The Duke of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo was so utterly complete, and so swift that it is almost totally forgotten today that in the spring of 1815 there were many who were against plunging Britain into a fresh war against Napoleon. Astonishingly, the anti-war faction included the Duke of Wellington’s elder brother, Richard, the Marquess of Wellesley.
It is easy to see why many were against a new war. Napoleon had been exiled to the safety of Elba, a Mediterranean island off the coast of Tuscany, in 1814. People all over Europe were beginning to enjoy the fruits of the peace. For the first time in a decade, Britons were free to travel to the Continent without the risk of being imprisoned as spies. Thomas Creevey, a Radical MP, his wife – a widow called Eleanor Ord and her children by an earlier marriage – had celebrated the peace in the autumn of 1814 like many new middle-class British families by decamping to the Continent.
The Creeveys – the redoubtable Mrs Creevey had a private income – rented a house in the centre of Brussels, where her daughters, the Ord sisters, and her son, enjoyed a social round of balls, banquets and walks in the central park. They joined the throngs, admiring the formal Dutch gardens, the smartly dressed officers, and the gossip.
But in the spring of 1815 Napoleon escaped and the Creeveys found themselves suddenly caught up like characters in Thackeray’s novel, Vanity Fair, in the excitement of a city preparing for war, though there was no let-up in the social round of balls, banquets and walks in the central park.
As the city busied itself for war, Creevey received a letter from his close friend and ally, Henry Grey Bennet, one of the most talented Radical MPs in Parliament. It was full of the latest Westminster gossip about who was for war, and who was against; and the doubts, Bennet claimed, reached right into the Cabinet of Lord Liverpool, the Tory prime minister:
Perhaps a less flattering medal portrait of ‘Old Hookey’ than the one of Napoleon in the colour section. He was known at home as the Iron Duke not because of his military prowess but because of the iron shutters he had installed to prevent protestors from breaking the windows of his home. (From Napoleon’s Medals by Richard A. Todd)
There’s two sides to every story (and every conflict). ‘The Treaty of Amiens Broken by England’ (1803), an English leopard/lion/bulldog tears up the treaty; engraved by Romain-Vincent Jeuffroy at the Monnai des Medailles in Paris. (From Napoleon’s Medals by Richard A. Todd)
Napoleon dragged off to Elba by the devil in 1814 – ‘inseparable friends’. The matter was not settled. (From Napoleon’s Medals by Richard A. Todd)
Lord Greville [William Greville, ex-prime minister ‘of all the talents’] started furious for war or at least declaring there was no way of avoiding it. A correspondence has taken place between him and Grey [a reformer and ex-Cabinet minister in Greville’s government] … and now he declares his opinions are not made up …
Lord Spencer [Whig MP] and the Carringtons are for peace and what is more amusing is that Yarmouth who preaches peace at the corners of all the streets and is in open war with Papa and Mama [Lord Hertford, the Lord Chamberlain of the Household and his wife, Isabella, mistress of the Prince Regent] upon that subject.
Prinny [the Prince Regent] of course is for war. As for the Cabinet, Liverpool [the prime minister] and Lord Sidmouth [Home Secretary] are for peace; they say the Chancellor [Sir Nicholas Vansittart] is not so violent the other way. But Bathurst [Secretary of State for War and the Colonies] and Castlereagh [Foreign Secretary] are red hot …
Bennet, a member of the Whig opposition, undoubtedly exaggerated the opposition to war but there were many who harboured serious doubts about whether Britain should go to war against Napoleon.
Radicals like Bennet and Creevey were reluctant for Britain to meddle in France’s affairs to restore a despised Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, while they were dealing with the excesses of their own despised Prince Regent at home.
There was a sullen mood among the Radical MPs against a fresh war with Napoleon in 1815 that was similar to the feeling in the Commons in 2013 when Labour, Lib Dem and Tory MPs voted against military intervention over Syria. They had had enough of war. Britain had spent more than twenty years engaged in wars against the French, first in the Revolutionary Wars and then after a year’s respite, the Napoleonic Wars. The country was exhausted by war, and it had its own troubles nearer home – poverty, unemployment, and social unrest.
I discovered that Wellington’s older brother Richard was worried about another more serious consequence of two decades of war: Britain was also broke. Napoleon funded his campaigns with plunder. Britain paid for its wars with debt. National debt had rocketed to levels that would make Britain’s ‘debt crisis’ after the 2008 bail-out of the banks look modest. Britain’s national debt reached 75 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010. In 1816 it soared to more than 230 per cent of GDP. A few days before the Battle of Waterloo, the Chancellor asked Parliament to support an increase in borrowing to pay for the new war of £6m. Prime Minister William Pitt had introduced income tax as a temporary measure to reduce the debt from the French wars with a sinking fund but it could not keep pace with the colossal cost of war.
The Treasury had raised money to finance the war against France – and subsidise Spain and Portugal – by issuing government stocks and bonds, known as Consuls and Omnium. Wellington also obtained money for his army by issuing bills like IOUs, which could be sold on by traders or redeemed at the Bank of England. Because he was so often short of money on his campaigns, he had to sell these bills to foreign suppliers at a discount, adding more to the burden of government debt. Britain was also going through a slump at home, and Parliament had passed a bill in 1815 to fix the price of grain at 80s (today something over £200) a quarter (about 219kg) to stop cheap imports of grain flooding into Britain as a bonus of the peace.
