Scotland's Waterloo E-Book

Owen Dudley Edwards

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 314

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

I saw the field of battle' It still exhibits a most striking picture of desolation all the neighbouring houses being broken down by cannon-shot and shells. There was one sweet little chateau in particular called Hougomont which was the object of several desperate assaults and was at length burned to the ground' There was an immense carnage on this spot and the stench of the dead bodies is still frightfully sensible. WALTER SCOTT Why was the Battle of Waterloo so significant for Scottish history? How has the conflict been represented in Scottish art and literature? What did the Scots who witnessed the battle and its aftermath have to say about it at the time? The Battle of Waterloo represented a seismic shift in the tectonic plates of national identity for Scotland. In art and political rhetoric, the Scots became the poster boys of the British Empire at Waterloo. Ostensibly fighting alongside England against France, the battle also arguably saw Scotland move away from the Auld Alliance towards identification with the United Kingdom. Scotland's Waterloo concentrates on how the battle was perceived at the time, showcasing the different ways that illustrious Scots documented and responded to the battle in its immediate aftermath. Owen Dudley Edwards starts with the painters and their patrons, before moving on to the fascinating eyewitness accounts of Scottish soldiers and doctors. He finally introduces the voices of two of the most famous Scottish writers who experienced the horrific aftermath of the battle first-hand, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron.

Leseprobe

OWEN DUDLEY EDWARDS, FRSE, FRHistS,FSA(Scot.) was born in Dublin in 1938, studied at Belvedere College (for reference to which, see James Joyce’sA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), and University College, Dublin, then at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, subsequently teaching in the University of Oregon. He then worked as a journalist for a year in Dublin. He taught in the University of Aberdeen for two years (1966–68), and since then at the University of Edinburgh whence he retired in 2005 but where he still gives occasional lectures. His subject is History but he frequently trespasses into Literature. He worked in the Yes campaign in 2014 and found it like the Civil Rights movements he knew in theUSAand in Northern Ireland, the protest movements against the war in Vietnam in theUSA, Ireland and Scotland, and the anti-Apartheid movement in Ireland.

Scotland’s Waterloo

OWEN DUDLEY EDWARDS

LuathPress Limited

EDINBURGH

www.luath.co.uk

First published 2015

ISBN: 978-1-910745-16-8

ISBN: 978-1-910324-52-3

The author’s right to be identified as author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

© Owen Dudley Edwards 2015

To three colleagues at Edinburgh University whom I can never repay:

Pat Storey, Tom Barron and Roger Savage

Contents

Timeline

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Painting Waterloo

Chapter 2: Soldiers

Chapter 3: Doctors

Chapter 4: Walter Scott

Chapter 5: George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron

Epilogue: The Bonnie Bunch of Roses

Timeline

10 April 1814

Lord Byron writes ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’.

7 July 1814

Sir Walter Scott’sWaverleyis printed by James Ballantyne.

26 February 1815

Napoleon Bonaparte escapes from the island of Elba on the shipSwiftsure.

13 March 1815

The Congress of Vienna declares Napoleon an outlaw.

16 March 1815

WilliamImade ‘King of the Netherlands’.

20 March 1815

Napoleon reaches Paris and starts mobilising troops. Start of the ‘Hundred Days of Napoleon’.

25 March 1815

Great Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia, members of the Seventh Coalition, come to an agreement to supply 150,000 men each.

15 June 1815

Start of the hostilities. Napoleon crosses the frontier at Thuin near Charleroi.

16 June 1815

Battle of Quatre-Bras: Marshal Ney attacks. Death of Colonel John Cameron of the 42nd Highlanders. Wellington’s Dutch army at an important tactical crossroads. It ends in a draw. Battle of Ligny: Napoleon uses the right wing of his army and the reserves to defeat the Prussians.

17 June 1815

Wellington’s army marches to position at Mont-Saint-Jean. Napoleon draws his forces symmetrically along the Brussels Road.

18 June 1815

The Battle of Waterloo begins. Napoleon launches an attack against the allies at Hougoumont. Charge of the British heavy cavalry, including the Scots Greys and Inniskilling Dragoons. The French cavalry attack. Marshal Ney takes possession of La Haye Sainte. Arrival of the Prussian troops. Napoleon despatches the elite Imperial Guard, but they are defeated. The Prussians storm Plancenoit and the French armies disintegrate. The battle is won by the allied forces.

