by Tim Clayton
British Whigs again made overtures for peace, but King George III remained as implacably hostile to the new upstart Emperor as he had been to the old Republic. Napoleon sought to break Britain commercially by imposing a continental embargo on trade, but this proved widely unpopular and impossible to enforce. It caused Napoleon to become embroiled in a long war in the Iberian Peninsula that tied down French troops and resources and enabled Britain to develop an efficient, veteran army led by the Duke of Wellington. The embargo irritated Russia and in 1812 Napoleon attacked the Tsar Alexander at a time when Wellington was ready to take the offensive in the Peninsula. The Russian campaign cost Napoleon and his allies half a million men, while his brother’s rule in Spain collapsed after Wellington’s victory at Vitoria. First Prussia, then Austria and the German states deserted the French alliance and after the great defeat at Leipzig in October 1813 Napoleon lost all territory east of the Rhine. He could still win battles but he was losing the war. In 1814 the allies invaded France. When they reached Paris, Napoleon’s marshals deserted him and he finally abdicated. The victorious monarchist powers reinstalled the Bourbon family on the throne of France, in the immensely obese shape of Louis XVIII.
Louis’ royalist supporters handled affairs spectacularly badly. The returned émigrés seized every opportunity to remind the French of why they had had a revolution in the first place. Their handling of the army – in particular their failure to pay people – alienated the senior officers who had made their return possible and reinforced the nostalgia for Napoleon that was widespread among junior officers and lower ranks. Soldiers began to count, ‘15, 16, 17, gros cochon [fat pig], 19, 20 …’ Two hundred thousand newly repatriated prisoners of war were convinced that Napoleon could not have been beaten had they been present, and detested the restored Bourbons and the betrayal of the republican principle for which they had suffered cruel incarceration. Meanwhile, the allies were practically at war with each other.4
So Napoleon returned. He considered and quickly rejected an instantaneous strike on Belgium. Several veteran officers stressed the low risk and high reward of such a move, but Bonaparte was well aware that he lacked political support for the aggressive schemes of his soldiers. Tempting though it would be to chase out Louis XVIII and the king of the Netherlands and bring Belgium back to the fold, the French people would not forgive him for plunging them straight into a war of conquest. If there was to be a war, it was imperative he didn’t start it. However, Napoleon hoped that if he accepted the borders of France as they stood, his resumption of his throne might be accepted by the other rulers of Europe. He had at least to put this notion to the test, so he wrote to all the princes assuring them of his peaceful intentions. Should the allies obstinately reject these peaceful overtures, then he would prepare the country for defence, or at least that is what he said. Those who were ill-disposed towards Napoleon argued that he was merely anxious to convince people that he desired peace when the reality was that with him in charge war was inevitable, and he knew it.5
Bonaparte’s own propaganda sought to reconcile nostalgia for military might with peace and a renewed commitment to revolutionary liberties. In Le départ précipité et le retour imprévu, a print published in April celebrating his return, the sun shines on an eagle bearing an olive branch. Napoleon rides another eagle with a tricolour in its beak bearing the legend ‘Gloire, Liberté & Paix’. ‘Veni, vidi, vici,’ announces Napoleon, striking a fleeing Louis XVIII with his lightning. A more expensive print was titled Rentrée de Napoleon le Grand dans la Capitale de l’Empire Français, le 20 Mars 1815. It showed Napoleon in classical costume as a Roman emperor, surrounded by emblems of agriculture, trade and justice, with tributes to his achievements and a flag declaring ‘Honneur aux Braves’ – the brave soldiers of his army. The writing described how France having experienced some unexpected reverses had been suffering for several months under a foreign yoke. Her hero and liberator had retired to Elba but left on 28 February at the head of a handful of his ‘Braves’. He crossed France unopposed in twenty-two days, welcomed everywhere.
Bonaparte had marched to Paris on a wave of popular support from the peasants of eastern France in which the most startling ingredient was renewed revolutionary fervour, with the recrudescence of liberty trees and similar symbols. To a senior administrator he confided, ‘Nothing has surprised me more on returning to France, than this hatred of priests and the nobility which I find as universal and as violent as it was at the beginning of the Revolution. The Bourbons have restored their lost force to the ideas of the Revolution.’6
In reality he had sought to stir up this revolutionary fervour from his first landing: his proclamation of 1 March had labelled the feudal nobility, émigrés and clergy ‘enemies of the people’. Once more he presented himself as the Saviour of the Revolution that he had been back in 1800. For this reason decrees of 21 March abolished the nobility and feudal titles, expelled the émigrés and sequestered their property and removed nearly all the detested excise duties on alcoholic drinks. A pamphleteer announced ‘A general appeal to all the peoples of Europe to join with the French to shake off the yoke of their oppressors, to give themselves a chief of their choice and laws which establish liberty, equality and the rights of all citizens’. The cause was clearly defined: once again, the French were striving to preserve their Revolution, struggling against despots and seeking to make common cause with the oppressed in places such as Belgium.7
Popular support for Napoleon was not universal, however, and some cities in the south, west and north, notably Marseilles and Bordeaux, came out in favour of the king. Emmanuel de Grouchy, a cavalry general who, rusticated by Louis XVIII, had rallied to Napoleon, defeated the royalists in Provence, but the Vendée soon rose in revolt. In northern France the Bonapartist Lieutenant Martin found ‘townspeople and country folk appeared less happy than us [soldiers]; not, I believe, through some ideal love for the Bourbons, about whom they knew little, but through fear of war.’8
The appeal to Revolutionary fervour was double-edged and royalists used it to alarm the bourgeoisie, whose support Napoleon coveted. They were far more sceptical about his prospects, happy to see the back of the Bourbons who had shown too much favour to the émigrés, but worried that Bonaparte’s reappearance was certain to entail the renewal of war against the whole of Europe. Was gloire compatible with paix? Even loyal officials struggled to believe in a future for the regime: ‘It was impossible for us to reawaken the illusions of the dream which had just ended. Nothing could make us believe in a change of fortune, unheard-of in history. We were certain that it was all over, and yet we had to carry out the orders that we were given.’9
Simple republicans bought Bonaparte’s renewed revolution, but the sophisticated were sceptical of the man whose version of liberty had so resembled tyranny and whose gloire required perpetual war. Most liberals felt that the concessions that he made towards constitutional reform did not go far enough. He also made gestures towards foreign opinion, banning the French slave trade for the benefit of those English Whigs who were well-disposed towards him.
Despite all his efforts to make his coup appear popular rather than military, he constantly appealed to his army, to notions of gloire and to the high value he set on his ‘Braves’. In the army support for the Emperor was strongest among ordinary soldiers, who still worshipped him. The army remained more Jacobin in its sentiments than was typical in France and most soldiers were enthusiastic to fight to defend the Revolution against invading princes, although even they were averse to the idea of foreign conquest, at least of territory beyond Belgium and the Rhine frontier.
Army officers – especially senior officers – were more circumspect. Some were royalists, others felt that they could not break their oath to the King, and yet others had serious reservations about Bonaparte, or about his chances of success. Many senior officers felt that war was inevitable and defeat scarcely less certain. A royalist-sympathising artillery officer recalled a conversation with
General Ruty, Napoleon’s overall artillery commander, in which Ruty gave his opinion that Bonaparte was doomed to failure. ‘I felt sorry for this poor general who, royalist at heart, joined the army against his principles and convinced of the inevitability of defeat.’ Duty, employment and legal obligation, rather than political enthusiasm, kept many senior officers in place, and even the many ardent Bonapartists or republicans who were delighted to see the Emperor back in charge, welcomed him with a degree of foreboding.10
Napoleon began to inspect his army from very early on. The Imperial Guard were given back their old eagles at the Tuileries on 21 March. Bonapartist half-pay officer André Ravard, freshly arrived from the Charente, saw Napoleon review about ten thousand soldiers on 26 March, watched by a crowd of fifty thousand shouting ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ with ‘joy and approval painted on each face’. These military reviews featured a favourite and characteristic performance from the Emperor. At a review on 28 March Jean-Baptiste Lemonnier-Delafosse saw Napoleon at close quarters for the second time in his life. This comfortably employed staff officer with the 1st Division was not predisposed in the Emperor’s favour – Napoleon’s sudden reappearance had ruptured a peaceful life for his family at Paris and subjected him once again to the hazards of war – but he was profoundly impressed at close quarters. ‘It did not do to approach him, much less to hear him. He exerted a magnetic attraction on everyone who came near him,’ he recalled. The presentation of the eagles was a set-piece with a standard formula:
Soldiers, here are your standards; these eagles will always serve you as a rallying point. They will go wherever your Emperor judges necessary for the defence of his throne and his people. Do you swear to sacrifice your life to defend and maintain them constantly, through your courage on the path to honour and victory? Will you swear to this?
Yet, however formulaic the words might have been, Lemonnier-Delafosse found Napoleon’s performance utterly spellbinding:
The expression that he gave to each short phrase, making them scan like verse, gave this oath incredible intensity. You were frozen to the spot, immobile, your skin prickling with goose bumps. His regard, indescribable, was that of an exterminating Deity. When he cried, ‘Do you swear to defend them? … Will you swear to this?’ it was as if he said, ‘Do it, or I shall crush you to dust!’11
4
Old Hooky Takes Charge
Before midnight on 4 April the Duke of Wellington arrived in Brussels to take over command of the allied forces from the Prince of Orange. The Duke got down to work immediately, contacting his Prussian ally General Gneisenau to form a new plan. Wellington felt that they should be prepared to resist ‘a sudden stroke’ that might be delivered in the imminent future, but in his view it was imperative for political reasons to defend Brussels. ‘It would be of the greatest importance to Bonaparte to drive us back behind Brussels, to chase away the King of France and to reverse the order of things that the King of the Netherlands has established here. It would have a terrible effect on public opinion.’ He said that he could put 23,000 troops in the field, the Dutch could contribute 20,000 men and 60 guns, and recommended to Gneisenau that the Prussians should bring all their forces closer to Brussels and concentrate them on a line from Charleroi, a fortified town thirty miles south of the city, eastward to Namur and Huy, spread over about forty miles and protected from French attack by the rivers Sambre and Meuse.1
Having announced his presence to his Prussian allies, Wellington put 20,000 men to work repairing the defences of the ports and border fortresses. He sent off deliberately unrealistic requirements for more and better troops from a home government that he felt needed to shake off its lethargy and realise that his need was urgent. He wrote to Earl Bathurst, Secretary of State for War, requiring 40,000 more good infantry, 18,750 cavalry and 150 guns, together with the special equipment required for a major campaign:
I beg you also to send here the waggon train, and all the spring waggons for the carriage of sick and wounded; and that you will ask Lord Mulgrave to send here, in addition to the ordnance above mentioned fully horsed, 200 musket ball cartridge carts at present, and as many more hereafter; and an entrenching tool cart for each battalion of infantry, and 200 more for the corps of engineers, and the whole corps of sappers and miners. It would be also desirable that we should have the whole staff corps … Without these equipments, military operations are out of the question.2
This demand was characteristic of Wellington’s precise and somewhat abrasive style. At forty-six, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, was the same age as Napoleon. Born Arthur Wesley, he was the third son of an Anglo-Irish peer, a passionate musician whose compositions had brought him a professorship at Trinity College Dublin; it was Arthur’s brother who adopted the more aristocratic spelling Wellesley in 1798. Educated at Eton and the École Royale d’Equitation at Angers in France, Arthur was a gifted violinist but showed little interest in anything else. His relatives bought him a commission in the 73rd Foot in 1787 and the following year he went to Ireland as aide to the Viceroy.
