Went the Day Well?

by David Crane

  ‘Your letter fills me with the deepest sorrow,’ came back the answer from a little village in Shropshire – Bredwardine and London drawn together in the same grief – ‘alas in vain were planted, with so much pleasure and innocence, the trees he planted, which he said himself, were to commemorate the era of his military career, they will serve however, with many a pang of deepest sorrow, to call to my sad remembrance, the happy hours in which he planted them in the days that are gone … The bells are ringing, all around me, no doubt for great and glorious victories, but how they mock my feelings.’

  ‘The days that are gone’ – a grove of young saplings planted in Shropshire, two miniatures found in a dead son’s desk – these were all his family had to hold on to, and yet even for the Blackmans grief in these days was dignified if not softened by a deep and sober pride and gratitude for what their son had done. ‘Alas he is fallen, but how bravely fallen,’ Sir George Harnage wrote to his parents, ‘your boy has done his duty let that be your consolation; long will he live in the memory of his friends and deeply is he lamented – thanks be to the Immortal Wellington, thanks to the ever lamented Guardsman & his brave companions, the chains, the spell, that forged the Infernal Tyrant’s power is by their means, for ever broken.’

  It was a belief that only private loss can ever validate, and yet when almost everyone was touched at some remove or other, everyone claimed the right to speak. This did not curtail any of the more exuberant public celebrations of course – the church bells, the illuminations, the guns at the Tower, the great bonfire at Calne that Coleridge attended, the ‘gotho-barbaric rejoicings’ that penetrated even Beckford’s extraordinary Fonthill retreat, the Victory ribbons – but even the most die-hard of Tory converts, Robert Southey, seemed almost awed by the sheer magnitude of events. ‘Our bells are ringing as they ought to do,’ he wrote from Keswick on the 24th, where the Victory Mail had just brought the first tidings of the battle, ‘and I, after a burst of exhilaration at the day’s news, am in a state of serious and thoughtful thankfulness for what, perhaps, ought to be considered as the greatest deliverance that civilised society has experienced since the defeat of the Moors by Charles Martel.’

  Along with this sense of thankfulness was the undeniable fact of national achievement, too, and that, in tandem with the human cost, placed all those who had opposed the war in a difficult position. On the same day that the news of Waterloo reached London, the future prime minister Charles Grey was telling anyone who listened how much the world needed the genius of a Napoleon, but even a confirmed Bonapartist like Lord Holland, whose Holland House was the political and literary centre of Whig England, knew that if victory for the allies was the death of every liberal hope for Europe, defeat would have meant another twenty years of war.

  It would not put a stop to the private hostility of William Godwin, to the graceless carping of old Samuel Parr or the drunken stupefaction of Hazlitt and the theatricals of Byron, but while the authentic voice of radicalism would make itself heard soon enough, the world on both sides of the Channel for the moment belonged to the victors.2 For a politician like Lord Grey – Sir William Ponsonby’s brother-in-law – there were double reasons for holding his peace, but the opposition silence in Parliament was the silence of a defeated party only too conscious of its own irrelevancy. In the privacy of letters they might wonder how the march on Paris squared with the government’s protestations that the war had nothing to do with restoring the Bourbons, but on the floor of the House the men who had once hounded Wellington over Cintra and carped at every stage of his Peninsular campaign could now only vote him their thanks and add another 200,000 – nem. diss. – to ‘the former liberal grants by which its sense of his extraordinary merits had been demonstrated’.

  It was never going to be more than a pause in hostilities, though – no more than an undeclared and resented truce – and by the middle of the summer the world was already finding its post-Waterloo equilibrium. From the first day after the battle the field had become a tourist site for anyone prepared to brave the horrors, and while a broken-hearted Lord Carlisle watched Frederick Howard’s body being exhumed and Sir James Craufurd stood over his dead son among the charred ruins of Hougoumont, the first waves of pilgrim-tourists – Croker, Walter Scott, Robert Peel – were already streaming across to Flanders to haggle over their souvenir swords and helmets or visit the shrine raised above the buried leg of Uxbridge.

