Ihave tried to be faithful to what is known of both the way in which news of the Battle of Waterloo reached London and the timing. Because Percy’s journey from Wellington to the Prince Regent was rather convoluted, those who write about it often simplify it, with the result that many of the accounts one sees are misleading.
Wellington sent a messenger to London on Friday, the sixteenth of June, telling the British government about the battles of Quatre Bras and Ligny; this is the messenger Hendon comes to tell Sebastian about. Waterloo took place two days later, on Sunday, the eighteenth of June, and its outcome was essentially decided by about eight thirty that evening. Wellington then went back to the inn at the village where he had spent the previous night. As he was about to retire to bed, one of his officers suggested it might be a good idea to send word of the victory to the French King Louis XVIII, then in Ghent. So a messenger was dispatched, and Wellington went to sleep.
The next morning the Duke rode back to Brussels, where he first sat down and wrote to a married (and pregnant) woman named Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster, with whom he was in all likelihood having an affair (he later denied the affair, of course, as was required of a gentleman). He then began writing his dispatches. Such dispatches were traditionally quite long, as they contained the names of some of the dead and wounded as well as officers the commander wished to commend (being “mentioned in the dispatches” was an honor that was good for one’s career and therefore important). The dispatches then had to be copied several times. As a result it wasn’t until one o’clock Monday afternoon that Wellington’s aide-de-camp, Major Henry Percy, finally set out for London.
Percy began his journey by carriage. It was only seventy-five miles to the port of Ostend, but the roads were choked with civilians fleeing Brussels (no one had thought to tell them the French had been defeated), fresh horses were scarce, and mud from the recent rains added to the mayhem. It took Percy twenty-four hours to reach the port. There he found a small but fast two-masted brig-sloop, HMS Peruvian, waiting for him, and they set off on what could have been a relatively speedy seventy-mile voyage to Kent. But the winds failed and they were virtually becalmed. It wasn’t until the next day—Wednesday—that they were close enough to Kent that the Peruvian’s captain could put Percy, his dispatches, and the two captured Imperial Eagles into a boat with four sailors who then spent hours rowing him to England.
But by that time at least four other men had arrived in London with news of the battles. The first unauthorized report came from a man named Daniel Sutton, and he got it wrong. Evidently having heard a garbled account of the battles of Quatre Bras and Ligny, he told everyone that the French had been thoroughly defeated on Friday, the city of Charleroi burned, and Napoléon sent fleeing back to Paris.
The stock market soared. But then an Irish knight named Maurice Fitzgerald arrived in London with more authoritative and accurate—although incomplete—news. With him was the MP James Butler, a younger brother of the Marquis of Ormonde. The two men had been traveling as tourists and were present at the Duchess of Richmond’s famous ball. On Saturday morning they had visited the scene of the Battle of Quatre Bras and had actually spoken to Wellington at about ten thirty Sunday morning, when the British Army was in position at Waterloo but before fighting had begun. Then, at the request of a British admiral named Malcolm who feared news of Wellington’s retreat from Quatre Bras and the Prussian defeat at Ligny might have spooked his countrymen, the two men left Belgium aboard the HMS Leveret to carry word to London.
Their more accurate news contradicted Sutton’s earlier, flawed report, and the stock market fell. But while authoritative, this report was technically unofficial and thus dangerously close to a serious breach of the sacred dispatches protocol, and in the end most people simply didn’t know whom to believe.
The identity of a fourth man to reach London, one “Mr. C. of Dover,” is still unknown. He seems to have been present in Ghent when Wellington’s messenger delivered word of the victory at Waterloo to the French King Louis XVIII. But he was evidently a rather shifty character (hence his desire for anonymity), and London had already been burned by Sutton’s false report, so most of those in the government and the press were disinclined to believe him. Much of the populace took to the streets, waiting together for Wellington’s official messenger to finally arrive and sort it all out.