24 June 1815

Napoleon announces his second abdication.

8 July 1815

LouisXVIIIreturns to Paris to reclaim the French throne.

28 July 1815

Sir Walter Scott sets out for Waterloo.

15 July 1815

Napoleon finally surrenders to Captain Frederick Maitland of theHMSBellerophon.

9 August 1815

Sir Walter Scott arrives at Waterloo.

15 October 1815

Napoleon disembarks on the island of St. Helena, where he is henceforth to stay in exile.

23 October 1815

Sir Walter Scott’s ‘The Field of Waterloo’ is printed by James Ballantyne.

20 November 1815

TheTreaty of Parisis signed.

3 May 1816

Lord Byron arrives at Waterloo.

16 September 1816

Lord Byron’sChilde Harold’s Pilgrimage, CantoIIIis printed by John Murray.

1816

Charles Bell’sSurgical Observationsis published.

5 May 1821

Napoleon dies and is buried on the island of St Helena.

1822

Commissioned by the Duke of Wellington, David Wilkie paintsChelsea Pensioners Reading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo.

1881

Elizabeth Lady Butler paintsScotland Forever!

December 1894

The first of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard stories, ‘How the Brigadier Won His Medal’ is published in theStrandmagazine.

Preface

To work out the importance of Waterloo for Scotland confronts the historian with the 19th-century hostility to Scottish identity surviving the Union for any purposes other than tourist enhance­ment, military recruitment, picturesque costume, drawing-room singing, Presbyterian piety and Queen Victoria’s affection for her manservant John Brown (1826–83).

Where Scottish history was permitted to exist, it was firmly closed with the Union of 1707. Peter Hume Brown (1849–1918) was appointed the first Professor of Scottish History at Edinburgh University in 1901 and had already begun hisHistory of Scotland(published between 1899 and 1909). His candidacy for the Chair of History at that university had been set aside for less qualified but more English applicants in 1894 and 1899 but a legacy had forced the Sir William Fraser Chair of Scottish History into existence. He at least saw that Scotland had continued to exist historically, and weighed in on Waterloo with the evidence from perhaps the wittiest Scottish memorialist of the time (History of Scotland,III. 400):

According to Lord Cockburn, the year 1815 – the year of Waterloo and the fall of Napoleon – divided in twain the lives of his generation. Previous to that year the double dread of revolution and invasion had been fatal to all reform; when that dread was removed, the nation could breathe more freely and with new-born confidence turn its thoughts to political and social amelioration.

He added a thoughtful footnote:

A story is told of James Mylne, Professor of Philosophy at Glasgow and an ardent Reformer, which illustrates the tension of public feeling. On Sunday 26 March 1815, news came of Bonaparte’s escape from Elba. Preaching that day, in the University Chapel, Mylne gave out the paraphrase, beginning, ‘Rejoice! He comes, your leader comes!’ This was interpreted as a welcome to Bonaparte, and Mylne was prosecuted by the Lord Advocate.

Hume Brown nevertheless noted little immediate change in poverty of the lower class and repression from the upper. Henry Cockburn (1779–1854), a Whig remembering the growth of Whig sentiment in the 15 years before the Whig return to power of 1830, had been more optimistic (Memorials of His Times(1909 [1856], 269–9):

In 1814 the Allies made their first conquest of Paris, and for a year Europe was without Napoleon. Hostilities were unexpected renewed in 1815, and then ceased, after the short and brilliant flash at Waterloo; but in 1814 a war which had lasted so long that war seemed our natural state was felt to be over…

Meanwhile a generation was coming action so young that its mind had been awakened by the excitement of the French revolution, and not so old as to have been put under a chronic panic by its atrocities… The force of this new power was as yet unknown, even to those among whom it was lodges, particularly in Scotland. Nowhere in this part of the [United] kingdom, expect at Edinburgh, was there any distinct scheme, or rational hope, of emancipation. But the mind of the lower, and far more of the middle, classes had undergone, and was still undergoing a great, though as yet a silent change, which the few who had been long cherishing enlightened opinions lost few opportunities of promoting and directing.

