Wellington and Waterloo

by Foster, R E

The most remarkable story of the period, however, was that of David Sutherland. He was found destitute in Covent Garden in spring 1831. It transpired that he had been born the night before the battle (according to some accounts, actually during it), near Hougoumont, a fact which must qualify him as the youngest person present on 18 June. His father in the 42nd was killed that day by a musket ball to the head. The regiment had thereupon effectively adopted both him and his mother as mascots. They had followed it to Gibraltar where the mother died. But the boy returned with it to Scotland, until in 1830 he was turned out of the barracks at Stirling Castle for having brought in alcohol. A few months later he took a boat to Woolwich. Pending proof of the tale, a Mr Campbell of Knightsbridge offered him a position in his household.294

  The Waterloo Fund was presumably meant to have prevented at least some of the stories of human misery mentioned above from arising. By Waterloo Day 1819, its governing committee had investigated 7,531 applications and voted one-off donations totalling £192,844 to wounded servicemen and their dependants. Annuities totalling £22,142 had been granted to 727 widows, 977 children and 277 disabled NCOs and privates.295 This constituted an impressive record but the Fund was, inevitably, far from being a failsafe.

  Wellington is sometimes criticised for not having done more to assist his comrades-in-arms. The charge is understandable but unfair. It would be long after his death before the State accepted that it had an ongoing responsibility to former servicemen and their families. His main contribution to Waterloo commemoration was the less burdensome dinner he hosted at Apsley House every 18 June, primarily for surviving officers of the campaign. In 1821, which seems to have been the first time the press noted the event, forty-two were present, including George IV. The following year, when the gathering was more widely reported, about sixty attended. Bathurst, still Secretary for War and the Colonies, received what was effectively an invitation from the Duke for that occasion, the earliest extant such document. By 1823 the event was becoming so well established that newspapers were recording that the invitations in general had gone out. For the tenth anniversary gathering, two military bands were engaged to provide music in the grounds.296 The only year during the period when the dinner did not take place at Apsley House was in 1829. Instead, guests converged on 10 Downing Street, probably because the 90-foot Waterloo Gallery at Apsley House was then under construction. Following its completion in 1830, it became the fixed venue for what was increasingly referred to as a banquet.297

  Wellington himself was not short of dinner invitations. He could rely upon his hosts to remind guests of his indispensable contribution to Britain’s victory in the war in general and at Waterloo in particular. The Duke was brief and platitudinous in returning thanks on such occasions. This could be interpreted as meaning that he was cold, but most took it as proof of a self-effacing nature in a man who was proud of his officers and men and what they had achieved together. It was an arrangement in which both hosts and their honoured guest tacitly agreed to marginalise or even overlook altogether the contribution of Britain’s erstwhile allies. On 27 December 1820, for example, when attending a grand dinner in Chester, Wellington reflected that it was the British Army, now increasingly maligned, which had ‘rescued Europe from the grasp of tyranny, and its services never can be forgotten, however its noble deeds may be treated by the folly of some men, and the wickedness of others’.298 His most expansive remarks made in public about the Waterloo campaign during this period came at a dinner in London in May 1825. Of all his triumphs, he declared, the 1815 campaign was unparalleled and had:

  produced consequences which were unheard of as the result of any event of that description in modern times, or, indeed, in any times. It completed the military glory of this country. It relieved mankind from the apprehension of a return to that horrible, revolting, and degrading tyranny which had been imposed upon nearly all the world except the people of this country. It enabled his Majesty’s government to effect the peace of Europe upon terms most honourable to ourselves and as such have led us to the greatness and prosperity we now enjoy.299

  Radicals baulked at the details, but it was a good summation of the Establishment view of what Waterloo meant: Britons should be proud of their nation, their soldiers and, though Wellington did not say it, their hero.

