by Tim Clayton
To the great majority who believed the doctrine of the British government ‘that the existence of the French power, with Napoleon at the head, is incompatible with the safety of Europe’ the final defeat of Bonaparte was a great achievement that closed more than twenty years of warfare. It sealed the triumph of counter-revolution in Europe and secured the restoration of the Bourbons in France and Spain and of the House of Orange in the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, leaving aristocracies and monarchies stronger in material terms than they had been prior to the French Revolution.
To the enduring fury of the Prussians, Wellington succeeded in claiming most of the credit. From a British perspective Waterloo and the negotiations that followed, premised on Britain’s prime role in Napoleon’s defeat, were brilliantly successful. Britain emerged as the world’s leading naval, colonial, commercial, financial and industrial power, and retained its dominance for most of the next century. Waterloo had brought to a close ‘the second Hundred Years War’, a bitter commercial rivalry between France and Britain that began with the struggle against Louis XIV and ended with the defeat of Napoleon. In this context the Waterloo campaign confirmed the result of the battle of Trafalgar, for the harvest of the long war, in which Britain had refused to make peace, was reaped through mastery of the seas and global trade. The Congress of Vienna brought huge immediate dividends to Britain through the acquisition of many prize French, Spanish and Dutch colonies – Trinidad, Tobago, Saint Lucia, Demerara, Essequibo, the Cape, Mauritius and Ceylon, some with strategically valuable harbours – and Britain gained Mediterranean naval bases at Malta and Corfu. Britain retained the huge empire that Wellesley and his successors had conquered in India, while the peace produced a balance of power that made Hanover safe, removing the need for regular intervention in Continental affairs. After Waterloo, Britons had every reason to congratulate themselves on having scored an unusually decisive victory.
The tiny minority in Britain who, like Napoleon, blamed the endless wars on the acquisitive self-interest of the ruling British oligarchy, who were supporting a cause that was detrimental to the common good of Europeans, saw Waterloo in a different light. The news, combined with other blows, caused the leader of the opposition, Samuel Whitbread, to commit suicide. For some liberals, like the journalist William Hazlitt, who went about unwashed, unshaven and drunk for weeks afterwards, Napoleon’s defeat represented ‘the utter extinction of human liberty from the earth’.11 There was much discontent in post-war Britain, far closer to revolution after 1815 than it had been when Bonaparte was a threat. Waterloo coincided with the passing of the corn laws, designed to protect the income of landowners. Demands for change culminated in a huge demonstration at St Peter’s Field in Manchester in 1819, where policing cavalry panicked and charged. Ironically, the 15th Hussars next saw action after Waterloo in a bid to restrain the enthusiasm of the Manchester Yeomanry, who were sabreing demonstrators and bystanders at ‘Peterloo’; one Waterloo veteran was among those killed by the cavalry.
For all that, Waterloo left the nation with enormous confidence throughout the nineteenth century and a pride in its army that had never previously existed in England, and British prestige was at an unprecedented height in Europe. On 20 July 1815 Willem I created Wellington Prince of Waterloo and gave him parcels of land between Nivelles and Quatre Bras to produce an income of 20,000 Dutch florins.12 Meanwhile, Alexander Baring, who in 1803 had arranged finance for the Louisiana purchase, the proceeds of which funded Napoleon’s attempted invasion of Britain, now chaired a committee to raise a subscription for relief of the wounded and the families of those killed. Within a fortnight the Waterloo subscription brought in £40,000 to which Lloyds added £10,000 and the Bank of England £50,000. By the end of 1815 it had raised £350,000.
