Wellington and Waterloo

by Foster, R E

  Publication of the Despatches also provided a fillip to writers: they were immediately hailed as the indispensable source for anybody aspiring to write authoritatively on the subjects of Wellington and Waterloo. And the market for such works remained undiminished. ‘The battle of Waterloo,’ wrote The Times, towards the end of Wellington’s life, ‘is still a story of this present generation, and whether its details are reproduced in a narrative or a model, in a circus or a puppet show, they still command the lively attention of everybody.’363 One person alive to the fact was William Hamilton Maxwell. His 1829 Stories from Waterloo had been an early and successful example of rollicking military fiction. The third volume of his life of Wellington, which appeared in 1841, completing a project of nearly 2,000 pages, received both popular and critical acclaim. His own claim to have fought in both the Peninsula and at Waterloo was almost certainly erroneous. For those wanting something more manageable, drawing unashamedly on the Despatches and the Duke’s speeches in Parliament, the 1845 volume, Maxims and Opinions of the Duke of Wellington, edited by G. H. Francis, was highly recommended.364

  More commercially successful was Archibald Alison’s ten-volume History of Europe from the French Revolution to Waterloo. The volume covering the 1815 campaign appeared in 1843. Alison was a Tory (he was satirised by Disraeli in Coningsby as Mr Wordy, who wrote a history to demonstrate that God was a fellow traveller), who admired Wellington, instancing his superior judgement, devotion to duty, perseverance and fidelity when comparing him to Napoleon. At Waterloo, Napoleon succumbed to the Duke’s superior military skill and ‘the fortitude of the troops which he attacked’. In an 1842 review, however, Alison had written that Wellington and Blücher ‘were surprised, outmanoeuvred, and out-generalled’. Though he was referring only to the opening hours of the campaign on 15 June, this unwelcome reminder of reality, re-stated in his 1843 volume, earned him the lasting hostility of the Duke and his disciples.365

  To modern historians, however, one name stands pre-eminent in this period. William Siborne served with the army of occupation in France until 1817. During the 1820s he made a name for himself as a military topographer. This led, in 1830, to his being commissioned by Wellington’s government to make a model of the Waterloo battlefield. Siborne spent eight months surveying the Waterloo terrain. He also circularised surviving officers. The problem, so far as Wellington and his friends was concerned, was that Siborne decided to depict the action on the field at the moment when the Imperial Guard reached the crest of the allied ridge at about 7 p.m. By that time, Siborne’s researches suggested that roughly half of the men engaging French forces were Prussians. This was not what Wellington had believed at the time, certainly not what he had written. Privately, Sir James Willoughby Gordon voiced his concern that Siborne’s model ‘must in great measure tend to weaken the high authority of the Duke’s despatch’. If Siborne wanted to attain the accuracy he craved, it was suggested to him that an earlier and more static point in the action would better serve his objective, ideally its opening. The point was a fair, but hardly entirely honest, one. Almost certainly with Wellington’s connivance, the British military establishment’s understandable preference for such an option would, in depicting an earlier truth, have the advantage of excluding the Prussians from the model altogether. FitzRoy Somerset, however, was unambiguous when he told Siborne in March 1837:

  The position you have given to the Prussian Troops is not the correct one […] those who see the work will deduce from it that result of the Battle was not so much owing to British Valour, and the great Generalship of the Chief of the English Army, as to the flank Movements of the Prussians.366

  Siborne resisted the pressure. He was more preoccupied with practicalities: ironically, the Whig government had withdrawn funding for the project in 1833, doubtless in part because they did not want to finance the glorification in lead of the Tory chief in the House of Lords. Only loans and donations allowed Siborne to cover the £3,000 he spent on the model before it went on display at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly in October 1838.