Was this to argue that the Enlightenment (nowadays too easily taken to have ended with the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars) was in a serious educational sense begun after them? Or that in Scotland it had survived them? That last would certainly be true in Medicine.

A more direct sense of Scotland as product of Waterloo was still being offered in 1902 from the Reverend James Mackenzie’sThe History of Scotland, originally published in 1867 in the high tide of imperial rejoicing after the eradication of Indian Mutiny. It duly ended at the Union but with a bright afterglow for Scotland (pp. 657–59):

From the period of the Union, Scotland, amalgamated with England into one empire, ceases to have a separate history…

And where is the region of the earth in which Scottish blood has not flowed to maintain the rights and honour of Britain? The snows of Canada and the sands of Egypt, the fields of Spain and of India, have drunk it in. The ringing cheer of ‘Scotland for ever!’ as the Greys galloped down the slope of Waterloo, told that the despot’s hour had come. And who will ever forget the ‘thin red streak’ at Balaclava, or the battle march of Havelock’s men to the relief of Lucknow?

The sense of the Union as proto-Dracula for a sacrificial Scotland might be less evident to less elevated souls than his sanguinary Reverence, but his symbolics are instructive. Balaclava was a British disaster, the Indian Mutiny (however answered by ‘The Campbells are Coming’) an indictment of British misgovernment of theUK’s own troops, but undoubted proof that to proclaim defeat as victory is the recipe for success. (To do the British justice, they saved the world by that response to Dunkirk).

The leading professional historian of our own day, Professor Sir Thomas Devine, uses such sentiments to tempt readers of hisScotland’s Empire(2003) but as meat for the student rather than for the patriot (pp. 356–8):

This enduring association between militarism, Scottishness and Britishness came relatively late in the 18th century. Highland levies, all exempt from the post-’45 ban on Highland dress, had fought with distinction during the Seven Years War and the American War of Independence. But they only became icons of national valour during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars…

It was their role in three famous victories between 1799 and 1815 which transformed the Black Watch and the other Highland regiments into national celebrities… the Cameron Highlanders, the Gordon Highlanders and the Black Watch all distinguished themselves at Waterloo. The Times praised their bravery and elan while the three regiments also received the battle honour ‘Waterloo’ on their colours.

And the late Professor Rosalind Mitchison (1919–2002) showed how religion reflected Waterloo in ways a Churchman of Scotland like Mackenzie might have noted:

The new post-Napoleonic state was very different from miscellaneous collections of privileges and exemptions which had constituted the political structures of the 18th century… The relations of all established churches to the newly effective government power had to be defined and redefined as the governments increasingly accepted the principles of popular representation. Churches and states were both claiming increased authority on territory they had hitherto shared. (A History of Scotland(2002 [1970] 384.)

It might seem a long way from Waterloo to the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843, but Rosalind Mitchison’s argument implicitly carried with it the reminder that Napoleon (1769–1821) and his Papal Concordat took direction of a new agenda for religion and its uses for the state. Rulers had been trying to conscript religion to their advantage since before recorded history, but here as elsewhere Napoleon modernised rationally if tactlessly, and when Waterloo removed him definitely and finally his victors had to make the most of the world he had remade.

Alex Salmond, in his memoir of the Scottish Referendum of 2014The Dream Will Never Die(2015), opined that Prime Minister David Cameron ‘believed the centenary of the Great War in 2014 would be of… significance in reminding Scotland of the glory of the union’. Mr Salmond is probably right. The subsequent completion of Mr Cameron’s first administration and his consequent re-election would seem to have vindicated my thesis that Mr Cameron is far more intelligent than he sounds, but the notion that patriotism (vote-gathering or otherwise) climaxes in rejoicing at violence is certainly an old Tory superstition. Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) as a parvenue was desperately anxious to prove her high Tory credentials, and consequently told media reporters to ‘Rejoice’ at some success in the Falklands or Malvinas War. It exhibited an odd interpretation of the purpose and nature of pressmen, but it certainly was a traditional Tory strain. The Victorian Music-Halls, appropriate antecedents of Thatcher chauvinism, expressed it in 1877–78 at the prospect of war with Russia:

We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do,

We’ve got the guns, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too…

although even that baptism of Jingoism began by denying a desire to fight. And ‘Jingo’ never really became indigenous to Scotland albeit we were informed byThe Chambers Dictionary(before it became a mere Hachette job) that its less ideological derivative ‘Jings’ did (particularly in the world ofOor Wullie). The equation of patriotism and bellicose intent is common to many other cultures. Violent Irish nationalism (whether Orange or Green) is in many ways the child of British chauvinism, and refuelled itself with many songs on alleged Irish provenance of masculinity by sanguinary aspirations (from ‘The Sash My Father Wore’ to the Irish national anthem). Irish constitutional nationalism bootlegged folksong expressions of this, but in sobriety it was constructive, furthering the massive extension and organisation of democracy in these islands during the Irish Union with Britain, particularly under the leaderships of Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847) and Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91).

Mr Salmond went on to assert that Mr Cameron’s conviction that war nostalgia would determine the outcome of the Referendum debate, ‘betrayed a huge misunderstanding of the Scottish psyche. As a martial nation Scots tend to revere soldiers but oppose conflict’. I only read this after writing the present book, and I certainly was not trying to prove it. But having completed my researches and written the results, it looks very much to me as though Mr Salmond was right about Waterloo. I started out, at the request of that midwife extraordinaire, Mr Gavin MacDougall of Luath, to find out what Scots thought about Waterloo, and what I kept on finding was a sense of horror. This sense of horror was there whether the writers had witnessed the battle in 1815 or simply visited the terrain within the next few months, and this sense of horror was there no matter how great Scots’ admiration for the courage that the Scottish soldier displayed.

It was obvious enough that few Scots were likely to share English consciousness of war against the French as a national heritage. It doesn’t mean they were likely to make that much of the Scottish historical identification of national war as usually entailing a French alliance. Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), propa­gandising to the Irish in 1914, said they would be ‘fighting for France again’, knowing as he did that 18th-century Irish military glory had been chiefly limited to service in continental armies during prohibition of Irish Catholic recruitment in British service. (Kipling loved the Irish, making several of his heroes Irish, notably Kim.) The Scots were officially expected under the Union to have performed the change of military sides in 1748–56, when Britain switched from Austrophile to Prussophile, so that Jacobite Scots would ease from Francophile to Anglophile. Enough of them performed this nominal transfer of loyalties for it to be taken as successful. But Waterloo ceremonially set the capstone on Britain and Ireland (the new United Kingdom born on 1 January 1801). Sir Walter Scott (1775–1832) in some ways a historio­graphical security risk for earlier times, affirms in these pages Waterloo as the expression ofUKmilitary identity. The invaluable multi-authoredMilitary History of Scotlandedited by Jeremy Crang, Edward Spiers and others (2014) shows us a much more complicated past than that but would have to concur in its ambiguity as well as its complexity. ‘Scotland Forever!’ was a Waterloo war-cry, but it implies a living people.

The memory of Waterloo is no more likely to promote feelings of insular (or archipelagan) solidarity than is that of the Great War. It deserves recognition as a British moment, within which Scottish self-expression was ready to proclaim itself. There is a strong British tradition which asserts hostility to Waterloo perhaps most memorably in the verse of Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) and G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936). Belloc’s ‘Ballade of Unsuccessful Men’ saw the Devil as hostile to ‘The cause of all the world at Waterloo’, meaning the cause of Napoleon, partly from Belloc’s wish to think himself French. Chesterton’s ‘The Secret People’ (recently if ludicrously quoted in the 2015 General Election by Scotophobe Tory propagandists) made more English sense although ending in the same rejection of Waterloo as a victory for Britain:

In foam and flame at Trafalgar, on Albuera plains,

We did and died like lions, to keep ourselves in chains

We lay in living ruins; firing and fearing not

The strange fierce face of the Frenchmen who knew for what they fought,

And the man who seemed to be more than man we strained against and broke;

And we broke our own rights with him. And still we never spoke.

