Museums & Attractions

In life, Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington, dispatched Napoleon to St Helena after the battle of Waterloo. Symbolically, though, he was later to enshrine the French emperor at the very centre of his life. Visit the Duke’s old residence – now his museum – at Apsley House on Hyde Park Corner and almost the first thing you’ll see is a looming, naked Napoleon, nearly three-and-a-half metres high, turning blank-eyed to meet your gaze as you climb the central staircase. The statue, by Canova, was made for Napoleon himself in his heyday, but its diminutive subject rejected it on sight as ‘too athletic’ – embarrassed, perhaps, by the statue’s washboard abs and Greco-Roman buttocks. It was displayed, for a while, in the Louvre, and then bought by the irony-loving British government as a gift to Napoleon’s nemesis in 1816.
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Quite what Wellington made of it is not recorded. It’s tempting to imagine him rolling his eyes a bit when the thing turned up on his doorstep; it’s not the sort of gift you can stick out of the way in the cupboard under the stairs (though under the stairs is pretty much where it ended up). Or perhaps he received it gleefully, looking forward to tweaking the old megalomaniac’s nose as he went by every day, sniggering at his unimpressive figleaf and dressing him in frilly bloomers for special occasions.

Wellington was showered with gifts after the Napoleonic Wars, and most of them are still kept at Apsley House in a downstairs room designated by the Duke as ‘the Museum’ and open to the public even then. Much of it involves huge lumps of gold and silver-gilt, like the impressive but frankly unlovely Wellington Shield. The Museum Room is also where he stashed an enormous Egyptian dinner service, which had originally been presented by Napoleon to Josephine on the occasion of their divorce. She refused it, if not on grounds of dignity then surely on grounds of taste – crawling with scarabs and hieroglyphs and topped off by a vast and elaborate centrepiece, suggesting a series of Egyptian temples, it is kitsch on an appalling scale.

Apart from such dubious cast-offs from the Bonaparte clan, several further Napoleons and a set of portraits of his relatives also shared Wellington’s home (much of his art collection had once belonged to Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother). The Duke was a fan of fine pictures, and won friends across Europe by repatriating several Old Masters looted by the French on their continental rampage. And while he may have been lumbered with a few eyesores, he was determined to do his art justice by providing a grand setting for it. His upgrade of Apsley House – also known as No 1, London – involved building a huge extension in order to create the Waterloo Gallery, an impressive sight to this day, dripping with gilt mouldings and crammed with paintings both vast and intimate. He got a ticking off from his friend, Mrs Arbuthnot, for putting yellow damask on the walls; ‘just the very worst colour he can have for pictures,’ she fumed in her journal, ‘and will kill the effect of the gilding. However, he will have it.’

But if Wellington seemed intent on stamping his personality on the house, it was clearly a ‘new me’ sort of project. During the war, he had gained a reputation as a down-to-earth commander and had driven his chefs to distraction by subsisting on bread and cold meat. The expensive remodelling of Apsley House, originally a much smaller brick edifice built by Robert Adam, coincided with Wellington’s move into politics and civilian polite society. Yellow damask was the fashion, and yellow damask he would have – but these were stage dressings to bolster his public persona, and in fact he lived in modest apartments at the top of the house – where his descendants still occasionally stay, incidentally.

In fact, although he was prime minister twice, Wellington’s political career was ultimately unsuccessful. Out of step after so many years abroad, he couldn’t embrace the new reformist agenda, and became such a regular target of window-smashers that in 1828 he had metal shutters fixed to his house – hence his nickname the ‘Iron Duke’, according to one theory.

Unlike Nelson, who had the good manners to die heroically and was rewarded with a grand square and a column, Wellington lived on, a bit like Churchill, to become an embarrassing reminder of the past. And what did he get? A train station and an arch which doesn’t even hold his statue any more, the giant sculpture of the Duke on his trusty steed, Copenhagen, having been moved to Aldershot in 1882.

You can get a joint ticket for Apsley House and Wellington Arch, crossing the thunderous river of traffic which now swarms round them both (and which forced the arch, humiliatingly, to shift sideways in a road-widening scheme). You can climb up into its gallery and enjoy its famous view of Hyde Park, and ask yourself if there isn’t something a bit melancholy about Wellington’s memorials. But if his achievements as a strategic genius are not remembered with the same kind of pride and pomp other heroes have been granted, bear in mind that one thing Wellington never did was glorify war. He was famously moved to tears by the sight of his dead troops at Badajoz, and after the Battle of Waterloo, in which an estimated 60,000 men died, he wrote to a friend: ‘Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained.’ Perhaps these humble remnants of his life are appropriate to his memory after all.

Apsley House and Wellington Arch are open Wed-Sun 10am-5pm (from April-Oct, until 4pm otherwise). Hyde Park Corner tube. Joint ticket costs £6.90, children, £5.20. See english-heritage.org.uk.