Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  Yet all was not as it seemed. This was not the same man who had dominated Europe only a short time before. One of his supporters, Paul Thiébault, noted that his visage ‘had lost all expression and all its forcible character . . . everything about him seemed to have lost its nature and to be broken up; the ordinary pallor of his skin was replaced by a strongly pronounced greenish tinge’. He had not been defeated by any army; he had brought his misfortunes upon himself. He had ceased to be the leader of the forces of liberty, dispatched by the revolution, but another conqueror of independent peoples. His energy and almost manic certainty had begun to desert him; he now craved sleep and often seemed curiously tardy even in the hours before battle.

  But his will was indomitable. He started north to Belgium with the intention of confronting the two armies now raised against him; the army under Wellington consisting of British, Dutch and Germans, and the Prussian army under Field Marshal Blücher, must not be allowed to combine into a single fighting force. He must get between them and destroy each one in turn. A series of errors by Napoleon and his commanders, however, permitted the British and Prussian armies to retreat towards Brussels along two parallel roads that led to Waterloo and Wavre. At a distance of one mile from Waterloo, Wellington, sensing the strength of the terrain, turned to confront the enemy. A prominent ridge known as the Mont-Saint-Jean escarpment gave cover, while the large farmhouse or château of Hougoumont as well as a hamlet in the area could be fortified and garrisoned.

  Napoleon drew up his forces along the Brussels road but he could not see the extent of Wellington’s army concealed by the prominent ridge. The French army attacked Hougoumont without making great advances, and then the cavalry of both sides engaged in charge and counter-charge in a series of attacks which became, for the survivors, the most prominent aspect of the battle. By the evening Blücher’s troops had arrived from Wavre, and began to attack the French troops. Buonaparte thought that he saw a weakness in Wellington’s centre and sent forward his imperial guard to take advantage of the opening; but the guards, repulsed with artillery and with bayonets, wavered, collapsed and began to retreat. The cry went up that ‘La garde recule. Sauve qui peut.’ Wellington then took off his hat and waved it into the air, signalling a general attack upon the French whose lines were now disintegrating. The battle had been won. It was, as Wellington wrote to his brother, ‘a damned nice [finely balanced] thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’. The Prussians always believed that they, not Wellington and the British, had won the battle of Waterloo.

  Wellington and Blücher now regrouped and began the final march upon Paris. On 22 June Napoleon abdicated for the second time, and on 15 July he surrendered to the British at Rochefort by going aboard HMS Bellerophon. He had thought, before his surrender, that he might make his new home in the United States; but no such haven was permitted to him. He was taken instead to the island of St Helena, and spent the rest of his life on the volcanic rock in the South Atlantic. It had been the most expensive war in English history, and the most protracted since the ‘Hundred Years War’ of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

  Every word was now of peace, a peace guaranteed by the quadruple alliance of the great powers. And indeed there was to be no more serious strife on the continent until the time of Crimea in 1853. ‘It is impossible not to perceive’, Castlereagh wrote, ‘a great moral change coming on in Europe, and that the principles of freedom are in full operation.’ He might have added that Britain now considered itself to be the great moral leader in the struggle for freedom and against tyranny. It was clearly now the foremost power in terms of territory, and its empire included Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Australia and the Caribbean. It ruled, therefore, a large proportion of the earth’s surface.

  Yet there was no triumphalism and little sense of success. After the long war, weariness and hardship were as ever part of daily life. The problems of Ireland, the difficulties of empire itself, the clamour for parliamentary reform, the decay in trade, and the rise in industrial violence, were the shadows that victory cast. It was not at all clear, in 1815, that such problems could be resolved.

  Endnote

  1. A new and an old style of dating, the Gregorian and the Julian, were in use independently on the continent and in England, with a difference of ten days in their computations. The Julian style in England was not superseded until 1751, and I have therefore used it up to this date. In the seventeenth century the new year was celebrated on 25 March but I have followed the more familiar precedent of 1 January.

  Further reading

  This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents a selection of those books the author found most useful in the preparation of this fourth volume.

  GENERAL HISTORIES

  Ashley, M.: England in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1952)

  Aubrey, W. H. S.: The National and Domestic History of England (London, 1878)

  Baxter, S. B.: England’s Rise to Greatness, 1660–1763 (London, 1983)

  Black, J.: Britain in the Age of Walpole (Basingstoke, 1984)

  ——— British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt 1742–1789 (Basingstoke, 1990)

  Christie, I. R.: Crisis of Empire: Great Britain and the American Colonies, 1754–1783 (London, 1966)

  ——— Wars and Revolutions: Britain 1760–1815 (London, 1982)

  Clark, J. C. D.: English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985)

  Coward, B.: A Companion to Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2003)

  Dickinson, H. T.: A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2002)

  Harlow, V. T.: The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1793 (London, 1952–64)

  Harris, B.: Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002)

  Harris, R. W.: England in the Eighteenth Century, 1689–1793: A Balanced Constitution and New Horizons (London, 1963)

  Harvey, A. D.: Britain in the Early Nineteenth Century (London, 1978)

  Hill, C.: 1530–1780: Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Harmonds worth, 1969)

  Holmes, Geoffrey S.: The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain 1660–1722 (London, 1993)

  Holmes, Geoffrey S. (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution, 1689–1714 (London, 1969)

  Holmes, Geoffrey S. and Szechi, D.: The Age of Oligarchy: Pre-industrial Britain 1722–1783 (London, 1993)

  Hoppit, J.: A Land of Liberty? England, 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000)

  Jensen, M.: The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York & Oxford, 1968)

  Jones, J. R.: Country and Court: England, 1658–1714 (London, 1978)

  Lecky, W. E. H.: A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1892)

  Levack, B. P.: The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland and the Union, 1603–1707 (Oxford, 1987)

  Lingard, J. and Belloc, H.: The History of England (London, 1915)

  Macaulay, T. B.: History of England from the Accession of James II (London, 1906)

  Marshall, D.: Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1974)

  McLynn, F.: The Jacobites (London, 1985)

  Michael, W., MacGregor, A. and MacGregor, G. E.: England under George I (London, 1936–39)

  Namier, L. B.: England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1963)

  O’Gorman, F.: The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History 1688–1832 (London, 1997)

  Owen, J. B.: The Eighteenth Century, 1714–1815 (London, 1974)

  Plumb, J. H.: England in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1953)

  ——— The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London, 1968)

  Pocock, J. G. A.: Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1980)

  Prest, W. R.: Albion Ascendant: English History, 1660–1815 (Oxford, 1998)

  Ranke, L. von: A History of England, Pri
ncipally in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1875)

  Schama, S.: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London, 1989)

  Smollett, T.: The History of England: From Revolution in 1688, to the Death of George II (London, 1822)

  Speck, W. A.: Stability and Strife: England, 1714–1760 (London, 1977)

  Stone, L. (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994)

  Szechi, D.: The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 (Manchester, 1994)

  Trevelyan, G. M.: England under Queen Anne (London, 1965)

  ——— England under the Stuarts (New York, 1938)

  Watson, J. S.: The Reign of George III, 1760–1815 (Oxford, 1960)

  Williams, B.: The Whig Supremacy, 1714–1760 (Oxford, 1952)

  CULTURE, SOCIETY & RELIGION

  Allen, R. C.: Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford, 1992)

  Archer, J. E.: Social Unrest and Popular Protest in England, 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 2000)

  Ashton, J.: Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne (London, 1882)

  Beckett, J. V.: The Aristocracy in England 1660–1914 (Oxford, 1986)

  Beljame, A.: Men of Letters and the English Public in the Eighteenth Century, 1660–1744 (London, 1897)

  Bennett, G. V.: The Tory Crisis in Church and State 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford, 1975)

  Borsay, P.: The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989)

  Brewer, J.: The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997)

  Cannon, J.: Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984)

  Carter, P.: Men and the Emergence of Polite Society: Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001)

  Chadwick, W. The Life and Times of Daniel Defoe (London, 1859)

  Chalklin, C. W.: The Provincial Towns of Georgian England: A Study of the Building Process, 1740–1820 (London, 1974)

  Christie, I. R.: Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford, 1984)

  Clark, J. C. D.: Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986)

  Cockayne, E.: Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600–1770 (New Haven & London, 2007)

  Corfield, P. J.: The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1982)

  Defoe, D.: A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, By a Gentleman (London, 1742)

  Earle, P.: The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (London, 1989)

  Elioseff, L. A.: The Cultural Milieu of Addison’s Literary Criticism (Austin, 1963)

  Ford, B. (ed.), The Cambridge Cultural History of Britain, Vol. 5, Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1992)

  Foss, M.: The Age of Patronage: The Arts in Society, 1660–1750 (London, 1971)

  Gatrell, V.: City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 2006)

  George, M. D.: England in Transition: Life and Work in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1931)

  George, M. D.: London Life in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1925)

  Guillery, P., Donald, A. and Kendall, D.: The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London (New Haven, 2004)

  Hay, D. and Rogers, N.: Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (Oxford, 1997)

  Hill, B.: Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1989)

  Hilton, B.: A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006)

  Holmes, Geoffrey S.: Augustan England: Professions, State and Society, 1680–1730 (London, 1982)

  Jenkins, P.: The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry 1640–1790 (Cambridge, 1983)

  Kirby, P.: Child Labour in Britain, 1750–1870 (London, 2003)

  Langford, P.: A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989)

  ——— Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798: The Ford Lectures Delivered in the University of Oxford 1990 (Oxford, 1991)

