by Foster, R E
The British appetite for details of Waterloo appeared to be insatiable during the summer of 1815. That is the inescapable inference one must draw from the columns of both national and provincial newspapers, which regularly included letters from soldiers who had fought in the campaign. The letters, usually anonymous and to parents, made much reference to Picton, Ponsonby and Uxbridge; many dwelt also on the steadfastness of the infantry, and the charge of the British cavalry, which had led to the capture of two Eagles. Most salient, though, were the number of letters whose writers professed to have witnessed Wellington cool under fire, or even close enough to have heard him issuing orders. The Morning Chronicle, for example, published an account that insisted Wellington had exclaimed, an hour before the end of the battle, ‘Would to God that night or Blücher would come!’ At the end of October, the Lancaster Gazette was one of the last provincial newspapers to print a version of Wellington’s supposedly having said, ‘Up, Guards, and at them again!’ as the Imperial Guard met its nemesis.179
Apart from the official British and Prussian accounts, the other important 1815 overview of events that appeared in the press was that written by General Manuel Alava. Alava was Spain’s Minister Plenipotentiary to the King of the Netherlands in 1815. A friend of Wellington’s from the Peninsula, he took it upon himself to join the Duke on 18 June. Old habits dying hard, he was actively engaged at Waterloo. His Despatch was written on 20 June but only appeared in the British press from early August. Though it ‘contains some statements not exactly correct’, Wellington rated it second only to his own as a description of the action.180 This was presumably because it accorded with his own sentiments, especially perhaps Alava’s conclusion that ‘it may be asserted, without offence to any one, that to them [Wellington and the British Army] both belongs the chief part or all the glory of this memorable day’. The two may well have discussed the day’s events, for only Alava had eaten with Wellington on the night of Waterloo. If so, they agreed to differ over some details for Alava has the battle starting at 11.30am as against Wellington’s 10am. Alava also ventured the suggestion that it was Napoleon’s sighting the Prussians that precipitated his increasingly frenzied attacks from late afternoon. Where he is most original though, is in dividing the battle into four distinct phases. These comprised the initial assault on Hougoumont; second, d’Erlon’s infantry attack repulsed by Picton’s infantry and the heavy cavalry; third, the massed attacks by French cavalry from mid-afternoon; lastly, the final offensive by the Imperial Guard. Alava had provided the British public with the best early coherent narrative of Waterloo.
They were soon provided with many more. Even before the end of 1815, one could obtain a third edition of Lieutenant-General Scott’s Battle of Waterloo at 5 shillings or a fifth edition of a British staff officer’s account for 6 shillings. By the time the first anniversary of the battle came around, there was a sixth edition of James Simpson’s Visit to Waterloo. In the same month, Robert Hill’s Sketches in Flanders and Holland, containing thirty-six plates and fifty views, was being advertised for a hefty five guineas.181 By then, Waterloo had entered the national lexicon. One of the earliest examples comes from May 1816. A body of agricultural labourers was reported as having descended upon Great Bardfield in Essex with a view to destroying its threshing machines. Undeterred, Mr Spicer and his neighbours ‘determined to resist the attack of the rioters, and by a Waterloo movement got between the mob and the barn where the machine was deposited, and dared them to advance’.182
For those who wanted something other than the printed word to satisfy their appetite for what had taken place on 18 June there was much more. Prints of the heroic Corporal Shaw in action were particularly popular. One artist who responded to the demand was George Jones, whose resemblance to Wellington meant that he was occasionally mistaken for him. Serving with the army of occupation, he would earn the epithet ‘Waterloo Jones’ for his various sketches of the battle. A number of them were used as illustrations for one of the best known early accounts, The Battle of Waterloo by a Near Observer (1817). In February 1816 twenty artists competed for a 1,000-guinea prize when their works went on view at a public exhibition in London’s British Gallery. The Times thought it premature: ‘how is an historical picture, worthy of the admiration of an enlightened people, to be designed and executed in six months?’183