  In retrospect, the machinations over the model were, in a contemporary phrase which never quite caught on, ‘a battle of Waterloo in a teapot’. Its opening to the public was partially eclipsed by the publication of the Waterloo volume of the Despatches. Numbers visiting it were relatively disappointing; its London run had ended by 1840. Many visitors, even veterans of the battle, were simply overwhelmed by the detail. Consequently, the press did not, as Wellington’s supporters had feared, see anything untoward in the presence of so many Prussians. Reviewers saw what they believed to have happened in 1815: their focus was squarely on the model’s portrayal of Wellington and the British Army. The Standard, for example, informed its readers that the model showed ‘when the French imperial guard was attacked and defeated on the Anglo-allied position by the British guards and the light infantry brigade’. The Morning Post urged its readers ‘all who love and feel proud of their country to do as we have done’ and go and see it. Such perceptions were evidently blind to the facts as depicted by Siborne. Neither would Siborne have appreciated the irony of one review making the partisan aside that Wellington’s Tory government had sponsored the enterprise whilst Liberal ones had not. The Duke, however, steadfastly refused to visit the model, in the apparently genuine belief that to do so would be to condone inaccuracy.367

  Siborne’s greatest contribution to Waterloo studies, in any case, was the archive of nearly 1,000 items that he built up from Waterloo officers over twelve years. He used them to further his surely naïvely optimistic presumption that ‘by fairly weighing and comparing the data thus afforded me, I shall be enabled to deduce a most faithful and authentic record of the Battle’. His History of the War in France and Belgium in 1815 appeared, to positive reviews, in March 1844.368 Extending to well over 800 pages, its most significant revelation came in the preface. He had, he announced, since completing the model, reviewed his evidence in light of ‘some objections […] raised against the position thereon assigned to a portion of Prussian troops’. This led him to the ‘conviction that an error of some importance […] as regards time and situation did exist’. To be precise, Wellington had defeated the Imperial Guard at least twelve minutes before the Prussians launched their final decisive assault on Plancenoit. ‘It is undeniably true,’ he now concluded, ‘that the blow which decided the victory was that given by Wellington, when, after having completely defeated the grand attack by the French Imperial Guard, he instantly followed up that defeat by boldly attacking and penetrating the Centre of the Enemy’s Lines, and sustaining this movement by the General Advance of his whole Army.’369 Whether in now endorsing Wellington’s analysis of the climax of Waterloo, Siborne really had changed his mind, or was compromising his academic integrity in an attempt to secure much-needed funding from Peel’s Conservative government, is unclear. Like Alison, however, he would discover that once decided against him, the Duke was immovable.

  Siborne’s more pressing concern by the mid-1840s was the discovery that he had a rival. G. R. Gleig’s The Story of the Battle of Waterloo was published by John Murray on Waterloo Day 1847. Gleig had fought in the Peninsula, had known Wellington personally since 1829, and was to serve as Rector of Stratfield Turgis on the Duke’s Stratfield Saye estate. This must surely confer upon his work something of a semi-official authority. He tells us that the Despatches were ‘always […] before me’ as he wrote. He certainly follows the Wellington line very closely, even accepting as fact the Duke’s one-time claim that he had met Blücher after Waterloo at Genappe, not La Belle Alliance. He also warmly acknowledges Siborne’s signal contribution in amassing first-hand testimony that ‘has saved all who may be curious in these matters, a great deal of trouble’. But Siborne was incandescently angry. Gleig, in his view, both caricatured and rubbished his approach when he (Gleig) wrote that ‘my recollections of war lead me somewhat to undervalue – perhaps in a measure to distrust – the stories told in perfectly good faith by parties
who happen to be the heroes of them. Modern battles are not won by feats of individual heroism’.370 Worse, as Siborne demonstrated in a lengthy preface to the 1848 third edition of his History, Gleig had then proceeded to plagiarise him. Compounding Siborne’s frustration too, must have been the realisation that Gleig had beaten him to the popular market: Siborne’s first edition cost 2 guineas; Gleig’s 300-page account retailing at 6 shillings was priced so that ‘almost all classes could afford it’.371 The latter consequently won the literary Battle of Waterloo. Painstaking researcher and cartographer he undoubtedly was, but Siborne was also unfortunate and lacking in business sense. Only 51, he died of an intestinal disease in January 1849.

