by Foster, R E
Their monument should have joined that of other nationalities on the Waterloo battlefield. For though Victor Hugo may have been right in 1861 that ‘Each year the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo is being observed less, even at Waterloo, and the English no longer come on that day bearing laurels’, there remained a good number of visitors. The first rail links from Brussels to Waterloo were completed in 1854; Thomas Cook included the battlefield in his first continental tour of 1855. At that time there were still guides available who could remember 1815 at first hand: Matthew Arnold was thrilled to be shown the field by Byron’s guide of 1816 when he visited in 1860. Hugo reckoned the going rate for such tours to be 3 francs. And even though fellow travellers would agree with him that ‘The field of Waterloo today resembles any other stretch of country’, he was still able to find ‘the neck of an exploded bomb eaten with rust of forty-six years, and fragments of metal that broke like twigs in his hands’.480
Hugo’s is amongst the best descriptions we have for the battlefield just after mid-century. The Hougoumont complex, in particular, is described in helpful detail. A ‘shattered and gutted wing’ is all that remained of the manor house, whilst a tree had grown up through what was the main staircase. Whitewashed in 1849, the chapel walls were again ‘covered with graffiti’. The Lion’s Mound (‘that monumental hillock’) was soon to be more easily scaled by virtue of the fact that some 226 stone steps and an iron rail had been added. Entry cost half a franc.481
Hugo’s celebrity added the Hôtel des Colonnes in Mont St Jean, where he had completed Les Misérables in 1861, to the list of must-see attractions. It proudly boasted a letter from the novelist. Other notable visitors included the 13-year-old son of Napoleon III in September 1869. A decade later, the hopes of Bonapartists would die with him when he fell fighting with the British against the Zulus. Thomas Hardy paid his first visit to Waterloo in June 1876. He visited the Hôtel du Musée, still flourishing and run by one of Edward Cotton’s nieces. It proved less memorable than the peasant woman who showed him a basket of skulls with perfect teeth. Hardy, understandably, did not probe the question of their provenance. The trade in original artefacts had, after all, long since dried up: you were most likely to be assailed with locals proffering walking sticks made from wood cut near La Haye Sainte. ‘They must,’ declared one guide irreverently, ‘be the great-offshoots from the Holy Hedge of 1815.’482
Another to notice, indeed complain, about what he called beggars selling sticks, was Sir William Fraser. Born in 1826, he had first visited the battlefield in 1844. He was anxious to trace his father’s footsteps, Sir James having been a colonel in the 7th Hussars as well as reputedly steadying Uxbridge as his leg was being amputated. Sir William was amazed to spy his father’s sword amongst Cotton’s exhibits and eventually managed to buy it for £25. His third visit of 1888 provides us with the best end-of-century account, not just of the Waterloo battlefield but of other 1815 campaign landmarks.483 Le Caillou, where Napoleon passed the night of 17 June, was owned by an architect, Emile Coulon. He showed Fraser the tables on which the Emperor had both breakfasted and spread his maps on the morning of 18 June. At a more or less deserted Quatre Bras, he found the locals less helpful. They were gathered in an inn at the famous cross roads and ‘repudiated all knowledge of the battle; in fact declared that there had been no battle there’. Fraser concluded: ‘Such is Fame!’ More likely, he was experiencing an example of what Rossetti remembered as ‘how the English are victimized to a beastly extent everywhere’ contrasted to most Belgians’ ‘servile aping of the French’. But Fraser’s account is also suggestive, perhaps, of a past that was no longer relevant for locals who had once enthusiastically supplemented their income with tales of 1815.484
One way in which Waterloo was given new relevance in later-nineteenth-century Britain was through empire. When Tennyson’s 1852 Ode opened with ‘an empire’s lamentation’, it was the constituent parts of the British Isles that he had in mind. By the time he died in 1892, popular imperialism was nearing its height. Thus, to Waterloo’s dividends, which at mid-century were seen chiefly to consist of peace and prosperity, could now be added the bonus of imperial expansion. The battle also set the standard for the soldiers of empire to emulate. The heroics performed at Rorke’s Drift in January 1879 inevitably brought to mind those at Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, all examples of how the few could defy the many and in so doing ‘exert a strong influence over the fate of the day’. News that Germany and Britain had resolved their colonial frictions in East Africa and elsewhere was made public, surely not coincidentally, around Waterloo Day 1890.485 During the Second Boer War of 1899–1902, the dowager Duchess of Wellington lent the 1850 Landseer painting, Dialogue at Waterloo, as well as what purported to be the Duke’s Waterloo watch, for an exhibition at Weybridge to assist with the War Relief Fund. Six months later, on the eighty-fifth anniversary of the battle, hopes were voiced that this, of all dates, with the tide turning in South Africa, would be a good one to receive further good news from Lord Roberts, arguably Britain’s most popular soldier since Wellington. Long since safely returned, the Field-Marshal was the distributor of prizes at Wellington College’s speech day on Waterloo Day 1906. In his address, ‘he trusted that the boys of Wellington would feel it was their bounden duty to defend the empire when called upon, no matter in what calling or situation in life they found themselves’.486
