Martial masculinities

Experiencing and imagining the military in the long nineteenth century

Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry, Joanne Begiato, Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry, Joanne Begiato

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781526160447
  9781526135629
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526135643
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This collection explores the role of martial masculinities in shaping nineteenth-century British culture and society in a period framed by two of the greatest wars the world had ever known. It offers a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on an emerging field of study and draws on historical, literary, visual and musical sources to demonstrate the centrality of the military and its masculine dimensions in the shaping of Victorian and Edwardian personal and national identities. Focusing on both the experience of military service and its imaginative forms, it examines such topics as bodies and habits, families and domesticity, heroism and chivalry, religion and militarism, and youth and fantasy. This collection will be required reading for anyone interested in the cultures of war and masculinity in the long nineteenth century.

Part I

Experiencing martial masculinities

1

Burying Lord Uxbridge’s leg: the body of the hero in the early nineteenth century

Julia Banister

A year after the Battle of Waterloo (1815), the battle that brought to a close the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, a marble column paid for by public subscription was erected on the Welsh island of Anglesey to celebrate the commander of the allied cavalry, Henry William Paget, Earl of Uxbridge and Marquess of Anglesey.¹ William Thomas Fitzgerald, a clerk in the navy pay office and minor poet of patriotic verse, had predicted that the soldiers whose deaths had secured Britain’s ‘high renown! And EUROPE her repose!’ would be commemorated by the grateful nation with everlasting monuments: on ‘lofty COLUMNS of eternal Fame / Shall BRITISH GRATITUDE record each name’.² Given that the two most conspicuous British heroes of the wars, Admiral Lord Nelson and Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, only one of whom died in action, were honoured in this way, the fact that Paget was also celebrated in this manner attests to his standing as a hero figure in the early nineteenth century. That said, a comparison between the figures atop Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square, completed in 1843, and Paget’s column, completed in 1860, reveals a difference in the representation of the body of the hero. Whereas Nelson’s column is topped by a statue of the naval hero wearing the empty left sleeve of his jacket pinned across his chest, the figure atop Paget’s column gives no indication that, as a result of an injury sustained during the battle, his right leg had been amputated above the knee.³

Teresa Michals has argued that eighteenth-century artists struggled to combine heroism and amputation, and often resorted to eliding physical disability – what she terms ‘invisible amputation’ – so as to create an ‘ideal form’ of ‘heroic masculinity’.⁴ However, the fact that Paget had lost his leg at Waterloo was widely known in the nineteenth century, not least because the leg had been buried in a marked grave near the battlefield and the site of the burial visited by innumerable tourists.⁵ Such attention to (part of) a military body was unusual. True, Nelson’s corpse had been immersed in a barrel of brandy in the aftermath of the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), but only so that it might be transported to England; the hero was honoured with a grand state funeral two months after his death.⁶ It might be thought that the burial of Paget’s leg served likewise to mark a noble corporeal sacrifice, albeit on a smaller scale. In fact, it proved to be controversial for reasons that, I argue, reveal the complexity of the hero’s body as an ‘ideal form’. The military services of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries required intense physical activity – whether marching or engaging with the enemy, hauling sails or loading cannon – and this, coupled with the requirement that those involved pledge their lives and limbs to the service, made the military life appear to be one that required essentially, in the sense of physically, ‘masculine’ attributes and capacities. In other words, military heroes could serve as models of and for masculinity because they seemed to have excelled at being, in a bodily sense, ‘men’. Of course, this works only if the cultural construction of the physical relationship between gender ideals and the matter of the body is artfully obscured. As this chapter will show, responses to the burial of Paget’s leg suggest that, rather than solemnising his heroism, the burial of the body part exposed the artificiality of the connection between ‘masculinity’ and the matter of the ‘male’ body. Much as the burial of the amputated leg courted those inclined to hero-worship, elevating a limb in such a way also reduced it to the level of common corporeal matter and thereby undermined the military hero as a model of and for essential masculinity.

