by David Crane
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List of Illustrations
Image 1: The Duke of Wellington by Sir Thomas Lawrence (Private Collection/Photo © Mark Fiennes/Bridgeman Images)
Image 2: Napoleon Bonaparte by Robert Lefebvre, oil on canvas, 1809 (Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images)
Image 3: Blücher by Sir Thomas Lawrence, oil on canvas, 1814 (Supplied by Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014)
Images 4 and 5: Magdalene De Lancey; William De Lancey, from A Week At Waterloo 1815, John Murray, London 1906 (© The British Library Board)
Image 6: Charles and Mary Lamb by Francis Stephen Cary, oil on canvas, 1834 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Image 7: Rodel Harbour by William Daniell (© RCAHMS. Licensor www.rcahms.gov.uk)
Image 8: William Hazlitt, replica by William Bewick, 1825 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Image 9: James Henry Leigh Hunt by Samuel Laurence, oil on canvas, c.1837 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Image 10: Benjamin Haydon, engraving by W. Read (© Mary Evans Picture Library)
Image 11: Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem by Benjamin Haydon, oil on canvas
Image 12: Thomas Chalmers by David Octavius Hill, and Robert Adamson, calotype, 1843–8 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Image 13: Lord Cochrane, from a picture by P. E. Stroehling (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
Image 14: Shaw the Life Guards-man’s heroic attack on the French Cuirassiers, from History of the French Revolution, and of the wars produced by that event by Christopher Kelly, London 1820–22 (© The British Library Board)
Image 15: The Battle of Waterloo, 18th June 1815 by Denis Dighton, oil on canvas (Private Collection/Bridgeman Images)
Image 16: Colonel James MacDonell by Henry Raeburn, oil on canvas (courtesy Museum of the Isles)
Image 17: Closing the Gates at Hougoumont, 1815 by Robert Gibb, oil on canvas, 1903 (© National Museums Scotland)
Image 18: Elizabeth Fenning (photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Image 19: Edmund Wheatley, A Self-Portrait, from The Wheatley Diary: A Journal and Sketch-book kept during the Peninsular War and the Waterloo Campaign (ed. Christopher Hibbert)
Image 20: Distraining for Rent by Sir David Wilkie, oil on panel, 1815 (courtesy Google Art Project)
Image 21: Fare Thee Well by George Cruikshank (Private Collection/Bridgeman Images)
Image 22: Frederick Ponsonby and Colin Campbell by Jan Willem Pieneman, 1821 (courtesy English Heritage/Mary Evans)
Image 23: Lady Caroline Lamb by Sir Thomas Lawrence, oil on canvas (© Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, UK/Bridgeman Images)
Image 24: The Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch, 1822 by Sir David Wilkie, oil on wood, 1822 (Apsley House, The Wellington Museum, London, UK/Bridgeman Images)
Image 25: The Duke of Wellington describing the field of Waterloo to King George IV by Benjamin Haydon, oil on canvas, 1844 (© Royal Hospital Chelsea, London, UK)
Image 26: Napoleon on board HMS Bellerophon by Sir William Quiller Orchardson, colour litho (Private Collection/© Look and Learn/Bridgeman Images)
Image 27: The Triumph of Arthur (1769–1852) Duke of Wellington by James Ward (© Royal Hospital Chelsea, London, UK/Bridgeman Images)
I
mages 28 and 29: Injured soldiers by Charles Bell, watercolour, 1815 (courtesy Wellcome Library, London)
Acknowledgements
The best part of writing any book is the research, and I am especially grateful to everyone who has helped in tracking down material for me and patiently answering questions. The source material for a book of this kind is inevitably widely scattered, and there is nowhere – from the Seallam Visitor Centre on the Isle of Harris and the Highland Archive Centre in Inverness down to the West Sussex County Record Office on the South Coast at Chichester – where I have not met with more tolerance and kindness than anyone who was as unfamiliar with English Parish Bastardy Records as he was with Gaelic genealogy had any right to expect. The endnotes will, I hope, underline the extent of this debt. The passages from the sermon of Thomas Chalmers are quoted here with the kind permission of New College, The University of Edinburgh. My thanks, also, to the West Sussex County Record Office, to the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York University and to the Library of the Religious Society of Friends for allowing me to quote from material held in their collections. I am particularly grateful to Lisa McQuillan for her help at the LSF.