Late-nineteenth-century imperial history inevitably impacted upon wider foreign policy considerations. Colonial rivalries with France weakened the entente that had grown up since the Crimean War; it culminated with talk of war when the two nations clashed at Fashoda on the Nile in 1898. This was one reason why some in Britain sought a new understanding with their old ally from the Waterloo campaign. Though at the start of the Crimean War, reports from Berlin had proclaimed that ‘What the Prussians did then they are ready to do again at our side’, Prussia had remained neutral throughout that conflict. The fact that the British press subsequently condemned what it deemed excessive displays of commemoration on 18 June in Berlin and elsewhere, implied that France was Britain’s preferred ally of the two.487 But the memory of Waterloo, at least in the short term, was one reason why British public opinion generally welcomed the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War. As an 18-year-old, Kaiser Wilhelm I had been at Waterloo; his heir, Frederick, married Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter. In 1889 the Duke of Cambridge was appointed to command a Prussian cavalry regiment of the Guard, ‘a special compliment, intended to recall the brotherhood in arms of the English and Prussians at the battle of Waterloo’. The following year, in wake of news of the Anglo-German agreements, The Times told its readers ‘to remember that on the 18th of June, 1890, as on the same day seventy–five years before, the bonds of union have been drawn closer between the two great Teutonic nations’. For Waterloo Day 1895, Kaiser Wilhelm II sent a wreath to the Royal Dragoons in Ireland in his capacity as their honorary colonel. Though there was some unease in Britain at Germany’s rising population, its soaring industrial output, and its support for the Boers, the general presumption around 1900 was that the two nations would celebrate Waterloo’s centenary together in grand style.488
By 1900, Britain’s politicians were rightly preoccupied by French colonial ambitions and the Kaiser’s Weltpolitik, not Napoleon and the Seventh Coalition. So too, the British public were more disposed to celebrate empire and its generals than Waterloo and Wellington. Even so, the half century after the Duke’s passing would witness no real let up in the outpouring of works about him and the battle. Such change as there was included attempts to present a more dispassionate assessment of both.
Wellington’s death triggered a flood of unofficial lives and related works such as J. Timbs’ Wellingtoniana and the cumbrously titled Characteristics of the Duke of Wellington, apart from his military talents. Far more consequential was the decision by the second Duke to resume publication of his father’s papers. The former, for
all his eccentricities (he kept a small elephant to mow the grass at Stratfield Saye), proved a worthy keeper of the Wellington flame. In 1858 he began a series entitled Supplementary Despatches. Fifteen volumes, consisting mostly of items received by the Duke down to 1818, were published in the years to 1872. That covering Waterloo included Wellington’s famous letter to Lady Frances Webster about the Finger of Providence having been upon him; he had withheld it from the original series of Despatches on the grounds that it contained nothing of public or military interest. The second Duke also took his father’s story beyond 1818 with an eight-volume series of Despatches, Correspondence and Memoranda covering the years down to 1832. Disraeli considered the latter ‘the best reading he had ever had’.489
The most significant new work about Waterloo, as even Britons conceded on the battle’s fiftieth anniversary, was by Frenchmen. Two writers stood out. One was the literary statesman, Adolphe Thiers. He was reported to be visiting the battlefield in 1860 as part of his research for the concluding volume in his history of the French Consulate and Empire. It duly appeared in 1862. An apologist for Napoleon, Thiers ascribed the Emperor’s defeat to Grouchy’s treachery. For good measure though, he also belittled Wellington and his army. His thesis was widely ridiculed in Britain. The Times, typically, declared that his account ‘is as thickly charged with error and bombast as the field was with its lurid war-clouds’.490 It was the brilliance of Victor Hugo’s pen, however, that really excited British passions. Hugo was the son of an ardently Bonapartist general. Having overcome a long-standing aversion to visit Waterloo, he became obsessed with explaining it. When not immersed in contemporary accounts and histories, he more or less lived on the battlefield between May and July 1861. Les Misérables, published in 1862, may primarily be fiction and only incidentally about Waterloo, but the novel contains a memorable account of the battle. Nineteen chapters are devoted to what he called his ‘autopsy of the catastrophe’.491
