Footnote 6: The Duke of Wellington wrote to Croker, 19th of December 1846:—"I should desire never to move from my principles of indifference and non-interference on the subject of a statue of myself to commemorate my own actions."
And again, on the 14th of June 1847, the Duke wrote to Croker:—"It has always been my practice, and is my invariable habit, to say nothing about myself and my own actions.
"More than forty years ago Mr Pitt observed that I talked as little of myself or my own acts as if I had been an assistant-surgeon of the army....
"I follow the habit of avoiding to talk of myself and of what I have done; with the exception only of occasions when I am urging upon modern contemporaries measures which they don't like, and when I tell them I have some experience, and have had some success in these affairs, and feel they would experience the benefit of attending to my advice, I never talk of myself.
"These are the reasons for which they think that I don't care what they do with the statue.
"But they must be idiots to suppose it possible that a man who is working day and night, without any object in view excepting the public benefit, will not be sensible of a disgrace inflicted upon him by the Sovereign and Government whom he is serving. The ridicule will be felt, if nothing else is!"...
Queen Victoria to Lord Palmerston.
Buckingham Palace, 12th July 1847.
The Queen has been informed by Lord John Russell that the Duke of Wellington is apprehensive that the removal of his statue from the Arch to another pedestal might be construed as a mark of displeasure on her part. Although the Queen had hoped that her esteem and friendship for the Duke was so well known to the public in general as not to render such a construction possible, and although she had thought that another pedestal would have been more suitable for this statue, and that the Arch might have been more becomingly ornamented in honour of the Duke than by the statue now upon it, she has given immediate direction that the Statue should remain in its present situation, and only regrets that this monument should be so unworthy of the great personage to whose honour it has been erected.