Went the Day Well?

by David Crane

  It fed off and fed into other national myths, of course, myths that went back to the Henrician Reformation and beyond – myths about the apostolic foundation of her ancient, Erastian Church, about the uniqueness of her laws, the uniqueness of her national character and historic freedoms – but these were specifically English rather than British beliefs. For more than three hundred years these fantasies had provided generations of historians with their unexamined premises and generations of William Wheelers with their invincible sense of national superiority, and Waterloo was an extension of these to a wider Britain, a reconfiguration of ancient myths to meet the demands of a new imperial age and a new British destiny.

  No one is likely to read contemporary and nineteenth-century British accounts of the battle and learn that it was Dutch initiative that secured the crossroads at Quatre Bras; no one is going to hear much of the courage with which the allies fought, or the overwhelming impact of the Prussians’ arrival, or that British troops scarcely numbered more than one tenth of all the soldiers on the field; no one is going to hear, either, of the allied dead in Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte – or probably hear of Papelotte at all – but what one is going to hear, broadening and extending English myths of superiority to embrace a more inclusive sense of identity, is a hymn to Britain. That great mythologiser of Scottish identity, Walter Scott, had already celebrated the fundamental ‘Britishness’ of Wellington’s Peninsular army, and his ‘Field of Waterloo’ was an evocation of the same ideal, a vision of ancient ‘Albion’, ‘Erin’ and ‘Alba’ – ‘brethren in arms, rivals in renown’ – united under one banner and under the common title of ‘BRITON’ – one indivisible ‘Island Empress’, ‘one race of Adam’s offspring’ – one country – ‘my Country!’ as Scott proudly claims it,

  Period of honour as of woes,

  What bright careers ’twas thine to close!

  Mark’d on the roll of blood what names

  To Briton’s memory, and to Fame’s

  Laid there their last immortal claims!

  Thou saw’st in seas of gore expire

  Redoubted PICTON’S soul of fire,

  Saw’st in the mingled carnage lie

  All that of PONSONBY could die,

  DE LANCEY change Love’s bridal wreath –

  For laurels from the hand of Death

  Saw’st gallant MILLER’S failing eye

  Still bent where Albion’s banners lie,

  And CAMERON in the shock of steel,

  Die like the offspring of Lochiel;

  And generous GORDON ’mid the strife

  Fall while he watch’d his leader’s life –

  Ah! Though her guardian angel’s shield

  Fenced Britain’s hero through the field,

  Fate not less her power made known,

  Through his friends’ hearts to pierce his own!’

  It was a difficult balancing act that Scottish patriots had to perform, because for all the pride and the deep, Romantic consciousness of ‘Scottishness’ in the way writers such as Scott, Charlotte Waldie or Joanna Baillie responded to the battle, it was a consciousness that came with one eye firmly fixed on the other side of the border. There was a proprietorial thrill in Antwerp and Brussels that the Highlander was the cleanest, best-behaved and most popular of the troops billeted on the Belgians, but, somehow, in the mere fact of the claim lurked an uneasy and half-submerged awareness that Scotland in some way still needed to prove itself to England. ‘Let honour be paid where it is so justly due,’ wrote Charlotte Waldie after Quatre Bras, where so many of those ‘hardy sons of Caledon’ she had claimed as her countrymen only a day before, lay dead; ‘Let England be sensible of the vast debt of gratitude she owes them; and let the names of those who perished there be enrolled in the long list of her heroes.’

