Wellington and Waterloo
Page 2
Not all, however, could boast as distinguished a service record as Dickson. Growing up in Stow-on-the-Wold in the early 1860s, W. J. Rylance remembered a six-foot dragoon called ‘Long Charlie’, whose chief memory of the battle was the ‘unhorsing and killing of a French officer, but [he] was most proud of the watch and money he took from his pockets’. Rylance remembered that after Waterloo, Charlie was ‘hawker or poacher by turns, a regular old reprobate, but to me always a hero’. Waterloo may have set him apart but he hardly lived a life of virtue and, as the following chapters demonstrate, his example was very far from being the worst. Most Waterloo men, however, simply led unremarkable lives, many continuing in the army after 1815. William Thackeray, writing before his novel, Vanity Fair (set against the backdrop of Waterloo), brought him lasting fame, had strong views as to how the latter were neglected by their country. He did not:
know whether to respect them or to wonder at them. They have death, wounds, poverty, hard labour, hard fare, and small thanks […] if they are heroes, heroes they may be, but they remain privates still, handling the old brown-bess, starving on the old twopence a day. They grow grey in battle and victory, and after thirty years of bloody service, a young gentleman of fifteen […] calmly takes the command over our veteran, who obeys him as if God and nature had ordained that so throughout time it should be.12
The better-known Waterloo veterans today were those who aspired to an audience beyond the alehouse by writing about their experiences of the campaign. Far more wrote letters, many in response to William Siborne, who solicited them from surviving officers for the endeavours that were to make him the unofficial doyen of Waterloo studies during Wellington’s lifetime. Such letters reveal an extraordinary range of perceptions about what was going on throughout 18 June. They also exhibit a considerable variation, on the part of those who wrote them, as to how accurate they believed themselves to be. Writing in 1835, for example, Lieutenant-Colonel Dirom said he could remember 1815 ‘as if it had only occurred yesterday’. A fortnight later, Lieutenant William Fricke of the 1st Light Dragoons, King’s German Legion, asked Siborne to ‘excuse me if my description is faulty, to which a 20-year gap contributes greatly’ – quite apart from the practical difficulties of the day which he spelt out with wry irony: ‘An elevation in front of us hindered us completely from taking note of the positions of the French army, because we were unable to see it, except when we charged, but such a moment was not suitable for taking notes.’13 Fricke’s comments are a salutary reminder. The discrepancies and uncertainties in the story of Waterloo have provoked many allegations about personal bias and national posturing: many of them are to be explained by the honest disagreement arising from conflicting testimony.
The latter points can be illustrated by brief reference to the biggest of all Waterloo controversies, the contribution of the Prussians to Wellington’s victory. Stationed on the Duke’s left for much of the battle, Sir Hussey Vivian witnessed something of the impact they were making upon the French rear, and their arrival on the Anglo-Allied left. He was adamant in 1837 that, ‘I care not what any one may say to depreciate the importance of the Prussian aid […] but for that aid our advance never would have taken place […] it’s not fair not to give it its due weight and the Prussians their due credit.’ For ‘FM’ of the Guards, by contrast, writing on Waterloo Day 1866, the perspective had been very different. Positioned on Wellington’s right, he first saw Prussians at about 9 p.m. when the French were in headlong retreat:
Blücher came up at the time above indicated and took the front – not till then, however, as some would have it. I have been told that the Prussians fought side by side with us on that memorable day. Such, however, was not the case. I never saw the Prussians until we had beaten the Invincible Guards. They came up at that time, and not before.14
Then and now, how you see Waterloo depends upon where you stand.
