by Foster, R E
At the end of the Great War, the Belgian government was asked to turn round the lion on its eponymous mound so as to acknowledge France’s contribution to Belgium’s liberation. It was just as well that the idea was rejected, for it would presumably have been reorientated once more in 1940. The Second World War, even more than the First, would indeed make Waterloo seem like a skirmish. Among its 55 million or more casualties was the 6th Duke of Wellington, great-grandson of the first, killed by a German officer shortly after the Salerno landings in Italy in September 1943. It was a reminder, not that it was needed, of the Finger of Providence.560 A few weeks later, it was calculated that 36,700 tons of bombs had been dropped on Germany between April and June, compared to the 37 tons of shells fired at Waterloo. Small wonder, as early as the ‘Phoney War’ of 1939–1940, which preceded the Nazi Blitzkrieg of May 1940, that there was something of a wistful nostalgia for black-powder warfare. ‘This is not like any other war,’ declared an editorial, ‘The Battle of Waterloo was easy; you shot once; if you died you were buried; if you lived you came home; that was the end, quickly. The Americans say this is a cock-eyed war. It is true, also.’ From the other side of the Channel, the Nazi take on Waterloo was nothing, if not predictable. In 1940, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels approved the release of Die Rothschilds. The film included a scene in which the Jewish financier, Nathan Rothschild, is seen bribing a French general to ensure Wellington’s victory.561
The Wehrmacht’s victory of June 1940 ensured that there would be no international events commemorating the 125th anniversary of Waterloo. Instead, de Gaulle chose the day to broadcast his famous L’Appel du 18 Juin from London, a speech popularly credited with being the origin of the national resistance to the Nazi occupiers. Though, characteristically, he did not mention the events of 1815, his timing was surely an attempt to abrogate them by rallying the French to a more subliminal purpose. The British were, of course, more comfortable and explicit in comparing the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War as ones of national survival against tyrannical aggression. The Cambridge historian, G. M. Trevelyan, a great-nephew of Macaulay, published his hugely popular English Social History in 1942. Written in 1941, it concludes with a footnote comparing Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton (actually, in his view England’s village greens), to RAF pilots who ‘could not be the product of rural simplicity. If we win this war, it will have been won in the primary and secondary schools’.562 Comparison was most blatantly apparent, however, in the oeuvre of Arthur Bryant, who morphed from appeaser to celebrant of British patriotism following the fall of France. His English Saga 1840–1940 (1940) contained a cameo of the Duke as the embodiment of all that was best about old England. It was followed by The Years of Endurance 1793–1802 (1942), and Years of Victory 1802–1812 (1944), celebrating his achievements whilst openly equating Napoleon with Hitler. Even a modern critic has conceded that Bryant ‘did a superb job in helping to stiffen the people’s resolve by putting their sacrifices in historical context’.563 Both Churchill and Attlee admired his work.
Bryant would extend his story beyond Waterloo, as well as writing a biography of Wellington, after the war. But the popular press did not have to wait for him to make the analogies. Following the Normandy landings of June 1944, the Nottingham Evening Post wrote that, ‘On June 18th, 1815, the brilliant Napoleon met his fate on the field of Waterloo. He aspired to be world dictator. Today, side-by-side with French patriots, we are overthrowing another dictator.’ As the allies advanced that autumn, General Montgomery found time to see the Waterloo battlefield, including Hougoumont. He inevitably climbed the Lion’s Mound, viewed the panorama at its base and even sent some musket balls to a Mrs Reynolds.564 Montgomery was, in fact, relatively critical of the Duke as a commander. When he lectured at the University of St Andrews on the subject of military leadership towards the end of 1945, he chose Napoleon (as well as Moses and Cromwell), to illustrate his theme that the very greatest possessed an inner conviction transcending reason, ‘which enabled them at a certain point – the right one – to take a short cut which took them straight to their objective more swiftly and surely than equally careful but less inspired commanders’. Wellington, by comparison, ‘sometimes lost part of the fruits of victory through an inability to soar from the known to seize the unknown’. Perhaps Montgomery was piqued by rumours that the sword Wellington wore at Waterloo had recently been presented to Eisenhower.565
The 7th Duke, who succeeded to the title in 1943, denied the Eisenhower story. Over the next thirty years, nobody would do more than he to advance Wellington studies. He also took a keen interest in his ancestor’s battlefield. In 1955, for example, he provided documentary material to assist in the creation of the Musée Wellington in the building where he had slept after Waterloo. The 7th Duke also facilitated greater access to his great-grandfather’s papers by depositing his correspondence as Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire with the county’s record office in 1961, and his more voluminous general correspondence from 1833 with the Historical Manuscripts Commission in 1967. Unhappy with how the 1st Duke had been portrayed in Richard Aldington’s biography, first published in Britain in 1946, and even more so by Cruttwell’s 1936 life, he also devoted considerable time to his own literary endeavours. This included a slight volume, The Conversations of the First Duke of Wellington with George William Chad, chiefly important for its account of 13 August 1821 when Chad, a minor diplomat, was one of three people who accompanied the Duke to Mont St Jean, where he ‘rode over the field to explain the action’.566 He also published a selection of letters, mostly from the Duke’s female confidantes, under the title Wellington and his Friends.
The 7th Duke’s most important contribution to Wellington studies was his co-editorship of the journals of the most famous of those confidantes, Harriet Arbuthnot. Harriet Fane (1793–1834), a granddaughter of the Earl of Westmorland, became the second wife of Charles Arbuthnot (1767–1850), twenty-six years her senior, in 1814. It was widely presumed, even by his cabinet colleagues, that she was the Duke’s mistress: shortly after her death, the Brighton Patriot risked the thinly disguised suggestion that she knew all about the great man’s virtues. Her journals offer no corroboration for the imputation; the case remains unproven. Wellington knew that she was keeping a journal for he asked her curiously about it in February 1822 and on being denied a look at it ‘said he was afraid of a person who kept a journal […] He was very anxious to know if it treated of politics or only where I dined, & c.’ Had he seen it, he would have discovered, as their later editors intended, a Wellington ‘in daily contact with people who neither disliked him nor cringed to him, and they should make him a better understood, though, to some of his admirers, not necessarily a greater man’. For an insight into Wellington as both man and politician during the 1820s, they remain the indispensable source. On the warrior there is little, though Mrs Arbuthnot does record his admitting shedding tears in the aftermath of victory, something which prompted her indignant entry, ‘yet this man has been abused & accused of being completely without heart’. To Waterloo specifically there are very few references, the main one occasioned by Wellington’s amusement when finding her reading critical accounts of his part in the battle in 1823.567 Needless to say, her version of Waterloo was his.
Mrs Arbuthnot’s journal was not as immediately exploited by writers on Wellington as one might have expected. It was entirely absent from the most successful popular history of the 1950s, Sir Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Begun in the 1930s, Churchill returned to his grand project after the war. Volume three, The Age of Revolution, covering the years from 1688–1815, appeared in 1957. He was clearly more fascinated by the Emperor than the Duke; his bust of the former is still on display at Chartwell. By contrast, Wellington’s Indian wars are reduced to a single sentence in which, ‘The [Marathas] thereupon declared war on the British, and after heavy fighting were defeated at Assaye and elsewhere by Wellesley’s younger brother, the futu
re Duke of Wellington.’ Barely ten pages of text are afforded to the whole of the Peninsular War; to the Waterloo campaign little more than five. In the single page devoted to the battle, he at least gives the Duke credit for being ‘in the forefront of danger all day. On his chestnut, Copenhagen, he had galloped everywhere, issuing brusque orders, gruffly encouraging his men […] Only the power and example of his own personality had kept his motley force together.’ He chiefly credits Wellington for having identified the position of Mont St Jean: ‘He had noted the advantages of the ridge at Waterloo.’ But this was, one feels, only because, ‘So had the great Duke of Marlborough a century earlier, when his Dutch allies had prevented him from engaging Marshal Villeroi there.’568 Sir Winston’s real hero was his ancestor, John Churchill.
Churchill’s 1965 funeral was the grandest for a British non-royal since Wellington’s in 1852. There were striking resonances between the two occasions; even a popular belief that Churchill had wanted his coffin to depart for burial at Bladon from Waterloo station in order that the assembled French dignitaries would be discomfited. The year also marked the 150th anniversary of Waterloo. Given the unscheduled disruption of the 100th and 125th anniversaries, NATO forces in West Germany might well have been forgiven if they had felt some anxiety! Activities in Britain to mark the landmark anniversary were hardly on the grand scale. The closest approximation to an official commemorative event was a seven-week exhibition organised by the army at the Wellington Barracks in the Tower of London. The army also provided £800 for the restoration of the British Waterloo memorial in Evere cemetery, forgotten, covered in ivy, and with everybody denying responsibility for its upkeep. Elsewhere, the 7th Duke hosted a reception at Apsley House for Old Wellingtonians, whilst the 7th Marquis of Anglesey opened an exhibition in a London hotel mounted by the British Model Soldier Society.569
Even so, the 150th anniversary year did not pass entirely without incident. Speaking in Koblenz on 20 May, the Queen alluded to Blücher’s assisting the British as an example of older ties after fifty years of more recent animosities between the Anglo-Saxon peoples. One suspects that this was a deliberate attempt at diplomatic bridge building with the Germans. It is of a piece with the British press reporting the fact that 50,000 Germans processed to the Waterloo column in Hanover on 18 June as proof of a nostalgia for Hanoverians’ past association with Britain ‘and pride in the fact that the new Germany was now welcomed back as an ally and comrade in arms on an equal footing’. Frenchmen, however, were taking note. Three days earlier, Lord Kennet had been assured by the government that representatives from the nations of former enemies would not be invited to commemorations of past victories. His Lordship hailed the ‘satisfaction with which that answer will be greeted, in view of the fact that the impression had got around that we had invited representatives of the French Government to meet us and celebrate on the battlefield of Waterloo’. Taken together, this was too much. In protest, several French officials would not attend a reception at the British Embassy in Brussels for the Queen’s birthday. In tones evocative of its nineteenth-century antecedents, Le Figaro declared that it ‘was now time for European states to give up commemorating victories over each other in the past’.570
More constructively, the 150th anniversary did trigger a spate of new books about Waterloo, notably those by David Howarth, Christopher Hibbert and Jac Weller. Another fine account is to found in Elizabeth Longford’s Wellington: The Years of the Sword, which appeared in 1969. In writing it, she enjoyed access to family papers not seen by previous biographers. This in particular, in part perhaps because her husband was descended from the 1st Duke’s wife, followed hagiographical lines. She thought that her subject admirably fitted the dictum that history should ‘help to sustain man’s confidence in his destiny’. More important in some ways was her second volume, Pillar of State (1972), which not only devoted over 450 pages to Wellington’s life after Waterloo but also made a case for him, however reluctantly, as a reformer.571 Lady Longford’s two volumes remain the standard biography.