At the first opportunity civilians flocked to the battlefield and some drew what they saw. An Irishman named Thomas Stoney was one of the first, riding from Louvain to sketch in watercolours scenes at Waterloo, Mont Saint-Jean and Quatre Bras dated 20 and 21 June. At Quatre Bras pale corpses still littered the ground. James Rouse made sketches while the dead were still being buried or burned. A traveller who had arrived at Brussels on 15 June visited the battlefield a week later, riding past a line of vehicles carrying wounded men to the city. He found Waterloo church full of casualties and could not go in without lighting a cigar against the effluvia. Houses had the number of wounded they contained chalked on their doors. Swollen horses lay on their backs with their legs in the air. Newly discovered wounded were propped against La Haye Sainte, while bodies were heaped in the farmyard. Men were flaying horses.13
On 2 July, while Charles Bell was drawing amputees in Brussels, Lady Charlotte Paget, wife of Lord Uxbridge, visited the battlefield with Lord and Lady George Seymour and Lady Emily Somerset, wife of Fitzroy and Wellington’s niece. Uxbridge’s aide Thomas Wildman, who had himself suffered a slight wound to the foot, endeavoured to show the ladies the exact spot where Uxbridge had been hit in the leg, but was less certain where Fitzroy Somerset had lost his arm. They visited the cottages at Waterloo where their husbands’ limbs had been amputated; there, Lady Charlotte wrote to Uxbridge’s sister Caroline, a farmer’s wife ‘took me into the garden to show me where his poor dear leg was buried, & she has promised me to plant a tree over the spot’. She continued,
The road all the way to the field of battle is dreadfully disgusting, the smell from the dead horses is so horrid, but the field itself is perfectly sweet. The whole ground there is covered with caps, helmets & different bits & scraps of all sorts but nothing worth picking up. It has been so completely searched that nothing remains, but what I stated. The whole of the field of battle is now composed of heaps of earth thrown up where the poor dead bodies have been buried, they are as thick as mole hills, & in one part there is still a pile burning of dead bodies which were consuming by fire.
They visited Hougoumont and saw the ruins where ‘all the poor wounded perished in the flames’, lamented over the ruined, trampled flower garden and took away souvenirs. ‘Lady Fitzroy and I have each got some grape shot picked up there, & one of mine is the exact size that wounded your beloved papa. It just fits the hole in his colpacks [trousers] which he wore that day.’14
Two weeks later, when the travel writer Charlotte Waldie visited the battlefield, ‘the road between Waterloo and Brussels was one long uninterrupted charnel house: the smell, the whole way through the Forest, was extremely offensive, and in some places scarcely bearable. Deep stagnant pools of red putrid water, mingled with mortal remains, betrayed the spot where the bodies of men and horses had mingled together in death.’15
In the area where Picton’s division had fought, she found ‘a long line of tremendous graves, or rather pits, into which hundreds of dead had been thrown … The effluvia which arose from them, even beneath the open canopy of heaven, was horrible; and the pure west wind of summer, as it passed us, seemed pestiferous, so deadly was the smell that in many places pervaded the field.’16
The field was still covered in relics that the peasants considered relatively worthless – she picked up a copy of Candide – and there were moments of gothic horror, when a skull peered from a shallow grave and when she found the bones of a human arm and hand sticking out of the ground and fled with a shudder of terror. She was moved by the beautiful remains of the garden at Hougoumont and again, leaving its wood, was ‘struck with the sight of the scarlet poppy flaunting in full bloom upon some new-made graves, as if in mockery of the dead. In many parts of the field these flowers were growing in profusion: they had probably been protected from injury by the tall and thick corn amongst which they grew, and their slender roots had adhered to the clods of clay which had been carelessly thrown upon the graves.’17
Painters and poets were quickly onto a scene that promised both inspiration and profit. The painter Robert Hills visited the ground in late July to make drawings for Sketches in Flanders and Holland; with some account of a tour through parts of those countries sh
ortly after the battle of Waterloo, published in 1816. Sir Walter Scott visited the battlefield in August 1815 and during his tour composed his poem ‘The Field of Waterloo’, written in aid of the Waterloo subscription to raise money for the wounded and bereft; he later wrote a life of Napoleon. According to the journalist John Scott, who visited during the summer, hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of British visitors made the pilgrimage to the field of Waterloo at the earliest opportunity.
Robert Southey followed on Scott’s heels in October. When he first heard the news of Waterloo, he and William Wordsworth, who had once admired Napoleon as the saviour of the Revolution and the Liberator of Italy, had danced around a bonfire on Skiddaw, singing ‘God Save the King’ and feasting on ‘roasted beef and boiled plum-puddings’.18 Now, Southey wrote, feeling ‘in some degree bound to celebrate the greatest victory in British history, I persuaded myself that if any person had a valid cause or pretext for visiting the field of Waterloo, it was the Poet Lauriate’. His Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo appeared in 1816.19
Whereas Southey had abandoned his youthful admiration for Napoleon and viewed his downfall with delight, Byron continued to hold Bonaparte in high esteem and was bitterly disappointed by his defeat. After the collapse of his marriage he went abroad, reaching Ostend on 25 April 1816 and then travelling in a replica of Napoleon’s coach to Waterloo, visiting the battlefield on 4 May and buying a collection of ‘spoils’, before continuing his journey down the Rhine. He wrote the first lines of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto III, best known for its description of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, more or less on the battlefield. In contrast to his fellow poets, Byron saw Waterloo as the defeat of enlightenment and rationalism and a victory for tyranny, a battle whose only positive result was to fertilise the fields with rotting matter:
How that red rain hath made the harvest grow!
And is this all the world hath gained by thee,
Thou first and last of fields! king-making victory?
Like Constable, Lord Byron had lost a cousin: Major Frederick Howard of the 10th Hussars had been killed leading a charge against the retreating squares of the Imperial Guard, and Byron’s guide showed him the spot where he was killed and initially buried. After his visit he wrote to his friend John Cam Hobhouse, whose brother was killed at Waterloo, ‘The plain at Waterloo is a fine one – but not much after Marathon and Troy – Cheronea – & Platea. – Perhaps there is something of prejudice in this – but I detest the cause and the victors – & the victory – including Blucher and the Bourbons.’20 By the time he published his final lament for Napoleon, The Age of Bronze, in 1823, Byron saw the battle in an even more bitter light:
Oh, bloody and most bootless Waterloo!
Which proves how fools may have their fortune too,
Won half by blunder, half by treachery.
The painter J.M.W. Turner, who visited the battlefield on Saturday 16 August 1817, was struck most by the bloodiness of the conflict and was interested in the concentration of carnage. His sketches for The Field of Waterloo, which showed women searching for husbands among the dead and wounded, were annotated with ‘4000 killed here’, ‘1500 killed here’, ‘Hollow where the great Carnage took place of the Cuirassiers by the Guards.’
Turner followed a newly devised itinerary for tourists that gave the field of Waterloo a prime place in a European tour. The second edition of The Traveller’s Complete Guide through Belgium and Holland recommended a new route from Margate to Waterloo, across Belgium to Cologne and along the middle Rhine, and this route to Switzerland and Italy became increasingly popular. On the battlefield monuments to the fallen proliferated but all were dwarfed by the Lion Mound, ordered in 1820 to commemorate the spot where the Prince of Orange was wounded, and completed in 1826. A huge amount of earth was moved to create it, destroying the original appearance of the battlefield. The ‘perpendicular height of forty feet above the Charleroi road’ of which Captain Arthur Gore of the Cambridgeshires spoke in 1817 in his notes to accompany cartographer Benjamin Craan’s survey, became a drop of a few feet as earth was removed from the ridge to make the mound. Gore presumably exaggerated its original height, which drawings suggest was about twenty feet, but it had been enough of a precipice to kill some unfortunate cuirassiers.21 In 1831 the mound narrowly escaped destruction by the advancing French army, but changes to the topography continued as a century of improved farming levelled most other irregularities in the landscape.
A tax of 50 million francs was levied from France to provide prize money for the victorious armies. The share allocated to Wellington’s army and paid in 1817 was split between all participants: the Duke of Wellington was awarded £61,000 (but gave £40,000 back), general officers £1,274 10s 10¾d, field officers £433 2s 4¼d, captains £90 7s 3¼d, subalterns £34 14s 9½d, sergeants £19 4s 4d and privates £2 11s 4d.