Wellington, the best known British witness, knew where he stood. He said so in his Waterloo Despatch of 19 June. Long experience had made him adept in this most demanding of official forms of communication. As early as June 1809, he had taken strong exception when he heard of alleged remarks made by Samuel Whitbread in Parliament to the effect that he had lied in his accounts of the most recent actions:
I am not in the habit of sending exaggerated accounts of transactions of this kind. In the first place, I don’t see what purpose accounts of that description are to answer; and in the second place, the Army must eventually see them; they are most accurate criticks: I should certainly forfeit their good opinion most justly if I wrote a false account even of their actions, and nothing should induce me to take any step which should with justice deprive me of that advantage.15
But Wellington clearly knew, in modern parlance, how to spin. After the indecisive Battle of Albuera in 1811, he instructed Marshal Beresford to ‘write me down a victory’. He also conceded that some of his despatches contained omissions; brevity was a means to the end of being the soul of discretion. As he told Lord Hatherton in May 1820:
I never told a falsehood in them, but I never told the whole truth, nor anything like it. Either one or the other would have been contradicted by 5,000 officers in my army in their letters to their mothers, wives, brothers or sisters and cousins, all of whom imagined they as well understood what they saw as I did.16
Wellington was clear, however, that those officers’ accounts, let alone those of the men they commanded, must be inferior to his own. In a much repeated metaphor, he reflected that:
The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost; but no individual can recollect the order in which, nor the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance.17
Wellington judged, not without some reason, that if anybody was to attempt such an exercise successfully, it was him. He did, after all, combine experience with the liberty to roam the field, and was served by a staff whose job was to keep him informed as to how events were unfolding.
To pursue the ballroom metaphor, however, the Duke said nothing about the role of his dancing partners. Were not Napoleon and Blücher as entitled as he was to adjudicate on the course of events? Whilst the present study concerns itself primarily with the British perspective on Waterloo, it is important to remember that there are French and Prussian ones, arguably no less valid. French apologists for their defeat were legion: in 1846, the British press published a sardonic piece entitled ‘What the French say of the Battle of Waterloo’, which adduced no fewer than twelve reasons in mitigation or exculpation, including the militarily-more-than-dubious one that they had not lost! The French, understandably, remain sensitive on the subject: in 1998 a Paris councillor wrote to Tony Blair demanding that Britain rename its Eurostar terminus at Waterloo station. And whilst long-standing Anglo-French rivalries were reinforced by Waterloo, Anglo-German ones over who, precisely, had won the battle were created by it. The marriage of the 8th Duke of Wellington’s heir to a great-granddaughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1977 did at last suggest that a belle alliance between the two sides had finally been reached – though only on a personal level.18
Aspersions denigrating Wellington’s achievement at Waterloo, whether emanating from French or Prussian sources, could be guaranteed to rally Britons to the defence of their most famous living son.19 He was the subject of approximately 1,400 titles during the nineteenth century. He also appears in about 5 per cent of the British Museum’s collection of caricatures, not to mention over 300 paintings and drawings, and 180 published engravings. The Duke, as has been insufficiently acknowledged, was the creation of the media. It could hardly be otherwise for he became famous in absentia. Wellington could not really be said to be living permanently in mainland Britain until the end of 1818. Before then, the public face of Wellington was the product of a blank canvas on which his character had been imagined or, if the sources we
re his friends, as they wanted it to appear. The public persona was not, of course, entirely divorced from reality, but the real human being that was the Duke was revealed slowly, at first to an elite inner circle, and only really more completely, as will be seen, through them after his death. In life, the person he most resembles in British public life today is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II: forever in the public gaze and at the public service, but hardly a rounded personality: at once both universally known and yet unknown.
The Queen’s reputation rests, in part, on her being set above the political fray. Much the same has been said for Wellington; indeed he claimed it for himself. Whilst the notion is not without some substance, it is also, paradoxically, bogus. Uniquely amongst modern Britons, the Duke chose to follow his exalted military career with an even longer one in the higher reaches of public life. Wellington’s name, therefore, at least as much as that of his most famous battle, carried political connotations for his contemporaries. His second career, as chapters four and five attempt to show, was bound both to inform and colour perceptions of his earlier one. The British public was far less agreed about what it thought of the political as opposed to the military Duke. He was seen as being on the ‘wrong’ side of popular opinion, at least during the Reform Bill era. His longevity was such that he survived the resulting unpopularity to pass his last years as father of the nation, something akin to a mid-nineteenth-century Nelson Mandela. But he was, and remains, political. Just prior to elections for the Scottish Parliament in 2003, one SNP candidate called on Edinburgh City Council to remove the Duke’s statue and replace it with one of Robert Burns, since Wellington’s ‘says nothing distinctive or relevant about Edinburgh and Scotland now’. The call was seen as anti-English and rightly attacked as an insult to those Scots who had fought and died under Wellington.20 Neither side, however, seemed aware that he was Irish.
