Wellington

by Richard Holmes

  Napoleon thought Wellington’s appointment an unwise one, as he would be facing those he had humbled, and his presence in Paris was certainly one of the many ‘piquant contrasts’ of that first restoration, with bewigged émigré dukes going to mass with scarred marshals, and Swiss sentries at the Tuileries presenting arms to crippled veterans who turned back a coat lapel to reveal the Legion of Honour. Wellington met Marshal Ney out hunting soon after his arrival – though there was wide agreement amongst the young men at the embassy that French hunting was staid stuff, with few chances of ‘an English run’. Soult and Wellington recognised one another well enough, for Wellington had scrutinised Soult through his telescope on the ridge at Sorauren, and Soult had peered at Wellington in their coach when they were both on their way home in April. In December he met Massena at a party. The two men quizzed one another through lorgnettes as they might have done before a battle, and Massena was first to advance, saying: ‘My lord, you owe me a dinner – for you positively made me starve.’ ‘You should give it to me, Marshal,’ replied the duke, ‘for you prevented me from sleeping.’19 He saw a good deal of the royal family, and endured Louis’ spectacular greed. The corpulent monarch (Wellington described him as ‘a walking sore’) would tip a whole serving-dish of strawberries onto his plate without offering them to anybody else.

  Wellington was a welcome figure at the city’s many salons, attending the Duchesse d’Angoulême’s parties at the Pavillon de Flore, and enjoying afternoons with Mme de Staël, ‘a most agreeable women’, provided you kept her off politics. Not all his lady friends were above reproach. Pretty little Aglaé Ney, the marshal’s wife, was having an affair with a young Englishman, Michael Bruce, and Giuseppina Grassini, the opera singer once known as ‘La Chanteuse de l’Empereur’ had been Napoleon’s mistress. She may well have been Wellington’s too, and Lady Bessborough, staying in Paris that autumn, found his attentions to the singer rather too obvious. He certainly kept her portrait in his room, but then again, as Christopher Hibbert dryly observes, he kept pictures of Pauline Borghese and Pius VII there too. He also saw a very great deal of the tragic actress Marguerite Josephine Weimer, such a splendidly caparisoned lady that Napoleon had stuffed the not inconsiderable sum of 40,000 francs between her breasts after their first night together. She boasted that both the duke and emperor had been her lovers: ‘Mais M. le duc était de beaucoup le plus fort.’20 And then there was Harriette Wilson, kissed ‘by main force’ in the Bois de Boulogne and rattling on ambiguously and unreliably about the duke’s practice of visiting noble ladies à cheval.

  But it was not all strawberries and beautiful women. The British government was keen to persuade France to put an end to the slave trade in her colonies, and the issue was one that engaged Wellington’s emotions as well as his professional attention. The abolitionist Thomas Clarkson visited Paris and was delighted to discover that the duke ‘had made himself master of the subject’. Wellington assured William Wilberforce, who had done so much to get slavery abolished in Britain in 1807, that he would pursue his task ‘with all the zeal of which I am capable’.21 Despite encouraging signs in early skirmishes, he could not carry the position, partly because the Chamber of Peers (created, in the new French constitution, on the model of the House of Lords) contained many men whose fortunes had been made in the trade.

  Yet Wellington’s position was just as uncomfortable as Napoleon had suggested. The Bourbons had indeed learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. ‘They imposed upon us,’ wrote Philippe de Ségur, nobleman but Napoleonic officer, ‘the flag under which they had fought us.’ Seasoned veterans were sent off on half-pay while former émigrés took command. Families ruined by the revolution hoped for more than the restored monarchy could deliver, and Bonapartists compared le tondu (back at the peak of his form for that last campaign of 1814) with their gouty king. ‘We who were lately masters of Europe,’ wrote General Foy sadly, ‘to what servitude are we reduced? … O Napoleon, where are you?’22 France had evidently not settled to the hands of its new rulers, and Wellington was persistently warned of attempts to kill or abduct him. In October, the British prime minister begged him to leave Paris as soon as possible. It would not, however, be essential to move him without good cause, so as not to ‘betray any alarm on our part as to the prospect of internal convulsion in France’.23 He was asked if he would rather go to Vienna, to assist Castlereagh in the negotiations concerning the framing of a post-war settlement, or take command in North America. Wellington replied that he would rather stay on in Paris for the time being, but Liverpool replied that ‘we shall not feel easy till we hear of your having landed at Dover, or at all events, of your being out of French territory,’ so on 16 November the duke agreed that he would go, although he saw no need for haste.24