In the 1992 introduction to her condensed Wellington, Lady Longford asserted that there had been no major change in attitudes towards the Duke since her initial biographical endeavours, but that the most significant developments had been ones affecting the better preservation of the battlefield. On the latter point, she was too rosy in her assessment. The Musée Wellington, though enlarged in 1965, and again in 1975, was judged difficult to find, one reason perhaps for relatively poor visitor numbers. Altogether more worrying, the 8th Duke had helped found the Waterloo Committee in 1973, prompted by the news that the Belgian government was proposing to build a motorway through the battlefield, an act of historical vandalism that would have made the construction of the Lion’s Mound seem like a minor blemish by comparison. Mercifully, the road was re-routed to the north, leaving the Waterloo Committee to pursue its more general aims of preserving the battlefield, as well as educating the general public about the battle.572
Towards the former objective at least, progress has been slow. Even without the motorway, the field was being described in 1973 as ‘almost a fairground’ made worse, from a Wellingtonian point of view, by the fact that it bore ever-increasing evidence of becoming a shrine to Napoleon. ‘The field of Waterloo deserves a better representation,’ complained Kenneth Balfour, ‘and a British one.’ A decade later, matters were even worse. British visitors returned home to reflect upon ‘the nasty collection of grubby souvenir shops clustered at the foot of the Lion’s Mound’. Whilst Napoleonic kitsch was to be had in abundance, ‘there is hardly a sign of the Iron Duke’. To the south, meanwhile, La Belle Alliance had metamorphosed into a discotheque with the name Club Retro!573 Mindful that none of the 1815 commanders had used it for that purpose, the King Baudouin Foundation, in June 1988, launched an international competition for ‘creating an international tourist centre of the highest quality’, espousing a ‘vision of a Waterloo swept clean of the sight and smell of frites stands, the tawdry souvenir shops, the county-fair amusements’. Over 550 entries were received. As was confidently surmised at the time, however, the winning scheme, involving the construction of overlapping walls across the field where the armies stood, needed to surmount so many planning hurdles that it would never come to fruition. Even a lesser project would need to contend with the petty jealousies arising from the fact that the battlefield straddled the four communes of Waterloo, Genappe, Lasne and Braine-l’Alleud. With a misplaced sense of self-importance reminiscent of Herbert Morrison, the mayor of the latter, the largest portion lying within his domain, was apparently sincere in his wish that the battle should be renamed Braine-l’Alleud.574 For the moment, this new Battle of Waterloo remained in stalemate.
The 175th anniversary of Waterloo in 1990, however, attracted a good deal of attention – in Europe. A five-month programme of events was devised with the usual paradoxical aims of encouraging tourism and galvanising politicians to preserve the site. There were exhibitions at Le Caillou and the Musée Wellington focusing on the lives of ordinary people in 1815, and a light and sound display at the Lion’s Mound on 16 June. Celebrations culminated with a re-enactment of the battle the following day. No fewer than 2,000 people from ten countries took part, watched by crowds of 20,000. The most ambitious Waterloo re-enactment to date, this late twentieth century form of commemoration was broadcast live on Belgian television. And to confound those Britons (most), who regard such gatherings as the preserve of cranks and eccentrics – The Times mocked the 1988 participants’ endeavours ‘agreeably sandwiched between breakfast in an Imperial tent and a champagne picnic lunch’ – the role of one French general was assumed by Britain’s foremost Napoleonic scholar, David Chandler.575 Chandler also played a key part in saving Siborne’s model. In storage at Aldershot from 1962–1975, it was restored to become the centrepiece of the National Army Museum’s ‘Road to Waterloo’ exhibition, surviving calls for it to be transferred to Apsley House as ‘the time has come for the nation to better
honour one of its finest generals’. The nation obliged instead with Nosey, a 90-minute radio play on Wellington’s life, commemorative medals struck by the Royal Mint, and by the British Library’s purchasing one version of the Waterloo Despatch from the 8th Duke for £350,000.576
Lady Longford’s other observation in 1992, that no fundamental change in attitudes towards Wellington had been discernible over the previous twenty years, though essentially correct, required amplification. On Waterloo Day 1983, for example, some of Britain’s foremost military historians attended a conference at Apsley House on the Duke, spawning the book Wellington Commander. The same year would prove seminal for Wellington studies more generally, for it witnessed the depositing of the bulk of the 1st Duke’s papers at the University of Southampton. In 1987 the University co-hosted a major international conference on Wellington’s life and times. Some of the first fruits of new research appeared in an important collection of essays, edited by Norman Gash, the following year. Though much personal correspondence was destroyed by the 1st Duke (thereby imparting something of a formal or ‘cold’ bias to what survives), it was supplemented during his lifetime by Gurwood’s efforts to secure copies of originals for inclusion in the Despatches. The Wellington archive today contains approximately 100,000 items, making it one of the largest and most important national collections for the period in existence. In tandem with an ongoing programme of digitisation, the painstaking process of conserving some of the more delicate items was scheduled, appropriately, for completion in 2015. For all its fragility, the Duke’s archive is in safer hands than his battlefield.577