  Lees, L. H.: The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998)

  Linebaugh, P.: The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1991)

  Mackay, C.: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (London, 1852)

  Malcolmson, R. W.: Life and Labour in England, 1700–1780 (London, 1981)

  O’Toole, F.: A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London, 1997)

  Palliser, D. M., Clark, P. and Daunton, M. J.: The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2000)

  Porter, R.: English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1991)

  Rivers, I.: Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester, 1982)

  Rogers, P.: The Augustan Vision (London, 1974)

  Rule, J.: Albion’s People: English Society, 1714–1815 (London, 1992)

  Rupp, E.: Religion in England 1688–1791 (Oxford, 1986)

  Sambrook, J.: The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1700–1789 (London, 1986)

  Scull, A.: The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven & London, 1993)

  Seed, J.: Dissenting Histories: Religious Division and the Politics of Memory in Eighteenth-Century England (Edinburgh, 2008)

  Sharpe, P.: Women’s Work: The English Experience, 1650–1914 (London, 1998)

  Simmons, J. R. (ed.), Factory Lives: Four Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiographies (Peterborough, Ont. & Plymouth, 2007)

  Snell, K. D. M.: Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985)

  Sykes, N.: From Sheldon to Secker: Aspects of English Church History, 1660–1768 (Cambridge, 1959)

  Uglow, J. S.: Hogarth: A Life and a World (London, 1997)

  ——— The Lunar Men: The Friends who made the Future, 1730–1810 (London, 2002)

  Vicinus, M.: The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Literature (London, 1974)

  Vickery, A.: Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 2009)

  Warburg, J.: The Industrial Muse: The Industrial Revolution in English Poetry (London & New York, 1958)

  White, T. H.: The Age of Scandal: An Excursion through a Minor Period (London, 1950)

  Williams, D.: The Triumph of Culture: 18th Century Perspectives (Toronto, 1972)

  Wilson, K.: The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995)

  MILITARY HISTORY

  Black, J.: War for America: The Fight for Independence, 1775–1783 (Stroud, 1991)

  Blanning, T. C. W.: The French Revolutionary Wars 1787–1802 (London, 1996)

  Brewer, J.: The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989)

  Chandler, D. G.: The Campaigns of Napoleon (London, 2002)

  Conway, S.: The War of American Independence, 1775–1783 (London, 1995)

  Esdaile, C. J.: Napoleon’s Wars: An International History, 1803–1815 (London, 2007)

  Gash, N. (ed.), Wellington: Studies in the Military and Political Career of the first Duke of Wellington (Manchester, 1990)

  Gates, D.: The Napoleonic Wars, 1803–1815 (London, 2003)

  McLynn, F.: 1759: The Year Britain became Master of the World (London, 2004)

  ——— Napoleon: A Biography (London, 1997)

  Muir, R. Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, 1807–1815 (New Haven and London, 1996)

  Schneid, F. C.: Napoleonic Wars (Washington, 2010)

  Southey, R.: The Life of Nelson (London, 1941)

  Zamoyski, A. Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (London, 2007)

  MONARCHS AND COURTS
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  Beattie, J. M.: The English Court in the Reign of George I (London, 1967)

  Black, J.: George II: Puppet of the Politicians? (Exeter, 2007)

  ——— George III: America’s Last King (New Haven, 2006)

  Bucholz, R. O.: The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, 1993)

  Clark, G. N.: The Later Stuarts, 1660–1714 (Oxford, 1949)

  Field, O.: The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (London, 2002)

  Gregg, E.: Queen Anne (London, 1984)

  Hatton, R. M.: George I (New Haven, 2001)

  Kenyon, J. P.: The Stuarts: A Study in English Kingship (London, 1977)

  Miller, J.: The Stuarts (London, 2004)

  Pares, R.: King George III and the Politicians (Oxford, 1967)

  Smith, H.: Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 2006)

  Somerset, A.: Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (London, 2012)

  Thompson, A. C.: George II: King and Elector (New Haven and London, 2011)

  ECONOMIC HISTORY AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

  Alexander, D.: Retailing in England during the Industrial Revolution (London, 1970)

  Ashton, T. S.: An Eighteenth-Century Industrialist: Peter Stubs of Warrington, 1756–1806 (Manchester, 1939)

  ——— An Economic History of England: The 18th Century (London, 1955)

  ——— Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution (Aldershot, 1993)

  Berg, M.: The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820: Industry, Innovation, and Work in Britain (London, 1994)

  Broadberry, S. N. and O’Rourke, K. H.: The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2012)

  Brown, R.: Society and Economy in Modern Britain, 1700–1850 (London, 1991)

  Chapman, S. J.: The Cotton Industry and Trade (London, 1905)

  Cipolla, C. M.: Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700 (London, 1976)

  Coleman, D. C.: Myth, History, and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1992)