A GLORIOUS VICTORY
The year 1812 not only saw the beginning of the regency in Britain. It also marked the turn of the tide in Europe, leading in three years to the final collapse of Napoleon’s empire and the reassertion of Britain’s supremacy at sea and of her Imperial and commercial world power. Britain played a subordinate role in the vital military defeat of Napoleon, which her ministers recognized could be achieved only in central Europe, where the massive armies of the allies, Russia, Austria and Prussia in particular, were alone a match for French military resources. Britain’s role on land was limited to Wellington’s campaigns in the Iberian Peninsula, which, despite being the centre of British attention, was never more than a subsidiary theatre. Britain had not the manpower to field the large armies by which alone France could be subdued, and her naval supremacy after Trafalgar could have only a minimal impact on the war as a whole. A major reason for the fall of the Grenville-Grey ministry in 1807, and for George’s disillusionment with his former friends, had been the inability of the ministers to evolve an effective and coherent war strategy, wasting Britain’s efforts by dispersing her inadequate forces in pointless diversionary expeditions to various parts of the globe. More important was the financial contribution made by Britain to the overthrow of Napoleon. Millions of pounds were poured into subsidies, in specie or in war material, to persuade the continental powers to take the field and to support their armies. Not for the last time, commentators in other countries criticized Britain for using her financial resources to pay other people to fight for her interests, but in practice it was not until the very end of the war that Britain’s war aims were given much regard by her allies, who fought as much for their own interests as did Britain. Nevertheless if the Peninsular campaigns were something of a side-show they did tie down substantial enemy forces and by enabling British trade to avoid the continental blockade they played a part in weakening French resources. Nor was the British army a negligible force. The Duke of York’s military reforms had made it an efficient and well-trained body whose fighting qualities made it superior to many other armies; its part in the final battle at Waterloo was alone sufficient to ensure it an honoured place in the roll of victory, and Wellington’s generalship, with few exceptions, fully justified the honours heaped upon him.1
The Prince played his part, as has already been argued, with decisiveness and patriotic enthusiasm, when both the more radical and whig sectors of opinion were inclined to half-heartedness and despondency. The whig attitude towards Napoleon was never wholly hostile. He was seen as the child of the French Revolution rather than as a military despot, and his ‘liberal Empire’ was regarded as a vast improvement on the ramshackle despotism of the Bourbons which the allies sought to reimpose. Fox had declared himself an enemy of ‘the cause of Kings’ and had visited Napoleon in Paris during the peace of 1802–3, and Holland House, Fox’s shrine, continued to advocate allowing Napoleon to rule. As late as 1815 many British whigs and liberals were willing to settle for a negotiated peace that would leave Napoleon ruler of a territorially reduced but not impotent constitutional state. Grey himself, who had abandoned Fox’s search for a negotiated peace in 1806, expressed an ambivalent attitude towards the defeated Napoleon on the grounds that the triumph of the autocratic military powers of continental Europe would enable them to suppress liberal movements across the Channel and even threaten Britain’s own constitutional regime.2
These views however were largely restricted to certain liberal intellectual circles in England. There is no sign that public opinion in general was favourable to Napoleon, for government-inspired propaganda since the very beginning of the war in 1793 had identified the French Revolution, and later Napoleon as its embodiment, as a threat to everything the patriotic Englishman prized in his country and its traditions. George III, hardly a popular figure before the American war, had become after 1792 the personification of the British spirit against the French Revolution.3 One of the reasons why the Prince had become unpopular since the 1790s was that in quarrelling with his father he was seen as unpatriotic as well as selfish. The final decision to exclude Napoleon from France and restore the Bourbons was therefore popular among the Prince’s subjects, and it also accorded with his own strong views, which, in the case of Louis XVIII, he held to even more firmly than did his ministers.
George followed the events of the last years of the war with close attention and mounting satisfaction. He never wavered in his support of Wellington in the Peninsula and expressed delight at the news of every victory there, or by the allies in central Europe after the failure of Napoleon’s Moscow campaign. He supported the efforts of the ministers to bring about another coalition of the powers against France, and Sir John Macpherson, though a notorious flatterer, gave him the major credit in 1813 for personally winning the co-operation of Tsar Alexander.4 When the news arrived in September 1813 of the liberation of Mecklenburg, his mother’s family home, he wrote to her in ecstasy of his ‘boundless gratitude to Almighty Providence’. He asked her and all the royal household to drink a bumper to Bernadotte, the Prince Royal of Sweden, and not to forget ‘poor me, who have I think, some little merit at having been the first to set them all at work’. He wrote again two months later on the ‘glorious intelligence’ of Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig to send her a snuff box decorated with his effigy as ‘one who I hope you will now think is no disgrace to you, to his family, or to his country’. The liberation of Hanover was another cause for celebration, and this was swiftly followed by news of Wellington’s victory on the Nivelle, at which he was ‘quite worn out with the joy of the business of this thrice happy day’. Finally, on the news of the allied entry into Paris in April 1814 his brother Adolphus sent his congratulations on a victory to which the Regent had contributed so much, and the Hereditary Prince of Orange acclaimed him as one ‘to whose firmness we owe all this and whom the whole of Europe is obliged to acknowledge as his [sic ] deliverer’.5
No doubt all this was egregious flattery, to which George was never unreceptive, but it contained a truth, for had he not shown consistent support and encouragement to ministers who were committed to victory over Napoleon the outcome might have been different. Cumberland asserted that had the Regent not been firm, a compromise peace might have been arranged at Châtillon before Napoleon’s final defeat: ‘You are the mainspring of the whole’, he wrote. As it was, George had the satisfaction of accompanying Louis XVIII to London, where he invested him with the Garter, himself buckling it round his immense leg, which he later likened to ‘fastening a sash round a young man’s waist’, and then seeing him off on his way back to reclaim the throne of his ancestors to the echo of yet another tribute: ‘It is to the counsels of your Royal Highness, to this glorious country, and to the steadfastness of its inhabitants’, declared the newly restored monarch, ‘that I attribute, next after the will of Providence, the re-establishment of my house on the throne of my ancestors.’ The capital was indeed delirious with joy. London was illuminated for three nights with ‘every device that … taste and invention … could supply’, including a representation of Wellington destroying with a puff Napoleon’s house of cards. The celebrations culminated in June 1814 in the visit of the Tsar Alexander, followed by the King of Prussia and representatives of other allied sovereigns and their ministers and generals, to mark the general victory.6
The visit of the allied sovereigns, intended as a public endorsement of Britain’s role in the defeat of Napoleon, soon turned sour for the Regent. The Tsar to begin with was distinctly uncooperative. He had previously expressed the hope that it would be a private visit and not an occasion for large-scale public rejoicing, whereas George had hoped to use it as a boost to his own popularity which was flagging, largely because of the public’s sympathy for Princesses Caroline and Charlotte. Alexander refused the offer of apartments at St James’s Palace, preferring to join his sister the Grand Duchess Catherine, who was already in residence at Pulteney’s Hotel off Piccadilly, and he even changed his route into London to avoid the crowds which awaited him at London Bridge – a snub to the Regent as well as to the people of the capital. This was followed by other graceless acts, including his refusal to attend a banquet arranged for him at Carlton House on the evening of his arrival; expressing a wish to go to visit Princess Caroline, he invited the leaders of the Whig opposition to a long conversation on politics. He capped his offences by waltzing with Lady Jersey, the Prince’s discarded mistress, at a ball in his honour. The Grand Duchess had already given great offence by interfering in the proposed marriage of Charlotte to the Prince of Orange, encouraging her to break off the engagement, it was thought in the hope of securing a marriage alliance with one of the Russian Grand Dukes, and by lecturing the Regent on his marital obligations.7
The Tsar’s tactless behaviour towards the Prince was the more galling because all the allied visitors were popular with the crowds, whose cheers for George were pointedly less than enthusiastic. Marshal Blücher was an especial favourite – ‘a nice old man’, as Creevey remarked, who endeared himself to the crowd by toasting them, often apparently in an inebriated condition, from the open window of his hotel. King Frederick William of Prussia was also popular, despite his much more stiff and sober manner, and though the Austrian Emperor did not come, his representative, Prince Metternich, put himself out to be ingratiating and was well received. A born diplomat, he used the occasion to court ministers and George himself by flattering him as the architect of victory and arbiter of Europe.
The visit was a hectic round of ceremonies, appearances, parties and banquets which taxed the stamina of all concerned. One of Creevey’s friends reported that the Tsar ‘grumbles at the long dinners of the Regent’s’ and Creevey himself noted that ‘they are all sick to death of the way they are followed about’. They went to Ascot races on 10 June and attended a grand military review in Hyde Park on the 20th. On the 14th the Prince took them to Oxford for the conferment of honorary degrees, followed by ‘a sumptuous dinner to 200 persons’ in the Radcliffe Camera, at which the cheering public burst in and Blücher got so drunk on quantities of strong beer washed down with cognac that he could not find his lodgings afterwards and was found wandering about the streets. Four nights later the Corporation of the City of London gave a banquet in Guildhall, where they feasted on turtle and a baron of beef and drank sixteen toasts, with predictable consequences for Blücher’s sobriety. London was wild with excitement: it was said that there was a milk shortage because the cows in the Green Park, who supplied the West End of the capital, were frightened out of the park by the loud cheers. It was all very frustrating for the Prince, for despite his graciousness and his imposing costumes the applause was never for him, and as Creevey spitefully and gleefully reported he was ‘exactly in the state one would wish; he lives only by protection of his visitors. If he is caught alone, nothing can equal the execrations of the people [and] … he is worn out with fuss, fatigue and rage’. Even worse, he was upstaged by Caroline, who arrived at the theatre exactly at the moment to turn the cheers of the audience for the royal party into acclamations for her: ‘She … carries everything before her’, wrote Creevey.8 Fortunately, and to the disgust of Brougham and the Whig opposition, she was persuaded to retire to the continent by the offer of an extra £15,000 a year and she departed in early August.
The visit of the allied royalties and ministers ended on 23 June with a grand naval review at Portsmouth, where they were joined by Wellington who had just arrived from Paris and posted down from London. He was acclaimed by the crowd as the hero of the hour. The Prince escorted his guests on board HMS Impregnable, where they were treated to a ration of the ship’s grog. It was an appropriately symbolic occasion, when the Great Duke, as he had now become, joined the Regent, who had given him unstinted and uninterrupted support to defeat the French, on board one of the great ships which had protected his country from the possibility of defeat. From this time onwards the two became firm friends. On 7 July they attended a national service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s, sitting together in the Prince’s carriage drawn by eight cream-coloured Hanoverian horses and attended by footmen in sumptuous livery. The Duke sat on the Prince’s right throughout the service, and George paid him a further tribute by organizing a fête at Carlton House two weeks later.9
The fête was even more splendid than the one which had inaugurated the regency in 1811. The centrepiece was a Corinthian temple containing a bust of the Duke on a column of antique marble in front of a mirror, surmounted by a star over the letter ‘W’ in cut glass, and surrounded by draperies of pink and white muslin. The temple was approached through a brick polygonal structure of twenty-four sides and 120 feet in diameter, specially designed by Nash and draped with white muslin with an umbrella-shaped painted roof. Two bands, concealed within a mass of artificial flowers, played continuously ‘God Save the King’ and ‘The Prince Regent’s March’. Beyond the polygon room on the west and the Corinthian temple were two supper tents decorated with silk in regimental colours. On the east of the polygon room was a covered walk decorated with military trophies and allegorical transparencies representing patriotic scenes and leading to further supper rooms. The Queen and members of the royal family arrived at 10.30 and promenaded round the rooms. After supper Princess Mary and the Duke of Devonshire opened the ball, which went on till 6 a.m. It was a tribute unsurpassed in taste and luxury, all attributable to the Regent’s talent for design and theatrical effect.