  On the details of the battle itself, however, Wellington made no substantial public comment: the record, as he had stated it in the Waterloo Despatch, should continue to speak for itself. A rare, albeit inconsequential, exception occurred at Cheltenham in 1828 when a veteran accosted him, claiming to have given him water to drink at Waterloo. He received a peremptory, ‘Be off, you scoundrel […] I never took a glass of water during an engagement in my life.’300 In private, by contrast, Wellington would still quite happily talk about the campaign. Such conversations show him remaining true to his line that the battle was a victory for himself and his British soldiers. In face of suggestions to the contrary, it was, if anything, a position in which he became increasingly entrenched. Just how far he really believed all he said, was deceiving himself, oversimplifying, or genuinely confused, is impossible to say: almost certainly all four. His comments do at least suggest which aspects of the campaign lingered longest in his memory, in some instances perhaps, because they weighed most heavily on his mind.

  Foremost amongst his pronouncements was his estimation of Napoleon as an opponent whose presence on a battlefield equated to 40,000 men.301 Though Wellington was adamant that Bonaparte would have been better served by a defensive strategy in 1815 (‘we should then have had great difficulty in dealing with him’), he told Greville in 1820 that the offensive manoeuvres of 15 June were the ‘finest thing that ever was done – so rapid and so well combined […] The Duke says that they certainly were not prepared for this attack.’ This was one of only two occasions after Waterloo when Wellington admitted to having been surprised – albeit in the campaign, not the battle – a charge that he otherwise disingenuously denied, and in public his admirers rubbished. The other, surely a revealing contradiction, came in 1823 when he at first asserted to Mrs Arbuthnot ‘that was all nonsense, that it was quite ridiculous to talk of his having been surprised’, but then added that ‘if I was surprised, if I did place myself in so foolish a position, they were the greater fools for not knowing how to take advantage of my faults’.

  That both his friends and foes had been guilty of faults in 1815, Wellington was more than willing to explain. Chad recorded that he had explicitly told Gneisenau that the Prussians would be worsted if they insisted on fighting in their chosen position at Ligny. Gneisenau had replied only that ‘our men like to see their Enemy’. Thus unheeded, the Duke returned to save the situation at Quatre Bras (‘By God If I had come up 5 minutes later the Battle was lost’), in the process tying down Frenchmen who would have been better employed securing a more decisive victory against Blücher. The French compounded their error, he believed, by not moving against him earlier and in greater numbers on 17 June. This contrasted sharply with ‘the extraordinary celerity with which the allied armies were got together’.

  As for Waterloo itself, like everybody else, the Duke tended to exaggerate when it came to numbers: he told Greville that he had only 50,000 men at Mont St Jean. One should also treat his 1821 claim to Chad that it was he who repulsed what was presumably d’Erlon’s massed infantry attack (‘I brought the 95th to play upon the flank of the French who were at it, with the Highlanders, & this broke them’), as the comment of an excited battlefield guide. Similarly, his 1824 admission to Mrs Arbuthnot that having painstakingly placed every regiment himself ‘he was quite tranquil as to the issue’ may reflect more an outward than inward calm. The latter contention was confirmed by Alava, however, at the same dinner party: he recalled finding Wellington under the elm tree on 18 June concerned primarily for the well-being of Lady Charlotte Greville!

  On the point that Wellington was immensely proud of his dispositions for 18 June, we can be more certain. It was why he w
as so irked when critics suggested that his chosen battlefield position was a poor one: he would countenance the possibility that he might have had to retreat but not the accusation that to do so would have been impossible. Mrs Arbuthnot was told forcibly in 1823 that, ‘I could have got into the wood, & I wd have defied the Devil to drive me out!’ This had not proved necessary, not least because of his eye for the ground. Standing near the Gordon memorial in 1821, he asked Chad to ‘observe with this hollow Road & la Haie Sainte and Hougoumont, how strong the position was’. He told Greville that it ‘was uncommonly strong’ with the two farms ‘admirably situated and adapted for defence’. This was why he was repeatedly so vexed that the latter should have fallen, something he ascribed to the commanding officer’s failing to create an opening through the back wall which would have allowed his men to import ammunition.302 But the temporary loss of La Haye Sainte did not obviate his insistence that Napoleon had therefore been wrong to launch a frontal assault; he should have tried to outflank him via Hal. The Duke told Greville in 1820, prematurely as it turned out, that he was surprised not to have been more censured for sending a substantial portion of his own force to Hal in anticipation of such a manoeuvre.

