by Foster, R E
Contents
Title page
Abbreviations
Preface and Acknowledgements
Introduction: Perceptions and Perspectives
1 Before Waterloo: Battles for Recognition 1769–1815
2 Waterloo: The Battle of Giants
3 The Battle of Posterity: Opening Shots 1815–1818
4 Heroes and Villains: Wellington, Waterloo and other Battles 1819–1832
5 Wellington and Waterloo Despatched 1832–1852?
6 Victorians Remember: Wellington and Waterloo Reassessed 1852–1901
7 Battling into Posterity: Wellington and Waterloo 1901–2015
Select Bibliography
Notes
Plate Section
Copyright
Abbreviations
Arbuthnot Francis Bamford & 7th Duke of Wellington (eds.), The Journal of Mrs Arbuthnot 1820–1832.
Creevey Sir Herbert Maxwell (ed.), The Creevey Papers.
Chad 7th Duke of Wellington (ed.), The Conversations of the 1st Duke of Wellington with George William Chad.
Croker Louis J. Jennings (ed.), The Croker Papers.
Ellesmere Alice, Countess of Strafford (ed.), Personal Reminiscences of the 1st Duke of Wellington by Francis, the 1st Earl of Ellesmere.
Fraser Sir William Fraser, Words on Wellington.
ODNB H. C. G. Matthew & Brian Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
PD Parliamentary Debates.
Shelley Richard Edgcumbe (ed.), The Diary of Frances, Lady Shelley 1818–1873.
Stanhope Philip Henry, 5th Earl Stanhope, Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington 1831–1851.
WD J. Gurwood (ed.), The Despatches of Field-Marshal the Duke of Wellington, KG, during his various campaigns […] from 1799 to 1818.
WP University of Southampton Library, MS 61, Wellington Papers.
WS 2nd Duke of Wellington (ed.), Supplementary Despatches and Memoranda of Field-Marshal Arthur Duke of Wellington, KG.
Preface and Acknowledgements
As a young boy, the first serious history book I bought was John Naylor’s Waterloo. At senior school, in Taunton, I was in Blackdown House, which took its name from the Somerset hills nearby. Surmounting them is a triangular obelisk to the Iron Duke overlooking the town from which he took his title. Unthinkingly, at home, on my parents’ farm, I daily donned the footwear indelibly associated with his name. In the early 1980s, having completed my undergraduate degree at Southampton, I was lucky enough to be the recipient of a major state studentship from the British Academy. Serendipitously, the Wellington Papers were then in the process of being deposited in the University’s Hartley Library. The resulting doctoral thesis, on the Duke’s Lord Lieutenancy of Hampshire, appeared in book form in 1990. By then, I had embarked upon a teaching career, one which included withdrawing an application I had submitted to Wellington College: if you are not careful, you can become obsessive. Twenty years later, however, my wife indulged me, by taking me to Brussels to mark a personal milestone. This allowed me to realise a long-standing ambition in visiting the iconic campaign sites of 1815. It is no exaggeration to say that the present book originated from what I saw and felt that day. I am grateful to Alan Lindsey who guided us with such informed enthusiasm on that occasion.
My day at Waterloo, on 23 October 2011, crystallised thoughts that had been lurking in my mind for some time. I did not want to write an analysis of the battle or a guide to the field. Neither did I aspire to produce a biography of the Duke. Readers will find that my brief account of the campaign occurs in chapter two, whilst the Duke dies at the end of chapter five! Insofar as it is possible with such well-trodden paths, I wanted to take a different tack. Specifically, with the bicentenary of Waterloo imminent, I wanted to discover how the intertwined stories of the battle and its victor had been perceived in the intervening 200 years. The present book is primarily an exploration of reputations and memories. I am grateful to The History Press for having the confidence in me to carry it out, especially Jo de Vries, head of publishing, and Rebecca Newton, my project editor.