More commercially successful was Henry Barker’s panoramic painting of the battle housed in Leicester Square. Entry cost a shilling. So popular did it prove that an elevated stage was added for ease of viewing. It closed on 1 May 1818 prior to embarking on an equally lucrative provincial tour. Competition was provided by a Waterloo museum opened at 97, Pall Mall in November 1815. For 1s 6d, the public could view more than 1,000 exhibits, including one of Marshal Ney’s batons. It was wound up in a two-day sale in March 1817.184 Theatregoers to Sadler’s Wells, meanwhile, had been able to watch Mr Sloman perform Waterloo, or Wellington Forever within days of the battle. Not to be outdone, Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre advertised a new song by Mr Herring entitled ‘Waterloo, or Buonaparte Defeated’. At the close of its 1817 season, Mr Barrymore promised his patrons that 1818’s ‘campaign’ would ‘obtain for him a Waterloo victory over every other general in the theatrical field of battle’.185 The greatest coup, however, was effected by William Bullock. He bought the coach used by Napoleon at Waterloo, which Blücher had sent to London as a present for the Prince Regent in January 1816. Exhibited at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, it created a sensation, not least because part of the exhibit was Jean Hoorn, one of Napoleon’s coachmen, who had lost an arm in the battle. Well over 200,000 had paid to see it by August. A provincial tour quadrupled that figure. Two years later, an ‘unusual assemblage of persons’ was attracted to Tattersall’s near Hyde Park corner for an auction whose lots included the four horses that had pulled the coach. With more humour than imagination, Richard Tattersall himself conducted the bidding for ‘Bony the first etc.’ They made 73 guineas for the Prince Regent. A different sort of humour is revealed in letters to the press complaining about the nuisance that was Waterloo cracker fireworks and that ‘vagabond boys […] pay off old grudges against the old and infirm, by means of this weapon’.186
If these various and vicarious entertainments proved insufficient, people could view the site of battle for themselves. A month after Waterloo it may well have been Mr Sutton (the failed military analyst), who was advertising crossings from Colchester to Ostend as the ‘most cheap, expeditious, and pleasant route to Brussels, [and] the field of Waterloo’. Europe had been closed to Britons for much of the long Revolutionary Wars; their cessation made foreign travel all the more attractive. A visit to Waterloo, if only as part of a more general European tour, quickly became more or less compulsory. A widely-published letter of mid-August 1815 thought it odd that more people were not taking advantage of the opportunity.187
In fact, as Wellington complained at the end of 1817, many did. Early illustrious tourists included Czar Alexander, King William of the Netherlands and several Prussian princes who were guided around the field in September by the Prince of Orange. The Duke too would pay several visits to the scene of his victory – surely the ultimate guide – before his return to England. More typically, John Scott, the literary editor, who was at Waterloo in July 1815, found himself in the company of ‘a host of my countryfolk, of each sex, and every age, profession, residence, and condition’. They were not the earliest visitors. That dubious honour belonged to Belgian peasants. A sergeant in the Royal Artillery, writing to his father in Edinburgh from Paris in September, recalled that, ‘I saw several men and women from the adjacent villages stripping the dead; and I am told that these wretches plundered many of the wounded.’ The plunder included teeth. One visitor to the battlefield from Brussels on 19 June recalled that ‘some Russian Jews were assisting in the spoliation of the dead, by chiselling out their teeth! – an operation they performed with the most brutal indifference. The clinking hammers of these wretches jarred horr
ibly upon my ears.’ Not so, presumably, for the chisellers. Those in search of dentures might pay them up to £2 for a single tooth. Healthy teeth from young men both looked better and lasted longer than prosthetic alternatives.188 So plentiful were they that ‘Waterloo teeth’ became well known in both Europe and the United States.
But the scavengers left plenty behind for the early visitors. A Reverend Rudge vividly described the detritus of war:
Every part of the field of battle was strewed with different articles belonging to those who had fought and bled. Every thing around attested the horrors of war, and the march of devastation. On every side were scattered the arms and clothing of the slain; shoes, caps and belts, and every other military appendage, either stained with blood, or covered with dirt. In the corn fields, which had been completely ploughed up by the trampling of the horses, and the movement of the soldiers, a number of books, cards, and letters were seen.
