The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  He was on his way from the south back up to Paris with an army of his veterans which was snowballing by the hour. Marshal Ney, who had been sent to capture Napoleon and had vowed to bring him back in a cage, instead had joined his old comrade once more. The fat and unpopular Louis XVIII made no attempt to rally the French people. They scarcely knew him, as he had spent the war in England. All too mindful of his elder brother’s dreadful fate, he quickly got out of the country in an undignified scramble. Europe was back at war again.

  It was decided that each great power should provide 150,000 men against Napoleon. The British forces under Wellington, who was by now not only a duke but commander-in-chief, were deputed with the Prussians under Field Marshal Blücher to defend the southern Netherlands north-east of the French border. It was there that Napoleon decided he should strike. He needed a conclusive engagement to defeat that section of the allied armies to enable him to link up with his followers at Antwerp before Russia and Austria had time to invade from the east. The Battle of Waterloo turned out to be conclusive in another way. It was the final end of the man Wellington called ‘the great disturber of Europe’. But the situation was not straightforward. The victory of Waterloo was far from predictable. As Wellington, the Iron Duke, would himself say later, it was ‘a damned nice thing–the closest-run thing you ever saw in your life’.

  Wellington’s best, most highly disciplined peninsular veterans were far away in America. They had been sent there for a new Anglo-American war which had broken out in June 1812 over the carrying trade. What he was left with was a force he described as ‘an infamous army’–27,000 raw recruits most of whom had never held a gun in their lives. ‘I don’t know what effect these men will have on the enemy,’ he remarked, ‘but by God they frighten me.’ Moreover it was the emperor himself who was advancing out from France on 12 June 1815 with his most devoted partisans, veterans of twenty-two years’ campaigning.

  Wellington himself had come to the conclusion that Napoleon would need to strike quickly before the Prussian and British armies could work out their strategy, but he had no idea just how soon that would be. Absolute success and the complete defeat of Napoleon would depend on the arrival of 30,000 Prussians under Blücher, to bring the combined Anglo-Dutch forces up to about 65,000, still 5,000 lighter than the French. But the two armies were a considerable distance from one another. Wellington and the Anglo-Dutch army were in the main path of the emperor’s advance, and in the event the Prussians very nearly never turned up to help them. For Napoleon’s intelligence was excellent as usual. He decided that the Prussians must be attacked first at Ligny and put out of action before he dealt with the Anglo-Dutch forces.

  As a result of Napoleon’s secrecy and swiftness it was not until the afternoon of 15 June that Wellington discovered that his opponent had crossed the French border and was at Charleroi with 70,000 men. ‘Napoleon has humbugged me,’ said the furious duke. Not only were the Prussians being attacked at Ligny, but 1,500 French skirmishers had attacked an outlying Dutch division at Quatre Bras. This meant that the French were advancing up the highway to Brussels and were only twenty miles away.

  Wellington now ordered his army forward to concentrate at the crossroads of Quatre Bras in order to divert Ney from Blücher and the Prussians at Ligny. Though there was an inconclusive draw between the two sides at Quatre Bras, by the end of the day Wellington had succeeded in his limited objective: the British had prevented the French getting any nearer Brussels. Meanwhile the Prussians had retreated eighteen miles from Ligny to Wavre, which was due east of Waterloo.

  When the Prussian retreat became known, Wellington decided that Waterloo was where he should fall back to. He would make his stand there and hope that the Prussians would somehow come to his aid. The area crossed the highroad between Napoleon’s troops at Charleroi and allied headquarters at Brussels. It was bordered by the little village of Waterloo in the north, now on the outskirts of modern Brussels, and the Château de Hougoumont to the south with the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte in the middle. Wellington had had his engineers survey the ground for the past week for the maximum advantage. Every building, every peculiar feature of the landscape, had to be adapted for defensive purposes.

  In the middle of the night Wellington got word from the seventy-two-year-old Blücher, who had been seriously wounded at Ligny, that even if the old general had to be tied to his horse he would personally lead out his troops against Napoleon’s right wing the next day. As 18 June dawned, there was a terrific downpour, so often the prelude to victory for Wellington. The soldiers awoke to find themselves in a sea of mud, but were soon up and about preparing for battle in their red coats. Everywhere rode the duke in his cocked hat and civilian clothes, which he found more comfortable than regimentals, raising everyone’s morale by his phlegmatic and indefatigable presence.

  Napoleon, for his part, rose late. He shared none of his generals’ fears about the British infantry or the battle itself, for he believed that the Prussians had been too badly mauled by Ligny to be able to join up with the British. Nor did he rate his opposite number. Rather curiously, considering the havoc Wellington had inflicted on his armies, Napoleon dismissed him as a ‘bad general’. He took his time waiting for the ground to dry out for better use of his cavalry. That was another mistake, for every hour that passed gave the Prussians more time to come to the aid of the Anglo-Dutch, hours during which Wellington was seen surreptitiously looking at his watch and wondering where they were.

