by Colin Brown
The conqueror of Waterloo had great luck on that day; so he had when Marmont made a false move at Salamanca; but at last comes his own false move, which has destroyed himself and his Tory high-flying association for ever, which has passed the Reform Bill without opposition. That has saved the country from confusion and perhaps the monarch and monarchy from destruction.11
Wellington’s great victory in 1815 was so complete that Waterloo entered the English language as a simile for a crushing defeat. The Great Reform Act of 1832 was Wellington’s ‘Waterloo’. Wellington lived long enough for the reform battles to be forgotten and for the Duke to be celebrated as the elder statesman of the Victorian Age.
In retirement, Copenhagen was put out to grass at Stratfield Saye, the stately home granted to the Duke by a grateful nation on the Hampshire-Berkshire border, and Copenhagen became a family favourite when old age had dulled his skittishness. Kitty, the Duchess of Wellington, who wore a bracelet of Copenhagen’s hair, said: ‘He trots after me eating bread out of my hand and wagging his tail like a little dog.’ Copenhagen died aged 28 in 1836 and was buried with military honours; he was also honoured with an obituary in The Times:
On the 12th of February died at Stratfield Saye, of old age, Copenhagen, the horse which carried the Duke of Wellington so nobly on the field of Waterloo … He lost an eye some years before his death and has not been used by the noble owner for any purpose during the last ten years. By orders of his grace a salute was fired over his grave and thus he was buried as he had lived, with military honours …
He was buried under the Turkey Oak in the Ice House Paddock at Stratfield Saye, marked by a gravestone put up by the second Duke. The Duke made sure Copenhagen avoided suffering the indignity of Marengo, Napoleon’s favourite horse, which had its skeleton mounted after its death in old age. Marengo’s bones are still on show at the National Army Museum in London. It was going to be stuffed but the taxidermist lost the hide.
In the outpouring of pride over Waterloo, the Wellington Arch was built at Green Park near Apsley House. It was encouraged by George IV as a triumphal arch as part of a great processional way from Constitution Hill, and in 1848 a giant equestrian statue of the Duke mounted on Copenhagen was commissioned – thanks to a pro-Wellington clique led by his ally John Wilson Croker. It was huge. The equestrian monster weighed 40 tons and was 28 feet high, and immediately became the source of ridicule and acute embarrassment to the government. When the statue of the horse and rider – the biggest equestrian statute ever constructed in Britain – was erected on top of the arch as a trial, it became clear that the scale was far too great for even that grand pedestal. It loomed over Buckingham Palace, upsetting the young Queen Victoria, and caused a row. A campaign was started to remove it before it had settled into place. Wellington wrote to Croker on 19 November 1846 saying: ‘My Dear Croker, It appears that the Queen (Victoria) and Prince Albert came to London from Windsor on Saturday morning, the 7th, and her Majesty ordered that it should be removed …’
It would have been doubly galling to Wellington that Nelson had a vast square and a column dedicated to his memory and the Prince of Orange had the Lion Mound, but the young queen objected to an equestrian statue of Wellington, whose victory was more complete. Because of the Duke’s prestige, it was left in place for the next thirty-five years. It was finally taken down in 1883 when the arch was moved and, after an outcry by Waterloo veterans to stop it being melted down, it was removed 41 miles west to the garrison town of Aldershot – probably the longest retreat the Duke had made since the Peninsular War. It now sits largely forgotten by the nation on a grassy knoll by the A325. Instead of towering over Buckingham Palace and the traffic entering London on the Victory Way, Wellington and Copenhagen look down over a suburban roundabout by the Premier Inn.
Notes
* Castlereagh died by his own hand on 12 August 1822, slashing his throat with a penknife while he was having a mental breakdown.
* This doubly historic house was demolished in 1967 despite a building preservation order, and a furious planning row, by the Duke of Westminster’s Grosvenor Estates to make way for a block of mansion flats. It is now incorporated in the Millennium Hotel, Mayfair.