  Such a move would, at the very least, have drawn him away from the Prussians. Towards his ally, the Wellington of the 1820s was clearly not the generous Wellington of the Waterloo Despatch. He told Lady Shelley that Blücher’s main achievement had been to avoid Grouchy and arrive at Waterloo ‘in order that the Prussians may profit by their victory’. Equally small-minded was his contention that though he had seen them from 10am ‘that they had only one Corps of 30,000 […] & that they did not chuse to deboucher & come into action “till their whole force had joined”’. Mrs Arbuthnot, who surely derived her view of the battle exclusively from her hero, recorded the obvious untruth of ‘the arrival of the Prussians, who did not get upon the ground till eight at night & not till the Duke had charged the French line & they were flying in every direction’. ‘I beat them’, was Wellington’s 1823 summation to her of what had happened to the French Army.303

  Quite often, Wellington’s comments on Waterloo were made in response to what he or his interlocutor had just read on the subject, for example Gourgaud’s 1818 account of the campaign or Maximilien Foy’s more general history of the war, which appeared posthumously in English in 1827. The book criticising Wellington’s conduct at Waterloo that excited greatest public interest in 1820s Britain, however, was Napoleon in Exile. It was published in 1822, a year after Bonaparte’s death. The author revealed nothing substantively new. But unlike others who would write at first hand of the former Emperor’s time at St Helena, he was a Briton, Dr Barry O’Meara. In various conversations Napoleon had told him that if either Grouchy had arrived at Waterloo, or at least prevented the Prussians from intervening, Wellington would have lost. Moreover, nobody would have escaped since retreat was impossible from the Duke’s poorly chosen position. Instead, ‘destiny, decided that Lord Wellington should gain it’, albeit assisted by ‘the firmness and bravery of his troops’ but above all by Blücher’s arrival. The latter thus deserved greater credit. Wellington, by contrast, was ‘a man of little spirit, no generosity, and without grandeur of the soul’. He was also guilty of ‘folly’ in not having fallen back on Antwerp, where the combined strength of the allies must have prevailed; he had allowed himself to be surprised and needlessly given battle alone.304

  Mrs Arbuthnot was furious that ‘such stories shd go down to posterity uncontradicted, that the next generation wd really believe that he was surprised, & give all the credit of the victory to the Prussians’. Wellington professed not to be concerned. After all, the French ‘[might] talk & write themselves sick, that they never could alter the fact that their army was annihilated’. But he cared more than he liked to admit. He obtained a copy of O’Meara’s work and annotated the several charges levelled against him by Napoleon concerning his performance during the Waterloo campaign. There is a cross at the point where Napoleon claimed that it was ‘the arrival of Blücher, to whom the victory is more to be attributed than to Wellington, and more credit due as a general’.305 In literary terms, Napoleon was far more successful in keeping his two antagonists apart after the battle, than he had been in military terms during it.

  O’Meara’s book, portions of which were widely reproduced in both national and provincial newspapers, was just one example of the continuing avaricious public appetite for anything related to 1815. Stories of Waterloo, a very popular three-volume anecdotal work, appeared in 1829. Still one of the best known memoirs, Captain John Kincaid’s Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, first appeared in 1830. The 1832 annual report of the Liverpool Mechanics and Apprentices Library noted that accounts of Waterloo were amongst the most requested items. Launched three years before, the United Service Journal was yet another organ through which material could reach an insatiable audience. The very first number contained a striking eyewitness account of the battlefield on 19 June by an English denizen of Brussels and, like O’Meara’s book, was widely syndicated to the press.306

  But it was the roles of the two principal antagonists at Waterloo that continued to dominate literary outpourings on the subject. A comment on this came in the form of an 1824 essay, ‘The Wellingtoniad’, from the pen of the young Thomas Babington Macaulay. A twelve-book epic with that title would, he predicted, be written in 2824. In it, the narrator ‘with a laudable zeal for the glory of his country’ ignores the allied contribution to the war. ‘England and France, Wellington and Napoleon, almost exclusively occupy his attention.’ The gods and armies look on as the two titans clash in a duel at Waterloo: the Duke’s pistol shot strikes Napoleon, who thereupon flies. ‘The arrival of the Prussians, from a motive of patriotism, the poet completely passes over.’ Whilst Macaulay’s distaste for the nationalist and great-man-of-history approach to Waterloo might commend itself to a modern readership, this satirical take was decidedly untypical of the 1820s. Far more representative was the Brontë family. In June 1826 the Reverend Patrick Brontë bought his son, Branwell, a dozen toy soldiers in Leeds. The models inspired all his children to participate in the creation of an imaginary literary world of their own. The 10-year-old Charlotte commandeered ‘the prettiest of the whole’ to be Wellington; her hero-worship of the Duke persisted into adulthood. From the parsonage at Haworth the whole family could see the monument to Wellington’s wars on the top of Stoodley Pike.307