  The Battle of Waterloo began with an attack by the French on the Château de Hougoumont. Though it was set on fire, the British held it all day, protecting Wellington’s right as well as preventing the French advance up the highway to Brussels. The French fruitlessly used up troops trying to capture it, but they never did. Meanwhile the battle raged as again and again the French columns assailed the British positions without success. The British were very carefully arranged in squares by Wellington. Drilled in preceding months by their sergeant majors, the novice infantrymen had quickly learned the ‘steadiness’ under fire that according to the duke made the British the best soldiers in the world. They could not have had more need of it. For against their squares came first the fearsome French infantry columns and then for two hours the French cavalry. ‘This is hard pounding, gentlemen,’ said Wellington at one point, ‘try who can pound the longest.’

  But each British soldier, as taught, continued calmly to take aim and fire, and then kneel and let the man behind him, whose gun was cocked, take aim and fire in his turn, as the first lot cleaned their guns and loaded once more. The French cavalry with their glittering cuirasses and high plumed helmets, galloped round and round the squares trying to put an end to the steady firing by breaking them up and finding a way through the troops. But nothing could shake the steady British line, though they could scarcely see in the smoke and scarcely hear in the din. All the while the beautiful French horses and their superb riders crashed one by one into the mud–looking, as Wellington later remembered, like so many up-ended turtles. But the squares held. Later when he examined the battlefield with its awful debris the duke found a whole square of men who had died in formation rather than let the French pass. When Wellington had been asked if he could defeat Napoleon, he had pointed at a redcoated infantryman and said, ‘It all depends on him.’ His confidence had been well placed.

  Nevertheless, it had not been until mid-afternoon that Wellington got sight of tiny flickering troop movements in the woods in the far distance to the east. These were the first signs of the Prussians whose horses and guns he had been anxiously watching for since daybreak. At six o’clock in the evening La Haye Sainte, the farmhouse holding the centre, fell to the French. It was then that Napoleon tried to drive in Wellington’s line between the farmhouse and Hougoumont. But the French were held off by the 52nd Regiment, whose attack on the left flank of the French ended in the use of bayonets. Just before sundown Napoleon sent in his elite Imperial Guard. But even they were beaten off by the
allied infantry. For the first time ever the most legendary warriors in Europe broke ranks and abandoned the battlefield.

  And then, just before eight o’clock with only about half an hour of daylight remaining, the Prussians at last arrived. Blücher was more dead than alive, but he had not failed his allies. Here he was, his long white moustache black with dust, but as energetic as ever, able to deploy his army to chase the French back into France. From beneath his tree, mounted on his chestnut mare Copenhagen, veteran of so many battles, Wellington waved his hat three times towards the French. The British could go forward at last. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound!’ he shouted. Up to the ridge came line after line of scarlet-clad infantrymen, charging on to pursue the terrified French. It was the end. Napoleon fled for Paris, where he immediately abdicated in favour of his son, the King of Rome, hoping that the child could become King of France in his stead. A short time later he was safely isolated in mid-Atlantic on the island of St Helena, borne there by the Royal Navy frigate HMS Bellerophon. He had thrown himself on the mercy of the prince regent and the English, who, he said, were the most generous of the allies. He died on St Helena six years later.

  Radical Agitation (1815–1820)

  The Battle of Waterloo rid the world of the menace to peace that Napoleon represented so long as he was free. But the widespread support his Hundred Days had received in France ensured that the peace settlement made in 1815 was far more punitive than had been first envisaged. Although France’s borders reverted to those of the pre-revolutionary period, a humiliating army of occupation was put into northern France for five years, paid for by the French and commanded by Wellington, who also became Britain’s ambassador to Paris. To underline the fact that Napoleon was no longer the master of Europe, all the treasures he and his soldiers had looted from round the world, such as the four horses of St Mark’s in Venice and sumptuous paintings from the Vatican, were returned to their rightful owners. So furious were the Parisians at this, for they now considered that the loot belonged to them, that the works of art were taken away at dead of night to avoid rioting.

  All round France, which had terrorized Europe for a generation, her neighbours were strengthened to prevent her breaking out again. The former Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) were joined to Holland under a prince of the House of Orange to give France a more formidable presence on her north-east frontier. Further south her eastern border was more strongly defined by consolidating the 300 pre-war principalities into a German Confederation of thirty-nine states. Within the Confederation Prussia was reinforced by the addition of two-fifths of the former kingdom of Saxony and territory in the Rhineland. Such an entity would make the French think twice before they tried to expand their borders again.

  For similar reasons the mountain kingdom of Piedmont was also enlarged. Norway was taken away from the Danes, who had been allies of Napoleon until very recently, and combined in one kingdom with Sweden. South of the Alps, though most of her princes were restored to the status quo ante, Italy was back firmly under the protection of Austria. Russia, the new player in European power politics whose giant armies overshadowed the Congress, used the peace settlement to expand westward. The conference agreed to her demand to include the so-called independent kingdom of Poland in her empire; it was the price to be paid for Russian aid in the war.