Another claim made by the Duke, which many modern writers accept, was that he ‘had made it a rule never to read any work whatever bearing on his military career’. He went even further in 1847, when he wrote to J. W. Croker that, ‘It has always been my practice, and is my invariable habit, to say nothing about myself or my own actions.’21 The opposite would be nearer the truth. At the very least, there were those around him, for example Colonel Gurwood, Mrs Arbuthnot and Earl Stanhope (formerly Lord Mahon), who informed him about recent publications and opinions, if only to elicit his response. Stanhope noted that the Duke spent an hour and a half with him in 1836 discussing Robert Southey’s history of the Peninsular War. In December 1851, the last letter Stanhope ever received from Wellington was one thanking him for recommending that he read volume 11 of Thiers’s History of the French Revolution. Within hours he had done so – and reported that it ‘appears to be very interesting’. The evidence that Wellington was a voracious reader about himself, including at Waterloo, is overwhelming; he even annotated some of the books whose perceived falsehoods irritated him most.22
And, contrary to what he wrote to Croker, the Duke was also a great talker. Ellesmere’s daughter recalled hearing how Wellington had attended a dinner at Lord Glenelg’s ‘in company with several young officers, whom after dinner the Duke invited to ask him any questions they pleased as to his old campaigns’. Ellesmere himself was treated to a personal account of Burgos as he drove over from Basingstoke to Stratfield Saye with the Duke in February 1836. Charles Greville, who was one of those at Burghley with the Duke for New Year 1838, recorded that he spoke at length about the Peninsular War when they were out shooting. ‘It is impossible to convey an idea of the zest, eagerness, frankness, and abundance with which he talked, and told of his campaigns, or how interesting it was to hear him.’23
Wellington was not so much lying when he denied reading and talking about his heroic past as making a distinction between official pronouncements and off-the-record conversations. He never presumed that those listening would be so ungentlemanly as to set down the detail of what they remembered him to have said. The present work endeavours, in showing Wellington as he was, as well as how he was perceived to be, to recognise that distinction. This perforce means returning to original sources of information and anecdotes. Too many lives of Wellington, to vulgarise Guedalla’s epigram, simply regurgitate the more familiar tales, citing earlier biographies as their authority. That approach is eschewed here: hence the predominance of contemporary as opposed to secondary sources in the notes. I trust that the latter are not overly burdensome, but as I have frequently discovered in my work on a man who has been the subject of so many stories, there is nothing more irritating than an unreferenced bon mot. The result is a story of Wellington and Waterloo that follows familiar broad outlines, but is told with many less-familiar details.
A striking example of how this approach can yield fresh insights is an anecdote mentioned in virtually every book on Wellington, his exchange with the artist, Henry Pickersgill, as the latter was painting his portrait:
Finding the Duke getting rather drowsy under the operation, he wished to excite his attention and thus give some expression to his face. He succeeded only too well. Pickersgill said ‘I have often wished to ask your Grace a question.’ The Duke was far too prudent to say ‘What is it?’ ‘Were you really surprised at Waterloo or not?’ The Duke instantly replied ‘No! but I am now.’24
Where modern books provide a citation for the story (usually reduced to the final two sentences), it is invariably to Sir William Fraser’s 1889 Words on Wellington. As Fraser tells it, the story was obtained third hand from Lord Wilton on ‘one occasion’ with the assurance that ‘this version is absolutely correct’. Something akin to it was indeed circulating in the press in 1844 when it was described as having taken place ‘lately’.25 In fact, Pickersgill had been at Stratfield Saye working on his portrait a full decade before in the autumn of 1834. And it was the artist himself who described what had happened only a few months later. It is worth citing in extenso:
availing himself of one of those pauses which invariably succeed the withdrawal of the cloth from an English dining table, the worthy R. A. arose and assuming that solemnity of manner by which he is so peculiarly distinguished, begged leave to propound a query to his grace, obligingly intimating (as a merciful recorder will sometimes do to a culprit at the bar of the Old Bailey) that ‘he need not reply to the question if it was at all disagreeable’. The duke, good-humouredly, begged him to proceed. All eyes were of course directed to the painter whose form appeared to dilate, and whose countenance became pregnant with the mighty secret he expected to fathom.