  Wellington’s version of the Waterloo story thus remained, as it would for decades yet, the orthodox British one. He could rely on the bulk of the media to continue to endorse it. The British press treated conflicting versions, especially ones from French sources, with no less contempt than he did. Even press organs that cared little for his politics leapt to his defence. The Times, for example, was incensed that General Foy should allege that many British officers ‘have nothing to say for the resources of his understanding or the productions of his genius’ and that Waterloo was a triumph for ‘the force of inert resistance’.308 Sir Walter Scott provided the fullest case for the defence during the 1820s in his multi-volume life of Napoleon. The final chapters are less biography than popular history. Waterloo, they conclude, was not, as Napoleon and his proxies alleged, ‘lost by a combination of extraordinary fatalities’ which alone allowed the ‘incapacity of the British General’ to prevail. Neither was it the Prussians, for they had not ‘made any physical impression by their weapons, or excited any moral dread by their appearance’ by the time Wellington ordered the general advance. Wellington’s repulsing the Imperial Guard was the ‘decisive movement’. The Duke, considering that it read like a novel, did not rate the work. Possibly he objected to the author’s limited admission that, ‘The laurels of Waterloo must be divided – the British won the battle, the Prussians achieved and made available the victory.’309 If so, Scott was only saying in so many words what Wellington had himself conceded in the Waterloo Despatch. Wellington’s prejudices had conspired to make him un
charitable; the author had performed him a useful service.

  Artists too could be useful, for they, no less than writers, remained enthusiastic to treat Wellington and Waterloo as subjects. It was also a genre towards which the Duke was much more favourably disposed. He visited the Royal Academy in 1819 for an early viewing of James Ward’s allegorical picture, The Triumph of Great Britain after the Battle of Waterloo, commissioned for the hall of Chelsea Hospital. He must also have seen Jan Pieneman’s painting of Waterloo commissioned by King William of the Netherlands, which depicted himself about to order the general advance. Exhibited in Hyde Park in 1825, 18 June would have been the ideal opportunity since Waterloo veterans were admitted gratis.310 But perhaps he was otherwise engaged, sitting for Sir Thomas Lawrence who was commissioned to paint him at least seven times between 1814 and 1829. So frequent were the Duke’s visits to Lawrence’s studio that in January 1830, shortly after the artist’s death, he paid a final visit to retrieve the sword that he had carried at Waterloo.311

  Wellington himself commissioned what turned out to be the most successful of all Waterloo paintings. His original 1816 instruction to Sir David Wilkie was that ‘the subject should be a parcel of old soldiers assembled […] at the door of a public-house, chewing tobacco and talking over their old stories’. Wilkie only began work on the commission in 1820. It was he who gave it a Waterloo theme by suggesting that Wellington’s idea ‘wanted some […] principal incident to connect the figures together’. The result was the Chelsea Pensioners receiving the London Gazette Extraordinary, announcing the Battle of Waterloo. When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in May 1822, it proved so popular that it had to be protected by a rail from the crowds that thronged to view it. The figure reading the newspaper, Wilkie’s notes informed visitors, had been with Wolfe at the taking of Quebec. Behind the black man, who had witnessed Louis XVI’s execution, was a man who had served with Granby in the Seven Years’ War and another who had served with Eliott at the Siege of Gibraltar. Even the dog, known as Old Duke, had been in the Peninsula and sat at the feet of a corporal of the Oxford Blues who had fought at Vitoria. Wilkie was consciously linking celebrated episodes in Britain’s military past to the even more glorious achievement of 1815. The Examiner, no fan of Waterloo, declared that the painting was: