by Roger Knight
It took many months before the benefits of Napoleon’s defeat in Russia in late 1812 could be translated into concrete advantage on the ground in America. But Admiral Saumarez’s Baltic Fleet was steadily run down. By July 1814 seventy-two warships, including nine ships of the line, four 50-gun ships, twenty large frigates and thirty-nine sloops, were operating off the coast of the United States.52 By the end of the war, thirty-two American warships, from sloops to large frigates, had been destroyed, captured or were blockaded in American ports, and over 1,400 American merchant vessels had been captured.53
Army operations were less successful, however, and Admiral Warren’s successor as commander-in-chief, Admiral Alexander Cochrane, employed raiding and destruction tactics in an attempt to break the will of the Americans, bringing lessons from the vicious methods of warfare utilized in the Peninsula. In retaliation for the burning of York in Ontario by the Americans, a punitive British raid on Washington under Rear-Admiral Cockburn struck hard, using 4,500 lightly armed, fast-moving troops and marines. The British force burnt ships in the Navy Yard and destroyed government buildings, including the White House. It took only thirteen days to accomplish, and few casualties were sustained. This raid was a political rather than a military one, and it could not disguise the fact that British military resources remained stretched in North America.54 Some of Wellington’s best Peninsula troops were eventually sent to Canada, and as late as November 1814 the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, pressed Wellington to go to America to command the troops there, an offer that the duke refused: he feared the renewal of war in Europe and did not think that he could effect much improvement. He told Liverpool as peace negotiators were talking in Ghent: ‘You can get no territory; indeed the state of your military operations, however creditable, does not entitle you to demand any.’55 Liverpool ordered the negotiators to agree peace terms restoring the status quo antebellum, and the Treaty of Ghent brought the war to a close on 24 December 1814. The duke’s instincts had been correct: on 8 January 1815, the British Army, unaware that a treaty had been signed, attacked New Orleans and was badly beaten.*
British government ministers disagreed about the result of this war. The young Henry Goulburn, undersecretary of war and one of the negotiators at Ghent, was furious with Liverpool for letting the Americans off, as he saw it, very lightly.56 Primarily, however, there was relief that it was over, and, in any case, matters of far greater importance were being settled at the Congress of Vienna. Late in December 1814 the home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, wrote to his brother Hiley Addington:
Preliminaries of peace are signed with America. This a great relief, though not in all respects a subject of exultation … The war was too likely to become more and more unprofitable; and its continuance would have suspended our authority on the Continent of Europe, under circumstances the most critical. The good effects of the peace will soon be felt at Vienna.57
16
Final Victory
The more I hear and see of the different Courts of Europe, the more convinced I am that the King of France is (among the great Powers) the only Sovereign in whom we can have any real confidence. The Emperor of Russia is profligate from vanity and self-sufficiency, if not from principle. The King of Prussia may be a well-meaning man, but he is the dupe of the Emperor of Russia. The Emperor of Austria I believe to be an honest man, but he has a Minister in whom no one can trust …
– Lord Liverpool, prime minister, to the duke of Wellington, 23 December 18141
The Allied armies finally marched into Paris on 30 March 1814, Alexander, emperor of Russia, and Frederick William of Prussia at the head of their troops.2 The tsar immediately negotiated with Napoleon, who abdicated on 6 April and was granted the sovereignty of Elba, to which he retired. Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, Count Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian chancellor, and Baron Karl von Hardenberg, the Prussian chancellor, arrived ten days after the tsar and the king, so they could not reverse this fait accompli. Castlereagh, at least, realized that Elba was dangerously close to the coast of France, but no distant alternative such as the West Indies was available, as the Anglo-American War, which effectively encompassed the Atlantic basin, was only just coming to an end.
The Allies spent two months in Paris negotiating an agreement that would limit French power. Britain achieved its long-sought measure of security from invasion by ensuring that Antwerp and the Scheldt would be governed by an enlarged Holland. ‘Our great object is Antwerp,’ Lord Bathurst had written to Wellington in 1813. ‘We cannot make a secure peace if that place be left in the hands of France … you may consider it almost as our sine quâ non as far as peace with us is concerned.’3 Given the military situation, France was treated leniently. It renounced all claims over Holland, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.4 Louis XVIII was installed on the throne. Its frontiers were virtually the same as in 1792 and its colonies were returned, with the exception of Mauritius, Tobago and St Lucia.5 Austria was to remain dominant in north Italy. Dutch overseas colonies were returned, with the exception of the Cape of Good Hope, which remained in British possession. For the loss of the Cape, Holland was compensated with a payment of £2 million, which was to be spent in erecting fortresses along the new border with France. The Treaty of Paris was signed on 30 May 1814. The larger problems of containing Russian and Prussian ambitions, and what to do with Poland and Saxony, were to be tackled at the meeting of the Allies at the Congress of Vienna, set for 1 July. The first stirrings of German nationalism, excited by the effort to throw off Napoleon, were at this stage barely visible.
For a time, however, the mood lightened. Early in 1814, at the prompting of Castlereagh, the prince regent had invited the Allied sovereigns to visit England, which they did in June. Tsar Alexander and Frederick William of Prussia crossed the Channel in the 74-gun Impregnable, escorted by the duke of Clarence, landing at Dover on 6 June. The Emperor Francis of Austria returned to Vienna, but was represented in London by Metternich. In attendance were Count Hardenberg, for Prussia;* the Russian foreign minister, Count Charles Nesselrode; and Alexander’s Polish adviser, Prince Adam Czartoryski. The Allied sovereigns were mobbed and cheered by enthusiastic crowds and the tsar was particularly popular. According to Countess Lieven, the Russian ambassador’s wife, there were never fewer than 10,000 people outside his hotel, blocking Piccadilly traffic. A sunlit river procession on the Thames in the royal barge, from Whitehall to Woolwich, was accompanied by barges and gigs, and cheering spectators.6 There were many receptions and long dinners.7
Alexander grew weary of all the attention. He snubbed the prince regent, was rude to ministers and saw far too much of the members of the Opposition for the government’s taste. He lost British goodwill, thus making it easier for Castlereagh to convince his colleagues of the potential dangers of Russian ambitions.8 The vain, handsome and charming Metternich was, by contrast, hard-working and diplomatic, and courted the unpopular prince regent. The Austrian chancellor was taken aback by the fashions, manners and customs of London society, which, after a dozen years of separation by war, were now very different from those of Continental countries. He wrote home to his wife that London was more alien than Peking, adding that ‘The women are for the most part of great beauty, but their clothes are a fright.’9
After three weeks the Allied sovereigns left London and travelled south to Portsmouth, escorted by the prince regent. The party first inspected the ships building and repairing in the dockyard, and then the block mills. Samuel Bentham took centre stage in showing the royal party around, to the annoyance of Simon Goodrich, who had been in charge of the mills for nearly ten years.* The next day the tsar and Frederick William inspected 7,000 troops on Portsdown Hill. The Times commented, with some exaggeration, ‘Thus has ended the grandest scene perhaps witnessed in this or any other country.’ The party then rode on to breakfast with the duke of Richmond at Goodwood, and afterwards to Petworth House to stay the night with the earl of Egremont. Next they travelled to Brighton
, where the prince regent took his leave; and from there the sovereigns and their accompanying statesmen proceeded to Dover, where they took separate British warships to the Continent.10 Alexander did not endear himself to the rest of the powers by insisting that the opening of the Congress of Vienna should be put back to 1 October, so that he would have time first to return to Russia.