  The seemingly unending appearance of Waterloo material, not least the Despatches, inevitably prompted those who visited Wellington to ask their host for his recollection of events. Entirely typical was the after-dinner gathering at Walmer Castle in October 1838 at which ‘Lord Strangford alluded to Gurwood’s twelfth volume, which is just coming out; and this led the conversation to Waterloo’. Most of the recorded material from these occasions consists of familiar anecdote, for example that La Haye Sainte should not have been allowed to fall and that Napoleon’s tactics at Waterloo had been no more than ‘bullying with much noise and smoke’.372 Doubtless, however, with impaired health, advancing years, an expectant audience, and in the wake of a good dinner, the tendency for Wellington and old comrades to embroider proved irresistible. That would seem the best explanation for Wellington’s otherwise curious claim that he could, as Lady Salisbury recorded in 1836, ‘distinctly see’ the Prussian reverse at Ligny on 16 June from Quatre Bras. In May 1845 he reiterated in writing that ‘with a glass from Quatre Bras, I positively saw the principal events on the field of Ligny’. These included ‘Blücher’s personal situation, and the retreat of the Prussians from the field of battle’. Gleig’s account of Waterloo accepted Wellington’s claims uncritically. They could not, however, as well-placed contemporaries with no particular axe to grind pointed out, literally be true. Neither had they been made at the time.373

  Another new story about the campaign, which became public during the 1830s, is that the Duke rode over to see Blücher on the night of 17 June. Wellington apparently relayed the episode to his daughter-in-law’s father, Henry Pierrepoint, in 1833, and more fully to Mr Justice Coltman at Stratfield Saye in 1838. This is most probably a simple case of confusion on the part of those recording the anecdote. The Pierrepoint version was written down only third hand, whilst the Coltman one is surely that which appears to have originated in the Dover Chronicle. In this version, moreover, it is not 17 June but 15 June – when Wellington was actually at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball – that his lone mission was reported as having taken place. It is inconceivable that the contemporary record would not confirm a journey on either of the dates: the confusion was with the well-documented visit Wellington paid Blücher on the morning of 16 June.374

  Less doubt seems to attach to an episode concerning Hougoumont’s role in the battle. In his table talk, Wellington occasionally expressed contradictory views about the importance of the château. In 1837, however, he was visited by the executors of a man who had left £500 for the bravest soldier in the British Army. The Duke plumped for Sir James Macdonell on the basis that he commanded the defenders at Hougoumont, ‘the key to his entire position’ at Waterloo, which was in turn ‘the last, the greatest and most important action of the war’. Macdonell insisted on sharing the legacy with Sergeant Ralph Fraser of the Coldstream Guards, who had helped him close the north gates ‘by dint of sheer physical strength’. The story was widely circulated in the press, thereby further consummating Hougoumont in Waterloo mythology.375

  Of far more consequence was the lengthy memorandum Wellington penned on Waterloo in 1842, by far his fullest statement in writing on the subject since 1815. Why he should have been stirred into writing it is intriguing: controversy on the subject was hardly new! Perhaps he was simply more conscious of his own mortality? Gurwood had warned him in 1835 that unless he spoke, ‘the truth will never be known; and posterity will be led into error by the imagination of historians whose narratives will otherwise become hallowed by time as uncontradicted authorities’. There is certainly no doubt that the Duke was irritated by the flurry of Waterloo accounts that had appeared in the wake of the publication of the Despatches: they were meant to help end the controversies over Waterloo, not fuel them. ‘Surely,’ he wrote, not entirely ingenuously, ‘the details of the battle might have been left as in the original official Reports. The battle, possibly the most important single military event of modern times, was attended by advantages sufficient for the glory of many such armies as the two great allied armies engaged.’ In particular, his memorandum reveals that he had been riled by the critique of his 1815 strategy contained in Clausewitz’s History of the Campaign, a manuscript translation copy of which had been sent to him. He had also been provoked by Alison’s contention that Napoleon had surprised and out-generalled him, reference to which he had inadvertently come across when reading the Spectator, and which he believed, wrongly, to have been political in motivation. Whatever the truth, when Lord Francis Egerton informed Wellington that he was writing a piece for the September 1842 number of the Quarterly Review about a life of Blücher, the Duke broke with past habit and offered to provide material to assist him. Charles Arbuthnot informed Egerton that Wellington had sought out volume twelve of the Despatches and read out portions to him from pp. 375–476 ‘with high delight’. This would be the raw material from which to ‘write his Memorandum, and make out Alison to be a d-d rascally Frenchman’. The task was substantially completed between 22–25 July.376