‘And thrice he cleared his throat and then began.’
‘Pray will your Grace be obliging enough to inform me, if it be really true, as has often been reported, that your grace was taken by surprise at Waterloo!’
So far from resenting this somewhat impertinent inquiry, the duke, as soon as he recovered from the fit of laughter into which it threw him, condescended to satisfy Mr Pickersgill, that he had not been guilty of the unsoldierlike neglect imputed to him, and that he might satisfy his inquiring friends, on his grace’s authority, that he did not achieve the conquest of Waterloo by mistake.26
The earlier account does not alter the substantive point about Waterloo, but it is very different in detail and tone as regards the Duke. There was a Wellington who could be roused to laughter as well as one who could be reduced to fury. Privately, he laughed a lot. The late-Victorian public who read Words on Wellington in large numbers were more familiar with the terse iron persona that Fraser’s book helped to consummate.
The Pickersgill anecdote demonstrates that Wellington, for all his expressed contempt of the media, was mindful of what we now call ‘image’ (though he would have preferred to call it ‘honour’). He was after all, as he felt his critics often forgot, only human. When painting the Duke in 1824, Sir Thomas Lawrence proposed that his subject be depicted holding a pocket watch to signify his waiting for the Prussians. Wellington objected that this might suggest that he was anxious for th
eir arrival and protested, ‘That will never do. I was not waiting for the arrival of the Prussians at Waterloo. Put a telescope in my hand if you please.’ Lawrence, like so many others, deferred to the great man, but his idea had clearly touched a sensitive nerve. Moreover, though he did not speak or write officially about the various controversies relating to his military career, the Duke was not above getting others to do so, on his behalf. He told Stanhope, in May 1834, that one reason he had not yet read Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula was that ‘I might be tempted into contradicting him – into authorizing somebody to answer him for me.’27 Understandably, nothing was more precious to his honour than Waterloo, which apotheosised both himself and his army. In the thirty-seven years following the battle he would defend his chosen position no less doggedly than the one he had assumed on 18 June 1815 – not least because, in the forty-six years leading up to Waterloo, his personal and political battles for recognition had been particularly hard fought.
1
Before Waterloo: Battles
for Recognition 1769–1815
Early in 1785, largely in an attempt to reduce living costs, the widowed Countess of Mornington went to live in Brussels. Accompanying her was her third son, the aimless 16-year-old Arthur Wellesley.28 He would surely have spent some leisure time in the Forest of Soignes, nearly 30,000 acres of woodland extending over several miles south-east of the city to the village of Waterloo and beyond. Whether Arthur ventured that far, or further, to the hamlet of Mont St Jean, is uncertain. But since one of the major roads south from Brussels ran through the forest it would seem likely. In April 1815, the boy, now sure of his purpose, returned to Brussels as Duke of Wellington. A little over two months later, the army under his command won the decisive victory of Waterloo. One of the charges Napoleon levelled against his nemesis was that he took a great risk deploying his men in front of what Robert Southey described as, ‘One gloomy, thick, impenetrable shade.’ Wellington denied it. Writing in the 1840s, he claimed that he ‘had a perfect knowledge, having seen it frequently, and of which no knowledge could have been had by any other officer in the Army’. This was surely a cryptic allusion to his sojourn in Brussels. But he did not elucidate. Similarly, he had little to say about his heading a brigade in Flanders in 1794–1795. It was, said The Times a month before Waterloo, ‘a circumstance not generally known’, that Wellington’s first campaign had taken place in the Netherlands.29 Like so much else in the Duke’s early life, as he battled to win recognition, they were episodes that he chose to forget. Critics would charge that selective memory was a lifelong trait, which manifested itself in his last campaign too.