Research for those who are not tenured academics is hugely dependent upon the support of others. It is no exaggeration to say that I could not even have contemplated writing the current book without the exponential advance of online resources over the past decade. I have been enormously indebted to Project Gutenberg and the American University Online Library: they have made available in seconds many essential titles which would have been difficult or prohibitively expensive to obtain. No less a debt is due to those who have seen fit to digitise Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates and a portion of the British Library’s newspaper archives for the nineteenth century. The digital archive of The Times has proved similarly indispensable.
My obligation to more traditional repositories remains, first and foremost, that to Professor Chris Woolgar and his colleagues in the Hartley Library at Southampton responsible for its Special Collections. I would also like to thank the friendly, helpful staff of the Templer Research Centre at the National Army Museum. Closer to home, I have had full value for my Council Tax payments by making regular use of the reference section in Salisbury City Library and Wiltshire Libraries’ online facilities. Helen Cunliffe has endeared herself as an assiduous school librarian in regularly demonstrating to me the truth that one should never discard old volumes.
As the writing has progressed, Phil Badham has tolerated my technophobia with unfailing patience. In like vein, Sam Cox of Wiltshire Graphic Design has been generous with help and advice for the maps, whilst Melanie Jeffery has promptly answered queries relating to sources in French. I am also grateful to those who have read and criticised part or whole of successive chapter drafts: Isabella Dodkins, David Jones (whose sharp eye and sense of grammar and style have saved me from many infelicities of both), Dr Richard A. Gaunt of Nottingham University, and Professor Mike Clark of Southampton University. I am especially indebted to the latter for several stimulating conversations about methodology and the nature of memory. At a late stage, Dr Rory Muir very generously read the entire text and diplomatically highlighted a number of egregious errors. I regret that the first volume of his monumental biography of Wellington appeared in print too late for me to be able to use.
My children, Susanna and Edmund, have acted as harsh and unrestrained critics, in a way that only one’s offspring can. By far my greatest debt, however, in this project as in life, is to my wife, Michaela. She has accepted, with typical generosity, my unreasonable requests for her to be reader, creator of maps and financial support. She may not believe that I am more consumed by her than with the Duke and his battle, but it is true. The errors and faults of the book are mine; any merits, and the dedication, are hers.
Waterloo Day, 2013.
Introduction
Perceptions and
Perspectives
In the parish of North Newton with St Michael Church in Somerset where I grew up, there is a memorial to Sir John Slade (1762–1859). Slade joined the 10th Light Dragoons in 1790. By April 1809 he was a Major-General. Briefly, from January–March 1811, he commanded the cavalry in Wellington’s army in the Peninsular War. Aficionados of that conflict know him by his sobriquet, ‘Black Jack’. Both scholars and writers of historical fiction are agreed that he was ‘as incompetent an officer as ever was placed in command of a brigade of cavalry, and a coward, too, by common consent’. The Duke sent him back to England, a prime example of the sort of officers that frightened him more than they did the enemy. Slade’s memorial in Norton Fitzwarren church says that he ‘descended to the Tomb full of years and universally respected’. The epitaph could only possibly be true because Wellington had predeceased him.1
Slade, consequently, was not with the Duke at Waterloo. He thereby missed being part of an action that many immediately hailed as analogous to being with Henry V at Agincourt almost exactly 400 years before. As soon as he heard the news, Lord Stewart was ‘deeply mortified that my Lot did not lead me to share a part in the splendid triumph that has added new lustre to the British Name’. The passage of years only served to reinforce such feelings for those under arms but not actually at Mont St Jean on 18 June 1815. Major-General Peter Fyers saw fifty-three years’ service in the Royal Artillery and could boast of being known to both Nelson and William IV: when he died in 1845 it was recorded that, ‘to his unceasing regret’ he had missed Waterloo.2 By then, memorials to both Wellington and Waterloo were seemingly ubiquitous, but where the national Waterloo memorial stands, is a moot point. The imagination of posterity has been captured no less forcibly. Google, to take one ephemeral example, lists over 14,000 results for The Wellington Arms and over 15,000 for The Waterloo Inn. Given his frustration over the ill-discipline arising from the evils of drink amongst his men, and his subsequent fear that beer houses were breeding grounds for sedition, the Duke would have been appalled. Neither would he have been impressed that the most common Internet search for Waterloo today is for Waterloo Road, since 2006 a television drama about a challenging Scottish comprehensive school. If nothing else, it affords an example of how the name of a small Belgian town has become an integral part of British culture; or, as Robert Southey put it in 1816:
A little lowly place,