On 29 June, the ministers of the four great powers each agreed to maintain 75,000 men under arms on the Continent for the duration of the Congress of Vienna, to be used only by joint decision.11 Britain, with diverse demands on her manpower as usual, found this difficult: 20,000 troops had been sent to the war in America, and more were manning Mediterranean garrisons. In addition, parliament was anxious to reduce expenditure on the army: by the end of 1814, 47,000 men had been demobilized. In the Low Countries 15,000 Hanoverians were retained, but Britain still had only 33,000 on the Continent. An agreement was reached with the Prussians that they would maintain the number of troops by which Britain was short. For the eight months of this arrangement, Britain paid Prussia £355,333, effectively purchasing her manpower contribution.12
In London, victory celebrations continued. Lady Sarah Napier reckoned that ‘eight hundred thousand souls were collected in and about London for two months, & that it is universally allowed that all went mad.’13 The climax was the ‘Grand National Jubilee’ on 1 August. Lavish attractions were erected: in Green Park the ‘Temple of Concord’ housed ‘transparencies’;* a funfair was held in Hyde Park; a mock battle was staged on the Serpentine, with boats built at Woolwich Arsenal by Sir William Congreve, who had just succeeded to his father’s baronetcy and to his post as comptroller of the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich. The prince regent’s patronage ensured that Congreve played a major role in designing these attractions. He and John Nash designed a polygonal, timber-framed ballroom that was erected to the south of Carlton House.* Congreve was also responsible for the fireworks, during which not only was a man killed, but the Pagoda and ‘Rialto’ bridge in St James’s Park were largely destroyed by fire.14 One MP remarked in the Commons that the monuments were ‘temporary in the strictest sense of the word since they seemed to be made for the express purpose of being blown up’.15
The crowned heads and statesmen gathered in Vienna on 1 November 1814. The ministers were joined by Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, now France’s foreign minister. Talleyrand had become a bishop at the age of thirty-seven, but had embraced the revolution. He had then served Napoleon well, but fell out of favour and kept his distance from the emperor.16 He was the natural choice to represent the new Bourbon regime and, because of his cleverness and the divisions among the Allies, quickly became a strong voice at the negotiating table. Talleyrand joined the Congress at its most stressful point. Profound disagreements had to be solved over the borders of central European countries, such as Poland and Saxony, which affected the balance of power in Europe. A number of smaller nations, notably Denmark and the states of Italy, also had differences with their neighbours. Britain had settled most of the matters it was most concerned about in Paris, except for the issue of the abolition of the slave trade. Pushed on by solid support from British public opinion, Castlereagh worked hard to get those countries with maritime interests to agree to abolition: Holland, Denmark and Sweden agreed; France, Portugal and Spain, fearing that Britain was seeking overseas trade advantages, refused. The British government would be pressing for this objective for years to come.
The tsar dominated the Congress, not least because of his complex personality, a mixture of autocracy and liberalism that made him very difficult to read. He was convinced that only Russia could bring peace and stability to Europe, but he was inconsistent and idealistic, and influenced by ideas of mystical religion.17 The realpolitik was that Alexander had 200,000 troops stationed in Poland. The other great powers feared Russian expansion, and Castlereagh, Metternich and Hardenberg often tried to present a united front against the tsar, who wanted a kingdom of Poland under Russian control. The attempt to curb Russian power, however, failed: Castlereagh had overestimated the leverage that Britain and the other powers possessed. In London, Lord Liverpool and his government were concerned over Castlereagh’s prominent role in negotiations over Poland. The politicians in Whitehall saw that Austria and Prussia were considerably weaker than Russia and Lord Bathurst, secretary of state for war, was ordered by the cabinet to write formally to Castlereagh to inform him that Britain would not go to war over central Europe. In this matter, Castlereagh was relying upon his strong financial position, on which the Allies were counting, as well as the fact that Britain’s vital interests were not directly affected, both of which gave Britain’s view a force and objectivity that those of the other powers lacked.18
Prussia’s desire to appropriate Saxony, which had fought with France and now had to accept losses, very nearly proved to be the flashpoint of the Congress: the statesmen were unable to see a way around opposing views, and talked readily of renewed war. Negotiation became fraught, the participants exhausted.* In the midst of these complexities, news came on 1 January 1815 of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, ending the war between Britain and America and strengthening Britain’s position further: if it came to it, Britain was now in a position to go to war again. Castlereagh took some distinct risks. He confronted the Prussian negotiator Hardenberg with a secret, signed alliance between Britain, Austria and France, agreed on 3 January, to each put 150,000 troops in the field in the event of any attack by Prussia. A shocked Hardenberg backed down, and Prussia accepted only about a third of Saxony. A further month’s negotiation drew a series of compromises from Austria and Russia that finally resolved the issue.19 An agreement on Poland and Saxony was signed on 6 February 1815. By now Liverpool was urging Castlereagh to come home to explain what had been going on to parliament. The foreign secretary was relieved by Wellington, who arrived in Vienna on 3 February, and Castlereagh left for London on 15 February with his stock high, landing at Dover on 3 March. The arguments he presented in the House of Commons won him general support.