* There were recent demands for Picton’s portrait to be removed from a courthouse in his native Carmarthen, Wales, but it is still there. ‘I think we have to accept Picton warts and all and not judge him by today’s standards,’ I was told.
1. The Trials of Arthur Thistlewood, James Ings, John Thomas Brunt, Richard Tidd, William Davidson and Others (London: J. Butterworth and Son, 1820), p. 10.
2. Obituary, John Stafford, The Times, September 1837.
3. HO 44/4 207 Cato Street files, National Archives.
4. HO 44/4 Cato Street files, National Archives.
5. George Theodore Wilkinson, An Authentic History of the Cato Street Conspiracy
6. Ibid.
7. Wilkinson, An Authentic History.
8. Lord Liverpool to Canning, 23 March 1820, Harewood mss. West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds.
9. Rt Hon. Sir Herbert Maxwell, Creevey Papers, 17 August 1820 (London: John Murray, 1904), p. 142.
10. Louise J. Jennings (ed.), The Croker Papers of John Wilson Croker, Secretary to the Admiralty 1809 to 1830 (London: John Murrary, 1884), p. 137.
11. Ibid., 26 May 1832.
POSTSCRIPT
Do we treat our veterans any better today? Afghanistan and Iraq have left Britain with a legacy of injured men and women with physical and emotional scars like the veterans of Waterloo. Parish relief has been replaced by charities such as the Royal British Legion, the Not Forgotten Association and Help for Heroes, which was founded in 2007 by Bryn Parry, a former member of the Green Jackets, and his wife Emma after visiting the Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham and deciding they had to do their bit. The following year David Cameron, then Leader of the Opposition, claimed that the ‘military covenant’ established by the Labour government in 2000 was ‘well and truly broken’.1 One of the problems highlighted by Cameron stemmed from the phasing out of military hospitals such as the specialist burns unit near Woolwich barracks, London, on the grounds that there were not enough military patients to justify them in the long term. It led to an outcry after reports of soldiers being abused by other patients on NHS wards.
Cameron said injured soldiers should not be treated for their wounds alongside civilian patients in NHS hospitals. He set up a commission under the author Frederick Forsyth to investigate. Forsyth reported there was widespread dissatisfaction over armed forces pensions, widows’ pensions and compensation for injury and illness in the act of duty, which was often far less than criminals could claim for injuries. Forsyth’s report claimed Labour had failed in a number of respects to match their rhetoric with deeds: the failure to provide Service personnel with appropriate equipment – such as flimsy ‘Snatch’ Land Rovers that cost lives in Afghanistan – was ‘lamentable’. Forsyth’s commission also found soldiers were frustrated by ‘the onward march of “lawfare’’’, the legal requirements of the Human Rights courts; this was a problem that never confronted Wellington’s men, though they had a strong moral code.
In 2011 the Commons select committee on defence investigated whether the covenant was being upheld any better under the Coalition government. It still found plenty of failures, but its main concern was ‘whether the support for personnel when they leave the services will be sustainable …’
Have conditions really changed all that much from the time men like Sergeant Graham, Matthew Clay and John Lees were discarded by the army and made forgotten heroes of Waterloo? The cross-party committee, chaired by a Tory MP James Arbuthnot (whose ancestor Charles Arbuthnot helped to deliver Wellington’s Waterloo Despatch to the Cabinet), found many of the same problems that haunted the men when they left the ranks of Wellington’s army:
We are concerned about the number of people who may go on to develop severe and l
ife-limiting mental health, alcohol or neurological problems. We remain to be convinced that the government as a whole fully understands the likely future demands and the related costs.2
The committee won a promise from the government that no injured soldiers would be served redundancy notices on their sick beds, but that was little solace to the men and women who knew that when they got better, they could be sacked.
The reduction in the size of the army over the decade to 2020 from 102,000 to 82,000 – and their replacement by 30,000 reservists – is going to be a continuing cause of grievance and strain for the men and women serving in today’s armed services.