  Charlotte Waldie would not be disappointed – when Wellington was asked to name the bravest man in his army, he nominated a Macdonell from Glengarry and a Graham from Ulster – and out of the war with France and Waterloo a new British identity was taking shape. Only fifty years before, two uniformed Scottish officers had been booed out of a London theatre simply for being Scottish, and now after the heroics of Quatre Bras and Waterloo it would be a moot point whether Walter Scott or the Highland regiments had done more to alter the way in which England saw Scotland or Scotland saw itself. ‘Towards the end of the year the Forty-Second [The Black Watch] returned to England,’ recalled James Nasmyth – the same young lad who had watched the defiant march of the freed French prisoners only the year before – ‘and in the beginning of 1816 they set out on their march towards Edinburgh.’2 The crowds had been so immense that it took them two hours to make their way up the High Street towards the castle, and as Nasmyth and his parents and sisters waited, it was only the rolling cheers, the glint of bayonets and ‘the tattered colours riddled with bullets’ that marked the ‘red-coats’ path through the seething, crying, hand-shaking masses who had come out to welcome them. ‘At last they passed,’ Colonel Dick at their head, ‘the pipers and drums playing a Highland march; and the Forty-Second slowly entered the Castle. It was perhaps the most extraordinary scene ever witnessed in Edinburgh.’

  Here was Scott’s vision made flesh – Highland warrior and British redcoat one and the same thing – and if it was part myth, and Tory myth at that (everyone from Lady Frances Shelley to Bonaparte still happily used the word ‘English’ as if ‘English’ and ‘British’ were interchangeable) the fact is that even before Waterloo, Union was a reality within Britain’s army. In the last decades of the eighteenth century the influence of the Scottish Lord Bute had been met with a good John Bull-Wilkes-ite backlash in England, but even with Culloden fresh in the memory and the lingering association of Jacobitism and Catholicism still there, the army had remained the one institution that was ‘British’ in any real sense of the word: the one place in the collective life of the country where a Welsh Picton, a Scottish Cameron, an Irish Ponsonby and an Anglo-American De Lancey could fight under the same banner.

  If this was true of Protestant Scotland, it was more importantly so of a Roman Catholic Ireland that for twenty years had been an object of suspicion to an England in fear of rebellion and French invasion. It was remarkable that even after the hatred and bloodshed of the uprising of 1798 only one Irish regiment had to be disbanded, and if the British government and people needed any assurance of the loyalty of the Catholic Irish soldier it was lying there at the crossroads of the Ohain and Brussels roads and on almost every yard of the battlefield.

  In the most simple sense the impact of Waterloo here is obvious – England no longer had to worry about Ireland as the historic target of a French or Spanish invasion – but its more intangible effects can be only guessed at. For a generation the English establishment as a whole had been thawing in its historical opposition to Catholicism, and yet it is impossible to imagine that the heroism of the Irish soldier – the legendary reputation of the 88th in the Peninsula, the 27th at Waterloo, the mere title, again, of Ponsonby’s Union Brigade – and the rough-and-ready coexistence of seemingly conflicting religious and national loyalties under one flag did not in some way ease the passage towards eventual Catholic emancipation.3

  This had less to with any overt patriotism – Wellington would have laughed at the notion – than the fact that the army, certainly the army of the ordinary soldier, was a world of its own, with its own rituals, its own codes of honour and its own loyalties. For the tough veteran of the Peninsula such as William Wheeler, the first loyalties were to each other rather than to any abstract notions of country, and yet here again something seems to have happened at Waterloo, some shift in the relationship of the country and her soldiers, some reciprocal awareness of shared identity, that signalled the beginning of the end of Britain’s long, historic distrust of her standing army.

  It would be a mistake to simplify or sentimentalise this – sixty years later the mother of the future Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William ‘Wully’ Robert
son, could still wish her son dead rather than a redcoat – but this does not invalidate the sense of a genuine shift in the triangular relationship of army, government and people. Over the succeeding, troubled decades the army would continue in its old civil role, but at the end of a war that at its peak might have seen as many as one in five of the population in uniform of some kind, a conflict in which militiamen chosen by lottery increasingly fed into the regular army – in which militia units notoriously sided with bread rioters rather than the authorities – the disbanded soldier of Waterloo was no longer the ‘Piccadilly Butcher’, or the traditional butt of popular satire, or the detritus of the assizes, but boys and men who belonged to the communities from which they came.

