Wellington and Waterloo

by Foster, R E

  It was, however, the novel that increasingly found favour with the mid-nineteenth-century reading public. Charlotte Brontë’s Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, published in 1847, is generally assumed to have been based upon her hero, the Duke. Dickens visited Waterloo as part of his first continental tour in July 1837, probably in search of ideas, for he was accompanied by his illustrator, H. K. Browne, as well as Mrs Dickens. Though his novels contain Waterloo allusions (Inspector Bucket in Bleak House refers to Life Guardsman Shaw as ‘a model of the whole British Army in himself’), Dickens never engaged the subject directly. He found the emotions it aroused too powerful, being much moved on reading Lady Magdalene De Lancey’s A Week at Waterloo whilst writing Barnaby Rudge in 1841.381 Only Defoe, in his estimation, had possessed the genius required to do justice to it. But Dickens did not ignore the battlefield entirely. His now relatively neglected 1846 story, The Battle of Life, purporting to be set centuries before, begins when ‘a fierce battle was fought. It was fought upon a long summer day’. Countless thousands had been killed. The farmers’ ploughs, where ‘every furrow that was turned, revealed some fragments of the fight’, could leave no reader in any doubt as to where his inspiration had come from.382

  William Makepeace Thackeray had no such qualms about treating Waterloo in fiction. The first number of Vanity Fair, his famous ‘novel without a hero’ appeared in January 1847. Thackeray was barely 3 when Waterloo was fought. As a young man, he was ambivalent about Wellington the politician. He professed also to having been bored mindless by countless after-dinner armchair analyses of the battle. When he visited the Low Countries in 1840, he determined to visit Brussels without the obligatory detour to Waterloo. He succumbed and was duly inspired. That, at least, is the claim of a letter he wrote under the alias of Mr M. A. Titmarsh, one of a series entitled Little Travels and Roadside Sketches. In his masterpiece, later that decade, Thackeray made explicit reference to Gleig’s Story of the Battle of Waterloo, though it surely appeared just too late to have been of more than incidental use to him. His impressions were probably formed more from the time he spent poring over contemporary newspapers. He exhorted his readers to do likewise in order that they might recreate for themselves the enormity of the titanic struggle against France: ‘think of the condition of Europe for twenty years before, where people were fighting, not by thousands but by millions’.383 A generation before, this would have been so obvious as to have needed no explanation.

  Presumably because many veterans and painful memories still lived, Sir William Fraser was unhappy about Thackeray’s blending of fact and fiction. But he was in a minority: Vanity Fair was the most popular nineteenth- century treatment of the Waterloo campaign. As such, it was surely important in both forming and reinforcing public perceptions of those events. Thackeray’s account of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, in particular, confirmed its iconic status in the popular imagination, completing what Byron had begun in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Though he keeps the fighting in the background – Thackeray chooses to focus on some of his main characters in a Brussels church as the guns start to boom on 18 June – he cannot resist providing a brief snapshot as events unfold, for the ‘tale is in every Englishman’s mouth: and you and I, who were children when the great battle was won and lost, are never tired of hearing and recounting the history of that famous action’. In doing so, he is unashamedly patriotic. The references to the Duke are laudatory: he is ‘the genius of the immortal Wellington!’ He has, apart from a ‘raw militia’ of Germans and disaffected Belgians, only 20,000 British troops with which to confront 150,000 Frenchmen, a wild distortion even by contemporary standards of hyperbole. And reference to the Prussians is as brief as it is oblique: the reader is simply told that the French ‘had other foes besides the British to engage’. It is emphatically the British who prevail: ‘Then at last [with the Imperial Guard repulsed] the English troops rushed from the post from which no enemy had been able to dislodge them, and the Guard turned and fled.’ The pursuit, it is implied, is effected by the British. Thackeray even ridicules General Cambronne, ‘a commanding-officer of the Guard, who having sworn that “the Guard died, but never surrendered”, was taken prisoner the next minute by a private soldier’. He must have known that Cambronne had been apprehended by Colonel Hew Halkett but delighted in maximising the ignominy of the episode.384 Unlike Siborne, Thackeray was concerned with pleasing his public, not salving his historian’s conscience.