These were private ceremonies, though attended by hundreds of notable guests. The Prince however did not leave out his common subjects. For them an immense fête was prepared in the three royal parks on 1 August to celebrate peace and the centenary of the accession of the House of Brunswick. Nash was again placed in charge of the works, designed on the oriental theme now much in the Regent’s mind and shortly to be adapted to the reconstruction of the Pavilion at Brighton. A Chinese bridge topped with a blue and yellow pagoda was built across the lake in St James’s Park, and a medieval Gothic fortress in canvas 100 feet square mysteriously appeared in Green Park, eventually to be revealed as a setting for an immense firework display. Hyde Park was the free, popular end, with booths and tents housing hordes of pedlars, strolling players, puppet shows, acrobats and musical performers, complete with a menagerie and mock naval battles on the Serpentine representing Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, with the additional refinement of a fireship which accomplished, to great applause and general satisfaction, the destruction of the entire French fleet.
At the end of the firework display, which lasted two hours and temporarily obliterated the scene in Green Park in a cloud of smoke, there magically appeared on the previous site of the fortress (now revealed to have been made of canvas) a highly illuminated ‘Temple of Concord’, decorated with scenes representing the origins of war in ‘Strife expelled by Jupiter from Heaven’, the deliverance of Europe from tyranny, the restoration of the Bourbons, the return of Peace, and the triumph of England under the regency, showing the Prince Regent ‘crowned by victory … with Discord crouching in chains at his feet’, attended by Britannia and Mars and surrounded by ‘Art, Commerce, Industry, & the Domestic Virtues’. This patriotic construction was the work of Sir William Congreve, inventor of the ‘Congreve rocket’ which had played an interesting though not wholly successful part in wartime operations in Europe.10 All did not go entirely smoothly: Nash’s Chinese bridge and pagoda in St James’s Park which had amazed and delighted the spectators with its own interior firework display, ‘the canopies … throwing up their bright wheels and stars, the pillars enriched with radiance, every rising tower of the Pagoda pouring forth its fiery showers and rockets springing from its lofty top in majestic flights’, accidentally caught fire and toppled into the water, killing two spectators. The balloon ascent from Green Park by the well-known Mr Sadler, formerly of the Liverpool Gas Company, had to take place without the company of ‘a gallant lady, called Mrs Johnstone’ who was to have released from it a dove as an emblem of peace; there were fears that her weight might be too much for the balloon’s lifting power. Mr Sadler however took off in great style but had to make an emergency landing on Mucking Marshes near the Essex coast to avoid being swept out into the North Sea.11
The whole series of celebrations was a great success. Even whigs and the critical press had to admit that it was immensely popular, and it proved a spectacular triumph for the Prince himself and his artistic flair. The departure of Princess Caroline for the continent a fortnight after the grand fête crowned George’s satisfaction. George was free to cast off public and private cares for a time and retire to Brighton, where, he informed his mother on 22 August, there was ‘a complete stagnation & dearth of every thing, no, not even one little scrap of scandal’ and he spent his time with ‘a few male companions, my brother William at the head of them’, walking and riding in the mornings and ‘in the evening about half a dozen ladies, Mme. de Lieven &c. &c. &c. come at nine o’clock, when we have a delightful concert, Mme. de Lieven sometimes charming us for half an hour with her uncommon beautiful talent on the Piano Forte, & at half past eleven, or twelve at the latest, all is over, & we trip away to bed’.12
The visit of the allied ministers had been too festive for diplomatic activity of any serious nature, and the statesmen of Europe now transferred their attention to Paris, where Wellington and Castlereagh joined them to discuss the outlines of a European settlement, and then to Vienna where the Congress to negotiate the final treaties assembled in the autumn. The leisurely pace of the discussions was suddenly interrupted in March 1815 by news which reached London on the 10th of Napoleon’s escape from Elba and return to France. The flight of Louis XVIII from Paris followed on the 20th. The Powers were agreed on the necessity of resisting Napoleon’s re-establishment, but sections of British opinion were hostile to the principle of forcing any government on a nation without popular consent. The Prince and the government unhesitatingly backed the second restoration of Louis XVIII but some of the Whigs, including Grey, had reservations on principle.13 The months of April, May and early June were tense and anxious for many, not only because of uncertainty as to the defeat of Napoleon but even more because of fears that if the Bourbons were successfully restored by allied force of arms Louis XVIII might not be able to maintain himself on the throne. The four days of operations from 15 to 18 June, culminating at the field of Waterloo, settled the question of victory, and it was a decisive enough outcome for the Bourbon king to be restored, thanks largely to Wellington’s firmness in the ensuing weeks.
