Wellington and Waterloo

by Foster, R E

  Since 1983, both the concentration and accessibility of the Duke’s papers at Southampton has facilitated new work by scholars; for example, examination of hitherto neglected aspects of Wellington’s career, such as his Chancellorship of Oxford University and his Lord Lieutenancy of Hampshire.578 These, in turn, contribute to a better understanding of his character. Taken together with wider historiographical trends over the past generation, the most important general development in Wellington studies is the fuller appreciation of his role in British politics, especially after 1832. Already, during the third quarter of the twentieth century, the work of Professor Norman Gash had demolished the prevailing orthodoxy of British political history after 1832 as a story of inexorable Liberal advance. He replaced it with one that characterised the difficult years to mid-century as the Age of Peel. In this interpretation, Wellington was rescued from the role of reactionary villain and cast in that of able subordinate. A feeling that Gash had overstated the case for Peel, however, has led to Wellington’s reputation rising further, so that the relationship between the men can now be viewed as a genuine, if unofficial and sometimes uneasy, partnership. Recently indeed, it has even been suggested that Wellington was the more pragmatic of the two and that his policy of bending to reform when unavoidable – a political version of knowing when to retreat and daring to do it – qualifies him as a contender to be regarded as the true founder of the modern Conservative Party. Gash was heavily involved in establishing the Wellington archive at Southampton. During that period, he revised his own earlier assessment of the Duke. In his entry on Wellington for the 2004 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he judged him not only Britain’s greatest soldier but, for all his personal foibles, a man whose humanity and personality ‘left an imprint on his countrymen equalled only by that of Winston Churchill a century after him’.579

  Whilst the past thirty years have also seen welcome new studies of Wellington and the Peninsular War, the Duke’s archive does not contain anything that forces scholars (not that it stops them!) to rewrite the history of the 1815 campaign. As a non-military specialist, Gash simply followed prevailing academic thinking for his ODNB entry in describing Waterloo as Wellington’s best known, as opposed to his best, battle. It is a verdict with which Wellington would have agreed. He would have been less ready to accept the various criticisms levelled at him in the unrelenting barrage of accounts of the action, which continue to appear. Charles Esdaile, for example, writes of the ‘series of extraordinary mistakes’ he made prior to the actions of 16 June. The Duke would have denied them, or at the very least dismissed them as counsels of perfection from armchair historians – and probably something far stronger! He would surely also have objected to those accounts that emphasise the shortcomings of his opponents as the main reason why he prevailed, distracting attention, as they do, from the heroics of his own brave soldiers. Whether he would allow the Prussians more credit for their contribution to the campaign, another salient feature of modern accounts, than he was wont to do in his post-Waterloo years, must also be considered extremely doubtful.580

  For all their caveats, however, modern accounts continue to acknowledge both the personal bravery and tactical nous which Wellington displayed on 18 June. The main dissenting voice is Peter Hofschröer’s. His two volumes on the campaign, drawing substantially on Prussian sources largely unfamiliar in Britain, are valuable in correcting the myopia of more narrowly Anglo-centric histories. Where Hofschröer proved tendentious, with what one critic called ‘almost missionary zeal’, was in his insistence that Wellington was not just slow to react in support of the Prussians on 15 June, but that he subsequently compounded his tardiness by lies, distortion and the destruction of compromising evidence. The Duke’s tactics, so Hofschröer argued in a later book, extended to his small-minded victory over Siborne’s disposition of the Prussians on his model. Hofschröer’s work received endorsement from respected British academics. Unusually, his thesis also made the pages of the national press; there was even a radio play based on the Siborne saga. Hofschröer’s most serious charges, however, must be judged, at least by this author, as unproven. His arguments are ingenious but very often circumstantial. To suggest, for example, that Wellington was deliberately spreading disinformation about Waterloo when talking to Stanhope in the 1830s when he did not even know that Stanhope was keeping notes, stretches credibility beyond belief.581 Why, since he knew she kept a journal, did he not use Mrs Arbuthnot as a conduit? Hofschröer finds Wellington guilty of dishonesty; the only ‘crimes’, he might be convicted for on the basis of hard evidence, would be the lesser ones of caution and confusion caused by the vagaries of communication in battle.