This crude piece of protectionism was aimed at protecting the profits of the farmers and the livelihoods of farm labourers but it had the effect of putting up the price of bread. As most of the land in Britain was held by members of the small aristocratic elite who effectively ran the country, Parliament was accused with some justification of passing the Corn Laws to help the very richest in the land at the expense of the poor. It was not entirely as simple as that – farm workers were being forced to turn to the workhouse, because the farmers laid them off. But that meant nothing to the poor flooding into London’s overcrowded slums trying to keep food on the table.
In 1815, as Britain sent troops to Belgium to do battle against Napoleon, there were food riots on the streets of London. While Wellington’s regiments gathered around Brussels, the redcoats were mobilised to throw a ring of bright bayonets around Parliament to protect MPs and peers from a mob protesting against the passage of the Corn Laws legislation.
Opposition MPs were afraid the government was about to impose martial law by deploying troops on the streets around the Palace of Westminster. A government supporter, William Vesey Fitzgerald, assured MPs in the Commons debate in March 1815, the soldiers ringed the Commons ‘not to overawe its proceedings but to defend its members from violence’. John Wilson Croker, the Admiralty Secretary, had been ‘rudely treated’ outside Parliament on his way to the debate, said Fitzgerald, and was only rescued with difficulty from the mob, while other MPs were ‘collared, dragged about’ and challenged about how they were going to vote. Despite the threats, after a long and rowdy debate, the bill went through unamended, fuelling the anger of the mob outside who had no vote in Parliamentary elections.
Britain was becoming almost ungovernable as it prepared for war. And then on 4 April, Napoleon tossed a diplomatic hand grenade into the laps of the allies to exploit their divisions: he secretly sent an ‘overture’ to Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary and European heads of government, seeking peace. It was sent from Paris by Napoleon’s foreign minister, the Duke of Vicence, Marquis de Caulaincourt:
The Emperor has appeared, the Royal Throne has fallen, and the Bourbon Family have quitted our territory, without one drop of blood being shed for their defence.
Borne upon the arms of his people, His Majesty [Napoleon] has traversed France, from the point of the coast at which he at first touched the ground, as far as the centre of his capital, even that residence which is now again, as are all French hearts, filled with our dearest remembrances …
This was cleverly crafted to press all the danger points of Britain’s troubles at home, starting with the fact that thanks to a wilful Prince Regent, the monarchy in England was increasingly despised. Then he offered peace:
He has no other wish than to repay such affections no longer by the trophies of vain ambition, but by all the advantages of an honourable repose and by all the blessings of a happy tranquility. It is to the duration of peace that the Emperor looks forward for the accomplishment of his noblest intentions.
Napoleon’s secret peace offer was at first denied by the government, but when Whig MPs discovered its existence, the government’s handling of the affair caused outrage in the Commons. Reading the Hansard report of the debate on 28 April 18151 in the Commons, as Whig MPs attacked Castlereagh and Wellington for marching Britain into war, reminded me strongly of the debates I covered for the Independent before the Iraq war in 2003. The protests against the Blair government in the spring of 2003 were a pure echo of Whig MPs in the spring of 1815. The Whig MPs accused the government of Lord Liverpool, and the Duke of Wellington, of declaring war not against a country but against a man, just as Labour rebels had accused Tony Blair of going to war against Iraq to seek ‘regime change’ over Saddam Hussein. They were furious that Wellington, as Britain’s leading diplomat at the Congress of Vienna, which was taking place when Napoleon inconveniently landed in France on 1 March, had signed a declaration on 13 March making Bonaparte an outlaw. It said: ‘Napoleon Bonaparte has placed himself without the pale of civil and social relations; and that, as an enemy and disturber of the tranquillity of the world, he has rendered himself liable to public vengeance …’
It seems remarkable now, but at that time the Radicals were outraged at the idea Britain could be seeking a fresh war to topple Napoleon if the French people wanted him. They said the reference in the declaration to ‘public vengeance’ was an invitation to assassinate the emperor. The most outspoken Radical MP, Sam Whitbread, a Jacobin sympathiser, accused Castlereagh of ‘deluding the House and the country’ by ‘holding forth the possibility of an alternative to war and the wish to adopt a pacific resolution, when in truth it had been already decided (by the Privy Council) that hostilities should be commenced. Such was the delusion practiced upon Parliament and country.’ Whitbread argued that the restoration of the reviled French monarchy had never been a ground for Britain going to war, just as Labour MPs argued it was illegal for Blair to pursue war to change the leader of a foreign power. It was to answer that charge that Blair came up with the dossier on ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to try to prove that Saddam posed a threat to Britain and its assets abroad. Whitbread said both Pitt (the late prime minister) and the Crown, the Prince Regent, had disavowed war simply to bring about a change in the French government: ‘For the first time in the history of the world, war [is being] proclaimed against one man for the demolition of his power,’ Whitbread thundered. ‘What is his power? His people: and the conclusion therefore is inevitable, that hostilities are to be renewed for the desperate and bloody enterprise of destroying a whole nation.’
But by then the die was cast. Wellington had replaced Castlereagh in early 1815 at the Congress of Vienna, which was busy carving up the map of Europe when Napoleon escaped. From the moment Wellington put his signature to the declaration there could be no accommodation with Napoleon, said the Whig MPs: it meant war.
Whitbread said he felt ashamed that the name of Wellington had been attached to the Vienna declaration outlawing Napoleon: ‘While they proclaimed death to Buonaparté and vindicated assassination, by their own abandonment of treaties, they were the direct authors of this new war.’ He accused Wellington and Liverpool of ‘plunging Great Britain into a war that, if not otherwise terminated, must, in the opinion of all thinking men, be soon abandoned, from a deficiency in our very physical resources’. Hansard, the official Parliamentary report, records other Whig MPs shouted ‘hear hear!’ after Whitbread said he wished the Commons and the county would weigh the alternatives, before plunging into a new war.