  Dickens and Thackeray were not the only literary luminaries of a new generation to see the battlefield in this period. John Ruskin made his second visit in 1833, aged only 14. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who went there with William Holman Hunt in October 1849, was born in the year that Wellington became prime minister. Reflecting afterwards, in A Trip to Paris and Belgium, he dared to ask whether Waterloo:

  the name which travels side by side

  With English life from childhood

  really was so unique? This was highly untypical. Thackeray spoke for the vast majority when he wrote of ‘the little secret admission that one must make after seeing it. Let an Englishman go and see that field and he never forgets it. The sight is an event in his life […] I will wager that there is not one of them but feels a glow as he looks at the place, and remembers that he too, is an Englishman.’385

  The literati did not have the field to themselves. Tipu Sultan’s son visited during the 1830s, but not to venerate Wellington. He is reported to have said, ‘Ah, I hate the English; they killed my father!’ Almost certainly he encountered some, for Henry Addison, retired dragoon guard turned battlefield guide, estimated there to be some 4,000–5,000 British visitors a year by the end of that decade. By then, John Murray had filled the void created by the absence of a good guidebook. Thackeray’s complaint that it was a hack job which ‘must have gutted many hundreds of guide-books’ sounds suspiciously like sour grapes: it anticipated his own project for something similar. As he conceded, ‘Every English party I saw had this infallible red book in their hands, and gained a vast deal of historical and general information from it.’386

  Letters in the British press describing the battlefield become noticeably sparser after 1830. Those that did get published comment on how it was changing. In 1836 it was reported that there had ‘recently been erected several manufactories of sugar from beet root, or, as it may on this occasion more appropriately be called, mangel worzel’. More noticeable still was the rapid decline of woodland as landowners of the forest of Soignes converted tracts of it to arable land. On the battlefield proper, by the end of the 1840s, the orchard and wood at Hougoumont had virtually disappeared with only a few trees and hedges left to delineate the boundaries of 1815.387

  Anybody travelling to the battlefield in 1840 would have discovered that Wellington’s Waterloo headquarters was no longer an inn. It had become the town’s post house and post office. Further disregard of the past was apparent in the form of a new flight of stairs to the organ loft in Waterloo church: they obscured one of the regimental memorials. But at least the willow over Anglesey’s leg was doing well. For travellers who wanted to stay or stop at Mont St Jean, there was either the Hôtel de la Couronne or the Hôtel des Colonnes. They reputedly sold poor maps; one even had no beer. As you approached the field itself, ‘women and children sally out, with maps and charts, and relics’ – the latter still readily to be found. A sceptical officer preferred to take a piece of charcoal from Hougoumont: ‘This I value the more, as I feel sure it was not manufactured for the occasion.’ On the south-eastern side of the field, the 1819 memorial to the Prussians, wantonly vandalised by French forces in 1832 en route to helping the Belgians against the Dutch, had been repaired and railings added to it.388

  Visitors invariably recalled the Lion’s Mound as the salient feature of the battlefield: its original clay steps were visibly crumbling under the weight of the tourist traffic. For all that it was an incomparable vantage point, however, it continued to prove annoying. French troops had damaged the lion�
�s teeth and tail in 1832. In December that year, there had been an abortive attempt by a Belgian deputy to have it replaced with a ‘funeral monument’. Still smarting from memories of their unwanted union with the Dutch, some of his compatriots hoisted a black flag at the summit on Waterloo Day 1843. As for the British, Thackeray reported that ‘military men regard [it] as a kind of sacrilege, which they will not soon forget or forgive’. Ample proof of what he meant was provided by an 1839 officer’s account fulminating that it disfigured ‘the most interesting quarter of the field […] thus not only disabling posterity from appreciating the refined military skill, the matured judgement, and the happy combinations of the veteran who won the day, but actually altering the bearing of positions so as to present to the eye of the spectator “the thing which was not” in matters of vital moment.’389