  If nothing else, Hofschröer’s books show that Wellington and Waterloo can still stir academic passions. Britain’s politicians too, continued to invoke 1815 when taking a subjective view suited them. A fortnight before polling day – 18 June – in the 1970 general election, Julian Amery, the Conservative candidate for Brighton Pavilion, rallied supporters in face of discouraging opinion polls with the thought that Napoleon was presumed to be winning at Waterloo until late in the day. In 1984 Labour MEPs tried to raise a stir by claiming that the bureaucrats of the European Commission wanted to rename Waterloo station. And when the Tory governments of the 1980s started allowing schools to sell off their playing fields, their opponents were quick to remind them what would have happened if, in an earlier age, Eton had sold theirs. Mrs Thatcher herself, on arriving in Downing Street, professed to find her new home dowdy. She introduced portraits of both Nelson and Wellington, telling a BBC documentary that, ‘I got more strength into the place […] This one […] of Wellington is excellent. You can see the determination, you can see the Iron Duke […] We were absolutely right to have these two great heroes of British history and people who fought and won crucial battles.’ In the days preceding her funeral, in April 2013, it transpired that one of the Iron Lady’s favourite books was Elizabeth Longford’s biography of the Iron Duke.582

  Just how far the later-twentieth-century British public fully understood politicians’ allusions, or were even aware of the nuances of academic debate, is difficult to judge. Amongst many born in the years immediately after 1945, there existed a presumption that Waterloo is in England; not just south of Brussels. Since Germany, as much as France, moreover, was now regarded as the natural enemy, references to ‘Prussia’ were surely read, if at all, as a misprint of ‘Russia’. For those born a little later, Waterloo was chiefly remembered as the title of the song by Abba which triumphed at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest. As a source it was unreliable: Wellington is never mentioned and Napoleon did not surrender there. Neither were more high-brow musical presentations necessarily any more accurate. In what might be seen as the long tradition started by Astley’s and Vauxhall, military band and classical music spectaculars down to 2015 regularly included Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory in their programme, oblivious to their error that it was written for Vitoria, not Waterloo. Major Christopher Gilding of the Royal Marines made the same mistake in 1988. He also claimed, as his unsuccessful defence against a charge of speeding on the M5 motorway, that he was listening to the piece on his radio and thereby imagined that he was in a British cavalry charge!583

  Literary and visual representations of 1815 were more likely to impress themselves on the public mind. A notable film depiction, Waterloo, was released by Columbia Pictures in 1970, though it played fast and loose with historical accuracy (Lord Hay, for example, dies at Waterloo in the film, not at Quatre Bras), and Christopher Plummer’s Wellington is a rather wooden character reduced to spouting some of his many sayings wildly out of context. More solidly based historical novels set in the period found favour with a popular audience, especially Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series, from 1981, which transferred successfully to television (1993–1997). In the latter, however, the Duke, played by Hugh Fraser, was a largely peripheral and benign figure. Far more memorable was Stephen Fry’s portrayal in the final e
pisode of the hugely popular Blackadder the Third, in 1987. Fry’s Wellington was a large, unfeeling martinet who boomed in stentorian tones, was a crack shot and gloried in death – erroneous in every detail. Far fewer watched the excellent three part series on Wellington by Professor Richard Holmes in 2002 or his episode on Waterloo in the series War Walks. The Duke nevertheless came fifteenth in the BBC Millenium poll for the greatest Briton, whilst in 2013 Waterloo headed the National Army Museum’s online vote for Britain’s greatest battle.584 Both the Duke’s and the battle’s reputations remained high with the British public.