Chesterton was Scottish enough to withdraw from a Glasgow University Rectorial election in favour of the Scottish Nationalist candidate, and to love Walter Scott, but there was nothing particularly Scottish in this rejection of Waterloo.

Chesterton in fact summed up English resistance to Napoleon in his novelThe Flying Inn(1914) where outlaws in a motor car invent songs to explain ‘the rolling English road’ the paradox of whose virtue is declaimed by a Wildean aesthete named Dorian Wimpole;

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,

And for to fight the Frenchman I did not desire;

But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed

To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made…

But the modernisation he saw as inevitable should Napoleon have realised his lifelong ambition to conquer England had already been imposed on Scotland, by enlightened Scots and by Anglicised clan chieftains. The poem won its Britishness when the English drunkard in the ditch under a wild rose inspired Hugh MacDiarmid aka Christopher Murray Grieve (1892–1978) to proclaim modern Scottish nationalism inA Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle(1925)

If this book had been somewhat bigger it would have contained Scots’ retrospective visions of Waterloo. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59) was Leicester-born and London-reared, but as the son of a Gaelic-speaking Highlander/Islander he sometimes identified with the historic bards, and about 1824 he produced a hilarious parody of the plot of Virgil’sAeneidin ‘The Wellingtoniad’, imagining a version of Waterloo by a poet of the remote future with Gods and heroes of the classical kind whether genuinely Homeric or artificially Virgilian. It was lively and even bawdy enough, with Virgilian-style Funeral Games winning a prize of 12 opera girls for the Duke of Wellington (which in real life he might have been ready enough to welcome). This did not reject Waterloo, but it was ready mildly to mock the Tory hero increasingly identified with the reactionary government. Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1936) was the great short story-teller of Napoleonic history, his Gerard stories unrivalled as a historical fiction series, of which a linked pair show how the comic heroic French soldier bore himself at Waterloo, while his short story ‘A Straggler of ’15’ (1891) about the last days of an old English soldier remembering Waterloo decades later became a great stage success starring Henry Irving (1838–1905) and renamed ‘Waterloo’ (1894–95). Conan Doyle’s achievement in visualising the Napoleonic wars from a devoutly Napoleonist viewpoint is particularly rema­r­kable. He himself was a devout Unionist (though one converted to Irish Home Rule) and his Irish parentage and Scots birth and upbringing seem to have given him the detachment necessary to make a successful narrator and protagonist of Gerard. As it is, the present book largely restricts literature to perhaps the most interesting literary witnesses of the battle. And since Scottish medicine in 1815 was probably the best in the world, we have medical authorities as well as soldiers among our authors. Their work is officially non-fiction although any memoir of a battle will contain some fiction whether the authors realise it or not. Our soldiers include two sergeants, who have enough command to see more of the battle than their immediate surroundings, but not enough to lose touch with humanity. We have also one soldier whose existence, let alone his narrative, has been questioned, but if Howell is more fictional than the rest, whoever perpetrated him understood and probably witnessed Waterloo.

Our intention then was to discover what the Scots made of Waterloo, but to do so through writers whether participants in the battle or not. Neither Gavin MacDougall nor any of his admirable staff nor I had any initial thesis to prove or disprove. We were neither caught up in fundamentally racist assumptions about a Scottish propensity for killing fellow-humans nor a denial of readiness to fight on the part of those who fought or who celebrated it. We were particularly anxious to get Walter Scott’s findings and expression of them into our narrative, and thus knowing that his chief prose workPaul’s Letters to his Kinfolkwas to be reprinted we turned to his letters to his wife and other correspondents, as well as taking a fresh look at his ‘The Field of Waterloo’. Byron his friend naturally followed, and while I knew they really liked one another, I had not realised how similar in some ways their responses could, regardless of political differences between two men so passionate in political expression so affectionate in indifference to their differences. We have concentrated on a few witnesses considered in detail but have taken soundings from many other contemporaries. We found that Waterloo forced attention to Scots’ political and constitutional attitudes and that here much more than elsewhere was a British consciousness. Just as we could say of the Battle of Britain, the Union was intensely alive there, in a different form the same seems possible to perceive of Waterloo.