  The Lion’s Mound also appears in Wellington’s two artistic ‘visits’ to the battlefield during this period. In 1849 Sir Edwin Landseer went to the battlefield as preparation for his Dialogue at Waterloo, exhibited in 1850. Supposedly set around 1833, it depicts an imagined scene in which the Duke conducts Lady Douro over the field. It was not generally well-received. Part of the problem was that his canvas had been anticipated by Benjamin Robert Haydon. Haydon had wanted to paint Wellington at Waterloo to mark the battle’s twentieth anniversary. But Wellington initially rejected Haydon’s request for a sitting, lecturing him portentously that ‘a painter should be a historian, a philosopher, a politician, as well as a poet and a man of taste’. The proposed subject, he assured him, would accomplish none of this. Haydon conceded that it would, of course, be unhistorical but that ‘imagining a great general visiting the field of his greatest battle after many years is both natural and poetical; that the musings that must occur to him there would be philosophical […] I glory in placing you there, and think the public and the army will glory in seeing you there’. Haydon was subsequently granted access to his subject in May 1839 when a group of Liverpool gentlemen approached Wellington for a portrait from the artist. On this occasion he expressed complete indifference as to the subject matter. The canvas was completed later that year.390 The episode is yet another illustration of the Duke’s ambivalence towards the memorialising of Waterloo; Haydon’s image was one of the most potent commemorations. Wordsworth, now Poet Laureate, explained its message for the public the following year.

  By Art’s bold privilege Warrior and Warhorse stand

  On ground yet strewn with their last battle’s wreck…

  But by the Chieftain’s look, though at his side

  Hangs that day’s reassured sword, how firm a check

  Is given to triumph and all human pride!

  Yon trophied Mound shrinks to a shadowy speck

  In his calm presence! Him the mighty deed

  Elates not.391

  In the absence of the Duke as a battlefield guide, British tourists found a worthy replacement in Edward Cotton. Born in 1792 on the Isle of Wight, Cotton served with the 7th Hussars at Waterloo, where he distinguished himself by rescuing a comrade pinned to the ground by a wounded horse. When he left the army in 1835, Sergeant-Major Cotton settled at Mont St Jean and quickly earned a reputation as ‘an excellent and intelligent guide’. His home also served as a museum for the various artefacts found, bought and donated to him. Such was his success that during the 1840s he was able to relocate the enterprise to the newly-built Hôtel du Musée near the base of the Lion’s Mound. By 1846 he felt confident enough to produce his own battlefield guide. Within a year it was sufficiently well-known – especially for its section of Waterloo anecdotes – that it was being widely quoted in the British press. This helped persuade him to use a London publisher for the third edition of February 1849. By then, A Voice from Waterloo was, in truth, less a guide than a history of the campaign, drawing heavily on the Despatches and Siborne. Running to over 300 pages, the mid-century tourist needed capacious pockets. Cotton continued guiding until two days before his death shortly after Waterloo Day 1849. He was buried in the grounds of Hougoumont.392

  Cotton is a good example of a Waterloo veteran who prospered. Others were noticeable for their longevity. In 1835, Old Bustler, a dog who had supposedly been at the battle, died aged 22. Reference to horses was understandably more common. The most famous of all, Copenhagen, who had carried Wellington throughout 18 June, died on 12 February 1836. The Duke ordered his burial at Stratfield Saye with full military honours. He fared far better than Jack, the last surviving Waterloo horse at the Knightsbridge Barracks. He was bedecked in laurel, as usual, on 18 June 1836, but infirmities led to him being unceremoniously shot a few days later.393

  There was outcry in some quarters at Jack’s fate: were not Wellington’s Waterloo heroes – even the non-human ones – deserving better of the nation in their later years? One who believed they were was Mr Boxer of Southwark. He cited the case of a Waterloo widow with five children whose husband had served twenty-one years in the 52nd Light Infantry, but who was now confined to the workhouse, because of ‘the enactments of this inhuman law’. Another who believed that Waterloo veterans were cases apart was a magistrate called Cottingham. In 1843 he ‘declared that he never will punish any man who was present at the battle of Waterloo for any offence short of felony’.394 His remarks caused a furore. But there is no real evidence that they had a basis in fact. In September 1845, Joseph Laycock was charged with hawking calico without a licence. He pleaded unfair arrest and ‘added, as if to touch the sympathy of the court, that he was at the battle of Waterloo’. He was fined £10 and, being unable to pay, was sent to the house of correction for three months.395