  The political thrust of the post-1815 settlement was thus strongly conservative, and where it did not interfere with the imperial ambitions of the great powers, it was legitimist–that is, it restored the ruling families who had been in power before the French Revolutionary Wars. As Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary in charge of the peace negotiations put it, ‘We want disciplined force under sovereigns we can trust.’ The problem was that the conservative statesmen running the Congress, particularly the Austrian chancellor Prince Metternich, were so determined to bury the dangerous ideas which the French Revolution had set free in the world that they completely ignored the wishes of the native populations.

  For all the conservative aims of the peace, the history of the next hundred years was to be the working out of the effects of the French Revolution as the Poles, the Italians and the Germans revolted against the settlement. The French Revolutionary ideals resurfaced in powerful offspring, liberalism and nationalism, that were not confined to Europe. Further wars and revolutionary convulsions produced a unified Italy, a unified Germany and conflagration in the decaying Ottoman Empire. England herself, whose Parliament already had a version of democracy in place, by expanding the suffrage over the next hundred years did just enough to prevent her own revolutions. There were sufficient far-sighted members of both Houses to see what had to be changed to fit the post-revolutionary age. Parliament itself could provide the safety valve so lacking on the continent. Nevertheless it was a bumpy ride.

  Though Britain’s conference negotiators were the Ultra or extreme Tory Anglo-Irish aristocrats Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington, their sense of what a Parliamentary democracy would not tolerate made Britain a leavening liberal presence among the repressive eastern European powers. Britain refused to join a new international organization to police Europe, an anti-democratic straitjacket called the Holy Alliance and proposed by the excitable Tsar Alexander I. It would permit the great powers to intervene in one another’s affairs if they thought that Christianity, peace or justice were threatened, or, more bluntly, if the government became too liberal for their liking. Given her representative system of government Castlereagh and Wellington knew that Britain would never countenance the powers interfering by force in a country’s internal affairs. On Holy Alliance principles, one of the first places to be invaded might be Britain.

  What Britain could agree to was practical and pragmatic. In order to keep the peace in Europe and prevent another Napoleon ever arising, the victorious great powers, Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia, formed a Quadruple Alliance to stop by armed intervention any aggression by France which would alter the Congress of Vienna settlement. Castlereagh had been sufficiently impressed by the recent co-operation between the powers to believe that a permanent system of conferences, like the Congress of Vienna, which he called the Concert of Europe, was a good way of hammering out issues before anyone resorted to war. By the second Congress in 1818, France had finished paying her war indemnity early, so Castlereagh got her occupying army withdrawn and France herself welcomed back into the fold of great powers. He believed that this would ensure Europe’s future stability, for if France continued to be a European pariah it would make her disruptive and dangerous.

  However, the Congress system which Castlereagh had such hopes for was hijacked by the Holy Alliance and Britain pretty well withdrew from it. The next few years were dogged by uprisings and demands for more liberal rule in Spain, Portugal, Naples and Piedmont. By 1820 the Congresses were issuing claims that they had the right to put down revolutions in foreign countries as well as clamping down on the press and on liberal teachers in the German universities. As a result Britain no longer attended in an official capacity, sending observers to Congress meetings rather than ambassadors. Britain, said Castlereagh, whose own king was the product of a revolution, could not logically ‘deny to other countries the same right of changing their government’ by similar revolutions. Thus by the 1820s Britain was once more the friend of constitutional change abroad, as she had been before the French Revolution.

  As befitted the nation over which shone the glory of Waterloo and the honour of removing the menace of Napoleon, and which had financed a great deal of the war, Britain did extremely well out of the peace. After Trafalgar she had seized the opportunity to rid herself of any rivals at sea, and she remained the dominant country in the carrying trade. She now usefully expanded her trading bases throughout the world, adding Malta, the Ionian Islands, the small island of Heligoland off the coast of Hanover and some important former French West Indian islands–St Lucia, Tobago and Mauritius–to her colonial possessions. The route to India was safeguarded by her con
tinuing to hold the Cape of Good Hope, which she had captured from the Dutch, as well as Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), at the foot of India. Britain’s naval and commercial supremacy was confirmed.

  Thanks to the British delegation the 1815 Peace Treaty contained within it a clause condemning slavery, in the face of Spanish and Portuguese protests. The efficient mobilization of British public opinion by the Anti-Slavery Society made it impossible for Castlereagh to draw up a treaty determining the shape of post-war Europe without registering a protest at the continued reliance of European economies on slave labour. By 1817, in return for £70,000, Portugal and Spain had both abolished their slave trade. The Netherlands had outlawed it the year before, and it continued to be outlawed in all French territories, as it had been by the French revolutionary government in 1793.

  What has been called Britain’s second Hundred Years War ended with France most conclusively beaten. In the new century Russia was the power whose activities Britain regarded with the most suspicion. But now that peace was established the government’s most pressing problem was the domestic situation. The severe hardship and dislocation caused by twenty years of war combined with the industrial revolution was tearing the country apart. What was happening at home needed urgent attention and bold surgery. But surgery in the shape of Parliamentary reform, which the starving working class and the disfranchised middle classes were united in calling for, the Tories were most reluctant to grant.