Wellington’s army coped with its bloody victory by enjoying some time in Paris as conquerors. Today, some go through ‘decompression’ for thirty-six hours in an armed forces ‘beach club’ in Cyprus after tours in Afghanistan or elsewhere to help them cope with the stress. Many fail to cope. Men like 18-year-old John Bryant, Britain’s youngest serving frontline serviceman in Afghanistan in 2010, who broke the rules to get out of the Army and six months later was left homeless.3
The MPs returned to the theme of the military covenant in 2013 and recommended that the armed forces should do more to educate its men and women for life outside the forces when they are discharged. Today, after Iraq and Afghanistan, there are nearly 200,000 servicemen and women who depend on the Defence Medical Services, which runs the Defence and National Rehabilitation Centre at Headley Court, Surrey (to be moved to Loughborough in 2018), the NHS, charities and welfare organisations. The terrible carnage caused on patrols by roadside bombs (they are often so sophisticated that they should no longer be called Improvised Explosive Devices) means that Britain is having to get used to the sight of ex-service men and women without limbs, like Regency Britain did in the peace after the Napoleonic Wars.
Historically, Britons have always been wary of a standing army just in case it was used against them. They have always been ambivalent about the problems of the ‘Bloody Infantry’ until they are needed (as Kipling brilliantly identified in his poem ‘Tommy’). The Royal British Legion and Help for Heroes are making a difference to public attitudes. But we still owe it to the men and women of the armed services that they are not forgotten. They deserve better than to be treated like some of Wellington’s forgotten heroes, the ‘scum of the earth’.
Notes
1. BBC online, 4 March 2008.
2. HC 762, Armed Forces Covenant in Action? Commons Select Committee for Defence.
3. Independent, 21 February 2013.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Manuscript sources
Wellington Archive, Southampton University
Archives of the House of Rothschild, London
National Archives, Kew – for police statements on Cato Street conspiracy
Published Sources
Bush, Michael: The Casualties of Peterloo (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing Ltd, 2005)
Byron, Lord: Byron’s Correspondence (London: John Murray, 1903)
Cecil, David: The Young Melbourne and Lord M (London: Phoenix Press, 1988)
Clare, John: Poems Chiefly From Manuscript edited by Edmund Blunden and Alan Porter (Project Gutenberg eBook, 2005)
Clay, Matthew: A Narrative of the Battles of Quatre-Bras and Waterloo; With the Defence of Hougoumont, edited by Garth Glover (UK Ken Trotman Publishing, 2006)
Colby, Reginal: Waterloo Despatch, The: (London: HMSO, 1965)
Creevey, Thomas: The Creevey Papers (London, John Murray, 1904)
Croker, John Wilson: The Croker Papers, (London: John Murray, 1884)
Dalton, Charles: The Waterloo Roll Call (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1904)
De Lancey: A Week at Waterloo in 1815. Lady de Lancey’s Narrative, edited by Major B. R. Ward (London: John Murray, 1906)
Dowling, Joseph Augustus: The Whole Proceedings before the Coroner’s Inquest at Oldham on the Body of John Lees (London: Joseph Augustus Dowling, 1820)
Ferguson, Niall: The House of Rothschild – Money’s Prophets 1798-1848 (London: 2000)
Gibson Lockhart, John: History of Napoleon Buonaparte (London: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1906)
Gronow, Rees Howell: The Reminiscences and Recollections of Captain Gronow (London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1862)
Hibbert, Christopher: George IV (London: Penguin 1976)
Hibbert, Christopher: Wellington – A Personal History (London: HarperCollins, 1997)
Holmes, Richard: Complete War Walks (BBC Worldwide, 1997); Redcoat – The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (London: HarperCollins 2001)
Hugo, Victor: Les Miserables: (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co, 1887)
Jackson, Lt-Col Basil: Notes and Reminiscences of a Staff Officer (London: John Murray, 1903)
Klingaman, William K and Klingaman, Nicholas P: The Year Without Summer – 1816 And the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2013)