  Waterloo was moving from the present into the past, and it is tempting to put a symbolic date to the transition, because on the day that Magdalene De Lancey quitted Brussels for England, Lady Caroline Lamb arrived in the city to look after her brother Frederick Ponsonby. ‘I enclose you my drawing and Miss Webster will send you my MSS,’ she had written in a hurried scrawl to John Murray before she and her much-tried husband, the future prime minister Lord Melbourne sailed, her attention characteristically wandering between her brother’s health and the fictional world of her novel. ‘It is in a dreadful state as I had only time to correct the 3rd vol [of Glenarvon] which you read all the rest is merely copied from my Brouillon & terrible – I scarce can think but write constantly there as I will to you – direct it to the post office God bless you and all who have been so good & kind – I hope my journey may not be in vain – William’s kindness in going with me surpasses everything I ever heard of.’

  There was no more than a hope that the seven-times wounded Ponsonby would survive – it seemed a miracle that he had lasted that first night – and whether the same infinite, good-natured patience that had got him through that ordeal could be proof against his sister’s arrival was a moot point. ‘Lady Caroline Lamb is arrived to nurse her brother Col. Ponsonby, who is doing very well,’ Georgiana Lennox wrote home to Lady Bathurst in London on 3 July, happy to spread her disfavours impartially around, ‘but she will hurt him I fear. The Surgeon tells her the best thing she can do would be to hold her tongue, in answer to her wishing to know if she had not better read to him all day.’

  Caroline Lamb could not have held her tongue to save her own life, let alone her brother’s, and it was probably just as well for him that the old dangerous restlessness that ran through her generous and contradictory nature was still alive and well. She probably loved her brother Fred as disinterestedly as she ever loved anyone, but with the duke and the army gone and the social and political world following them towards Paris, the giant sickroom that Brussels had become had lost its charm without losing any of the grim reminders of what had happened there. ‘The great amusement at Bruxelles,’ she told her hated mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne, one of the unmistakable targets of the roman à clef she had just delivered to Murray: ‘Indeed the only one except visiting the sick is to make large parties to go to the field of Battle – & pick up a skull or a grape shot or an old shoe and a letter to bring home … there is a great affectation here of making lint & bandages – but where is there not some? & at least it is an innocent amusement … it is rather heart-breaking to be here – however – one goes blubbering about – seeing such fine people without their legs & arms – some in agony – & some getting better. Lady Congham is here … Lady D-Hamilton … Lady F Webster most affected – and Lady Mountmorris who stuck her parasol into a skull at Waterloo.’

  The world was moving on – the smouldering burial pits, the protruding skeletal hands that Charlotte Waldie and her sister had visited in the middle of July were now a picnic ground, the skulls subject for jokes at old Lady Mountmorris’s expense – and the same process was happening in Britain. ‘June 22,’ recorded George Ticknor, ‘I dined with Murray, and had a genuine bookseller dinner, such as Lintot used to give to Pope and Gay and Swift … Those present were two Mr Duncans … Disraeli … Gifford and Campbell. The conversation of such a party could not be long confined to politics, even on the day when they received full news of the Duke of Wellington’s successes; and after they had drunk his health and Blücher’s, they turned to literary topics as by instinct, and from seven o’clock until twel
ve the conversation never failed or faltered.’

  In London the ambitious Mrs Boehme was still blaming Major Percy and his wretched eagles for ruining her ball. In Edinburgh, where the young Elizabeth Grant was recovering from a broken engagement, Hussar jackets were all the rage. In Crieff, Highlanders’ bonnets – the same bonnets that Magdalene De Lancey had watched disappear out of the Namur gate on the night of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball – were sold out. War was becoming a fashion. But as the tourists flocked across the sea to scavenge among the bones of the battlefield, and Lady Bessborough brought home her son, Fred Ponsonby – one arm useless, an unhealed wound ‘through his body, but otherwise healthy and well’ as his mother cavalierly reported – events on both sides of the Channel were already facing a reluctant Britain with two inescapable questions: against whom – and for what – had she fought Waterloo?