  For others, fortunes were inevitably mixed. James Thompson, the 6-foot–9-inch Scottish giant, who had been a circus attraction in the 1820s, appeared as a plaintiff at the Surrey sessions in 1838, accusing two of his fellow lodgers of stealing clothes to the value of £1. One thing at least was certain: they could not have been stolen to order for his landlord, George Strutt, for he was ‘a mere dwarf’. The case excited much amusement. Less funny was the fate of Dr John Gordon Smith. He spent the last fifteen months of his life in the Fleet Prison for debt, dying suddenly at the age of 41 in 1833. As surgeon to the 12th Lancers, he had saved the life of Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Ponsonby, commanding officer of the 12th Light Dragoons, the account of whose horrific wounding was one of the best known personal stories from 1815. Also no respecters of reputation were the Rebecca rioters who completely destroyed the tollhouse at Penygarn in 1843. The keeper was a Waterloo pensioner; his medal was stolen.396 And notoriety, rather than sympathy, was the fate of Joel Fisher, capitally convicted in 1844. After twenty-three years of exemplary service in the 11th Hussars, he murdered his wife with brutal ferocity. When he was hanged at Wilton Jail in Somerset, over 5,000 turned up to watch. One presumes this was at least partly due to his Waterloo association. So also, the fact that ‘several applications were made to the governor of the prison by persons afflicted with the king’s evil and rheumatism for permission for the hand of the dead man to be rubbed over the parts affected with idea that they would be cured’. The requests were declined.397

  Mid-nineteenth-century society was clearly more comfortable with murder than insanity. A striking number of Waterloo men who appear in the columns of the press were said to be suffering from the latter affliction, though whether their number proportionately was greater than that for society as a whole is impossible to say. One such was 42-year-old Captain William Henry Rowlls, erstwhile of the 14th Light Dragoons. He was prone to periods of blindness, a belief that he was the MP for Surrey, and a propensity to undress in public. Such details are suggestive of what we would now call post-traumatic-stress disorder. This is surely more plausible than the contemporary verdict that his symptoms were the consequence of his ‘leading a very idle and luxurious life’. Far less ambiguously, the jury in an 1838 lunacy commission on William Bartlett of Chelsea, an ensign in the 69th Foot at Waterloo, was instructed to ‘find that the delusions u
nder which Mr Bartlett laboured were strongly tinged with the events of that day and the characters who took a prominent part in it’.398 And madness was inextricably linked in the contemporary mind with suicide: the latter almost invariably attracted a verdict of temporary insanity. At least ten Waterloo veterans took their own lives between 1839 and 1845, most famously John Gurwood, editor of the Despatches, who cut his throat with a razor on Christmas Day 1845.399 His suicide was ascribed to depression, but the battle, a generation on, was still claiming its victims.

  Wellington’s dictum that not every man in uniform was a hero thus remained as true as ever. One obvious exception was Charles Ewart of the Scots Greys. He had generally chosen to shun the limelight that followed his capture of the Eagle of the 45th. Walter Scott had prevailed upon him to appear at an 1816 celebration dinner in Edinburgh, but Ewart had told his audience that he would rather fight the battle again than make a speech. He retired, after thirty-two years’ service, with his wife to Salford, where he became a fencing master. Proof that he had succeeded in lying low is suggested by the fact that some newspapers referred to him, phonetically, as ‘Hewitt’ in 1837. The occasion was the presentation to him of a silver cup by some of his erstwhile comrades on Waterloo Day that year. The cup was stolen three months later by Ewart’s neighbour, John Reddish. It was never recovered. Ewart died, aged 77, on 23 March 1846. His grave would be virtually forgotten. But his exploits were kept alive and consummated in oils by Richard Ansdell’s 1848 Battle for the Standard. The painting was on display in Regent Street in 1852.400 Partly because of it, almost alone of the rank and file who fought at Waterloo, Ewart’s name would survive into the next century.