It is impossible to exaggerate how much this book owes to all the previous writers on the subject, but, again, I hope the endnotes and bibliography will spell that out. From the moment, almost, that the battle was over both soldiers and civilians recorded their impressions and memories of Waterloo and its aftermath, and two hundred years of argument and counter-argument over every aspect of the battle, campaign and background – military, political, diplomatic, biographical, and social – have left a legacy that would be impossible to escape even if one wanted to do so.
On a more personal note, I would like, as always, to thank all the friends and family who were prepared to talk about this book, read it in draft, point me in the direction of sources and tramp over the battlefield with me. I would particularly like to thank Colin Young for his help with some tricky genealogies and, especially, John O’Reilly, who scoured the county archives of southern England, turning up letters and diaries enough to fill another volume.
I am very grateful to everyone at William Collins involved with this book, to Arabella Pike, Kate Tolley, and to Kate Johnson for her patience with a manuscript that cannot have been easy to edit. I would also like to thank Derek Johns, who oversaw its beginning, and Natasha Fairweather its end. Above all, my thanks, as ever, go to Honor for all her help and support. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my mother. She died while I was finishing it so was never required to honour an unlikely promise to read it, but she was very keen on the title.
Picture Section
Wellington: ‘the Genius of the Storm’. ‘By God! I don’t think it would have been done if I had not been there!’
Napoleon Bonaparte: ‘that mighty man of war – the astonishing genius who has filled the world with renown’. Even as Wellington’s army was fighting at Waterloo, London crowds were queuing to see Lefebvre’s portrait.
Marshal ‘Forward’: ‘I should not do justice to my own feelings or to Marshal Blücher and the Prussian army,’ wrote Wellington after the battle, ‘if I did not attribute the successful result of this day to the cordial and timely assistance I received from them.’
A romantic heroine for the Victorian age: Magdalene De Lancey had been married only weeks when she joined her husband in Brussels just days before the battle.
Sir William Howe De Lancey, Wellington’s chief of staff and one of the first men the duke asked for at the outbreak of war.
Mary and Charles Lamb. Nobody has ever been quite sure which of them was looking after which, but not even the mad-house or death would separate them.
Rodel Harbour, the Isle of Harris, in 1815. It was here where Alexander MacLeod had set up his fishery in the 1790s, that Eury MacLeod was brought for questioning when the body of her child was discovered.
‘That singular compound of malice, candour, cowardice, genius, purity, vice, democracy and conceit’ that was the essayist, Bonapartist and follower of the ‘Fancy’, William Hazlitt. Hazlitt was drunk for a month after the news of his hero’s defeat at Waterloo.
J. H. Leigh ‘Examiner’ Hunt: poet, essayist, journalist and hero of the younger generation of Romantics, he had only just been released from prison himself at the time of Bonaparte’s escape from Elba.
Benjamin Haydon, painter, diarist and paranoid suicide. ‘Poor Haydon,’ exclaimed Elizabeth Barrett after his death. ‘Think what an agony life was to him to be thus constituted. Tell me if Laocoon’s anguish was not an infant’s sleep compared to this.’
Benjamin Haydon’s Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. The painting with which Haydon hoped to do for British art what Wellington had done for British arms. Both Haydon and his model for the centurion in the foreground, the Life-Guardsman Sammons, were too excited by events in Belgium to concentrate on the work in hand.