  New Battle Lines

  When the news of Bonaparte’s escape from Elba first reached Vienna back in March, the allies had planned a concerted campaign in which its various armies would converge on Paris in overwhelming numbers from the north and east to crush French resistance. The pre-emptive strike launched by Bonaparte into Belgium on 15 June had changed the whole configuration of the war, but as Wellington counted the cost of his own victory there were still allied armies marching towards France and still loyal Bonapartist forces in the south and east ready to resist and stretch out the fighting deep into July.

  Even for Wellington the campaign as opposed to the battle did not end with Waterloo and 18 June – the Prussian and allied armies had to march in parallel through France, uncertain of what lay ahead, unsure of the temper of the people, in the dark as to where Bonaparte was – and at Cambrai the British met their first show of resistance. ‘We had collected what ladders and ropes we could find in the farm houses,’ William Wheeler, as irrepressibly jaunty as ever, wrote home on the 25th, ‘then we began splicing to enable us to scale the wall if necessary. A flag of truce was sent to the Town but they were fired at, which caused them to return, and a ball had passed through the Trumpeter’s cap. We were now ready for storming and were only waiting the order to advance.’

  For soldiers who had fought their way up through Spain, Cambrai was routine stuff, and under cover of their field pieces they pushed their trench works close up to the walls and fixed their scaling ladders in place. A more resolute garrison might still have a bloody day of it, but with the regular troops fleeing to the citadel and ‘the shopkeepers to their shops’, wall, gate and town were soon in British hands. We ‘let in the remainder of the brigade, formed and advanced in the great square. We were as was usual, received by the people with vivas, many of whom had forgot to wash the powder off their lips caused by biting off the cartridges when they were firing at us from the wall.’

  There had not been much in the way of fighting – the worst incident came that night, when six of the battalion ‘fell in with a barrel of gunpowder’, blowing themselves up when a corporal, already so drunk that he thought it was a brandy cask, fired into it to make a bung hole – but Cambrai offered an interesting preview of the peculiar problems that peace would land at Wellington’s feet. On the day after the siege the army had halted while Louis XVIII – ‘His pottle belly Majesty … the Sir John Falstaff of France’ – had arrived to forgive and forget the errant affections of his ‘beloved subjects’, and a sardonic soldiery stood by while Bonapartists turned royalist to receive ‘their father and their king with tears of joy’, and old Louis le Désiré ‘blubbered over them like a big girl … called them his children, told them a long rigmarole of nonsense about France, and his family, and his heart, and about their hearts, how he had always remembered them in his prayers, and I don’t know what’. What the papers will not mention, Wheeler told his family, was that the 4th Division and a brigade of Hanoverian Huzzars were ‘in readiness within half a mile of this faithful city, and if the loyal citizens had insulted their king we should have bayoneted every Frenchman in the place. The people well knew this, and this will account for the sudden change in their loyalty … from their Idol Napoleon (properly named) the Great, to an old bloated poltroon.’

  It was crucial at this stage that the duke had Louis under his wing, because whatever the common soldier might think of him, Wheeler’s fat, blubbering ‘Old Bungy’ and a moderate French government represented Wellington’s best hope of peace. It was still not clear whether Paris would fight or surrender to the allies, but as the British continued their advance down through northern France, Wellington insisted on paying for everything his army needed, determined to do all he could to avoid bloodshed or inflame resentment against his client king.