Sam Whitbread was the handsome son of the founder of the brewery. He bore a striking resemblance to Jane Austen’s dashing Mr Darcy but would soon suffer a bloody end. He was unusually outspoken but few of his friends, like Creevey, knew he was also deeply depressed by debts of more than £25,000 on the Drury Lane Theatre. It all became too much for him. On 6 July, less than a month after Bonaparte’s final defeat at Waterloo, Whitbread committed suicide by slashing his own throat with a razor.
But Sam Whitbread had not been a lone voice. Whitbread did not know it, but Wellington’s older brother, the Marquess of Wellesley, was privately airing his misgivings about the prospect of war. And they were cogent, practical reasons why Britain should not go to war against the resurgent Bonaparte. Wellesley had advanced Arthur’s military career in India when Richard was its governor-general. He had been the Foreign Secretary in the government of Spencer Perceval. But when Perceval was shot dead in the Commons – the only British prime minister to be assassinated – by a deranged businessman nursing a grudge over his debts, Wellesley refused to serve in the Cabinet of Perceval’s successor, Lord Liverpool.
Liverpool – Britain’s most underestimated prime minister (Disraeli called him an ‘arch mediocrity’) – remained in office until 1827 and held the Tory Party together throughout one of the most turbulent times in Britain’s long history. This curtailed Richard’s ministerial career and reduced his influence over both Liverpool and his brother. Even so, it was a remarkable fact that he secretly lobbied against the war. His reasons were more practical than the Whig MPs’.
I stumbled across Richard Wellesley’s opposition to the war in a long-forgotten memorandum attached to the Ninth Volume of the Duke of Wellington’s despatches after his death by the Duke’s son, Arthur Richard Wellesley, the 2nd Duke of Wellington. The 2nd Duke revealed that in 1815 Prime Minister Lord Liverpool had told the Duke of Wellington he had information, upon which he could rely, that the French nation was decidedly against Bonaparte, and that he was only supported by a military conspiracy, which might easily be put down if the allies mounted an immediate attack on him. The Marquess of Wellesley bluntly told Liverpool – and his brother the Duke – this ‘was a fallacy’ and even if it were true, it would take at least three months for the Duke to get his army ready. In the meantime, said the Marquess, they ought to look for a negotiated way out:
Three months of military inactivity must inevitably take place on our side, and it is unwise to forego the possible advantage of negotiation in that interval, if it had no other object than to ascertain the real inclination of the French people, and whether they might not be disposed to choose a government, with or without Bonaparte, which would be agreeable to themselves and promise tranquillity to Europe …
A far bigger objection to war, said Wellesley, was the state of Britain’s finances. His greatest objection ‘to plunging into a new war, independently of the exhausted situation of this country’, was that he could not foresee any benefit that could be expected by England, ‘even in the event of complete success.’ Wellesley warned that a military victory would leave Britain having to keep an occupying force in France for months, perhaps years to come, in order to keep King Louis XVIII on the throne. Britain could ill-afford the bill for such a victory, he said. In that, he was proved right. But the victory at Waterloo was so complete that many have forgotten there were doubters before the battle. Professor Michael Rowe, Senior Lecturer in European History at King’s College, London, told me:
With the benefit of hindsight, the outcome of the Waterloo campaign of 1815 looks like a foregone conclusion.
However, it is worth bearing in mind that such an outcome was by no means obvious to statesmen in the weeks following Napoleon’s daring escape from Elba and triumphal return to Paris in March 1815.
The challenges confronting the new anti-Napoleonic coalition that quickly came into being were formidable. Not least of these was the fact that the largest coalition armies – the Austrian and Russian – would take a considerable time to deploy, thereby affording Napoleon time to strike pre-emptively at the weaker British and Prussian forces available in the Low Countries …
The memorandum also points to the wider problems that would arise even in the event of a military victory over Napoleon. Not least of these was the probability that the Bourbons could only be re-imposed on the French people through the long-term commitment of considerable military force by the coalition, a scenario that according to Wellesley was hardly in the interests of a war-weary Britain.
It is all remarkably similar to the problems that faced the Americans and their allies after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the early twenty-first century. And it proved to be highly prescient. Britain had to pay for an occupying force to remain in Paris to shore up the French Crown. However, Richard Wellesley and the Whig critics of the war had not calculated on his brother securing such an utterly decisive victory over Napoleon that it would bring an end to the new Napoleonic war in a day.
At 46, Wellington had never expected to have to climb back into the saddle to go to war again against Napoleon. He had been enjoying a comfortable life as a revered war hero, a respected diplomat, and a supporter of the Tory government under Lord Liverpool with a seat in the House of Lords.
Wellington had returned to Britain in 1814 as a national hero after a final victory against Marshal Soult at Toulouse. Napoleon was forced into exile on the mountainous Mediterranean island of Elba. It was near his native Corsica and he was allowed to preside over it and its people with the laughable title of ‘Emperor of Elba’. It seems astonishingly naïve that the allied governments believed the conqueror of Europe would settle for life as the emperor of an island that at one point is only 2½ miles across, but there was no attempt to imprison Napoleon on the island under lock and key. The island was patrolled by the Royal Navy and a British Army officer, Sir Neil Campbell, was ordered to keep an eye on him, but was away from the island – possibly visiting his mistress on mainland Italy – while Napoleon sailed away with his personal bodyguards. Campbell had a long list of battle honours behind his name, including the capture of Martinique and Guadeloupe, the Siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, the Battle of Salamanca, and was severely wounded in a cavalry charge in France in 1814 by a Russian hussar who mistook him for the enemy. He commanded the 54th West Norfolk Regiment of Foot at Waterloo but inevitably became known as ‘the man who let Boney go’. He was rewarded in the way that the army knows how: he was sent to the ‘white man’s grave’ of Sierra Leone in 1826, where he died a year later – causing indignant fury in the press.
