On Stage at the Theatre of State: The Monuments and Memorials in Parliament Square, London STUART JAMES BURCH A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of The Nottingham Trent University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2003 Abstract This thesis concerns Parliament Square in the City of Westminster, London. It is situated to the west of the Houses of Parliament (or New Palace at Westminster) and to the north of St. Margaret’s Church and Westminster Abbey. This urban space was first cleared at the start of the nineteenth-century and became a “square” in the 1860s according to designs by Edward Middleton Barry (1830-80). It was replanned by George Grey Wornum (1888-1957) in association with the Festival of Britain (1951). In 1998 Norman Foster and Partners drew up an (as yet) unrealised scheme to pedestrianise the south side closest to the Abbey. From the outset it was intended to erect statues of statesmen (sic) in this locale. The text examines processes of commissioning, execution, inauguration and reaction to memorials in this vicinity. These include: George Canning (Richard Westmacott, 1832), Richard I (Carlo Marochetti, 1851-66), Sir Robert Peel (Marochetti, 1853-67; Matthew Noble, 1876), Thomas Fowell Buxton (Samuel Sanders Teulon, 1865), fourteenth Earl of Derby (Matthew Noble, 1874), third Viscount Palmerston (Thomas Woolner, 1876), Benjamin Disraeli (Mario Raggi, 1883), Oliver Cromwell (William Hamo Thornycroft, 1899), Abraham Lincoln (Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1887/1920), Emmeline Pankhurst (Arthur George Walker, 1930), Jan Christian Smuts (Jacob Epstein, 1956) and Winston Churchill (Ivor Roberts-Jones, 1973) as well as possible future commemorations to David Lloyd George and Margaret Thatcher. Parliament Square has consistently been characterised as a “sacred”, memory-laden site. It is analogous to a public park. In the thesis it is envisioned as a ‘stage at the theatre of state’ and dramatic moments of authorized celebration and unsanctioned behaviour are narrated throughout the text. Occasions of official rite and ritual are accordingly paralleled by irreverent irruptions, concluding with the ‘Reclaim the Streets’ protests of 1 May 2000. Key words : ceremony, commemoration, identity, memorial, memory, monument, nation, pantheon, park, profane, protest, public, sacred, sculpture, space, statue. 2 i Contents o PART TITLE PAGE N Abstract 2 i Contents 3 ii Acknowledgements 5 iii Preface: addressing the nadir of English sculpture 6 1 Parliament Square’s principal themes: sculpture, space, identity and memory 18 1~1 Introduction 18 1~2 Monuments and the commissioning process 22 1~3 Commemoration and sacred sites 26 1~4 Preserving memories and shaping identities 31 1~5 Monumental bodies: meaning and value 37 1~6 Space and the texture of memory 49 1~7 Gender distinctions 52 1~8 Sculpture and national identity 57 1~9 The Parliament Square pantheon: a stage at the theatre of state 62 2 Riot, reform and royalty: Canning to Coeur de Lion 70 2~1 Commemorating Canning 71 2~2 Identity: civic, national and political 77 2~3 Civil commotion 81 2~4 Tributes of respect to the late Sir Robert Peel 90 2~5 The London Peel Testimonial Committee and the search for a suitable site 99 2~6 Canning and Peel: friendship or feud? 103 2~7 Iconoclasm and national monuments 107 2~8 Baron Carlo Marochetti and the warrior on horseback 113 3 ‘A place of honour for statues of public men’: E.M. Barry, Parliament Square and the New Palace at Westminster 117 3~1 A sculptural architect 118 3~2 A disappointed architect 124 3~3 A parliamentary architect 127 3~4 Shaping the commemorative forum (I): Parliament Square 1861-63 131 3~5 The Buxton memorial fountain: temperance and abolition 138 3~6 New Palace Yard: excluding a mob and maintaining the view 144 3~7 The fiasco in New Palace Yard 149 3~8 Shaping the commemorative forum (II): Parliament Square 1865-69 153 3~9 Relocating the idol of 1827 160 3~10 A place of honour established: reflections and recapitulations 165 3 4 Enclosures and squares: meccas of the educated or haunts of the verminous? 167 4~1 Breathing space: parks and gardens 168 4~2 A harmonious whole: ‘the two gardens in Parliament Square’ 176 4~3 Ceremonial rites and ritual remembrance 183 4~4 An exemplary memorial of the fourteenth Earl of Derby 185 4~5 The Earl of Beaconsfield and the Primrose League 187 4~6 Imperial marker: an Egyptian obelisk in London 190 4~7 The ‘local or imperial improvement’ of St. Margaret’s Churchyard 198 4~8 Inspecting nuisances: monuments and uncivilised behaviour 207 4~9 The profanation of sacred sites 215 4~10 ‘A resting place for foreigners & strangers’ 218 5 A regicide in a royalist pantheon: Oliver Cromwell and the New Palace at Westminster 228 5~1 Cromwell and the vicissitudes of history 228 5~2 Should Cromwell have a statue? 