by Tim Clayton
Confused by these utterly unexpected reports of hostilities, Wellington acted cautiously, preferring a slow move to a move in the wrong direction; in this he was possibly influenced by the French royalist intelligence of early June predicting that Napoleon’s real attack would be preceded by a feint at the Prussians.6 Grolmann’s message – announcing Napoleon’s attack and stating that Blücher intended to fight next day – sent at midday to Müffling, had not yet arrived when at 7 p.m. Müffling reported to Blücher that after receiving Ziethen’s message the Duke was concentrating his forces and endeavouring to discover the direction of the attack.
Word soon spread. The local naval commander had dined with Wellington; he went straight to Uxbridge’s house, where Sir Hussey Vivian and other cavalry officers had been eating, to deliver the shocking news.7 Rumour was hard on the heels of official information, if not ahead, for the officers of the Royal Scots were at dinner in the Hotel de Tirlemont when they heard a commotion outside. Soon some ‘Belgian gentlemen’ came in and told them of a clash on the frontier, just over thirty miles away.8
After dinner Wellington walked in the park, as was the general custom. An ensign of the Royal Scots recalled that while he himself was walking there he encountered two Prussian ADCs, who had recently arrived with news of the attack, and one of Lord Hill’s aides also learned in the park ‘that we were going to move immediately, but on enquiry I found that everybody meant to stay out the ball, I therefore determined to do so myself’.9 Since all the officers who had been invited to the ball were already in Brussels and further clarification of events at the front might reasonably be expected, Wellington probably saw the gathering as an opportunity to brief them in person without losing much time. Naturally, he did not want to disappoint the Duchess, or to create any greater sense of panic than was inevitable.
Nevertheless, the park hummed with rumour and anticipation that evening. Thomas Picton, who had arrived in Brussels to command the 5th Division that very afternoon, found the colonel of the 28th Foot walking with his officers and told them how pleased he was to have them under his command.10 Wellington’s secretary Fitzroy Somerset, who had dined at his own quarters and there learned the news, ‘found the Duke in the Park, giving the necessary orders to those around him’. Wellington left the park towards dusk, deep in conversation with Sir Charles Stuart, the British ambassador.11 He wrote to the duc de Berri, the French royalist general, asking him to concentrate his forces midway between Brussels and Ghent, and then at ten o’clock to the duc de Feltre, to suggest that the King should be ready to leave Ghent if necessary.
At about this point Müffling brought Wellington Quartermaster-General Grolmann’s assessment of the situation at midday, confirming that the Imperial Guard was involved, which implied Napoleon’s presence, and stating Blücher’s intention to fight at Ligny. This removed any lingering doubt: Wellington had to march to support Blücher. The Duke instructed Delancey to issue the ‘After Orders’, timed at 10 p.m., which directed the troops towards Nivelles as Ziethen had asked, and Müffling reported to Blücher that this was where Wellington would be concentrating his army.
The route of the march to Nivelles protected a broad area to the south of Brussels, in case the attack against Charleroi should prove to be a feint and another attack should develop from the direction of Mons. The troops at Brussels, Wellington’s powerful reserve, were told to stop at Mont Saint-Jean at the junction of the roads to Nivelles and Charleroi, for from there they could still move in either direction. Wellington certainly didn’t order his troops to race to help Blücher, but while he still had so little information he was most anxious not to make an irreparable blunder.