But while we may be refreshed by the thought of Scots finding new directions whence to look at themselves and their neighbours in the archipelago and Union, we must remember what discussions of such great battles so often miss, the unfortunate locality where they happen.1066 And All Thatopens up new ways of wisdom whenever we look at its hilarious pages, certainly including its remark that the first World War was between America and Germany and was thus fought in Belgium. Belgium seems forever caught between the pass and fell incensed points of mighty opposites, but if the Scots might have understood better what it meant to be Scots while thinking of Waterloo, what did it mean to the people amongst whom, and to whom, so much of it happened? How many discussions of Waterloo even think of the fact that 15 years later Belgium would come into political existence following a successful revolt against the new Kingdom of the Netherlands to whom the victors in the Napoleonic wars had consigned the southern Netherlands? And for all of the Waterloo conquerors’ anxiety to obliterate the French Revolution the Belgians would achieve their independence partly through the Roman Catholic clerics who had been so hostile to the French revolutionaries. If Scotland thought back on its days of independence, Belgium had 2,000 years of conscious identity as the victim of some great powers, the football of others. In our book we keep on running into references to Belgium and the Belgians which first seemed anachronistic and became clearly unavoidable. After all, Caesar’sGallic Warsin their second campaign (or Book) had featured the Belgae in a big way, and his incursion to Britain partly arose from British-Belgian links (it is a pleasant thought that Brussels (or its ancient and medieval equivalents) is one of the oldest points of diplomatic and demo­graphic reference in British history).

You are in many different hands in this book, and it seems sensible to stress Scott’s incredible value as a historical witness whether through observation, imagination or wisdom. I don’t add a regret that nobody reads him now, so often repeated, and so untrue. Writers on Scott however valuable have been saying this for the last century, regardless of the fact that so many of his works have been on sale during that time, and that publishers are neither sentimentalists nor philanthropists.

It only remains for me to thank my admirable publishers, particularly Gavin MacDougall and Chris Kydd, and to thank even more deeply and passionately the National Library of Scotland all of whose staff are invariably so wonderful to me and encouraging in my literary enterprises. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues and students, in English and Scottish Literature, Scottish Studies and Politics, and in history of every shape and kind, at the University of Edinburgh. As in so many historical enterprises, I am deeply grateful to Pat Storey for her unstinting aid and infectious enthusiasm. I must also thank Edinburgh University Library, Edinburgh Central Library and the National Library of Ireland. And I cannot thank my family enough, above all my wife Bonnie, without whom my life would have been an endless series of Waterloos.

Introduction

The Reverend George Robert Gleig (1796–1888) was a Scot with a military record, followed by ordination as a Scottish Episcopalian minister (his father George (1753–1840) was Bishop of Brechin). The younger George Gleig served in the Napoleonic wars, was wounded, and became a priest in 1820, ultimately combining both of his professions by appointment as chaplain-general of the forces (1844–75). He wrote extensively for Scottish or Scottish-influenced magazines – theEdinburgh Review,Blackwood’s, theQuarterly Review,Fraser’s– and also produced many books. His biographies were stalwart crusades defending their subjects, some­times questionably. Thomas Babington Macaulay reviewing his volumes on the administrator of India Warren Hastings (1732–1818) wrote ‘It is not too much to say that Mr Gleig has written several passages, which bear the same relation to the “Prince” of Machiavelli that the “Prince” of Machiavelli bears to “The Whole Duty of Man”, and which would excite amazement in a den of robbers, or on board of a schooner of pirates’, a verdict which evidently inspired W. S. Gilbert (1836– 1911) to make the pirate king inThe Pirates of Penzance(1879) assert his moral superiority to legally appointed rulers. Gleig was not inclined to ask awkward questions of his heroes.