The roof of La Haye Sainte was ‘pierced with a thousand holes’.189 A group from Leeds who visited the battlefield on 30 August found that La Belle Alliance ‘is now used as a sort of inn for the sale of bad small beer, and dignified with the pompous designation of The Wellington Hotel’.190
The collection of Waterloo memorabilia was an inevitable by-product of this embryonic tourist trade. For all that Britons declaimed against scavenging by Belgian peasants, some were perfectly prepared to indulge in some petty scavenging of their own. T. S. Lea, a Kidderminster carpet manufacturer who visited the field on 28 September, borrowed a hatchet in order to extract bullets from the trees. Their lower reaches denuded of the lucrative lead balls, local peasants subsequently used ladders to retrieve those in the upper reaches. Unlike Lea, most British visitors were content simply to buy from them. As they walked the field in October, a group from the north of England was pestered by Belgian peasant boys proffering buttons, eagles and musket balls. In August Walter Scott had bought two cuirasses and a French soldier’s memorandum book.191 He reported that French muskets were so plentiful that they could be bought for 7s 6d each in Brussels. Though appalled by what he had seen on his visit, the Reverend Rudge picked up a small piece of skull. It was at least easier to carry around than the 12-pound cannonball found by John Scott.192
One spot, perhaps above all others, proved a magnet for these early visitors. This was the elm tree that Wellington had designated as his nominal command post close to the crossroads of Mont St Jean on 18 June. Unsurprisingly, the many musket balls the earliest visitors remarked on seeing embedded in it, had all disappeared by September. The artist David Wilkie complained that this, of all trees, had been desecrated in such a way but saw nothing untoward in removing ‘a good sized branch’. An account published in 1818 described what remained of:
an old picturesque tree, with a few straggling branches, projecting in grotesque shapes from its ragged trunk […] it still retained, however, the vitality of its growth, and will probably for many future years be the first saluting sign to our children and our children’s children, who, with feelings of a sacred cast, come to gaze on this theatre of their ancestors’ deeds.193
Sadly, they would not.
Though the battlefield quickly resumed its former guise as unremarkable farmland, the flow of visitors to Waterloo continued unabated, attracted by a burgeoning of memorials. A rapid popularity attached to the building known as ‘the Maison Paris’ next to the inn that had been Wellington’s headquarters. Owned by a retired forester, it was here that the wounded Marquis of Anglesey (as Uxbridge had become), had had his leg amputated. The limb had then been placed in a coffin and buried in the yard of the property, surmounted at first by Michaelmas daisies and then a willow tree. The Bishop of Norwich’s wife visited there on the first anniversary of Waterloo and was shown ‘as a relic almost as precious as a Catholic bit of bone or blood, the blood upon a chair in the room where the leg was cut off’.194 Across the road, opposite Wellington’s former headquarters, an unofficial memorial centre was provided by the church of St Joseph. There were at least two marble tablets there by the end of 1815. In 1817, a man from Liverpool found it ‘nearly covered with monuments to the memory of British officers […] every English reader, whilst his heart is touched with the deepest sympathy, must feel himself elated in belonging to a country which has produced instances of such unparalleled heroism.’ On the battlefield itself, he could not but notice the newly-completed monument to Colonel Alexander Gordon paid for by his six siblings and the ‘plain mural monument’ at La Haye Sainte. Hougoumont, ‘a heap of ruins’, was sufficient monument in itself.195
Visitors to the battlefield clearly needed direction. Captain Mercer had not even finished breakfast on 19 June when a carriage from Brussels disgorged its passengers to examine the field. In speaking to one of them about the previous day’s events, Mercer had acted as the first, albeit involuntary, battlefield guide.196 The man who became the intending visitor’s must-have guide, however, was Jean Decoster. Tall, in his early 50s ‘and of a robust appearance’ in 1815, he had been selected on the morning of 18 June by three French generals as a local who could be of use to Napoleon in describing the terrain before him. He was with or near him throughout the day, even on occasion being given snuff by the Emperor. Only in the early hours of 19 June was he relieved of his duties near Charleroi, recompensed with a single Napoleon and deprived of his horse. But the canny peasant did not need Walter Scott to advise him that he had been indirectly presented with a potential fortune. When his January 1816 testimony of his day at Waterloo was published, his financial future was secured.197 There cannot have been many days thereafter when his recollections and services were not in demand.