  A peace treaty was signed between Britain and America on 24 December 1814, blasting one excuse for his removal, but Castlereagh was now required back in England, and so Wellington was sent to Vienna as British representative. News of the peace travelled too slowly to reach America before Ned Pakenham had attacked the Americans at New Orleans. Before leaving England, he had been advised that as commander-in-chief, he would not need to hazard his person as he had when a divisional commander; he replied that he knew this well, but would not hesitate to lead if he had to. When the attack bogged down in the face of heavy fire from well-entrenched defenders, some of the attacking infantry broke, and Pakenham rode forward to rally them, shouting: ‘For shame! Recollect that you are British soldiers.’ He was shot through the spine and killed. Wellington was both sad at Ned’s death and angry at Ned’s naval colleague, whom he blamed for the failure.

  We have but one consolation, that he fell as he lived, in the honourable discharge of his duty, and distinguished as a soldier & as a man.

  I cannot but regret that he was ever employed on such a service or with such a colleague.

  The expedition to New Orleans originated with that colleague, & plunder was its object … The Americans were prepared with an army in a fortified position which still would have been carried, if the duties of others, that is of the Admiral, had been as well performed as that of him whom we lament.25

  But providence performed it otherwise & we must submit …

  Ned’s death struck another blow at Wellington’s own marriage. Elizabeth Longford suggests that the facial likeness between Ned and Kitty was so strong that Wellington may have seen in his brother-in-law the looks that he once found so attractive in his wife, and Ned’s regard for his sister and hero-worship of Wellington may have helped preserve the peace between the soaring duke and his awkward, short-sighted duchess.26

  It is no surprise that Kitty stayed behind in Paris with the Somersets when Wellington set off for Vienna on 24 January 1815. He travelled at top speed, stopping for only four hours a night, and arrived in the depths of an Austrian winter – the overheated rooms soon gave him a cold. It was not a time for quick decisions. When Wellington asked his colleagues what they had done towards achieving a settlement for Europe, Prince Metternich, the Austrian representative, replied: ‘Nothing; absolutely nothing.’ He soon immersed himself in the politics of peace-making, trying to find some way of reconciling the aims of the Russian-inspired Holy Alliance of Prussia, Austria and Russia, with Britain’s need to collaborate with France in order to secure a lasting peace. And there were enough ladies about to raise the enticing prospect of liaisons: Castlereagh’s half-brother Charles, now raised to the peerage, was ambassador at Vienna, and was the lover of one of the Duke of Courland’s pretty daughters; another announced her devotion to Wellington. But on the morning of 7 March 1815, he was just getting ready to go hunting when he heard momentous news: Napoleon had escaped from Elba. It quickly became clear that he had landed in France, and that the army was going over to him en masse – on 20 March Napoleon was carried shoulder-high into the Tuileries.

  On 12 March, Wellington told Castlereagh that the allies planned to assemble three large armies: one, wholly Austrian, in no
thern Italy; another, with Austrians, Bavarians, Badeners and Württembergers, on the upper Rhine; and a third, largely Prussian, on the lower Rhine, whence it would join British and Hanoverian troops in the Netherlands. The Russians, moving to the theatre of war more slowly, would constitute a reserve. Tsar Alexander hoped to ‘manage the concern’ in a council consisting of himself, the king of Prussia and the Austrian Prince Schwarzenberg. He had asked Wellington to join him, but the duke thought that ‘as I should have neither character nor occupation in such a situation, I should prefer to carry a musket’.27 Wellington was invited to remain British plenipotentiary in Vienna or to become commander-in-chief of British forces in the Netherlands, and not surprisingly chose the latter. Before he left Vienna, Tsar Alexander laid his hand on his shoulder and said: ‘It is for you to save the world again.’

