A monument depicting a hero of the Battle of Waterloo surrounded by angels and a lion is one of hundreds in St Paul’s Cathedral that are under review in a project to identify potentially offensive statues.
The monument to Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Picton, the only Welshman buried in the cathedral in London, is likely to be identified as one of the most contentious in its pantheon of 19th-century art.
His sacrifice at Waterloo in 1815, where he was the most senior British officer to die, is overshadowed by his reputation as a brutal governor of Trinidad who made a fortune in the slave trade and was convicted of ordering the torture of a 14-year-old girl.
Scholars of church monuments are concerned that the investigation, conducted by the University of York with the blessing of the Dean of St Paul’s, the Very Rev David Ison, will lead to calls for the cathedral’s collection of more than 500 monuments to be broken up. The three-year project has received £800,000 of public money from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The dean has declined to rule out whether any of its statues could be removed, stating only that it is unlikely.
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The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, said in June that church statues must be put in context. “Some will have to come down, some names will have to change. The Church, goodness me, you just go round Canterbury Cathedral and there are monuments everywhere, or Westminster Abbey. We are looking at all that and some will have to come down.”
The outline for the project, entitled Pantheons: Sculpture at St Paul’s Cathedral, states that it is inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and draws a direct comparison between the cathedral’s monuments and statues of Confederate generals in the United States, which campaigners wish to be removed.
Dr Jean Wilson, a leading scholar of funerary monuments, said that she wanted a guarantee that the pantheon would remain in place. “The pantheon is an ensemble of people thought worthy to be commemorated. If you break up the pantheon you are in effect destroying an ensemble which is itself a work of art,” she said. Professor James Stevens Curl, author of the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture, said he was concerned that the investigation would lead to “widespread destruction” and that it was wrong to judge 19th-century figures by 21st-century standards.
St Paul’s said: “The phrase about monuments being unlikely to be removed in the long term was written in 2019, long before the Archbishop of Canterbury’s comment about monuments coming down was made, and was intended to indicate the long-term commitment of St Paul’s to housing these monuments which has not changed. The Pantheons Project is a three-year research project which should help visitors and the cathedral understand and interpret the memorials for the 21st century.”
Set in stone
Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Picton
(1758-1815)
The most senior British officer killed at Waterloo was also a brutal governor of Trinidad, where he ordered the torture of Louisa Calderon, a 14-year-old girl accused of theft.
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Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson
(1758-1805)
A monument, begun in 1808 and finished in 1818, shows the hero of Trafalgar resting his hand on an anchor. He lies in the crypt below in a sarcophagus originally intended for Cardinal Wolsey. A supporter of colonial slave owners, Nelson wrote in the year of his death that he would “launch my voice against the damnable and cursed doctrine of [the abolitionist William] Wilberforce and his hypocritical allies”.
Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore
(1761-1809)
The officer died at the Battle of Corunna in the Peninsular War and is celebrated as Moore of Corunna. In 1796 he had led efforts to put down slave uprisings in St Lucia. His monument shows him being laid to rest by angels.
Sir George Grey
(1812-1898)
Grey, who has a marble memorial in the crypt, was governor of New Zealand during the initial stages of the country’s wars in the mid-1800s, when many Maori were killed and their land confiscated. In June this year protesters daubed the word “racist” on a statue of him in Auckland.