Inevitably Arthur Wellesley (1769–1852), Duke of Wellington, was one of them. Gleig had served under Wellesley’s command in the Peninsular Wars but having been sent for service in the War of 1812 against the United States of America, Gleig missed Waterloo and never quite got over it. His bookThe Story of Waterlooappeared in 1847, his biography of Wellington in 1862, and when (at the same age as the present writer) he produced hisHistory of the Reign of George III to the Battle of Waterloo, with Outlines of Literature during the Period(1873), clearly intended for the use of schools, he intended to do Waterloo proud. Having shown Napoleon abdicating and being given the toy kinship of the island of Elba, he first noted the premature rejoicings in 1814 for the advent of an apparently lasting peace, and then ushered in Waterloo. We are concerned with the way some Scots thought about Waterloo whether they had participated in it or not, and we will let the regretful absentee be the first one to talk to us about it (pp. 120–23):

… England was the scene of festivity and rejoicings, such as had never before been witnessed. The allied sovereigns, the Emperors of Austria and Russia, and the King of Prussia, with the most distinguished of their nobles and officers, visited London, and the whole mass of the population appeared giddy with delight. In both Houses of Parliament, likewise, the Duke of Wellington (for he had been raised, by a grateful prince [the future George IV (1762–1830 Regent 1811–20 rgd 1820–30)] to the highest dignity of the peerage) was hailed, both by the Lords and Commons, with enthusiasm; while the people out of doors appeared almost willing to cast themselves under his chariot-wheels.

In the midst of all this triumph, however, the allied sovereigns did not suffer themselves to remain unmindful of the state of Europe, which the conquests of the French Revolution and Empire had utterly deranged. The Pope was restored to his temporal sovereignty; Italy and Germany were brought back, with a few trifling exceptions, to what they had been previous to the Revolution; Ferdinand, the son of Charles, resumed the throne of Spain; and Holland and Belgium, being united into one kingdom, were assigned to the house of [Orange] Nassau, the head of which became, thenceforth, King of the Netherlands [Belgium breaking away in 1830].

Arrangements were likewise made for the promotion of a good understanding, and the encouragement of commerce and the arts of peace, in all lands. But of the effects of all this legislation no time was afforded to make trial, when an event befell, which, however it ought to have been foreseen and provided against, affected the whole civilised world with astonishment.

From his lonely habitation on the isle of Elba, Napoleon Buonaparte still kept up a communication with the world; and discovering, or being willing to believe, that the [restored kings of France the] Bourbons were unpopular, he resolved to become again an actor on the stage of politics. He suddenly quitted his retreat; and throwing himself into the heart of France, was joined, wherever he appeared, by the troops, who carried him back in triumph to the capital. The colonel who commanded the 7th regiment of the line, and whom his master especially trusted, was the first to assume the tri-coloured cockade, and to distribute it to his followers. In like manner Marshal Ney, after pledging himself to bring back the invader in chains, not only joined his standard, but brought over his whole army. Thus was Louis [XVIII] deserted, one after another, by all in whom he had reposed confidence, and driven once more to seek personal safety in flight from a kingdom which he had entered only a year ago amid the shouts and blessings of the populace.

When intelligence of Buonaparte’s escape from Elba first reached Vienna, where the ministers of the allied sovereigns were met in congress to discuss the affairs of Europe, it excited shouts of laughter. In proportion as reports came in, however, descriptive of the absolute success of the enterprise, kings and ministers changed their tone. Europe again flew to arms; and a proclamation being puiblished, in which Buonaparte was declared to have placed himself out of the protection of law, Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Great Britain hastened to bring their armies into the field. The Duke of Wellington assembled his force, which consisted of 30,000 British, 8,000 of the German legion, and a large number of Hanoverians, Belgians, and others, on whom little reliance could be placed, so as to cover the great road that leads from Avesnes to Brussels. The Marshal Prince [Gerhard Leberecht von] Blucher [(1742–1819)], who commanded the Prussians, established himself in front of Namur; and the communication was kept up between the left of the one and the right of the other, by patrols. Such was their condition in the end of May, 1815; while the troops of the Northern Powers were rapidly organising themselves, and threatening the other frontier of France, to the amount of nearly 300,000 men. But Napoleon, who soon discovered that his peaceful overtures were not likely to be attended to, resolved to strike at the corps which held the Netherlands ere the allies could come up. With this view, he put himself at the head of one of the finest armies that ever followed leader; and announcing, with his usual brevity, ‘I go to measure myself with Wellington’, advanced by hasty strides upon Brussels.

