT THEM THAT FEAR HIM
AND DELIVERETH THEM. PSALM XXXIV.V.7.
AND OF
FANNY ROSE WALLINGTON
WIFE OF LIEUT. COLONEL JOHN CLEMENT WALLINGTON
DIED MAY 2nd 1890 AGED 58 YEARS.[2]
Photographed by the author.
Considering the object only in terms of its tangible material properties, one can make several observations, including on the inherent tensions in the source. To start, this is the burial place of three members of the Wallington family: John Clement, his wife Fanny, and Charles Arthur Grenado (whose exact relation to John Clement is unknown, as well as much more detail about his life). Sharing of a grave is common and points to how this site was designed as a familial space for intimate commemoration.[3] These individuals were intended to be remembered together, rather than in the context of their other achievements. Nevertheless, the two men are described by rank and regiment. The military qualification somewhat undermines familial intimacy, as it bridges the memorial space to a much broader realm of nationalistic commemoration. Although not strictly a war grave since its incumbents were not killed in battle, the Wallington grave and others like it are just as part of the commemorative military tradition in Britain. The vitality of this movement in the twentieth century is testified to by the presence and maintenance of the graves and memorials themselves: there are few stones in Leamington Spa Cemetery in as visibly good condition as Wallington’s while being the same age. Moreover, on the 18th of June 2015, J. C. Wallington’s legacy was invoked as part of local events commemorating the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo, at which he had fought.[4] Thus, the Wallington grave can be seen as having both an intimate memorial function, and a further commemorative one. Here, it is helpful to use Pierre Nova’s term lieux de mémoire to think of this grave not just as a chamber for the housing of remains, but as a communally understood symbol vested with historical and memorial meaning.[5] It is both a grave and a monument.
The place of this grave at the junction of the personal and impersonal is just as apparent when regarding it in its spatial context. Leamington Spa Cemetery was opened in 1868, making the Wallington grave one of its inaugural constituents.[6] In what has become a sprawling burial ground containing thousands of remains, the grave is positioned in eyeline of the northernmost gate atop a slight hill, overlooking a main entrance and other, older headstones and memorials. Its literal and figurative elevation is a decision on the part of the cemetery’s planners, reflecting their evaluation of the grave as somehow more appreciable or more worthy of attention. The grave is also conspicuously placed beneath a tree, which obviously protects the object from the elements and ensures its longer-term survivability. However, its arboreal positioning indicates another example of the tension in the dynamics of this burial site. Leamington Spa Cemetery was established as part of a broader shift in Britain concerning treatment of the dead. From the mid-nineteenth century, the onus of housing remains – and thus the prerogative of memorialisation itself – was increasingly allocated to rural or suburban, private ‘cemeteries’ rather than urban, church-attached ‘graveyards’. The secularisation of memorialisation had manifold causes, but what is relevant to Wallington is how this shift reflected a general desire to bury remains in less crowded, more permanent, more aesthetic setting.[7] The presence of a tree conforms to contemporary bucolic ideals and provides a sheltered, personal environment more conducive to familial remembrance than wider commemoration.
Most cities and towns in Britain have one or more war memorials, which can serve as architectural, political, rhetorical, and ceremonial focus points.[8] They are commonly dedicated to World Wars One and Two, with other associations before or after more atypical, but not unusual. The Napoleonic Wars – which collectively constitute the largest conflict Britain has engaged in other than the World Wars – are more seldom represented in British commemorative culture, attesting to its more ambivalent memory in general.[9] Nevertheless, material traces of what David Bell called ‘the first total war’ do exist, not least in cemeteries. Janet and David Bromley’s lifetime project has been documenting the burial sites of over 3,000 British soldiers who fought in the Peninsular War or Waterloo, culminating in the publication of a two-volume reference work.[10] Wellington‘s Men Remembered is a magisterial resource for memorial historians, not least because it sheds new light on old problems of remembrance and commemoration. The first, and perhaps plainer, problem is the low number of graves. While 3,520 entries makes a formidable list, it pales in comparison to the 250,000 personnel estimated to have served in the British Army alone at its peak in 1813.[11] Appropriating Nora’s vocabulary, we have already seen how graves can additionally function as sites of communal memory. Given the general scarcity of pre-twentieth century military commemoration they become some of the most important memorial landmarks in places like Leamington Spa, where there are only two known Napoleonic graves. There and elsewhere, the reservoirs of memorialisation are few and far between.