Landale, James: Duel – A true story of death and honour (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2005)
Longford, Elizabeth: Wellington – the Years of the Sword (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969)
Longford, Elizabeth: Wellington – Pillar of State (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972)
Macbride, Mackenzie (ed.): With Napoleon at Waterloo and Other Unpublished Documents of the Waterloo and Peninsular Campaigns (London: Francis Griffiths, 1911)
Massie, Alan: Byron’s Travels (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1988)
Melbourne, Lady: Life and Letters, Byron’s Corbeau Blanc, edited by Jonathan David Gross (Liverpool University Press, 1997)
Mercer, General Cavalie: Journal of the Waterloo Campaign (London: William Blackwood, 1870)
O’Neil, Charles, The Recollections of an Irish rogue (UK: Leonaur, 2007)
Paget, Sir Julian and Saunders, Derek: Hougoumont The Key to Victory at Waterloo (Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Leo Cooper, 2001)
Porter, Roy: English Society in the 18th Century (London: Penguin 1982)
Roberts, Andrew: Waterloo - Napoleon’s Last Gamble (London: Harper Perennial, 2005)
Schama, Simon: A History of Britain V3 – The Fate of Empire 1776-2000 (London: BBC Worldwide, 2002)
Shelley, Lady Frances: The Diary of Frances Lady Shelley 1787-1817 (London: John Murray, 1913)
Siborne, Captain William: History of the War in France and Belgium in 1815 (London: T and W Boone, 1848)
Siborne, Maj-Gen. H.T. (ed.): Waterloo Letters (London: Cassell and Co., 1891)
Stanhope, 5th Earl: Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington, 1831-1851 (London: John Murray, 1888)
Summerville, Christopher: Who Was Who at Waterloo – A Biography of the Battle (London: Routledge, 2013)
Wilson, Harriette: Harriette Wilson’s Memoirs of Herself and Others (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1909)
PLATES
The Captive Eagle by James Princep Beadle. Francis Stiles grabs the standard; but was the picture a lie? (Great Yarmouth BC)
Probably the grandest portrait of Napoleon in his pomp, the medal created by Edouard Gatteaux at the French Academy in Rome. It was not actually struck until 1814 after the first restoration of Louis XVIII. Gatteaux happily switched his allegiance and his subject matter to the restored monarchy after 1815 and began a long and illustrious career under his new masters. (From Napoleon’s Medals by Richard A. Todd)
Waterloo memorial stone where Picton fell, now rolling farm fields once more. (Author)
Elm trees on the ridge at Mont St Jean, where Wellington stood with his ADCs. (Author)
Gilded eagle standard of Napoleon’s 105th claimed by Stiles at the National Army Museum.
Sir Alexander Kennedy Clark-Kennedy in old age; he was officially credited with capturing the eagle. (National Portrait Gallery)
Charles Ewart of the Scots Greys – The Fight for the Standard by Richard Ansdell (Crown Copyright reproduced courtesy of Historic Scotland www.historicscotlandimages.gov.uk)
Ensign Ewart public house,
Castle Esplanade, Edinburgh. (Martin Hillman)
Hougoumont South Gate where the French dead were piled up. (Author)
The South Gate visited by Barry Sheerman, MP for Huddersfield. He has been, amongst other things, Labour spokesperson for Disabled People’s Rights 1992–1994, a position unavailable in 1815.
Mass burning of the dead, rather than burial, represented at Hougoumont; watercolour engraving and etching by James Rouse after C.C. Hamilton, from An Historical Account of Campaign in the Netherlands in 1815 … by W. Mudford. (Musée Wellington, Waterloo)
Hougoumont chateau was burned down in the siege but the chapel miraculously survived. (Author)
Matthew Clay died in poverty – his Waterloo medal is reversed, possibly in protest at the Prince Regent. (The Guards Museum)
In July 1818 the Prince Regent awarded the Waterloo Medal to all combatants in the 1815 campaign in Belgium. The Angel of Victory holds a laurel palm and olive branch.
A fireloop in the garden wall at Hougoumont where many died. (Author)
North gate, Hougoumont, the scene of the most bitter fighting – Wellington said the battle turned here. (Author)
Waterloo souvenirs collected by Lord Byron and sent to his publisher John Murray. (Author)