Before Castlereagh reached England, Napoleon had escaped from Elba. On 7 March 1815 the dramatic news reached Vienna.* No one knew where he was going. The Congress continued its negotiations, settling less critical matters such as the navigation of international rivers, the borders of Switzerland, details on the Low Countries and the states of Italy.20 The Treaty of Vienna was finally signed on 9 June 1815.
Inevitably attention turned to military preparations. Relations between the Allies were ragged. Each of the four great powers had kept its armies at 75,000 men as agreed on 29 June 1814, although these troops were dispersed through Europe, positioned not defensively against France but rather against each other. However, under the renewed threat posed by Napoleon, the Allies pulled themselves together. On 13 March they outlawed Napoleon. Then came the news that the troops sent by Louis XVIII to arrest Napoleon had switched their loyalty back to the emperor. Talks in Vienna now became a council of war, held at Wellington’s quarters. On 25 March each of the four major powers pledged to put 150,000 men into the field, to enforce the provisions of the treaties of Paris and Vienna, and to place Napoleon ‘beyond all possibility’ of ruling France. Russia’s troops were too far away to be of immediate use, stationed mainly in Poland. Alexander offered to put 200,000 troops in the field with another 200,000 to come, and keep 150,000 in reserve – the British would provide the finance for him to do so. (The Russian minister of finance warned Nesselrode that without British subsidies far greater than those paid in 1814, more war would bankrupt Russia.21) But neither Castlereagh nor Wellington wanted a huge Russian army in central Europe again and, in the event, the Russian Army, so critical in central Europe in 1813 and 1814, came nowhere near the fighting in 1815.
The British manpower deficit was calculated at effectively 100,000 men and subsidies needed to flow again to bring men to the battlefield. Troops kept in the field by British subsidies would count towards the British quota, but
that did not necessarily mean that those troops would serve under Wellington. Fierce debates ensued with the Prussians over which German troops would fight with the British: they were likely to be men from the north German states, since they feared the power of Prussia. It was fortunate for the British that Wellington was in Vienna, where his political experience and talents were fully exercised in the bargaining for troops. Because of his great prestige, he was appointed to command the combined armies of Britain and the smaller powers, alongside the Prussians.22
Regiments were sent the news of Napoleon’s escape as soon as it was known in London. Transporting British Army units to Belgium in a hurry was no easy task, with Wellington sending more and more demanding letters to Bathurst in London. By the end of May, Wellington had 36,000 troops, mostly British and the King’s German Legion, with his headquarters in Brussels.23 By June he had gathered a disparate force of nearly 68,000, more German than British, and with a considerable Dutch contingent.* British troops were still being transported across the Channel well into June.†
Napoleon gathered an army of 72,000 men and marched on Brussels, meeting Blücher, the senior Prussian general, at Ligny, where the Prussians fell back. On 16 June Wellington fought a defensive action at Quatre Bras against a hesitant Marshal Ney, and then fell back to Waterloo. Wellington skilfully deployed his disparate forces, defending the farmhouse of Hougement on his right in early attacks by the French, which failed. In the middle of the day Napoleon’s artillery renewed their fire, but the Allied forces were positioned on a reverse slope, so that little damage was done. The great attack that followed on Wellington’s centre nearly succeeded, but the French were stopped by point-blank volleys from British infantry. In the late afternoon Napoleon sent in waves of cavalry, but the squares of German and British infantry held. By six in the evening the French cavalry had given up exhausted, and the final attack by the Imperial Guard failed because Wellington had managed to assemble enough artillery to repel them and they disintegrated. In the end, Waterloo was as much a Prussian victory as it was a British one, for the arrival of Blücher’s army swept the French from the field in confusion.24 It was a desperate battle. The French lost 30,000, the British 15,000 and the Prussians 7,000. An unusually high number of senior British officers were casualties; almost all members of Wellington’s staff were killed or wounded in the action.25 When the prince regent heard the news of the victory, and of those who had fallen among his friends and acquaintances, he was moved to tears.26