  Why this is so was well illustrated when those behind Blackadder were persuaded to reprise their roles for a 1999 film version that premiered in the Millennium Dome as Blackadder: Back & Forth. The eponymous hero is sent in a time machine on a series of quests, one of which is to acquire the boots Wellington wore at Waterloo. He lands on and kills the Duke, just as he is about to divulge his battle plans. Hurriedly returning to the present, Blackadder finds Britain part of a French-dominated Europe: the Christmas Day broadcast is about to be made from Versailles by the president. Wellington and Waterloo, in other words, clearly remain, in the popular mind, totemic symbols of British superiority, independence and triumphalism. William Rees-Mogg was being serious when he accused Tony Blair of a lack of historic tact in agreeing to a draft treaty for a European Constitution on Waterloo Day 2004. ‘That victory,’ he wrote, ‘was the culminating point in one of the recurrent British repudiations of European power.’585

  Europhiles immediately took exception to Rees-Mogg’s comments, for they, no less than Eurosceptics, have long since integrated Waterloo into their vision of the past. In 1973, when the Cold War provided additional grist for their mill, Mr J. Macmillan insisted that had the French won in 1815:

  we should by now be enjoying the fruits of a long established united European state of individual nations working together for each other’s good. There would not be the present menace of communism if the Russian people had been liberated by the French armies with the principles of Liberty, Equality of opportunity and Brotherhood. We should have been spared the German wars and the rise of Nazism.586

  Britain had been wholly wrong, he concluded, to ally herself with the decadent monarchies of Europe against Bonaparte in defence of a burgeoning empire and the concomitant evils which this would later bring.

  Supposedly more scholarly essays in counter-factualism are hardly less tendentious. G. M. Trevelyan suggested in 1907 that had Napoleon won at Waterloo, a war-weary France would have forced him to make a generous peace with England. Writing ninety years later, an Oxford professor, Norman Stone, speculated that a less generous Emperor would have installed his brothers Lucien and Joseph respectively, as kings of Scotland and England. More nuanced was Alistair Horne in 1996. He was unconvinced that Napoleon was bound to lose at Waterloo. Had he survived to be overwhelmed by the Seventh Coalition at a later date, however, he was adamant in his belief that a victory less dependant on British arms would not have led to a century of peace in Western Europe. But even in defeat, Andrew Roberts suggests, it is Napoleon’s rather than Wellington’s conception of Europe which more nearly prevails two hundred years later. Roberts further hypothesised that indirectly, by breaking French imperial power, Waterloo ultimately helped pave the way for the rise of the United States in the twentieth century.587

  The above is important, at least insofar as it helped to inform how Britain would mark the bicentenary of Waterloo. Since Wellington’s death, as the current study demonstrates, landmark anniversaries have been essentially low-key. As the bicentenary approached, there were auguries that it too would pass without much official or public notice, in marked contrast to widespread interest in events commemorating Trafalgar 200 in 2005. The premature death of Richard Holmes in 2011 was a serious blow, removing someone who would have been a key driving force. Not least, he was prominently associated with the British arm of Project Hougoumont, a group dedicated to the long overdue restoration of its composite buildings as ‘a living memorial’ in time for 2015.588 Neither was confidence inspired by the fact that, in 2013, the members of the Waterloo Association (an enlarged and rebranded version of the 1973 Waterloo Committee and its Friends), stood accused by the editor of its journal of inertia. Almost unbelievably, the National Army Museum housing Siborne’s model was closed for refurbishment during 2015. The present author wrote to Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, in 2012 with the modest proposal that Waterloo Bridge, ostensibly the nation’s memorial to the victory and those who fell achieving it, at least carry some plaque recording the fact. He was referred to Transport for London as the relevant body; they did not deign to reply. Central government too made it known that it was not intending allocating significant public funds for any 1815 commemorative events. It is true that it operated in straitened financial times, but its refusal needs to be set alongside the fact that it did see fit to provide £40,000,000 for events to mark the centenary of the start of a war, with no less contestable a legacy, in 2014.589 Not for the first time with respect to Waterloo, the British government, wanting to appear both politically correct and good Europeans, was averse to doing anything that might be construed by its neighbours as being redolent of national chauvinism. The announcement from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, in his June 2013 Spending Review that a million pounds would be donated towards restoration projects was therefore as welcome as it was unexpected. But his irresistible parliamentary quip in announcing the fact that Waterloo was ‘a great victory of coalition forces over a discredited former regime that had impoverished millions’ was immediately accompanied by an anxious official from the Foreign Office emphasising that Britain and France were ‘the closest military partners in the EU […] There is therefore no contradiction between our celebrating British military heroism at Waterloo and our close military relationship with France, which has held through two world wars and continues to this day.’590