  Wellington might have wished it otherwise – he would have given anything for his incomparable, battle-hardened Peninsular army that had fought its way through Spain – but he had to fight with what he was given and not with what he wanted. At the time of Bonaparte’s escape from Elba, the bulk of Wellington’s old troops had been still in Canada or lying dead at New Orleans, and in their place he had an army of second battalions and raw recruits, of plough boys like Keppel’s ‘Peasants’ who should never have been allowed anywhere near a battlefield, or Hamilton’s Scots Greys who in twenty years of war had never seen a shot fired in anger.

  The ‘infamous army’ that fought at Waterloo was probably more representative of the country than any British army before it, and if a Waterloo Medal and two years seniority might be all the common soldier had to show for it then that only tells half of the story. He would have to wait another century and another war to get his equal due, but in the letters and diaries of 1815, in the testimony of officers and the admiration of those tending the wounded, in the appeals and collections raised in parishes, in the sermons preached across the country and the triumphant pride of the tourists who flocked to Belgium, we glimpse a Britain awakening to the nature of its responsibilities and debt. ‘The ferocious, the imbecile, the melancholy, the clean, and the unclean, are all blended together,’ one naval surgeon, Dr James Veitch, wrote in 1815, protesting at the appalling conditions at one military asylum; ‘All is chaos and confusion, and decidedly exhibits a want of proper system in the treatment of men whose suffering gives them a strong claim to attention from the benevolence, humanity, and generosity of that country, in whose service their diseases have been contracted.’

  It went further than a mere sense of obligation or pride, though, because if such a thing as ‘Britain’ did exist anywhere it was on the field of Waterloo with the heirs to Crécy, Agincourt, Poitiers and Blenheim the glue that held it together.4 ‘My LORD,’ a baffled William Cobbett wrote in an open letter to Castlereagh, after a bizarre brush with a villainous-looking crowd of gypsies who had given him his first news of Waterloo: ‘at the first view of them, I thought of nothing but the robberies which they constantly commit upon us … but upon nearer approach to them, I perceived the whole caravan’ – the ruffian men, the ferocious, pipe-smoking women, even the ‘poor asses’ – were all decked out in boughs and sprigs of laurel. ‘Somewhat staggered by this symbol of victory,’ Cobbett had passed them by in silence until he came across a particularly ‘ill-looking’ straggler who, ‘with two half-starved dogs, performed the office of rearguard. I asked him the meaning of the laurel boughs, and he informed me, that they were hoisted on account of the “glorious victory obtained by the Duke of Wellington over Bony”, that they were furnished them by a good gentleman, in a black coat and big white wig, whose house they had passed the day before … and who had given them several pots of ale, wherein to drink the Duke’s health – “And to be sure,” added he, “it is glorious news, and we may now hope to see the gallon loaf a grate again, as ’twas in my old father’s time”.’

  ‘History … is boredom interrupted by war,’ wrote Derek Walcott and – spurious or genuine, and it was simultaneously both things – it was war that had kindled the fragmented, often inward-looking, disparate communities that made up the country into a vivid, collective life that was national and British. ‘Will these ladies say that we are nothing to them?’ De Quincey wrote of the Victory Mails and the healing alchemy of war that could unite strangers glimpsed in a passing carriage in a common bond of kinship. ‘Oh, no; they will not say that. They cannot deny – they do not deny – that for this night they are our sisters: for twelve hours to come – we on the outside – gentle or simple, scholar or illiterate servant – have the honour to be their brothers. These poor women again, who stop to gaze upon us with delight at the entrance of Barnet … do you mean to say that they are washer-women and charwomen? Oh, my poor friend, you are quite mistaken; they are nothing of the kind. I assure you, they stand in a higher rank: for this one night they feel themselves by birthright to be daughters of England, and answer to no humbler title.’

  ‘The English name stands so high from Ostend [to] here, that it makes one feel proud,’ Caroline Lamb wrote home from Brussels at the beginning of July 1815, and after the bitter years of Peterloo, the repressive Six Acts and the Cato Street Conspiracy the whole country was again ready to share in that pride. In the early 1830s, Whig memories were still long enough to deny Captain William Siborne the money to complete his great model of the battlefield of Waterloo, but as Britain came out of the long political crisis of the post-war decades and the Chartist movement for reform came and went without bloodshed, and a suitably sanitised Lifeguardsman Shaw took his place in the pantheon of national heroes, mid-nineteenth-century Britain found itself able to look back on Waterloo through its Victorian-tinted glasses with pretty well unalloyed complacency.