But what did this mania for visiting Waterloo mean? Stuart Semmel has recently suggested that early travellers to Waterloo wanted to venerate a tangible past at first-hand in its wholeness – an objective that sits rather awkwardly alongside their competing desire to bring back parts of it! In any case, the Waterloo they visited was already an imagined or interpreted past, whether it be through the plethora of written accounts and images or through the medium of guides such as Decoster. The true explanation is perhaps much simpler. Those who went to Waterloo shortly after 1815 were mostly described in neutral terms as visitors. Some were pilgrims; the majority we would characterise as tourists. They were all drawn by the enormity of the events that had taken place there on 18 June. Some paid homage, more were simply curious. There was nothing new about visiting and desecrating battle sites. Whilst in Paris with the army of occupation, the enterprising Colonel Woodford excavated the field of Agincourt for a period of two to three weeks unearthing, amongst other things, stirrups and spurs. He did so unmolested: Agincourt had not excited general public interest for several centuries. What brought most people to Waterloo, therefore, was a mixture of fascination and fashion. The poet E. S. Barrett observed that most visitors returned from early-post–1815 Europe either ‘Beparised or Bewaterlooed’. It quickly became unfashionable not to know at least ‘one honest gentleman, who has brought home a real Waterloo thumb, nail and all, which he preserves in a bottle of gin’. It may safely be concluded that Wellington was not much impressed by any of this. He observed with wry irony to Lord Limerick that, ‘I hope the next battle I fight will be further from home. Waterloo was too near: too many visitors, tourists, amateurs, all of whom wrote accounts of the battle.’198
Lord Byron, Robert Southey and Walter Scott were amongst those ‘amateurs’ who visited Waterloo partly in search of literary inspiration. Poetry, not least theirs, was to play an important part in memorialising the battle. There was a feeling that it was a more appropriate art form than prose for an event so recent and gigantic in scale. Not everybody agreed. Wordsworth, for example, was initially so overpowered by what he had heard about it, that he was persuaded ‘rather to decline the subject than to grapple with it’, except perhaps in some distant future. But he was unusual. As early as 27 June, the Morning Chronicle had Wellington improbably addressing his army after Wa
terloo in verse, exhorting it onwards to Paris.199
Best known of the less ephemeral offerings, of course, is Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The first two cantos, describing a pilgrim’s travels and reflections, appeared in 1812 and had made their author famous. Only weeks after Waterloo, one correspondent from Paris was reporting overhearing an argument that, ‘Lord Byron qua Poet was a greater man than the Duke of Wellington qua general and that Childe Harold would be read when nobody would think of Waterloo.’ Byron visited Waterloo early in 1816 and rode over the field twice, principally to find the spot where Major Frederick Howard of the 10th Hussars had been killed. Howard was a son of the Earl of Carlisle who had briefly acted as Byron’s guardian. Equally dutifully, Byron sent a piece of round shot, French badges and cockades to his publisher, John Murray.200
By June 1816 the third canto of Childe Harold was complete. In journeying through Belgium (thence onwards to the Rhine and the Alps), his hero inevitably stops at Mont St Jean:
And Harold stands upon this place of skulls,
The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo!
It was not part of Byron’s purpose, however, to analyse the battle. Whilst he acknowledged the bravery of the ordinary British soldiers and featured Howard prominently, Wellington, whose politics he disliked, is not even mentioned. Instead, the most memorable lines were inspired, as Byron explained, by the fact that, ‘On the night before the action, it is said that a ball was given at Brussels.’201