  On their flank, however, it had been a very different story and when the provisional government in Paris surrendered without a battle, Blücher’s Prussians entered the city not just as conquerors but avengers. In a letter from Brussels to his brother-in-law in London, George Stonestreet had cheerfully reported Blücher’s hopes of a Parisian Rape of the Sabines, and short of wholesale rapine Blücher was ready to make good his threat, ransacking the city for the art treasures plundered over twenty years of French conquest, threatening to blow the bridge named after Bonaparte’s victory over the Prussians at Jena, and treating Paris and Parisians with a brutal, Hunnish contempt that – as he was not slow to point out – was no more than payback for the humiliations and ravages France had inflicted on German lands. ‘They’ – the French government – the Paris-born Duke of Devonshire wrote to Miss Mary Berry on 2 August, ‘think everything going as ill as possible for the king & for France; they are incensed with the Prussians who extort immense sums of money & when the Prefets refuse fill their houses with soldiers – they have seized upon the models of the frontier towns & indeed the whole collection at the Invalides, and they are packed up and some gone to Berlin … At the Louvre they have taken about thirty pictures, some by Rubens … & more are coming down every day – having begun there is no knowing where they are to stop.’

  It was a very different Paris and a very different occupation from that of the year before, but with Lady Caroline Lamb following the army down for one last exhibitionist fling, and Sergeant Lawrence of the 40th wooing a young woman who had a market stall near their encampment, and Louis le Désiré turning into Louis l’Inevitable, the city did its best to rekindle the mood of 1814. ‘The most ridiculous and most characteristic thing is a ballet at the opera and the excessive applause it has,’ Devonshire told Mary Berry1; ‘the story is the Battle of Waterloo, the scene Paris, the Imperial guards beaten come back and inform the national guards of their disaster, a young lady hears her lover is killed, but an English officer arrives with him having saved his life, upon which tout danse apropos de tout, white lilies and plenty of Scotchmen are introduced which puts the audience into raptures.’

  If there was anything needed to confirm Britain’s and Wellington’s prestige in France, to add to the lustre of the Waterloo laurels that had been so successfully filched from under Prussian noses, it came in the middle of July with the news that Bonaparte had surrendered to a British man o’ war off Rochefort. He had finally left Paris just days ahead of Louis XVIII and the allied cavalry, and moving only with his immediate entourage had travelled incognito down to the coast, hoping to beat the British blockade and a Prussian rope and escape by frigate to America.

  It had taken him just four days to reach Rochefort, but it was not long before word of his presence there was leaked, and with contrary winds and Captain Maitland’s blockading squadron waiting off the coast, surrender was only a matter of time. He had hoped at first that he would be able to negotiate terms for his exile but Maitland was having none of it, and on 15 July the Emperor threw himself on the mercy of ‘the most powerful, the most constant, and the most generous of his enemies’, as he wrote to the Prince Regent, and gave himself up to Captain Maitland and the Bellerophon.

  It was the end of an age – not with a bang but a whimper, not on the battlefield but in the cabin of
the old Billy Ruffian – and for all the relief that the Tiger was finally caged, his old capital still remained on a knife edge. Through the summer months, allied troops continued to pour into France to batten on the French exchequer, and with the arrest and execution of Marshal Ney and the launch of the ‘White Terror’ against the surviving rump of loyal Bonapartists, the pre-Waterloo Paris of 1814 and the exemplary Treaty of Paris that had ended the war might have belonged to a different era.

  Even the duke’s immense prestige took a knocking – when British engineers dismantled the four bronze horses of St Mark’s from their triumphal arch he was booed at the theatre – but the change of mood was inevitable. After the Hundred Days and fresh hecatombs of dead at Ligny, Quatre Bras and Waterloo the largesse of 1814 was never going to be repeated, and between a deep Prussian resentment that Prussia had not got its full dues then and a suspicion that they were going to be shafted again, the situation was ripe for a settlement that would undo all the good of the first generous treaty.

  There were serious, and potentially combustible, political differences between the allies which went well beyond the question of art works, but for liberal Britain watching from home the shameful thing was that the differences were not as great as they ought to have been. In all the negotiations over France’s future, Castlereagh’s and Wellington’s would certainly be the voices of moderation against wild Prussian talk of dismemberment and extinction, but for all the arguing over the size of reparations and length of occupation or the number of French fortresses to be destroyed or the scale and detail of border changes, peace would reveal that parliamentary Britain and her autocratic allies had fought the Battle of Waterloo for much the same reasons.