  It had reason to do so of course, because Benjamin Haydon was right – the efforts of the British nation had been ‘gigantic’ – and the nation had more than reaped its rewards. Winston Churchill would later declare that the ‘Age of Waterloo’ only finally ended with the new century, but even if you were a Briton living only thirty-odd years into that age – sixteen years or so into Victoria’s reign – with the memories of the Great Exhibition still sharp, a navy that ruled the waves sailing unchallenged through the Black Sea towards Sevastopol, and an army – under the command of a man who had lost his arm at Wellington’s side at Waterloo – about to give autocratic Russia a bloody nose, then you would have been forgiven for thinking that God’s plans for his chosen nation were working out just as He intended.

  War has always been the great catalyst for change, the ultimate evolutionary dynamic, and the Napoleonic wars were no different from any other in that respect. The peculiar set of circumstances that made nineteenth-century Britain the world’s only superpower were already in place at the end of the eighteenth century, but twenty years of conflict involving the collaboration of government and private initiative, the stimulation of industry, the improvement of the infrastructure, the dockyard development of mass-production techniques, naval dominance, the emergence of men of talent and not birth in public life, had all accelerated the process, leaving Britain not just in a position to finance the coalitions that defeated France but to make the ensuing peace a Pax Britannica.

  There had also been something deeply in tune with the national psyche, that when Bonaparte finally surrendered it was to a Royal Navy man o’ war, Captain Maitland’s Billy Ruffian, doing what the navy had done for twenty years, but it was Waterloo that satisfied national feeling in a way that only Trafalgar could begin to match.5 There had been something slightly unsatisfactory about the capitulation of Bonaparte’s Paris in 1814 to the Emperor Alexander and an allied force that had no British presence, and for all the dismay at the escape from Elba, the Hundred Days and Waterloo had almost come as a second chance, an opportunity to rectify that wrong and reclaim the military high ground and prestige in a war that British gold had financed, British resolve had maintained and Britain’s navy had done so much to win.

  A victory of this scale comes at a price, though, because the only thing more dangerous in the long run than a battle lost is a battle won. In t
he wake of its disastrous defeats by Napoleon, Prussia had put in place major military reforms, but Britain had won at Waterloo and in 1853, as British troops waded ashore in the Crimea under commanders who could not command and with equipment that had not changed and a commissariat that was useless and a medical service that was non-existent, the country was about to discover the price of forty years of resting on its laurels.

  It was the same story with Nelson’s navy – it would simply take the country another sixty years and the Battle of Jutland in 1916 to realise it – and this complacency ran deep through national life. It is one of the sad paradoxes of British military and naval history that the influence of her two greatest commanders should have had such baleful effects on their successors, but an even greater paradox is that Churchill’s Age of Waterloo – an age of gold that, in popular mythology, had begun with the triumph of British liberties over Napoleonic tyranny – could end in the years before the Great War with the Britain that in 1789 had been the most politically advanced nation in Europe locked in combat with a House of Lords as bitterly resistant to change or reform as it had been in 1832.

  ‘What was most impressive in that battle was England,’ Victor Hugo insisted in his great digression on Waterloo in Les Misérables, ‘English steadfastness and resolution, English blood’, and above all Englishmen. It galled Hugo that the credit that properly belonged to the ‘people’ had gone to Wellington, but what irritated him even more was that ‘they’ did not seem to mind; that ‘in spite of their revolution of 1688, and our own of 1789’, they were still so hopelessly wedded to notions of hierarchy, heredity and ‘feudal illusions’, so resolutely determined to ‘think of themselves as a nation, not as a people’, so willing to accept subordination – the lash for the soldier, contempt for the workman – that they were incapable of even wanting their just rewards.