  Wellington was insistent that what he wrote was not for publication under his name. As he told Gurwood, ‘I don’t propose to give mine enemy the gratification of writing a book!’ Egerton nevertheless drew heavily on Wellington’s memorandum for his 1842 article. So, at least indirectly, did Sir Francis Head in a piece he wrote for the Quarterly in October 1843 defending Wellington’s strategy. Egerton inevitably returned to it again for an article in the June 1845 number of the Quarterly on Marmont, Siborne and Alison. He sent Wellington the proofs; the Duke perused and annotated them on Waterloo Day. Together, the Quarterly articles constitute the clearest and most detailed examples during his lifetime of what he called getting somebody to answer for him.377

  Unsurprisingly, neither Wellington’s 1842 memorandum, nor the subsequent notes and annotations he provided for Egerton, reveal any significant new insights on Waterloo. The memorandum, in particular, as Arbuthnot’s letter makes clear, was more or less a précis of the Waterloo material in the Despatches. Familiar charges were denied and rebutted: that he had taken a poor position before the campaign opened; that he had been surprised and was slow to react on 15 June; that he had not given the Prussians the credit they merited.378 He was especially severe in his 1845 annotations on Egerton’s review of Siborne’s History: even Egerton thought the Duke guilty of unreasonable harshness towards the latter, either through confusing him with Alison or misinterpreting his language. But it was more than this. Wellington seized, for example, on details such as Siborne’s statement that Uxbridge had been wounded before the general advance; the Duke was emphatic that it was afterwards. Wellington’s fundamental objection to Siborne, as Egerton perhaps insufficiently grasped, was one of methodology. Siborne’s History, after all, had reached favourable conclusions about Wellington. But, as the Duke explained, in words that anticipated Gleig’s criticism of Siborne, he had reached them in the wrong way. It was the historian’s duty:

  to seek with diligence for the most authentic details of the subject on which he writes, to peruse with care and attention all that has been published; to prefer that which has been officially recorded and published by responsible public authorities; next, to attend to that which proceeds from Official Authority, although not contemporaneously published, and to pay least attention to the statements of p
rivate individuals, whether communicated in writing or verbally; particularly the latter, if at a period distant from the date of the operation itself; and, above all, such statements as relate to the conduct of the Individual himself communicating or making the statement.379

  In writing this, Wellington was simply being consistent. He had objected to all accounts since 1815, whether favourable or unfavourable, if they were not based squarely on the proper – namely, his – authority. This explains a largely overlooked and otherwise inexplicable paradox. Wellington was happy to sanction the publication of his Despatches, containing as they did his criticism and abuse of individuals, even countries – material clearly damaging to his own reputation and character. He did so because the Despatches were a true record. With so many Waterloo accounts, it was different. Whether they differed from his version of events through misperception, misinformation or through malice was immaterial. They could never be condoned; they must either be ignored or corrected. In old age, Wellington was as adamant in the belief that his version of the truth was the right one, no less than he had been in 1815!

  The Duke’s logic inclined him to dismiss all accounts of the 1815 campaign as either fiction or poetry. Such contempt did not deter practitioners of the latter two genres from continuing to treat either him or his battle as subjects. Waterloo-inspired poetry, often little better than doggerel, remained most likely to appear in newspapers on 18 June. More crafted was the English Prize poem read at Wellington’s installation as Chancellor of Oxford in which Napoleon ‘Bowed to thy Genius, Chief of Waterloo’. In 1846, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘The New Timon’ referred in similar terms to Wellington as ‘Our Man of men; the Prince of Waterloo’. Half a century later, Sir William Fraser presumed the lines would be familiar to everybody.380