The Prince noticed that the Dutch cavalry had been forgotten and penned a postscript to Constant, moving them closer to Nivelles, a large walled town dominated by a huge Romanesque abbey. To this town he ordered his headquarters to move. Nobody thought to summon the two brigades of heavy artillery – twelve 18-pounder guns – that were fitting out only six miles north of Brussels. Next day the commander of one of the two batteries wrote to his wife, ‘My brigade is not yet ready, principally I believe for want of drivers,’ but this does not sound like an insuperable problem. Rather, neither he nor headquarters judged the situation to be sufficiently dangerous to warrant getting this powerful field artillery on the move ahead of the scheduled advance into France. They must have regretted the decision by Sunday, when such firepower would have been invaluable.12
Meanwhile, at Quatre Bras the German troops settled down to rest. As it grew dark, Prince Bernhard reported to General Perponcher requesting reserves of ammunition, anxious that he knew nothing about what faced him and that he had no cavalry with which to scout and patrol his open flank. He reminded Perponcher that the second Orange-Nassau battalion, which had arrived from Dillenburg in Hesse only three days ago, was armed with French muskets and had only ten rounds of ammunition each, and that the volunteer Jägers, who had arrived with them, had only six rounds.13
Perponcher, four and a half miles further west at Nivelles, had a clearer and more terrifying idea of what was afoot than anyone else. Reconnaissance had established the loss of Gosselies, and a French deserter had confirmed the fall of Charleroi and warned that Bonaparte, at the head of 150,000 men, was marching on Brussels.14 This was serious to say the least. If Brussels really was the target, should he reinforce Quatre Bras or evacuate it to save his troops from annihilation? At dusk he sent his aide ten miles west to Braine to get guidance from Constant, but ordered all the division’s baggage northward up the road to Waterloo.
At Braine-le-Comte, meanwhile, Constant had received no new information for some hours. Since he had every reason to keep his troops outdoors, he ignored Orange’s instruction to disperse them to their billets. Then Perponcher’s aide announced the attack on Frasnes, the appearance of French cavalry at Quatre Bras and the reported threat to Brussels. Constant was astonished that the Prussians had left the road from Charleroi to Brussels open. It was evidently a flaw in the arrangements between the two armies – it was unclear who was supposed to be guarding it, just as Napoleon had hoped. Constant sent Orange’s aide Henry Webster to inform Brussels at top speed. His statement that the French had reached Quatre Bras, only twenty miles from Brussels, slightly exaggerated the danger, but Constant probably designed it to jolt his superiors out of their complacency. He sent another aide to Quatre Bras to get a first-hand insight and to advise Perponcher to defend the crossroads, but to fall back westward on Braine if it proved impossible.
Half an hour later, Constant received an order from Wellington to concentrate both his infantry divisions at Nivelles, which meant abandoning Quatre Bras and leaving the Brussels road open. Like the earlier order to stand his men down, he thought this the wrong thing to do, and decided not to obey, considering that if the Duke had known that the French were poised to advance up the Brussels road he would not have told him to evacuate. Consequently, Constant ordered General Chassé to withdraw to Nivelles but did not order Perponcher to leave Quatre Bras. The initiatives taken by Saxe-Weimar and Perponcher and the calculated insubordination of Constant would prove vitally important to the allied cause in the light of what happened next day.
The Duchess of Richmond’s ball was held at the Lennox family’s rented house in the rue de la Blanchisserie. Wellington playfully called it ‘the wash-house’, although the blanchisserie itself was further along the street.15 The house belonged to a carriage maker, and his showroom, linked to the main building by a stair and a covered passage, was used as the ballroom. Like a number of other British families, the Richmonds had moved to Brussels in order to economise, the cost of living being lower in Belgium than in London, but in spring 1815 the British colony had suddenly expanded. Families had moved there from Paris after Bonaparte’s return, and then the troops had arrived, accompanied by wives and children or people providing services for the army.
The most distinguished British civilians were invited to the ball, alon
gside foreign diplomats, aristocratic army officers and the cream of Belgian society. Their carriages began to pull up outside about nine in the evening as the first of the two hundred or so guests arrived. Of these only sixty-seven were women and even fewer were young women, but there were enough young ladies to fill a small ballroom while their illustrious elders sat around as spectators. Few of the older guests were elderly – the Duchess herself was forty-six – and most were soldiers dressed in their most splendid uniforms, a dazzling array of elegance and colour.
Dancing commenced about ten, as the musicians turned to the newly fashionable and exciting waltz, ‘the indecent whirling-dance of the Germans’, controversial for its capacity to inflame the passions through bodily contact. Not until the following year did this ‘voluptuous intertwining of the limbs’ first make an appearance at the Prince Regent’s court. ‘So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses we did not think it deserving of notice,’ The Times fulminated in consequence, ‘but now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.’16
Needless to say, young officers and seventeen-year-old ladies loved waltzing, but the Duchess was keen to show her foreign guests the fashionable dances from her native Scotland, for she was a Gordon, daughter of the 4th Duke of Gordon, and ‘Lady Charlotte Gordon’s Reel’ had been composed in her honour. As a pièce de résistance the adjutant, pipe-major Alexander Cameron, and four sergeants of the Gordon Highlanders performed a sword dance.17
The Duke arrived ‘rather late’, probably about eleven, while nineteen-year-old Georgiana Lennox was dancing. Soon afterwards an aide began to distribute movement orders to the officers present and, as the dancing progressed, the whispered rumour began to circulate that there had been an action between the French and Prussians. ‘About half past eleven it was said that the French army was advancing & I found that orders were immediately going off to Lord Hill to move his corps, I therefore determined to stay no longer, & consequently I went off to Grammont, & reached it on Friday morning’, noted one of Hill’s aides.18 At first the civilians didn’t believe the rumour, but ‘when the General Officers whose corps were in advance, began to move, and when orders were given for persons to repair to their regiments, matters began to be considered in a different light.’
Wellington spent some time sitting with Jane Dalrymple-Hamilton (Admiral Duncan’s daughter) while the dancing went on:
Although the Duke affected great gaiety and cheerfulness, it struck me that I had never seen him have such an expression of care and anxiety on his countenance. I sat next to him on a sopha a long time, but his mind seemed quite preoccupied; and although he spoke to me in the kindest manner possible, yet frequently in the middle of a sentence he stopped abruptly and called to some officer, giving him directions, in particular to the Duke of Brunswick and the Prince of Orange, who both left the ball before supper. Despatches were constantly coming in to the Duke.19
In contrast to Jane Dalrymple-Hamilton, Elizabeth Ord recalled ‘Lord Wellington walking about with Lady F Webster on his arm sometimes talking nonsense to her and sometimes reading reports and giving orders but not seeming as if he had more than usual on his mind’.20
Almost every senior British officer in the army of the rank of brigadier and above was present, along with their ADCs and most of the officers of the Guards brigade. Wellington briefed these people and sent them off to their units as soon as supper was over, or in some cases sooner. The forty-three-year-old Duke of Brunswick, with a leonine blond beard and piercing blue eyes, cut a fine figure in his jet black uniform with sky blue facings. His sabre was a present from Princess Charlotte, with a lock of her hair adorning the scabbard. He left after receiving instructions from the Duke to muster his men and march to Waterloo. Sir George Scovell sent instructions to have his black stallion saddled at midnight. Uxbridge got his orders just before supper and left at 1 a.m., ‘giving a hint for all cavalry officers to repair to their quarters’, although one of Sir Hussey Vivian’s aides admitted that he did not leave Brussels until 4 a.m. Some officers recalled that the Duchess tried to stop them leaving before supper and spoiling her party.
Between midnight and supper Orange’s aide Henry Webster arrived with the news that the French were at Frasnes on the Brussels road.21 Wellington studied a map with the Duke of Richmond, exclaiming, ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, by God, he has gained twenty-four hours march on me.’22 It is conceivable that he also indicated, as ‘witnesses’ reported, that if he couldn’t hold the French at Quatre Bras, he would have to fight at Mont Saint-Jean, for that position had been chosen and surveyed as a possible battlefield earlier in the year.
Supper was normally served at one o’clock in the morning. Georgiana Lennox claimed that she sat next to Wellington and he gave her a recently painted miniature of himself, although the Marquise d’Assche remarked that he paid ‘ardent court’ to the pregnant beauty Frances Webster on his other side. At supper the Duke returned thanks to the toast to the allied armies proposed by General Alava.23 After supper the ballroom became substantially depopulated and although dancing continued for a while, the party, which should have lasted until six in the morning, ended early. As Lady Jane Lennox remarked:
I know I was in a state of wild delight – the scene itself was so stirring, and the company so brilliant. I recollect, on reaching the ball-room after supper, I was scanning over my tablets, which were filled from top to bottom with the names of partners to whom I was engaged; when, on raising my eyes, I became aware of a great preponderance of ladies in the room. White muslins and tarletans abounded; but the gallant uniforms had sensibly diminished. The enigma was soon solved. Without fuss or parade, or tender adieux, the officers, anxious not to alarm the ladies, had quietly stolen out.24
According to Elizabeth Ord, ‘The young officers insisted on our dancing but it was with such an effort that of course it did not last long. Little parties with pale cheeks and red eyes were to be seen in many parts of the room.’25
The order to be ready to move at the slightest notice had been received in plenty of time for the officers attending the ball to instruct their servants to have everything packed and ready, but not all of them learned in time of the new order to march at 4 a.m. Some stayed late, and a few were to end up fighting in the outfits they had worn to the ball:
It would appear that the aforesaid ‘ball-room votaries’, trusting to the directions they had left with their servants, spent more time in making their adieux to the ladies than they otherwise should have done. They arrived at their billets, intending to doff their ball dress, and proceed forthwith to the place of rendezvous, when ‘donner and blitzen’, they found their quarters empty, their baggage, servants, horses, all gone … These unfortunates had no alternative but to set out in the dress they wore at the ball.26
The Duke must have left fairly late, for Jane Dalrymple-Hamilton said that when she left at half past two, he was still there. As far as was possible, no doubt, he wished to convey an impression of calm confidence, even if it was rumoured afterwards that it was his attachment to Lady Webster that ‘was the cause of his not being at the Battle in time’. Finally, however, he slipped away to bed.27
18
Marching Orders
15–16 June, 11 p.m.–10 a.m.
Communication was something that Wellington’s armies generally did well, and in this campaign they were to make the French and the Prussians look amateur by comparison. The Duke’s system had been tried and tested in Spain: he explained his wishes to his Quartermaster-General, who had orders written out by officers from the Royal Staff Corps and distributed by orderlies of the 3rd Hussars who had been selected for their steadiness. These German Legionaries usually spoke French and English as well as their native German. ‘To each was explained the rate at which he was to proceed, and the time when he was to arrive at hi
s destination; he was directed also to bring back the cover of the letter which he carried, having the time of its arrival noted upon it by the officer to whom it was addressed.’1 This enabled Quartermaster Delancey to track the progress of his units.
In emergency, messages were carried by aides-de-camp, nearly all wealthy young noblemen, trained to ride well, and equipped with several exceptionally fine horses. It was widely believed that English mounts, bred for hunting and racing, were faster and better adapted for cross-country endurance than foreign horses, trained for obedience in manoeuvre; Müffling was impressed that a British aide-de-camp was capable of covering fourteen miles in an hour at top speed. Officers of the Royal Staff Corps carried duplicate dispatches ‘to guard against the possibility of mistake’.2
However, on this occasion communication was not as slick as had been hoped. The British army did not concentrate on its left wing within twenty-two hours of the first cannon shot, as the Prussians claimed Wellington had promised. Indeed, twenty-two hours after the first shot concentration had barely commenced, and twenty-two hours after that it was far from complete. Müffling reckoned the projected timetable had rashly assumed concentration would happen in daylight, whereas ‘In dark nights orderlies cannot ride fast on cross roads; in the various cantonments they find every one sunk in deep slumber; and delay in arriving at the rendezvous is the inevitable consequence of a calculation grounded on the time it will take to execute an order by day, and not by night.’ This was a moonlit night but the minor roads in Belgium were so bad as sometimes to be difficult to recognise as roads.