Henry Paget had embarked on a military career soon after the outbreak of war with Revolutionary France.⁷ His first position was commander of the 80th Regiment of Foot, a volunteer regiment with whom he saw active service in France. He moved through the ranks of army command with paper promotions, and by 1801 had become full colonel of the 7th Light Dragoons. In 1808, Paget joined General Sir John Moore as commander of the cavalry for the Peninsular War. Paget was instrumental in Moore’s attempts to harry French forces in the northwest of Spain, and he cemented his reputation for bravery by covering Moore’s retreat, at one point staving off thirteen regiments of French cavalry with only five of British.⁸ This period of military success was soon to be overshadowed by incidents in his private life, however. Paget had married Lady Caroline Villiers in 1795, but shortly before leaving to join Moore he became involved romantically with Lady Charlotte Wellesley (née Cardogan), the Duke of Wellington’s sister-in-law. The affair became a scandal when, on Paget’s return from Spain, Charlotte eloped to be with him. As a result, Charlotte’s brother challenged Paget to a duel, and her husband sued him for criminal conversation. Paget’s lawyer, Mr Dallas, attempted to defend his client by stressing that Paget had sought to extricate himself from the affair by throwing himself into military action with Moore: ‘careless of his safety, prodigal of his life, he seemed to search for danger wheresoever it was to be found; and to hunt after death in whatever shape it might appear’. Following Dallas’s argument, Paget’s good fortune not to be killed in battle became his misfortune at home. ‘Fallen from a situation the most exalted, and the most enviable’, Dallas argued, ‘he has forfeited private esteem and public regard; and the hero who so lately glittered the brightest in the dazzling ranks of glory, and was the light and star of every professional scene in which he moved, is now reduced to have no other wish than that of complete solitude and seclusion’.⁹

Paget won the respite from heroism that he, apparently, so desired. After a brief reconciliation, he and Caroline divorced, and although he married Charlotte, the whole affair seems to have contributed to the stalling of his career. Paget participated in the Walcheren expedition in 1809, but did not see further active service in Wellington’s wars until the summer of 1815. Wellington had not wanted Paget to join the Waterloo campaign, but the Prince Regent and Duke of York insisted. In the end, Wellington and Paget came to a working accord, and Paget acquitted himself so well that he secured his place in the pantheon of the nation’s heroes. Paget’s numerous contributions to the battle of Waterloo included marshalling and leading the cavalry into action to prevent Lieutenant-General Thomas Picton’s infantry from being engulfed by three times the number of French soldiers at what was a crucial position for the allies, La Haye Sainte. Five days after the battle, The Times reported that Paget had been ‘throughout the day foremost in danger and glory’.¹⁰ According to a ‘Memoir of the Most Noble Henry William Paget’ printed in the European Magazine, and London Review (1821), ‘next to the illustrious Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Wellington, the success of the battle of Waterloo was, perhaps, more indebted to the “first Cavalry Officer in the world”, as the gallant Marquess is justly entitled, than to any other of that band of heroes, who immortalized themselves on that eventful day’.¹¹ The Gentleman’s Magazine (1854) repeated this sentiment in its obituary for Paget: ‘next to the great leader of the host, the victory of Waterloo was more indebted to the Earl of Uxbridge than any other of the numerous warriors of that memorable day’. His ‘gallantry’ and ‘dash’ had inspired the men; his actions were ‘prodigies of valour’.¹² Some fifteen years after the battle, the Scottish journalist and man of letters William Jerdan defended Paget’s lieutenancy of Ireland on the basis that he had been ‘one of the brightest military heroes of our age’.¹³ In his life as a politician – a life that saw him come under attack for his sympathy for, among other things, Catholic emancipation – Paget acted, so the Gentleman’s Magazine obituary asserts, ‘with a moral courage not inferior to his brilliant physical bravery in the field’.¹⁴

Linda Colley has argued that the final battle of the Napoleonic Wars popularised ‘a cult of military heroism and of a particular brand of “manliness”’.¹⁵ According to Colley, this served the interests of the aristocracy by lending new glamour to old power, but I want to suggest that this was also a ‘cult’ that idealised the physicality of the male body. The dandy soldiers of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, dressed in form-fitting breeches and high-waisted jackets, sought to create a masculine identity based on bodily brilliance, ‘however inadequate [they and their bodies] might in fact be’, as Colley puts it.¹⁶ Though encouraged by the Prince Regent’s love of military uniform, the dandy soldiers were ridiculed by the satirists of the age in images which imply that the cut of a well-made coat created an illusion of, rather than made manifest, an impressive physique.¹⁷ In comparison to the dandily dressed military body, the injured or wounded body could be more easily represented as authentic and so admirable, as Philip Shaw has shown. In Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination and, more fully, in Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art, Shaw argues that literary and visual texts which acknowledged the human cost of war did not necessarily undermine attempts to celebrate victory, as bodily sacrifice could be co-opted so as to neutralise the ‘felt contradiction between the waste and the wonder’, that is the ‘waste’ of soldiers and the ‘wonder’ of the ideals to which they or their bodies had been sacrificed.¹⁸ Just as Michals argues that Nelson could be represented as an amputee because his missing arm could be pinned in ways that echoed existing conventions for elite portraiture, so Shaw highlights a painting of Paget – Constantin Fidele Coene’s Imaginary Meeting of Sir Arthur Welle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Experiencing martial masculinities
• Part II Imagining martial masculinities
• Epilogue: Gendered virtue, gendered vigour and gendered valour
• Index