Obscure till now, when it hath risen to fame,
And given the victory its English name.3
Waterloo also triggered an avalanche of writing: in 1815 alone, there were at least seventy titles relating to it. Sir John Fortescue pointed out a century ago that the many accounts since had been ‘more prolific of new conjectures than of new facts’. Despite what he implied, the essence of many of the conjectures too, was in print within two years of the battle having taken place. There was some truth in Wellington’s 1817 complaint that ‘every creature who could afford it, travelled to the field; and almost everyone who could write, wrote an account’.4 Nor, surely, is it coincidental that it was Philip Guedalla, biographer of the Duke and historian of the Hundred Days, who coined the aphorism that, ‘History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.’ In 1986, Donald Horward’s bibliographical study listed over 2,000 books on the campaign and battle. A search of the forty-eight titles comprising the British Library’s nineteenth-century newspapers online website yields 150,000 results for the ‘Duke of Wellington’ and over half a million for ‘Waterloo’.
Why so many? Even in 1815 the broad outlines of an answer to this question were clear. A British commander and his army had first withstood, and then repulsed, one of the greatest commanders and armies of any age. In doing so, they had epitomised the supposed national virtues of endurance and tenacity. Waterloo also, in its decisiveness, provided an appropriately dramatic final scene to the great drama that was the generation of struggle that had followed the French Revolution. One participant in the battle was therefore right to suggest that, ‘Many a battle had been fought in the Peninsula with as much credit and bravery, but there was a combination of circumstances at Waterloo which gave éclat irresistible.’ Victor Hugo memorably called it the hinge of the nineteenth century.5
Contemporaries, as Wellington had noted, consequently wanted to visit the scene of the action. Viscount Palmerston, Secretary at War, stopped off at Quatre Bras and Waterloo en route from Namur to Brussels on 29 October 1818. With a dose of characteristic cynicism, he reported to his sister how:
by the assistance of a good plan and description and some peasants we met on the ground, we satisfied ourselves completely about Waterloo – walked over the position of our army, picked some bullets out of the orchards of La Haie Sainte and Hougoumont, cut a bundle of sticks at the latter enough to beat [c]lothes with during the rest of our lives, bought [a] French sword which probably never [saw] the battle, and came on here b[y] ½ past 8 this evening.6
Maps, guides, and mementoes of doubtful provenance were already, as they remain, established ingredients of the Waterloo tourist industry.
One early visitor, James Simpson, rejected the suggestion that he was a tourist. He conceived of himself as a pilgrim, for whom visiting the battlefield was a quasi-religious act: ‘The very ground,’ he wrote, ‘was hallowed and it was trod by us with respect and gratitude.’ Even more, however, he insisted he and his fellow travellers were patriots: ‘Multitudes, impelled by an interest which would unworthily be called mere curiosity, crowded the packets to Belgium, eager to see a field so near and so recent, to learn the tale on the spot and to breathe the very air of a region shining with their country’s glory and resounding with their country’s praise.’7 High-minded in the view of Simpson, such feelings could easily degenerate into a baser national chauvinism. Rees Gronow, in his reminiscences of the battle acknowledged as much, and rather unconvincingly denied ‘any share in the vulgar John Bull exultation which glories in having “licked the confounded French.”’ No British contemporary, however, bettered the surgeon Charles Bell in capturing the contradictory emotions of revulsion and horror that was the reality for so many at Waterloo on the one hand, and the tsunami of relief and exultation that greeted news of the victory at home on the other. Bell spent eight days tending casualties of the battle before visiting the scene of it:
The view of the field [he wrote] the gallant stories, the charges, the individual instances of enterprise and valour, recalled me to the sense which the world has of ‘Victory’ and ‘Waterloo’. But this was transient: a glooming, uncontrollable view of human nature is the inevitable consequence of looking upon the whole as I did – as I was forced to do. It is a misfortune to have our sentiments so at variance with the universal sentiment. But there must ever be associated with the horrors of Waterloo, to my eyes, the most shocking signs of woe – to my ear, accents of entreaty, outcry from the manly beast, interrupted by forcible expressions of the dying – and noisome smells.8
Bell, as he recognised, was decidedly untypical of his countrymen in his balancing of the emotions. Waterloo was, and is, remembered less for the blood than the victory. As the historian Denis Richards wrote with dismissive accuracy during a 1952 spat over casualty numbers during the Battle of Britain: ‘Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo: who remembers the casualties?’9 The fact does much to explain why the balance in the unending struggle between those who would see the battlefield as a site of remembrance and those who see it as a tourist attraction (in stark contrast, it might be noted, to the Great War battlefields), has always lain with the latter.