Hugo’s Waterloo did create or perpetuate some potent myths, including those of a defiant Cambronne refusing to surrender; and of the sunken lane along Wellington’s defensive ridge, passable only when filled with the bodies of 1,500 Frenchmen and 2,000 horses.492 The latter was an example of what offended British sensibilities, Hugo’s thesis that Waterloo was decided by contingency: for example, the storm of 17 June that thwarted Napoleon’s plans for an early start on 18 June, and the decisive fact that it was Blücher, not Grouchy, who reached Mont St Jean. This marginalised Wellington’s contribution to victory. Hugo was blunt in his conclusion that Waterloo was ‘the complete, absolute, shattering, incontestable, final, supreme triumph of mediocrity over genius’. It was ‘a battle of the first importance won by a commander of the second rank’.493
Rees Gronow, erstwhile of the 1st Foot Guards, helped rally the forces of patriotism in Wellington’s defence. A volume of colourful, if unreliable, reminiscences appeared in 1862, with a preface cheerfully admitting that his timing owed not a little to the offence caused by the Gallic pair. Waterloo was won, Gronow insisted, by ‘the genius of Wellington, the energy of Blücher, and the dauntless courage of the English and Prussian armies’.494 A more redoubtable champion was on hand in G. R. Gleig. From 1858–1860, Gleig was working on an English version of a life of Wellington by a Belgian military engineer, Henri Alexis Brialmont. A revised 700-page single-volume second edition appeared in 1862 under Gleig’s own name. It is the nearest we have to an official life, based as it is on access to the Duke’s papers and help from his family and friends, not to mention Gleig’s own long-standing acquaintanceship with his subject. The third, ‘people’s edition’ of Gleig’s Life of Wellington, which appeared in 1864, proved even more successful than his Story of the Battle of Waterloo. Its hardly original theme was that ‘the guiding star of Duty through life’ was the key to understanding the Duke. With cheap editions being reissued until well into the twentieth century, Gleig amply succeeded in his aim of producing ‘a book which shall come within the reach and be level with the understandings of the great body of my countrymen’.495 Those countrymen were also reminded, in language even more emphatic than the Duke ever used in public, of what had happened at Waterloo:
The French had delivered their last attack, and failed in it, before the pressure of the Prussians on their flank and rear was felt by either side […] The opportune arrival of the Prussians, therefore, sufficed to convert defeat into rout; but it contributed in no degree to the preservation of the English army.496
This was going too far. Work prompted in part by Thiers, Hugo, and Waterloo’s fiftieth anniversary, said so. Published posthumously in 1865, Sir James Shaw Kennedy’s Notes on the Battle of Waterloo came from an author who had served with the Third Division in 1815 and who was regarded as one of the ablest soldiers in the service. Essentially a series of 171 extended observations, Shaw Kennedy said something that the Duke’s pride and honour had never allowed him to admit, that even great commanders made mistakes. Wellington’s included risking battle on 16 June, keeping men at Hal on 18 June and inadequately defending La Haye Sainte. Even so, he judged that victory ‘would have been eminently imperilled had the Duke of Wellington fallen at any period in the action previous to the last general attack’.497 Three years later, Colonel Charles Cornwallis Chesney dared to go further in The Waterloo Lectures: A Study of the Campaign of 1815. Chesney was a hugely respected figure in military circles, writing and speaking with the authority of a former professor at Sandhurst and the incumbent one at the Staff College, Camberley. In his preface he declared that the idea that Waterloo had been won by British pluck was ‘hardly less a romance’ than Victor Hugo’s colourful interpretation of events. He gave due weight to the Prussian contribution, insisting that as many as 50,000 were engaged at Waterloo by the time Wellington ordered the general advance. For all that Wellington performed well, he owed much to Napoleon’s mistakes and his Prussian ally. Chesney had, said one reviewer, finally exploded national myths to which the younger generation in both France and Britain were still being subjected.498 He was the first recognised British authority to really challenge the Wellington orthodoxy.