While Napoleon secretly plotted his return, Wellington basked in the afterglow of a long, successful military career that seemed over in 1814. He was garlanded with honours and financial rewards for ending Napoleon’s tyranny and liberating Portugal and Spain from France. He was lionised in London, feted at banquets and balls in his honour, and showered with glittering prizes by Britain’s grateful allies. Capping them all, the Prince Regent bestowed on Sir Arthur Wellesley a title that was grander than the five he already possessed: he was made the 1st Duke of Wellington.* Fashionable Regency ladies flocked to his court. They included Frances, Lady Shelley, an excitable 27-year-old married heiress, who kept a gossipy journal about the sayings of the great and not-so-good. She confided to her journal she was so overwhelmed to be in the Duke’s presence, she was struck dumb: ‘I must admit that my enthusiasm for this great soldier was so great that I could not utter a word; and it was with the greatest difficulty that I restrained my tears.’
Whatever attracted the ladies, it was not the Duke’s sparkling wit. He set about conquering a woman like a military campaign. He paid 100 guineas to an intermediary for an introduction to Harriette Wilson, a high-class Regency courtesan and suggested another 100 guineas for Harriette if he was ‘successful’ in breaking down her defences. She took the money but complained about his lack of charm in her ‘kiss-and-tell’ memoirs:
Most punctual to my appointment, Wellington made his appearance. He bowed first, then said, ‘How do you do?’ then thanked me for having given him permission to call on me; and then wanted to take hold of my hand. ‘Really,’ said I, withdrawing my hand, ‘for such a renowned hero you have very little to say for yourself. I understood you came here to try to make yourself agreeable?’ ‘What child!’ retorted the Duke. ‘Do you think that I have nothing better to do than to make speeches to please ladies?’
Despite this awkward introduction, Wellington stayed, paid her bills, and remained one of her part-time lovers for many years. Frances, Lady Shelley felt that a light had gone out of London society when the Duke accepted the offer of a plum diplomatic post as the British Ambassador in Paris, in the autumn of 1814, but several of his female admirers followed him to the French capital.
Wellington took over the Paris house of Pauline Borghese, Napoleon’s sister, rumoured to be another of his conquests, as the British Embassy. He paid her 870,000 francs on behalf of the British taxpayer, for the Hotel de Charost in the rue du Faubourg St Honoré that today, with its great couture houses, is said to be the most fashionable street in the world. It is still the official residence of the British Ambassador, and the equally elegant house next door, No. 35, with French windows opening onto tree-shaded gardens, was added in 1947, and is now the British Embassy, used for hosting more public events. They are shielded from the outside world by discreet black doors on the narrow street, which give no clue to the graceful houses and gardens beyond, to which I can testify, having been there to cover a visit by Tony Blair for a British ‘cool Britannia’ trade fair.
Throughout his life, Wellington liked to give dinners for a large number of guests (it was a custom, he said, that had been acquired with his officers in the army), and he was soon surrounded by beautiful female admirers at banquets, balls, the theatre, and riding in the boulevards of Paris. His Irish aristocratic wife Kitty, Catherine Packenham (the family name of the Longfords), had never loved the limelight and though devoted to Arthur, found it impossible to play the role of the grand society hostess he wanted; she had captivated him as a young man, but as his star rose, she shrank into the background and they became estranged.
In London, Wellington was lampooned for his sexual liaisons by the great Georgian satirical cartoonists such as Isaac Robert Cruikshank. One showed him sitting astride a cannon to the alarm of two ladies – one says: ‘What a spanker! I hope he won’t fire it at me.’ Her friend says: ‘It can’t do any harm … he has fired it so often it is nearly worn out.’2
Soon the real cannons would be firing again.
Wellington lampooned for his womanising: The Master of Ordnance Exercising his Hobby by Robert Cruikshank (© Trustees of the British Museum)
In Paris in December 1814 there was growing unrest among the Bonapartists at the emperor’s exile, while Wellington’s presence at the head of the foreign occupying force became a cause of worry back in Whitehall. Lord Liverpool became increasingly alarmed for the Duke’s safety and looked for something that would get him away from Paris. The prime minister offered Wellington the command of the British forces in North America, where Britain was engaged in a war against the newly independent United States of America (it was called the War of 1812, although it dragged on into 1815). It was a colonialist campaign ostensibly to protect Britain’s possessions in Canada, but it developed into a bitter struggle over sea power mixed with a desire for revenge for the loss of Britain’s American possessions. In 1814 the British carried out a punitive raid on Washington, the only attack in history on the American capital by a foreign power. Redcoats torched the White House as the President, James Madison and his wife, fled to safety. British troops burned down both houses of Congress, the State Department, the War Office, and the Treasury. The British forces there included some of Wellington’s battle-hardened regiments from the Peninsular campaign in Portugal and Spain, but with poor leadership they had suffered a number of reverses.
Wellington wisely turned down the offer to lead his old regiments again – the war with America was practically over and a peace deal was signed a month later.* Instead of heading to America, Wellington agreed to go to Vienna to replace Castlereagh at the Congress, where the brilliant Austrian diplomat Metternich was acting as the Maitre d’ of the talks with the four major powers – Britain, Austria, Russia, Prussia – and Bourbon France, represented by the sinuous Charles Maurice Talleyrand, to put flesh on the bones of the 1814 Treaty of Paris. This restored the throne to Louis XVIII and broadly returned France to the lands it held in 1792, before the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars began.