Dr Thomas Chalmers, evangelical churchman, social reformer, ecclesiastical wreckingball and one of the great preachers of the age.
Thomas Cochrane, naval hero, radical, liberator and perennial thorn in the side of Admiralty and Government. Cochrane spent the day of Waterloo in the King’s Bench prison.
Life-Guardsman Shaw, pugilist, swordsman and popular hero. His last moments took their place among the legends of Waterloo.
The Battle of Waterloo. There had been greater and longer battles during the Napoleonic Wars, but never one where so many men had fought over so constricted a field.
Colonel Macdonell: ‘the bravest man in the army’. ‘Ah, but you don’t know Macdonell,’ Wellington remarked when doubts were expressed that Hougoumont could be held.
The North Gate, Hougoumont: ‘The success of the Battle of Waterloo,’ Wellington would later insist, ‘depended on the closing of the gates of Hougoumont.’
Eliza Fenning, poisoner or romantic victim? In the weeks after Waterloo, her condemned cell in Newgate became the first post-war battleground between the forces of reaction and change.
Edmund Wheatley, natural-born fighter and philosopher: a self-portrait. ‘It is an awful situation,’ Wheatley wrote, ‘to stand with a sharp-edged instrument waiting for the signal to snap the thread of existence of those we never saw, never spoke to, never offended.’
Distraining for Rent by David Wilkie. Its prettified handling of economic misery and eviction, in a year when the Highland Clearances were in full swing, made it one of the stars of the 1815 Royal Academy exhibition.
There were three great men ruined in 1815, insisted Byron: Bonaparte, Byron and Brummel. As Byron takes his last farewell of England in Cruikshank’s cartoon, Lady Byron, the incarnation of the country that had once worshipped and then turned on him, stands jealous guard on the cliffs of Dover.
Peninsular veterans: Sir Colin Campbell and Frederick Ponsonby (right), one of Wellington’s ablest and most popular cavalry officers. It was a moot point in Brussels whether his wounds or the nursing by his sister, Lady Caroline Lamb, constituted the greatest danger to Ponsonby’s life.
Lady Caroline Lamb. While her brother Frederick Ponsonby lay badly wounded on the field of Waterloo, Caroline Lamb was putting the last feverish touches to Glenarvon, the notorious roman à clef that would bring about her final exile from society.
David Wilkie’s The Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch, 1822. Commissioned by the Duke of Wellington, Wilkie’s painting is a brilliant celebration of the idea of Britain united by the triumph and grief of Waterloo.
‘They have ruined my battlefield!’ The Duke of Wellington shows what tourists and the Dutch had left of the field of Waterloo to George IV. When he saw the spot where Uxbridge’s leg was buried, the King burst into tears. One of numerous images of his hero, Wellington, painted by Haydon.
It was a matter of profound national satisfaction that Bonaparte had surrendered to a British man of war. Not with a bang but a whimper. The British had been unfairly blamed for Bonaparte’s escape from E
lba, and they were taking no risks the second time around. Here Napoleon begins the long journey into exile that would end only with St Helena and death.
The Triumph of Arthur Duke of Wellington. James Ward’s celebration of Waterloo, an astonishing allegorical confection showing the duke borne triumphantly in a chariot over the same monsters of revolution and Napoleonic tyranny that would fill De Quincey’s opium-induced dreams. The painting is a sketch for a vast, now mercifully lost, commission celebrating the battle.
‘Johnnie, how can we let this pass,’ the distinguished surgeon Charles Bell wrote to his brother-in-law when he heard the news of Waterloo: ‘Here is such an occasion of seeing gunshot wounds come to our very door! Let us go!’ Above and next, two of his remarkable illustrations of the work he carried out on both allied and French wounded soldiers in the days after Waterloo: Two British soldiers suffering from facial wounds.
A soldier of the King’s German Legion, called Voultz, who remarkably survived not just the surgeon’s knife but also tetanus to make a full recovery.
Index
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