  Doubtless mindful in part of the same considerations, the 8th Duke of Wellington wrote that:

  I am often asked whether we should not now, in these days of European unity, forget Waterloo and the battles of the past. My reply is, history cannot be forgotten and we need to be reminded of the bravery of the thousands of men from many nations who fought and died in a few hours on 18th June 1815 and why their gallantry and sacrifice ensured peace in Europe for 50 years.

  His words appeared on the website of Waterloo 200, a body independent of government, officially launched at Apsley House in 2009 to plan for the bicentenary. The group’s more general aim was to promote a greater understanding of the campaign and period. An ‘1815 trust’ was to be created, geared especially towards young people, whose objective was ‘a legacy which takes us all forward into a new European perspective’. Planned national events included a Waterloo dinner, exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery and British Library, a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s and a re-enactment of Major Henry Percy’s journey in bringing the Waterloo Despatch to London.591 The organisation also hoped to encourage local communities to hold their own celebrations, focusing on men known by them to have served in the 1815 campaign. That was a good idea, reflecting, as the present work demonstrates, the reality of the essentially local approach to Waterloo Day commemorations during Wellington’s lifetime. Unfortunately, however, it put the onus on local historians to research that information – with no necessary guarantee of success. British bicentenary commemoration consequently risked being both protean and haphazard.

  Waterloo 200 also, understandably, sought to harmonise its aims with preparations going forward for the bicentenary in Belgium. The anniversary was better remembered there, partly because it always had been, and partly because there was a growing understanding in mainland Europe during the later twentieth century of what Waterloo meant – or was said to mean. The relative tranquillity of Europe in the century after 1815 seemed attractive juxtaposed with the two global conflicts of the first half of the
twentieth century. The 1957 Treaty of Rome, which created the EEC, had clearer echoes, however faint or imaginary, of the earlier period with its Concert of Europe, than the latter. In 1985, Maurice Huisman founded Waterloo. Relais de L’Histoire. In doing so, he characterised the battlefield ‘as a valuable symbol of the futility of war and the necessity of peace and European unity’. The dramatic end to the divided Europe of the Cold War in 1989–1990, followed by the creation of the European Union in 1994, made the theme of European unity ever more alluring. On the 180th anniversary of the battle in 1995, the mayor of Waterloo, Serge Kubla, declared that he wanted the site to be an expression of the European ideal, not ‘an historical or emotional revival of the past’.592

  The main practical outcome for 2015 was a new visitor centre at Mont St Jean. As late as 2000, Major Graeme Cooper was reflecting on how little still had changed there in the perennially uneven struggle between tourism and commemoration. He was especially infuriated that a go-kart racing circuit had appeared near the foot of the Lion’s Mound. ‘To mark Europe’s transition to peace and to remember those who died,’ he pleaded, ‘should we not, as Europeans, render the field of Waterloo the same respect as that accorded Gettysburg?’ Thankfully, others agreed. The new complex, planned since 2004, and catalysed by the impending bicentenary, became part of a more ambitious scheme to restore the landscape in ways that would allow visitors to gain a better idea of how it appeared in 1815. Sadly, these did not extend to recreating the slope in front of Wellington’s line by removing the Lion’s Mound. Rather, they involved demolishing buildings in order to give the visitor a more uninterrupted view of it! The construction of large exhibition galleries 5 metres below ground, however, represented a major advance. They included a wall of remembrance, which whilst falling short of listing the names of all known combatants in the battle, did at least list all the regiments who fought in it. A central war memorial to all the British dead was incorporated into the walls of the restored Hougoumont. At last the British Army could be said to have been permanently memorialised on its most famous battlefield.593