It was not a conventional conference, and never met in plenary session. The horse-trading was done by the delegations in separate state-rooms of an Austrian palace. The Russian Tsar, Alexander, was using the post-Napoleon peace talks to annex most of Poland for Russia (a strategic ambition that was realised by Stalin in 1945 at the end of the Second World War). Britain formed a secret alliance with Austria and France (Talleyrand wheedled his way in) against Russian expansionism over Poland, short of war against the Tsar – Earl Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War, wrote to Castlereagh on 27 November 1814, to warn him that the Prince Regent did not want to spark a new Continental conflict against Russia.
When Wellington arrived in Vienna in January 1815 and asked what had been achieved, Prince Metternich bluntly said, ‘Nothing’. It probably suited Wellington. The Duke and Metternich were both against radical reform and shared a belief that after the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, what Europe needed was a return to stability and the status quo ante – the restoration of the legitimate monarchs of Europe to their thrones, and the old balance of power in Europe maintained, as if the turmoil caused by the upstart Napoleon Bonaparte had never happened.
France was stripped back to its pre-1792 possessions, the Netherlands gained Belgium, Prussia gained Saxony, Russia swallowed part of Poland (though Wellington and Metternich prevented it swallowing it all), and Metternich created the German confederation under Austrian influence (sowing the seeds for a future war with Prussia). Meanwhile, Britain emerged with an enlarged empire and the lucrative colonies in the Cape, South Africa, Ceylon, and Tobago.
The Congress was criticised for being too conservative with its redrawn map of Europe, but it was another ninety-nine years before a British soldier was called upon to fire a gun in anger on the Continent, when the Kaiser launched an attack on France through Belgium, a few miles down the road from Waterloo.
Wellington’s approach to diplomacy was rather like his approach to women: he wanted to tackle it head-on. He was uncomfortable with the duplicity of diplomacy as practised by the scheming French foreign minister, Prince Talleyrand,* who had survived the Terror of the French Revolution, the Empire of Bonaparte, and the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.
The negotiating tables of the Congress were kicked over on 7 March, when Wellington received a secret despatch from Lord Bathurst saying Bonaparte had escaped. The Russian Tsar Alexander laid his hand on the Duke’s shoulder and told him: ‘It is for you to save the world again.’
Wellington wrote to Castlereagh on 12 March. I found his original letter in the Wellington archive. He wrote:
My Lord, we received on the 7th March a despatch from Lord Bathurst giving an account that Bonaparte had quitted the island of Elba with all his infantry officers and about 1,200 troops on the 26th February. I immediately communicated this account to the Emperors of Austria and Russia and the King of Prussia and the ministers of the different Powers and I found one sentiment – to unite their efforts to support the system established by the Peace of Paris [the restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy to the Throne]. The sovereigns and all the persons appointed here are impressed with the importance of the crisis which this circumstance occasions in the affairs of the world.3
Wellington asked the arch-plotter Talleyrand, who knew Napoleon, what he thought Bonaparte would do next. Talleyrand told Wellington: ‘He’ll go anywhere you like to mention, except France.’
Talleyrand was brilliant at political intrigue but he was no military genius. Napoleon – the imperial eagle – had landed in France a week earlier, on 1 March, on the beach at Golfe-Juan, and was already marching north to Grenoble through the mountains of Provence.** When he reached the town of Gap on 5 March, he promised his followers: ‘The Eagle with the national colours, shall fly from steeple to steeple until it reaches the towers of Notre Dame!’
The emperor promised to bring back La Gloire, the glory days, to France in a ringing declaration:
Soldiers! We have not been conquered. Two men, raised from our ranks, betrayed our laurels, their country, their prince, their benefactor …* In my exile I have heard your voice. I have come back in spite of all obstacles, and all dangers. Your general, called to the throne by the choice of the people, and raised on your shields, is restored to you; come and join him. Mount the tricoloured cockade; you wore it in the days of our greatness. We must never forget that we have been the masters of nations; but we must not suffer any to intermeddle with our affairs. Who would pretend to be master over us? Who would have the power? Resume those eagles which you had at Ulm, at Austerlitz, at Jena ... Victory shall march at a charging step.
It was a masterpiece of political chutzpah, given his recent fall. And in a passage that echoed Shakespeare’s Henry V oration to his troops before the Battle of Agincourt, he added:
In your old age, surrounded and honoured by your fellow-citizens, you shall be heard with respect when you recount your high deeds. You shall then say with pride – ‘I also was one of that great army which entered twice within the walls of Vienna, which took Rome, and Berlin, and Madrid, and Moscow – and which delivered Paris from the stain which treason and the presence of the enemy imprinted upon it.’
This demonstrated the politician’s gift of a short memory: Moscow was a catastrophe that cost him an estimated 300,000 men and it had been Ney who had covered his back as he retreated through the snow. Napoleon was calculating on the army backing him against the despised Bourbons, and the foreigners who occupied their capital and squabbled over the future shape of Europe in Vienna. The soldiers gave him power, and if he could win them back to his eagle standards, he knew the people would follow. As he had promised his followers, Napoleon returned when the violets were in bloom. Violets were worn by Bonapartists in Paris that spring as a symbol of hope.
The emperor showed a combination of personal bravery and a flair for pure theatre: when a royalist force intercepted his forward guard near Grenoble, Napoleon marched to the head of his men, threw open his cape, showing the star of the Legion of Honour on his breast, and said: ‘If there be among you a soldier who desires to kill his general – his emperor – let him do it now. Here I am.’ He was greeted with the old battle cry, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ It would soon reverberate across Europe.
He expected his marshals to rally round but Marshal Louis Alexandre Berthier, his elderly chief of staff, refused. Soon after, Berthier fell out of a window to his death, arousing suspicions that he was murdered, though Wellington remained convinced it was an accident, telling a private dinner years later that Berthier was standing by a high window, and having just ‘eaten a hearty breakfast, became giddy, and lost his balance’. Either way, you had to be brave to say ‘no’ to Napoleon. Berthier was replaced by Marshal Soult who, though a capable field commander, was crucially not as effective as a chief of staff. Berthier was sorely missed by Napoleon at Waterloo.
The red-headed Marshal Michel Ney, one of the emperor’s most trusted generals before he too capitulated in 1814, had gone over to the Bourbon Crown and boasted to King Louis XVIII he would bring Bonaparte back like a bird in a cage. The king retorted: ‘Je n’aimerais pas un tel oiseau dans ma chambre!’ (I do not want such a bird in my room!)
Napoleon, who always had a personal touch with his men, sent Ney a personal note praising him as the ‘bravest of the brave’ for his rearguard action in the retreat from Moscow. When Ney intercepted Napoleon with a royalist force at Auxerre, one of the largest towns in the Burgundy region, about 91 miles south of Paris, his troops switched sides and Ney joined them in the emperor’s growing army.
The Duke of Wellington penned another note to Castlereagh from Vienna on 12 March that I found in the Wellington Archive. It was marked ‘private’. The Duke said the heads of Europe were pledging three corps to fight Napoleon – 150,000 Austrians who were in Italy; an additional 200,000 Austrians, Bavarians; and the troops of the Lower Rhine with the Prussian Corps, together with the British and Hanoverians in Flanders. Wellington shared the view expressed by Lord Liverpool that had been rejected by his brother Richard:
It is my opinion that Bonaparte has acted upon false or no information and that the King will destroy him without difficulty and in a short time … If he does not, the affair will be a serious one and a great and immediate effort must be made which will be successful … It will remain for the British Government to determine how far they will act themselves …I now recommend to you to put all your force in the Netherlands at the disposition of the King of France if you can trust the officers at the head of it. I will go and join it, if you like it, or do anything else that the Government chooses.4
On 24 March Wellington wrote to his younger brother Sir Henry Wellesley saying: ‘You will have seen what a breeze Bonaparte has started up in France. And in the course of about six weeks there will not be fewer than 700,000 men on the French border. I am going to take command of the army in the Netherlands.’ In fact, only a fraction of that number of troops ever arrived to face Napoleon. Captain William Siborne, in his history of the campaign published in the Victorian era, said France resembled a nation buckling on its armour – Napoleon had ordered up to 800,000 men to be mobilised. The Armee du Nord that had been hurriedly reconstituted in the north of France amounted to 116,000 men with up to 350 guns.
The emperor had decided to strike before Wellington and Blücher’s Prussians could invade France. Unsure of Napoleon’s intentions, Wellington rented a house as his headquarters in the fashionable centre of Brussels (the owner retreated to the top floor) and continued on a round of social engagements, balls, banquets, riding out on his favourite warhorse, Copenhagen, often with his society lady friends, to show how unconcerned he was by the threat of war. He remained convinced that the French people did not want Napoleon back in power.
Creevey was better informed. A young British Army officer, Major Hamilton, who was engaged to one of the Ord sisters and was trying to ingratiate himself into Creevey’s good books, wrote to Creevey on 18 March promising to give him the latest news from Paris providing he did not ‘blab’ about the source of the leak. Hamilton, aide-de-camp (ADC) to General Barnes, the Adjutant General of the Army in Brussels, wrote:
My dear Mr Creevey,
If you will not blab, you shall hear all the news I can pick up, bad and good as it comes. I am sorry to tell you bad news today. General Fagal writes from Paris to say that Bonaparte may be in that Capital ere many days. His army increases hourly, and as fast as a regiment is brought up to the neighbourhood of Lyons, it goes over to its old master.
The day after Hamilton penned his letter (19 March), Louis XVIII fled the Tuileries palace in the middle of the night, while Napoleon slept at the chateau of Fontainebleau. The white cockade of the Bourbon monarchy was trampled underfoot, and the next day, Napoleon re-entered Paris and thus began The Hundred Days – the time between his arrival on 20 March and the restoration of Louis XVIII on 28 June.
Lord Bathurst appointed Henry Paget, the Earl of Uxbridge (later Marquess of Anglesey) as Wellington’s second in command for the Waterloo campaign. This seemed astonishing to Wellington’s friends because, during the Peninsular War, Uxbridge had cuckolded Wellington’s brother Henry and ran off with his wife, Lady Charlotte. Uxbridge wangled the post now because he was a friend of the Prince Regent. Wellington insisted he did not give a damn and gave short shrift to a friend who said it would cause a scandal:
‘Your grace cannot have forgotten the affair with Lady Charlotte?’
‘Oh no! I have not forgotten that.’
‘That is not the only case, I am afraid. At any rate, Lord Uxbridge has the reputation of running away with everybody he can.’
‘I’ll take good care he don’t run away with me. I don’t care about anybody else.’
Wellington regarded the press and ‘public relations’ with contempt, and treated the scandal sheets with haughty disdain. This was particularly true about his own affairs, which is just as well, because the gossips had a field day when he moved from Paris to Brussels, where he was surrounded by Regency ladies drawn to the city by the excitement of war, the brilliant uniforms, and the dashing commander-in-chief, who, even at 46, was nicknamed by Creevey ‘The Beau’. When one of Harriette Wilson’s male friends later tried to blackmail him with her memoirs, he famously said: ‘Publish and be damned.’