Waterloo, with the passage of time, would also be remembered as much for what it began as for what it ended. Late in life, a former pupil at Kimbolton School recalled that the severe English and boarding master, George Cole, had ordered a half-holiday when news of the victory reached him: ‘There was no more work that day, and though most of us were too young fully to appreciate the effects of the victory, the joy on everyone’s countenance [was] […] sufficient to impress us with the fact that the event was of great and vital importance to the country.’ What that importance consisted of is a theme of the present study. For Sir Edward Creasy, writing in 1851, only weeks after the Great Exhibition had opened, the salient fact was that, ‘No equal number of years can be found, during which science, commerce, and civilisation have advanced so rapidly and so extensively, as has been the case since 1815.’ He judged the peace that Waterloo heralded as the precondition for what he described. For that reason, he continued, it ‘deserves to be regarded by us, not only with peculiar pride, as one of our greatest national victories, but with peculiar gratitude for the repose which it secured for us, and for the greater part of the human race’. For various reasons, however, as will be seen, the celebrations of a great national victory were about to end. Two centuries on, the sober conclusion of the best modern guide to the battlef
ield judges merely that Waterloo ‘was a blood-soaked milestone on the long and tortuous road called progress’.10 But even this is debatable. What Waterloo means has evolved with time; it remains elusive and chameleon-like. Perhaps it is still too soon to tell.
That Waterloo was somehow special, if only for those who were there, can surely be agreed. As Sir William Fraser put it nearly seventy-five years later, ‘Waterloo gave a patent of Nobility to all who were present. So long as Britain shall exist, a man who can trace his ancestry to one who fought at Waterloo will have a position of distinction.’ Whilst Wellington was alive, the distinction was commemorated each 18 June at Apsley House by the dinner he gave to surviving officers. Whilst many will be aware of that event, the ways in which Britons generally remembered Waterloo and those who fought in the battle have attracted far less attention. It is something the present study attempts to rectify. Suffice for the moment to say that the nation, though it lauded Waterloo men far more than the veterans of earlier conflicts, fell well short of what Fraser claimed. Returning home, Captain Cavalié Mercer remembered, with some bitterness, that he and his men had first had to endure several hours off Dover harbour because of bad weather before being ferried ashore by a pilot-gig whose ‘fellows charged us a guinea a-head for thus carrying us about 200 yards’. Many thereafter did, it is true, became local celebrities. Corporal John Dickson, the last survivor of the charge of the Scots Greys who settled in Crail, Fifeshire, spent 18 June 1855 in the coffee room of his local inn, clay pipe in hand, ready to recount his Waterloo story to both habitués and visitors. This was not unique ‘for, be it known, “Waterloo Day” was a high day in the village, kept in ripe memory by the flags flying and the procession of school children, decked in summer attire and gay with flowers, to do honour to “mine host”, whose deeds of valour were on every tongue’.11