The news of Wellington and Blücher’s victory reached London on 20 June, reportedly to Nathan Rothschild who used his secret information to make a profit on the Stock Exchange. It was not until the evening of the 21st that one of Wellington’s ADCs brought official news from the Duke. The Cabinet were dining at Lord Harrowby’s house in Grosvenor Square when Henry Percy, the ADC, burst in in a suitably dramatic tableau shouting ‘Victory!’ He then went on to St James’s Square where the Prince Regent and the Duke of York were attending a ball given by the society hostess Mrs Boehm. According to her daughter’s account the first quadrille was forming when the shouts of the crowd came through the open windows on that hot, sultry night, and Percy dashed in from his carriage carrying a captured French standard in each hand, pushed aside everyone in his path, and rushed up to the Regent. Dropping theatrically on one knee, he laid the flags at his feet with the words ‘Victory, Sir! Victory!’ The Prince, overcome with emotion, promoted him on the spot but was soon reduced to tears by news of the dead and wounded, who included several of his friends. As with Trafalgar, Britain’s greatest victory of modern times was bought at a price which muted the thanksgivings and rejoicings.14
The final act, or perhaps postlude, to the tragedy occurred when Napoleon decided to surrender to the British as the likeliest of his opponents to be chivalrous to a defeated enemy, and presented himself to Captain Maitland of HMS Bellerophon bearing an appeal to the Prince Regent ‘as the most powerful, the most constant, and the most generous of my enemies’. Despite the ridicule of some of George’s domestic opponents at what they considered gross flattery, it was not an unworthy sentiment, but the Regent and his ministers had no wish to be burdened with the responsibility of keeping the ex-Emperor and it was quickly decided to send him to the remote Atlantic island of St Helena where he ended his days in moderate comfort but in despair and frustration.15 Meanwhile Castlereagh, with the Regent’s full support, managed to persuade the allies to accept a peace settlement which, despite the inevitable imperfections of any such document, provided Europe with a hundred years of almost unbroken peace. George could look with justifiable satisfaction on a major achievement by his country.
1 R.J.B. Muir, Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon.
2 L.G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox, 165–9; Smith, Grey, 86–7, 166, 176–8; Muir, 328–9.
3 Linda Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III’: Colley, Britons, 208–16.
4 Macpherson to McMahon, 19 March 1813: RA, Regency 7.
5 George to Queen, 22 Sept., 3 and 24 Nov. 1813, 9 April 1814: LG4, i, 319, 340, 346, 420 and from Prince of Orange, 20 April 1814: ibid., 430.
6 Ernest to George, 2 May 1814: ibid., i, 440; Priestley, 115; Annual Register (Chronicle) 1814, 29, 32–43; Webster, 251–2; Muir, 327.
7 Muir, 330.
8 Stuart, Prince Regent, 82–4; Creevey to Mrs Creevey, 14 June 1814: Creevey Papers, i, 195–6; Richardson, 137–40; Muir, 330–1; Priestley, 121–3; Knighton, Memoirs, i, 151–8; Anon., Account of the Visit … to the University of Oxford [1815].
9 Stuart, Prince Regent, 92–3; The Times, 27 June 1814; accounts of the festivities daily in The Times, 10 June–8 July 1814.
10 The ‘Congreve rocket’ was a rocket projectile invented in 1808 and was used at the battle of Leipzig in 1813, but it proved to be inaccurate and hazardous to the user.
11 Fulford, George the Fourth, 140–2; Stuart, Prince Regent, 96–8; Priestley, 128–30.
12 George to Queen, 22 Aug. 1814: LG4, i, 477.
13 Smith, Grey, 177–8; Grenville’s contrary view led to the break-up of the alliance between the two groups in the Whig party.
14 Muir, 364–5; R. Colby, The Waterloo Despatch; M. Glover, A Very Slippery Fellow, 150.
15 J. Holland Rose, Life of Napoleon, ii, 520.