The second problem raised by Wellington’s Men Remembered is the question of representation. Insofar as graves are lieux de mémoire they contain a certain representation of the past, with implications for memorialisation today. The commemoration of war in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has largely been democratised, as illustrated by alphabetical (rather than seniority-based) ordering on war memorials and increased presence of ordinary people in memorial representations (including the motif of ‘The Unknown Warrior’), to give just two examples.[12] Such a democratisation has not occurred in the memory of prior conflicts including the Napoleonic Wars, whose modern conception mostly consists of Carlylean representations of battles, campaigns and ‘great’ men. This mechanical, devivified memory in Britain is reflected in and entrenched by corresponding lieux de mémoire: think of the hyper-masculine, imposingly phallic columns of Nelson, Collingwood or Hill; or the glorifying sculptures inside Saint Paul’s Cathedral; or the militaristic connotations of HMS Victory; or the triumphal, apotheosising vision of Wellington’s Arch. Even Wallington’s grave can be seen in the same vein. Though graves are something of an equaliser, Wellington’s Men Remembered illuminates their asymmetries in that, strikingly, six out of seven entries are for men who were officers. That Wallington was given such a prominent grave – and one that has been preserved and ceremonially commemorated since – is likely because of his accumulated status.
Lieux de mémoire are the conduits through which communities engage with the past, including with war. There has been some success in democratising our memories of more recent wars, however our memory of the Napoleonic Wars remains largely monochromatic and elitist. These perceptions are difficult to change due to their encapsulation in memorial objects. Graves, including Wallington’s, are part of this process, which risks perpetuating the memorialisation of elites while suppressing that of those below. Historians treating the memorial culture of the Napoleonic Wars should hence always have the question who is represented? at the forefront of their minds.
Josh Redden, April 2024
Bibliography
Beckett, Ian, ‘Military Commemoration in Britain: A Pre-History’, Journal for the Society of Army Historical Research, 92 (2014), pp. 147-59.
Bell, David A., The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (New York: Mariner, 2008).
Buttery, David, Napoleonic Britain: A Guide to Fortresses, Statues and Memorials of the French Wars 1792-1815 (London: Pen & Sword, 2023).
Bromley, Janet & David, Wellington’s Men Remembered, 2 vols (Barnsley: Praetorian, 2012).
Eason, David, ‘A son of Ealing is honoured in the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo’, Ealing Times, 1st May 2015.
Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975).
Gates, David, ‘The Transformation of the Army 1783-1815′ in The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army, ed. David Chandler, Ian Beckett (London: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 133-59.
Inglis, Ken, ‘War Memorials: Ten Questions for Historians’, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, 167 (1992), pp. 5-21.
Nora, Pierre, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), pp. 7-24.
Rugg, Julie, ‘Constructing the Grave: Competing Burial Ideals in Nineteenth-Century England’, Social History, 28 (2013), pp. 328-45.
———, ‘A New Burial Form and its Meanings: Cemetery Establishment in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’ in Grave Concerns: Death and Burial in England 1700 to 1850, ed. Margaret Cox (London: Council for British Archaeology, 1998), pp. 44-53.
[1] James Shirley, The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses for the Armour of Achilles (London: T.W., 1659), p. 129.
[2] Janet & David Bromley, Wellington’s Men Remembered, vol. 2 (Barnsley: Praetorian, 2012), p. 392.
[3] Julie Rugg, ‘Constructing the Grave: Competing Burial Ideals in Nineteenth-Century England’, Social History, 28 (2013), pp. 328-45.
[4] David Eason, ‘A son of Ealing is honoured in the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo’, Ealing Times, 1st May 2015.
[5] Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), pp. 18-9.
[6] ‘Cemeteries’, Warwick District Council, < https://www.warwickdc.gov.uk/info/20639/deaths/429/cemeteries> [accessed 22nd January 2024].
[7] Rugg, ‘Constructing the Grave’, pp. 336-7.
[8] Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 78-9.
[9] Ian Beckett, ‘Military Commemoration in Britain: A Pre-History’, Journal for the Society of Army Historical Research, 92 (2014), p. 159.
[10] Janet & David Bromley, Wellington’s Men Remembered, vol. 1 (Barnsley: Praetorian, 2012), p. ix.
[11] David Gates, ’The Transformation of the Army 1783-1815′ in The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army, ed. David Chandler, Ian Beckett (London: Oxford, 1994), p. 133.
[12] Ken Inglis, ’War Memorials: Ten Questions for Historians’, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, 167 (1992), pp. 7-8.