The Duke gave an annual banquet at Apsley House on the anniversary of Waterloo. Returning from France in 1818, Wellington went back into politics, taking office in successive Tory governments. He was Prime Minister from 1828–30 and briefly in 1834; he championed Catholic emancipation but fought hard to resist reform. His amours continued and his connection with the courtesan Harriette Wilson led to another famous bon mot, ‘publish and be damned’. After leaving office in 1846 he was commander in chief of the army until his death in 1852.
Lord Uxbridge was made Marquess of Anglesey as a reward for his services. He supported the Regent against Queen Caroline, sister of the Duke of Brunswick, and served as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in Wellington’s government. Like Wellington, he supported Catholic emancipation. Rowland Hill was commander in chief of the army from 1828 to 1842, while Wellington was in office, and became an enthusiastic foxhunter. Fitzroy Somerset followed Wellington into Tory politics. He was promoted to lieutenant-general in 1838 and became Baron Raglan in 1852. He led the British expedition to the Crimea, where he died from dysentery and depression in 1855. Henry Hardinge also entered politics and was Secretary at War in Wellington’s government. He was Governor-general of India in 1844, fought the first Sikh War and succeeded Wellington as commander in chief of the army in 1852. Harry Smith served in India and South Africa, where he had a troubled reign as governor of the Cape, and his wife Juana gave her name to Ladysmith. He was a standard bearer at Wellington’s funeral. Magdelene Delancey wrote the story of her sad experiences, A Week at Waterloo, for private circulation. She remarried but died in 1822 giving birth to her third child. Her book was published in 1906.
George Keppel was the last Waterloo officer to die, in 1891, as a general and 6th Earl of Albemarle. The last rank and file survivor was Maurice Shea of the 73rd Foot who died in 1892.
The fate of the lesser officers and lower ranks is often obscure, but a few can be picked out. John Haddy James (1788–1869) was elected surgeon to the Devon and Exeter Hospital in 1816 and became a general practitioner in his home town of Exeter, of which he was mayor in 1828. He was an original member of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association and an expert on inflammation. Being a ‘Waterloo man’ may have been the key to Edmund Wheatley finally obtaining her family’s permission to marry his Eliza Brookes in 1820. They had four daughters.
Thomas Morris left the army in 1817 when his seven years were up, ‘being disappointed in the nature of the service, and having no desire to wear away the best portion of my existence in a subordinate capacity, where the chances of promotion were so precarious, and the reward, at last, so trifling.’ He soon ‘attained a respectable position in civil society’. David Robertson also left the army in 1818 and retired to his native Perthshire where he lived off his pension.
Rifleman Ned Costello was invalided out aged thirty-one on sixpence a day and suffered great hardship until he became a Yeoman Warder of the Tower of London. Sergeant William Wheeler was discharged in 1828 aged forty-three, while Thomas Jeremiah left the Welch Fuzileers in 1837 to become chief of police in Brecon. After Waterloo, Matthew Clay was promoted to corporal
and then sergeant. He transferred from the regular army to the Bedford Militia in 1833 with the rank of sergeant-major and was finally discharged in 1852, aged fifty-seven, after thirty-nine years of service. Charles Ewart, the Scots Grey who captured the eagle, was given an ensigncy in a veteran regiment as a reward for his services at Waterloo, and earned money as a fencing master. After meeting Sir Walter Scott in 1816 at an anniversary dinner in Edinburgh, Ewart toured the country with him, making celebrity appearances at events. He died near Manchester but in 1938 was reinterred in Edinburgh Castle’s Esplanade.
After a few months in Paris, Prince Blücher retired to his Silesian estate, where he died in 1819. August von Gneisenau, a liberal, resigned from the army for political reasons in 1816, but became a field marshal in 1825 and died of cholera serving on the Polish border six years later. Karl von Grolmann occupied posts in the Ministry of War and tried to reform the General Staff. He supervised the author Karl von Damitz’s history of the Waterloo campaign (1837–8).