The Duke’s list of admirers included the lovely Lady Frances Webster, 21, who clearly captivated Wellington from the moment they first met in Brussels. Lady Frances was the wife of James Webster-Wedderburn, a Regency rake who once foolishly boasted to the Romantic poet, Lord Byron, that women were fair game, but his pious wife could be trusted with any man. He was wrong. Annoyed by Webster-Wedderburn’s boasts about his wife’s virtue, Byron, like a character in the bad plot of an Italian opera, set out to prove him wrong by seducing her. He described in a letter to Lady Melbourne, a grande dame of Whig society in Whitehall, how he easily succeeded. Lady Frances returned his ardent love when Byron cornered her in the billiard room of her home, but it was an offer he was too afraid to consummate because he feared it could have led to a duel with his friend.
In his letter to Lady Melbourne in October 1813, Byron revealed: ‘I have made love – & if I am to believe mere words (for there we have hitherto stopped) it is returned. – I must tell you the place of declaration however – a billiard room!’ At 6 p.m. he added a postscript to his letter: ‘This business is growing serious – & I think Platonism in some peril – There has been very nearly a scene – almost an hysteric & really without cause for I was conducting myself with (to me) very irksome decorum – her expressions astonish me – so young & cold as she appeared …’
Rebuffed by Byron, Lady Frances went on a few months later to ensnare her greater prize in Brussels. A young subaltern became curious at seeing the Duke of Wellington arrive at the central park, and slip behind some trees. Soon afterwards, a carriage arrived and he recognised Lady Frances as she ‘descended into a hollow where the trees completely screened them’.
It is unclear whether Wellington consummated their affair in the hollow or anywhere else – Lady Frances was more than four months pregnant – but there is little doubt that he was in love with her (paternally or otherwise). He found time to pen notes to Lady Frances in the precious hours on the morning of the Battle of Waterloo and the morning after it.
Rumours of their affair caused a scandal after the battle. While Wellington and his allied army occupied Paris, Lady Frances gave birth to a son in the city on 18 August 1815; he was christened Charles Byron (her husband clearly still counted the poet among his friends). But Wellington was drawn into a scandal in November 1815 over claims in a gossip sheet, the St James’s Chronicle, that her husband was going to sue Wellington for ‘criminal conversation’ – the legal expression at the time for extra-marital sex and grounds for divorce – with his wife. Rather than suing the victor of Waterloo, Webster-Wedderburn sued the publisher for libel. He was awarded £2,000. The scandal ended Wellington’s fascination with Lady Frances and she passed out of his life, but there were many other female admirers in Brussels and, later, Paris.
Wellington attended a party of Brussels high society on Saturday 22 April 1815, hosted by Lady Charlotte Greville, another from his list of lovers and wife of one of his officers, Colonel Charles Greville, a soldier-politician who supported the Tories. The Duke confidently assured Lady Charlotte’s guests that Bonaparte was likely to be killed by a stiletto-wielding assassin in Paris before he could wage war again.
The Duke approached Creevey at the party with a show of such bonhomie that the MP thought the Duke must be drunk. Creevey had metaphorically crossed swords with Wellington at Westminster – he opposed a £2,000-a-year annuity granted by the Prince Regent to Wellington as a reward from a grateful nation for his victory at Vitoria, which freed Spain of the French occupying army. Creevey was flattered by the Duke’s attentions to him but not impressed by what he had to say: ‘My Lord would have it that Bonaparte would be done up out of hand in Paris,’ Creevey shared with his journal. ‘I thought several times he must be drunk. But drunk or sober, he had not the least appearance of being a clever man.’ Though Creevey conceded: ‘Our conversation was mightily amicable and good, considering our former various sparring bouts in the House of Commons ...’ Wellington may have believed his assassination theory, but it is more likely he was putting on a brave show to avoid panic spreading in Brussels.
On 15 June Wellington, his ladies, and his senior officers, took part in one of the most celebrated balls in history. It was thrown by the Duke and Duchess of Richmond in the cavernous coach house – it was 150ft long by 54ft wide and decorated with wallpaper of trellis and roses – in the Rue de la Blanchisserie at the back of their rented house in Rue des Cendres, near the Botanical Gardens in the centre of Brussels.* The guests at Lady Richmond’s ball included Lady Frances Wedderburn-Webster, with whom Wellington was already rumoured to be having an affair, and the highly volatile Lady Caroline Lamb – Lady Melbourne’s daughter-in-law and Byron’s notorious mistress – who claimed she coined the description of the Romantic poet as ‘mad bad and dangerous to know’. It could have applied equally to herself.
As the fears about Napoleon gripped the city, the Duchess anxiously asked the Commander-in-Chief whether she should postpone the ball. He calmly assured her the ball would not be interrupted by Napoleon: ‘Duchess, you may give your ball with the greatest safety, without fear of interruption.’ Wellington undoubtedly wanted to put on a show of confidence at the ball because he did not want to fan the panic that was already growing in the city. Wellington was receiving reports two days before the ball about the French deployment close to the border from Major General Sir Hussey Vivian, commander of the 6th Brigade of cavalry, who had received intelligence from a French deserter. Wellington refused to react until he knew more clearly what Napoleon planned. The first contact came early on 15 June – the morning of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball – when the French skirmishers clashed with Prussian picquets inside the Belgian border south of Charleroi, only 37 miles from Brussels.