In the meantime, the rowboat containing Major Percy was landing at the small fishing village of Broadstairs. Hiring a post chaise and four, he headed for London. His passage through the English countryside must have attracted considerable attention, since the shafts of the two Imperial Eagles he carried with him were so long that they stuck out the carriage’s windows. The dispatches were, as always, addressed to the Secretary of War, so Percy went first to Bathurst’s office in Downing Street. Learning there that Bathurst was having dinner in Grosvenor Square with many of the other members of the cabinet, Percy went there. Then Percy, Bathurst, Liverpool, and others all trooped over to St. James’s Square, where the Prince Regent was known to be attending a grand dinner given by a wealthy couple named Boehm. By that time dinner was over, the Prince was up on his dais, and dancing was about to begin. Brian Cathcart’s The News from Waterloo provides by far the best explanation of the tangled saga of how and when London heard about Waterloo. My accounts of the earlier reports to the Palace of Napoléon’s departure from Paris and of the battles of Quatre Bras and Ligny are based on other sources.
If you’re wondering why they didn’t simply use the semaphore system developed during the Napoleonic Wars, it was because the British government had dismantled it in 1814 to save money. Government use of carrier pigeons was not common until the twentieth century.
Most exploring officers (probably the best known being Colquhoun Grant) rode in uniform to keep from being hanged as spies if they were captured. But such a tradition obviously seriously curtailed their ability to gather information, and some (such as John Waters of the Royal Scots) are said to have occasionally adopted local dress when slipping behind enemy lines. It wasn’t seen as a “gentlemanly” thing to do, so they tended not to talk about it. Although Dudley Tiptoff is my own invention, William Wickham was a real man. It is widely assumed that Jane Austen named the villain in Pride and Prejudice after him. See Elizabeth Sparrow’s Secret Service: British Agents in France, 1792–1815; Steven Maffeo, Most Secret and Confidential: Intelligence in the Age of Nelson; and Mary McGrigor, Wellington’s Spies.
The early nineteenth century saw a significant increase in the scholarly interest in folklore. The Grimm Brothers first published their collection of fairy tales in December 1812. There was a growing recognition of the fact that many old songs, legends, and sayings were quickly disappearing, provoking a scramble to record them before they were lost forever. The various witch and werewolf tortures and burnings mentioned here are historical; such persecutions were particularly severe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but had ended by the late eighteenth century. Seven Dials was indeed popular with astrologers and cartomancers, and werewolves were a frequent and popular feature in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romance novels. The more things change, the more they stay the same. . . .
The British did stop the Spanish government from honoring the terms of the French surrender after Bailén. Thousands of the twenty-five thousand prisoners (this figure includes men taken prisoner elsewhere) held for months in appalling conditions in Calais died; no one knows exactly how many. About half of the survivors, women and children amongst them, were eventually crammed into transports, taken to the tiny deserted island of Cabrera, and dumped there without food, shelter, or clothing. For five years, warships of the Royal Navy patrolled offshore to keep them there. The wife of one of the French officers did give birth to twins on the transport ships; I could not find what happened to them but presume they died. Some of the prisoners—especially those who were Italian, Swiss, and French conscripts—eventually managed to get off the island by volunteering to join the Spanish Army, figuring they would have a better chance of surviving the war that way. A few managed to pull off daring and exciting escapes. Most died.
In 1836, a group of survivors who petitioned the French National Assembly listed sixteen thousand dead out of those taken at Bailén. But many of those died in Calais or in transport, and other French prisoners were also sent to Cabrera. So no one knows exactly how many actually died on Cabrera, although the more conservative modern estimates do not add up. I have based much of the account here on Denis Smith’s The Prisoners of Cabrera: Napoleon’s Forgotten Soldiers, 1809–1814. It makes for harrowing reading.
After his defeat at Waterloo, Napoléon returned to Paris and abdicated in favor of his young son. He then tried to flee to a ship that was to take him to the United States but ultimately surrendered to the captain of the British ship HMS Bellerophon. The British refused to hand him over to the French to be hanged, but the French did hang or quietly murder many of the officers who fought with him at Waterloo. The Bourbons then launched a vicious and bloody White Terror against anyone they perceived as their enemies. They were overthrown by the French people again in 1830.