  Wellington arrived in Brussels on 4 April 1815 and found himself facing difficulties on every front. The dismal performance of King Louis and his supporters induced him to seek what he called a ‘third term’, to give the French a choice between the legitimate (but unappetising) Bourbons and the illegitimate (but appealing) Bonaparte. He thought that there might be some hope with a junior branch of the Bourbons in the person of the Duc d’Orléans (who did indeed become king as Louis-Philippe in 1830), but Castlereagh told him that dynastic changes were not among the government’s objectives. And although he got on well with Slender Billy (known less flatteringly as the Young Frog), his relationship with the prince’s father, King William I of the Netherlands (the Old Frog), was less comfortable. In part this reflected the fact that the king’s own position was insecure. His realm combined Holland with large parts of the former Spanish and Austrian Netherlands, and there were already signs of the schism that would later separate the southern provinces, the future Belgium, from Holland. Many of his officers and men had fought for Napoleon, and their loyalty could not be taken for granted. But although Wellington was very careful not to offend his allies – when Madame Catallani sang at a concert at the end of April he stared down his officers when they called for an encore of ‘Rule Britannia’ – he was concerned that the garrisons of the frontier fortresses might go over to the French. On 3 May, he was appointed a field marshal in the Netherlands army and commander-in-chief of its forces in the theatre of war, superseding the Prince of Orange who, by way of compensation, was to be given command of a corps in the allied army.

  For an allied army it was to be, with British, KGL and Hanoverian units combined within British divisions and Netherlands troops in their own divisions but interleaved into the fabric of the army. In arranging his force, Wellington deployed those talents rough-hewn in India and polished in Spain, using veterans to stiffen youngsters, and the robust to buttress the less reliable. Sir John Fortescue catches the real cleverness of the structure:

  In every British Division except the First, foreigners were blended with Redcoats. Alten’s and Clinton’s had each one brigade of British, one of the [King’s German] Legion, and one of Hanoverians; Picton’s and Colville’s had each two brigades of British and one of Hanoverians. Even so, however, the subtlety of mixture is as yet not wholly expressed. In Cooke’s division of Guards the three young battalions were stiffened by an old one from the Peninsula. In Alten’s, where all the British were young, the battalions of the Legion were veterans and the Hanoverians were regulars; in Colville’s, where the British were both old and young, the Hanoverians were both regulars and militia; in Clinton’s, where the British as well as the troops of the Legion were old, the Hanoverians were all militia.28

  The fact that all this laminating was necessary testifies to the nature of Wellington’s army. Some British historians have joined their contemporary countrymen in expressing a uniformly low opinion of the Netherlands troops. However, it is beyond question that many fought bravely at Waterloo, and, but for the common sense of a Netherlands general, there might have been no battle there at all. It is more honest to observe that across the board, Wellington’s army was of patchy quality, with Peninsula veterans alongside battalions filled out with new recruits. He later affirmed that if he had had his old Peninsula army, he would have attacked Napoleon at Waterloo and beaten him in about three hours. This may be hyperbole, but it reflects his conviction that, in April 1815, he had what he called ‘an infamous army, very weak and ill-equipped, and a very inexperienced staff.’

  Many old hands were unavailable. His former quartermaster-general, George Murray, was in Canada; Ned Pakenham was dead; Larpent was in Vienna, and Sir James McGrigor (as he now was) could not be spared from his medical responsibilities in London. In France in 1814, Sir Thomas Picton had come to him to admit that: ‘I am grown so nervous, that when there is any service to be done, it works upon my mind so that it is impossible for me to sleep at nights. I cannot possibly stand it, and I shall be forced to retire.’ But he let neither resentment at not having been made a peer, nor a premonition of death, hold him back when offered command of the 5th Division. Sir Stapleton Cotton, who had done so well at Salamanca, had now become Lord Combermere and would have been a good choice for command of the cavalry, but Lord Uxbridge (once Lord Paget) had been promised the job.

  Major General Sir Hudson Lowe, of whom Horse Guards had a very high opinion, was sent out as quartermaster-general. Wellington thought him ‘a damned fool’. He persisted in telling the duke the Prussians were better than the British so much that ‘I was obliged to tell him that I had commanded a much larger force in the field than any Prussian general.’29 Even this did not work, and Wellington was obliged to ask the government to replace him. His successor was Colonel Sir William De Lancey, who had served under George Murray in the Peninsula and mastered the Wellingtonian style of correspondence. On one occasion he regretted that the commander-in-chief could not reply to an officer’s letter because it was illegible, and so the man’s colonel was told that ‘his Lordship requests that you will recommend to Captain Campbell to pay a little more attention to his writing as it is impossible in many cases to allot the necessary time to trace the Characters in his letters without neglecting other public business’.30 Sir Edward Barnes, another Peninsula veteran, was adjutant-general.