236 5~3 A pantheon in plaster at the Crystal Palace 242 5~4 Cromwell and the House of Stuart 244 5~5 The Manchester Cromwell: a national reproach removed 250 5~6 Memories of Drogheda: Cromwell and the Liberal Government 254 5~7 The private munificence of an anonymous donor 264 5~8 A nation and its heroes: Lord Rosebery and the ideal of Oliver Cromwell 272 5~9 Cromwell and the continuing vicissitudes of history 284 6 Redesigning the hub of Empire: Parliament Square in the twentieth-century 290 6~1 Coeur de Lion as wartime symbol 291 6~2 Safeguarding sacred spaces (I): Westminster House 293 6~3 Safeguarding sacred spaces (II): Colonial Office 295 6~4 ‘The heart of the Commonwealth’: reconstructing the House of Commons 302 6~5 Parliament Square and the Festival of Britain 304 6~6 George Grey Wornum and Parliament Square 306 6~7 The ‘hub of Empire’ debated in Parliament 309 6~8 London traffic 325 6~9 In one word: Churchill 331 7 Parliament Square in the twenty-first century 337 7~1 Protesting in a realm of memory 337 7~2 Future commemorations 344 8 Conclusion 353 9 Bibliography 361 9~1 Archival sources (& abbreviations where used) 361 9~2 Serial publications (& abbreviations where used) 363 9~3 Published sources 364 4 ii Acknowledgements Considerable thanks go to Professor Richard Johnson who, together with Professor Eleonore Kofman, provided supervision for this thesis after initial input from Melanie Hall. Similar acknowledgement must also go to my colleagues at Nottingham Trent University, particularly those in Heritage Studies; the Audio Visual department at Clifton, especially Val Cliff; Robin Conway, IT support; Karen Roberts and Veronica Lawrence of Clifton Library as well as Terry Hanstock of Boots Library. Funding for this thesis came from The Nottingham Trent University. Subsequent grants facilitated, albeit indirectly, the writing: these include the Centre for International Mobility in Finland (CIMO) and the Swedish Institute. The intellectual environment of the universities at Helsinki and Stockholm were particularly stimulating. Special thanks go to my friends, most importantly Cecilia Notini, David Smith, Ilkka Tikkanen, Edem Kuenyehia, Hilary Carlisle, Terry and Hilary Fry. Final mention must go to my immediate family which has played such a large part in my life since this thesis began in September 1997 and I wish to express my gratitude to them all through some rather testing times. As a testimony to this I therefore dedicate this work with love and respect to Barbara Ann Burch, née Prince. 5 iii Preface Addressing the nadir of English sculpture The present time will probably be looked on in future years as the nadir of English sculpture. 1 Francis Turner Palgrave’s (1824-97) gloomy prediction for mid-Victorian sculpture was by no means unique either during the period in which it was written or at any time since. Indeed, contemporary Victorian critics and subsequent commentators alike have expressed their opprobrium for sculpture produced in Britain from, broadly speaking, the 1840s until the 1880s. It was then that the statue as a mode of commemoration became codified and commonplace. Its formal limitations mean that this genre remains susceptible to denigration and disregard in equal measure. Thus echoes of Stanley Casson’s castigation of nineteenth-century sculpture can still be heard with regard to analogous work produced today.2 For Casson (1889-1944), writing in Some Modern Sculptors of 1928, was convinced that: The Industrial Age rendered sculpture superfluous and undesirable, and monuments of the mid-Victorian age like the Albert Memorial served but to dot the i’s and cross the t’s of its death sentence, by emphasizing the divorce of sculpture from architecture… Statues were segregated in bunches, as in the Albert Memorial, or marooned in lonely squares like lepers. 3 The thesis that is to follow valiantly strives for a stay of execution. The ‘lonely square’ in question is Parliament Square in the City of Westminster, London and the marooned lepers are the statues of statesmen erected in that locale beginning with George Canning in 1832 and concluding with Winston Churchill in 1973. The exact 1 Francis Turner Palgrave, Essays on Art , Macmillan, London & Cambridge, 1866, p. 109. ‘Nadir’ is a noun meaning ‘the lowest or deepest point; the nadir of despair ’. Marian Makins (ed.), Collins English Dictionary , HarperCollins Publishers, Glasgow, third edition, 1991, p. 1034. 2 A marble statue of Baroness Margaret Thatcher completed in February 2002 (see 7~2) was condemned by Brian Sewell, art critic of the London Evening Standard as an ‘utterly contemptible’ example of ‘twentieth-century art at its worst’. His equivalent at The Times sighed that it was ‘necessarily bland’. Cited in David Charter, ‘Iron Lady meets match in statue’s steely gaze’, The Times , 2 February 2002, p.