The French army, though superior in point of numbers to either the Prussians or the English, taken separately, could not hope to act against them united, with success. Buonaparte, therefore, made his dispositions to overwhelm them in detail; and pouring his masses first upon Blucher, dislodged him on June 16, after a fierce encounter, from the position which he had taken up at Ligny. While that terrible struggle was going on, [Michel] Ney [(1769–1815)], at the head of 43,000 men, engaged the advance of the British at Quatre Bras, but could not, though far surpassing it in numbers, make any impression. On the following day, however, Wellington, made aware of the overthrow of Blucher, fell back to the position of Waterloo, the soldiers marching under a heavy rain, and continually exposed, in the rear, to attacks from the French cavalry. That night, officers and men bivouacked behind the ridge on which they were to contend for life or death on the morrow, while Napoleon, leaving General Emmanuel Grouchy [(1766–1847)] with a corps of 30,000 men to watch the Prussians, hastened with the remainder of his force to occupy another ridge, about long cannon-shot distance. Both sides looked anxiously for the dawn, which came in, as the darkness had closed around them, with heavy showers and frequent gusts of wind. Still no movement was made by the enemy: indeed it was eleven o’clock before their rear was well closed up, and the arrangements of their leader were complete. But, in about half an hour afterwards, just as the last of the storm wore itself out, a fierce cannonade opened from the French guns, and columns of horse and foot pressed gallantly up the slope.

A country house which stood on the right flank of the British line, and a farm house on the left centre, were repeatedly attacked, and the latter carried, after a murderous resistance. On swept the cuirassiers like an iron cataract, through the interval thus opened; and firm stood the squares of British infantry to receive them. Nor were the English cavalry, particularly the heavy brigade, idle. They charged the choicest of the French horse, overthrew them with great slaughter, drove their horses against the flanks of columns of infantry, and sabred large numbers, till the whole of the field was covered with the bodies of the dead and dying, whom in the confusion of the strife their very comrades trampled under foot.

In this manner the battle raged from noon tilll six o’clock in the evening, every attempt on the part of the French to penetrate the English line being defeated; while the English, gradually moving on as each successive wave was rolled back, found themselves thrown into a new order, with their flanks considerably advanced. It was then that Buonaparte, whom a few straggling shots on his flank warned of the approach through the wood of the indefatigable Blucher, resolved to make his last effort. All that could be collected, both of horse and foot, were formed into one dense column, and launched, amid loud cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ against the British centre. The head of that column crossed the ridge, but never came within push of bayonet with the English, who stood in ranks four deep to receive them, for there fell such a storm of fire on its front, and both its flanks, and the heavy brigade charged so home upon the men as they staggered, that an attempt to deploy brought with it irretrievable confusion, and all order, all discipline, was lost. Then there was seen a spectacle such as a British army can alone display, when Wellington, waving his hat, gave the word for the line to advance. Down went man and horse on the side of the French, while a wild cry arising, ‘Let them save themselves who can’, the rout became universal.

Wearied with their exertions throughout the day, the English left to the Prussians, who had now come up, the care of following the fugitives; and well and willingly was that duty discharged. Little quarter was given by men whose bosoms burned with the recollections of a thousand wrongs which those nearest and dearest to them had suffered; so that all the roads, for many miles beyond the field, were covered with slaughtered men. Meanwhile Buonaparte himself galloped back to Paris, where the utmost dimay prevailed. He spoke of raising fresh levies, but was answered with questions as to the state of the army which he had led to slaughter, till finding that his hour had come, he again abdicated, and thought only of providing for his own personal safety. He fled to the coast, and having rthere surrendered to Captain Maitland [(1777–1839)], who commanded the ‘Bellerophon’, an English ship of war, he was by him conveyed, as a sort of state prisoner, to Plymouth. He was not permitted to plant a foot on the English shore; but being transported to St Helena, a rocky island in the middle of the southern Atlantic, he there, though surrounded with all the comforts which were consistent with a due regard to his safe keeping, dragged out some years of misery. Disappointed ambition – it may be remorse for the crimes of other days – soured his temper, and preyed upon his vitals; and he died at last on 5 May 1821, of a disease to which his family was liable – a cancer of the stomach.

The battle of Waterloo put an end at once to the hostile disposition of the French people…

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Painting Waterloo