  Unusually, the duke divided his army up into three corps, the first under the Prince of Orange and the second under Rowland (now Lord) Hill, each containing two British and two Netherlands divisions. Wellington himself commanded the reserve, with two British divisions, a divisional-sized ‘corps’ of Brunswickers under the Duke of Brunswick, and a small Nassau contingent. He had a grand total of just over 92,000 men and 192 guns by the time Waterloo was fought.

  Whatever its strengths and weaknesses, Wellington did at least command the allied army forming up in the Netherlands in the late spring 1815. He did not command the nearest coalition contingent, on whose effective co-operation the conduct of the campaign would depend. The Prussian army in the Netherlands numbered nearly 121,000 men and 312 guns by the time the campaign opened. Its commander, Marshal Gebhard von Blücher, Prince of Wahlstadt, was a sprightly 73-year-old who had first been commissioned into the Swedish army a lifetime ago and entered Prussian service after being taken prisoner. A doughty adversary of Napoleon, he had had horses shot beneath him at Jena in 1806 and Lutzen in 1813, and had helped crush Napoleon’s last brilliant flicker in 1814. His headquarters were at Namur, and his four corps were stationed around it, with two posted forward close to the French border at Charleroi and Ciney. His chief of staff, the brave and experienced August Wilhelm von Gneisenau, was something of an anglophobe, possibly because he had served alongside the British army in North America during the Revolutionary War, when it was not at its best.

  The campaign was to turn on the relationship between Wellington and Blücher. They had met in Paris the previous year, and quickly established a sound working relationship. Most anglophone historians had long regarded the collaboration between Wellington and Blücher as an honest and fruitful one. However, the publication, in 1998 and 1999, of Peter Hofschrö
er’s two carefully-researched books on Waterloo raised issues that had long troubled German historians and cannot be lightly brushed aside by any modern biographer.31 Making extensive use of German sources, Hofschröer accuses Wellington of duplicity during the Waterloo campaign, and terms the battle ‘the German victory’. The debate has generated more heat than light, and has not been helped by the fact that while Hofschröer’s attack on Wellington appears in popular books, John Hussey’s reasoned rebuttal of some specific accusations are in the less widely circulated pages of the academic journal, War in History.32 And the clash is not simply national, for it is not hard to discern in the dispute something of the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ which makes Britain uncomfortable with her heroes, living and dead. One British reviewer looked forward to ‘the Oxford-accented screams’ that Hofschröer would cause.

  Three general points deserve mention. First, military history tends to fall prey to monolinguality. For example, British histories of the 1916 Battle of the Somme often pay as little attention to the Germans, who the British fought against, as they do to the French, who fought alongside them, and in the process suffered about one-third of the allied casualties.

  Secondly, the campaign to defeat Napoleon during the Hundred Days was always an allied struggle – not a British, Prussian or a German one. The great majority of allied troops in the theatre spoke German as their first language, and their enormous contribution to victory cannot be denied. But nor should it be taken out of context, and if the Prussians were able to set the seal on victory at Waterloo, it was only because Wellington’s army, with its British, Netherlands, Hanoverian and Brunswick contingents, had set the conditions for that victory before they arrived.

  Thirdly, any commander of a national contingent within a wider coalition force in any century must answer to two masters. On the one hand, he has a responsibility to, and loyalties within, the alliance. On the other, he derives his authority from his own government, and will be aware that there will be times when his national duty will override his responsibilities to the alliance. Wellington believed that his prime duty was to defeat the French in collaboration with his allies, and his first general memorandum on the campaign and his subsequent letters before the opening of hostilities make this clear. The allied object was to ‘defeat the army, and destroy the power of one individual’, and this could be accomplished by a concentric advance in the direction of Paris with ‘the largest body of men that can be assembled’.33 On 8 May, he told Charles Stewart that ‘Blücher and I are so well united, and so strong’ that he thought it unlikely they would be attacked.34 As Paris was their objective, he believed that he and Blücher would meet ‘the greatest force and the greatest military difficulties’, and their thrust should accordingly not be launched until offensives elsewhere could keep the French in play.