By 1792 he was a captain and had fallen for Kitty Pakenham, daughter of Lord Longford. In 1793 he borrowed from his brother the money needed to buy the two promotions necessary to make him lieutenant-colonel of the 33rd Foot. He then asked for her hand, but Kitty’s brother, the head of the family, turned him down.3 That year he fought in Belgium, in temporary command of a brigade, under ‘the Grand Old Duke of York’, an experience which, he said, taught him ‘what one ought not to do’.4 In 1796 he sailed for India and spent eight years there, with his remarkable brother Richard as governor general, carving out an empire at the expense of French allies. He learned to handle difficult terrain and conditions, subtle enemies and temperamental allies, and won a reputation for steely discipline and self-control. Although by no means rapacious, he returned a rich man, as well as a national hero.
Richard Wellesley, himself back from India, had been a key supporter of Pitt and in 1806 he brought Arthur into Parliament as Chief Secretary for Ireland in the Duke of Portland’s Tory ministry. He was persuaded by mutual friends to write to Kitty Pakenham to ask her to marry him. She was alarmed by the indifferent tone of his letter – ‘is there one expression implying that Yes would gratify or that No would disappoint?’ she wrote to a friend – but she eventually accepted. Wellington did not see her before their marriage, and his first sight of her after such a long period produced an unpleasant shock. ‘She has grown ugly, by Jove!’ he remarked to one of his brothers. Wellington later explained somewhat disingenuously to a friend that ‘I married her because they asked me to do it & I did not know myself. I thought I should never care for anybody again, & that I shd. be with my army & in short, I was a fool.’5 It was not a happy marriage.
In 1808 he was sent to Portugal and won the battle of Vimeiro. He commanded the force that returned in 1809 and in 1810 his defensive lines at Torres Vedras baffled Marshal Masséna. The following year he tied down Marshal Soult’s forces in southern Spain and in 1812, with much of Napoleon’s army withdrawn from Spain for Russia, took the offensive, capturing Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz and winning the battle of Salamanca. In 1813 he won a decisive victory at Vitoria and, after a struggle in the Pyrenees, invaded France, winning a final battle at Toulouse in 1814. On his return to London he was created Duke of Wellington. He had never fought against Napoleon himself but, unbeaten by the French in any pitched battle, he was arguably the Coalition’s best champion to oppose him.
Wellington was a complicated personality and even those who observed him closely over many years found it difficult to sum him up. ‘His is one of those mixed characters which it is difficult to praise or blame without the risk of doing it more or less than justice,’ wrote one such. ‘Confident, presumptuous, and dictatorial, but frank, open, and good-humoured’, he liked to exercise complete control, which worked in a small army but was to prove a fatal flaw in his later political career.6 Arrogant, disdainful and aloof, some of his officers knew him as ‘the pe
er’; others referred to him as ‘the Lord’. When his own reputation was in peril he could be caustically critical of subordinate officers and soldiers, which they tended to resent. On the other hand, he was extremely professional, efficient, brave, cool and unruffled. He had a fine eye for the military potential of the landscape and was so good at deploying troops that opposing generals became wary of what might be hidden in a wood or behind a ridge. He usually won his battles, extricated his armies from trouble and did his best to keep his troops supplied and as comfortable as possible. He shared their hardships and put his own steely body on the line, taking active control wherever the danger was greatest. He was physically very fit and lean and of slightly above average stature – his height was variously estimated between five foot eight inches and five foot ten.
His troops did not love him in the way that sailors idolised Nelson – indeed they tended not to like him – but they trusted and admired him. They called him ‘Old Hooky’ after his nose, or ‘the Bugger that beats the French’. He gathered around him a staff and field officers in whom he had faith, and he made good choices – his lieutenants were usually talented and highly efficient in their sphere. Even so, he was reluctant to give them free rein: he liked to control in detail, delegated unwillingly and disliked unauthorised initiative. If people showed initiative without orders they were liable to be reprimanded at least. He was somewhat vain and won a reputation as a womaniser: another nickname among officers was ‘the Beau’.7 Although he charmed women and children, men generally found his conversation unimpressive and he spoke ‘as if he affected a kind of boyish slang’.8