Bonaparte’s aim was to try to force a wedge between Wellington’s combined allied force of around 112,000 men and 200 guns and the 130,000-strong Prussian Army under the old Prussian warhorse, Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher known as ‘Marshal Vorwarts’ (Forwards).
Wellington had perhaps lulled himself into a false sense of security because he believed Napoleon would stand a far better chance of frustrating the Allied armies by fighting a clever defensive war within the French border as he had in 1814. Napoleon instead went for a bold move: strike first and trust to fortune. It was to be the biggest gamble of his life. Wellington heard of clashes with Napoleon’s forces from the Prince of Orange at 3 p.m. and at 7.30 p.m. that the Prussians’ 1 Corps under von Zieten was under attack at Thuin near Charleroi. Wellington insisted on attending the ball regardless of Napoleon’s manoeuvres, and watched the officers and their ladies twirling to the music until supper was served after 10 p.m. As more reports came in of the clashes with the French, the guests who included most of Wellington’s staff officers, brigade commanders, and allied chiefs became more agitated. They watched the Gordon Highlanders nimbly dancing jigs and reels in their kilts to the sound of bagpipes: ‘I well remember the Gordon Highlanders dancing reels at the ball,’ recalled Louisa, one of the Duchess of Richmond’s daughters:
My mother thought it would interest foreigners to see them, which it did … I remember hearing that some of the poor men who danced in our house died at Waterloo. There was quite a crowd to look at the Scotch dancers.
The foreign dignitaries were amazed to see men in skirts, but in twenty-four hours many were lying dead in the fields near a cross roads at a place called Quatre Bras.
There are still heated disputes about the extent to which Wellington was caught out. Wellington was undoubtedly surprised by the speed of Napoleon’s rapid advance but nursed a worry that Napoleon’s thrust towards Brussels was a feint, and the real attack would be through Mons to cut him off from the coast. Indeed, he all but admitted it in his famous Waterloo Despatch to Bathurst on 19 June, when he said he ordered his troops to ‘march … as soon as I had intelligence from other quarters to prove that the enemy’s movement upon Charleroi was the real attack …’
As the band played on, around midnight, he was told that the area in front of Mons was clear of enemy troops and ordered his officers to concentrate their men in support of the Dutch forces who were holding Quatre Bras, the strategic crossroads where the main Charleroi–Brussels is intersected by the west–east Nivelles–Namur road. By holding the crossroads, Wellington could keep in contact with Blücher a few miles to the east at Ligny.
The effect on the ball was compared to kicking a bees’ nest. Officers in dress uniform dashed for the exit, and hurriedly bade farewell to their dancing partners to join their regiments. Lady Caroline Lamb described its romantic poignancy: ‘There never was such a Ball – so fine and so sad. All the young men who appeared there shot dead a few days later.’ The injured included her own brother, a dashing cavalry officer, Sir Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby, who was one of the luckiest men to be alive after the battle. Her ex-lover Lord Byron eclipsed her words in a newly-added Third Canto to his epic poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage although he was not at the ball:
Ah! then and there was hurrying to and fro,
And gathering tears, and tremblings of distress,
And cheeks all pale, which but an hour ago
Blushed at the praise of their own loveliness;
And there were sudden partings, such as press
The life from out young hearts, and choking sighs
Which ne’er might be repeated; who could guess
If ever more should meet those mutual eyes,
Since upon night so sweet such awful morn could rise!
The ‘sudden partings’ included one of Wellington’s ADCs, the Honourable Henry Percy, who pocketed a ladie’s velvet handkerchief purse given him as a keepsake by an admirer. The purse was to play a part in the history of the battle and its aftermath. Like his fellow officers, Percy dashed off to war, still wearing the dress uniform he wore at the ball.
The Duke whispered to his old friend, Charles Lennox, the Duke of Richmond, that he needed to see a good map. Richmond took Wellington into his dressing-room and unfolded a map for him on a table. Wellington shut the door and said, ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, by God; he has gained twenty-four hours’ march on me … I have ordered the army to concentrate at Quatre Bras; but we shall not stop him there, and if so I must fight him there.’ According to Richmond, he made a mark on the map with his thumb-nail. It was over a crossroads on the main road into Brussels. It was about 9 miles to the south of the city on the Charleroi road at a hamlet called Mont Saint Jean.* Soon the world would know it as Waterloo.
* His brother William chose Wellington because the family could trace their roots to the nearby Wellesley in Somerset in 1104. The Duke approved but Lady Wellington did not, saying, ‘it recalls nothing’. (Wellington Despatches viii 148, Raglan Papers, 13 September 1809)
* General Andrew Jackson defeated the English under Packenham (brother-in-law of Wellington) at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 before news of the peace deal at Ghent had arrived.
* On hearing about the death of Talleyrand, Metternich said: ‘What did he mean by that?’
** La Route Napoleon, a 350km section of national road N85 through the Alpes-Maritimes to Grenoble, is celebrated by the French with gilded imperial eagles by the roadside.
* He blamed the Duke of Castiglione for surrendering Lyons without a fight, and the Duke of Ragusa for surrendering Paris to save the city.
* It has long since been replaced by a multistorey car park and boring blocks of grey offices and flats.
* The map with Wellington’s thumbnail mark was lost. Richmond took it with him to British North America (Canada) when he was made its Governor General, but his map was mislaid after his sudden death there in 1819. While touring the province, he was bitten by a pet fox and died in agony of rabies.
1. Hansard Report, 28 April 1915.
2. ‘The Master of the Ordnance Exercising his Hobby’, etching by Robert Cruikshank, British Museum, 1935,0522.11.159.
3. WP 1/453/7, Wellington Archive, Southampton University.
4. WP 1/453/8, Wellington Archive, Southampton University.