The next two decades would see no new British account of Waterloo of any great durability but they did witness the publication of some of the best known memoirs. They included Cavalié Mercer’s incomparable Journal of the Waterloo Campaign (1870) and Magdalene De Lancey’s heart-wrenching A Week at Waterloo (1888). Neither these, nor other works in the genre, have overly much to say about Wellington; still less do they offer any systematic analysis of the battle. An exception, at least in terms of providing raw material, was Major-General Herbert Siborne’s decision, prompted by the seventy-fifth anniversary of Waterloo, to publish a selection from 200 of the officers’ replies received by his father when constructing his model during the 1830s.499 However, William Siborne’s correspondents, given that their brief was to detail what was happening to them at 7 p.m., very often make no mention of Wellington. Reading them, one could easily reach the Duke’s ironic conclusion that he had not been there.
For a new popular work that explicitly addressed both Wellington and Waterloo, readers of the later Victorian period turned to Sir William Fraser’s Words on Wellington. In and out of Parliament for a generation after 1852, Fraser established a reputation as a collector of Waterloo memorabilia, an authority on the Duke and a lively raconteur. By 1889 he had sufficient material for a volume on his hero. Probably his most frequently cited anecdote is Wellington’s answer to the question of how he was able to beat a succession of Napoleon’s marshals in the Peninsula. The Duke memorably responded that, ‘They planned their campaigns just as you might make a splendid set of harness. It looks very well; and answers very well; until it gets broken; and then you are done for. Now I made my campaigns of ropes. If anything went wrong, I tied a knot; and went on.’ Historians have treated this, and much else in Fraser, uncritically. But Fraser rarely provides the reader with any provenance. The foregoing example, for instance, appears
sandwiched between an anecdote about a sword concealed in an umbrella and Wellington’s dictum that the best test of a great general was ‘to know when to retreat; and to dare to do it’. And Fraser’s broader judgements make Gleig read like a model of scholarly objectivity. He ranked only Shakespeare and Michelangelo as comparable to the Duke in the entirety of human history. Napoleon’s downfall, he contends, was ‘mainly owing to his utter incapability of comprehending the British Character’, whilst at Waterloo, Wellington ‘was fighting the true, honest cause of Civilization, and of Freedom […] and he must have felt during the Greatest Battle that the World has ever known, that it was his guiding spirit that would give Europe half a century of peace’.500 One can readily understand why Fraser’s patriotically colourful portrayal was popular with the late-Victorian public. It should not continue to be so influential.
Much more reliable and revealing about Wellington the man, if not always about Waterloo, was a handful of memoirs, notes and diaries which appeared in the last quarter of the century. The catalyst, in a succession of volumes in the decade from 1874, was the publication of Charles Greville’s memoirs covering the forty years down to 1860. As Clerk to the Privy Council from 1821, Greville was well placed to observe the great events of the day. Though he was never an intimate of the Duke (Mrs Arbuthnot called him ‘the most unprincipled reprobate in the Kingdom’), his brother, Algy, acted as Wellington’s private secretary and sometimes showed him his employer’s private correspondence.501 Never totally convinced by the Duke’s persona of simplicity, he found him difficult to fathom. But for all that he thought Wellington politically misguided, Charles Greville could not help but like him. Even at the nadir of his unpopularity in May 1832 he records that, ‘I never see and converse with him without reproaching myself for the sort of hostility I feel and express towards his political conduct, for there are a simplicity, a gaiety, and natural urbanity and good-humour in him, which are remarkably captivating in so great a man.’ Greville’s is the most comprehensive contemporary account we have of Wellington in the context of his political world after Waterloo. It is far less helpful about his military career. His only lengthy entry about Waterloo is his record of a conversation they had in 1820. However, Greville is the source for the popular version of the Duke’s terse reply to Uxbridge on losing his leg.502