Waterloo 1815: The British Army's Day of Destiny

The British Army's Day of Destiny

Gregory Fremont-Barnes

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781803990101, 9780752462110
• eBook ISBN: 9780750957854
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Writing to his mother the day after the fighting, Captain Thomas Wildman of the 7th Hussars described 'a victory so splendid & important that you may search the annals of history in vain for its parallel'. Little wonder, for Waterloo was widely recognised – even in its immediate wake – as one of the most decisive battles in history: after more than twenty years of uninterrupted conflict, this single day's encounter finally put paid to French aspirations for European hegemony.

The culminating point of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Waterloo also witnessed levels of determination and bravery by both sides which far exceeded anything experienced by the veterans of Wellington's recent campaigns in Spain and Portugal. Indeed, it was that unconquerable spirit which left over 50, 000 men dead on the field of battle and tens of thousands of others wounded.

This thoroughly researched and highly detailed account of one of history's greatest human dramas looks first at the wider strategic picture before focusing on the tactical roles played by individual British units – all meticulously examined with the benefit of an extensive array of hitherto unexploited primary sources which reveal the battlefield experience of officers and soldiers as never before.

Refusing simply to repeat the same unchallenged accounts and to commit the same errors of previous historians, this work relies exclusively on hundreds of first-hand accounts, by men of all ranks and from practically every British regiment and corps present on that fateful day, to provide a fresh and revised perspective on one of the most pivotal events of modern times.

PART 1

1

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

In seeking to understand the Allies’ motives in wishing to defeat Napoleon one must examine, if only briefly, the wars spawned in 1792 by the French Revolution which, apart from a brief period of peace between March 1802 and May 1803, finally came to an end in the spring of 1814. The first phase of this fighting, known as the French Revolutionary Wars, arose principally out of two requirements of the new republic, one ideological and the other strategic. In the case of the former, the French sought to spread the principles of the Revolution abroad, specifically by appealing to the populations of the Low Countries, Switzerland, the Rhineland and northern Italy to throw off, as the revolutionaries characterised it, the yoke of monarchical tyranny, which represented the corrupt system of privilege the French themselves had cast off in the first years of social and political turmoil following the fall of the Bastille in 1789. Having seized that great fortress and prison – the very symbol of monarchical oppression – the revolutionaries established a national assembly. The powers of the king were curbed. Later, a republic was declared and a series of constitutions adopted. Finally, Louis was executed in January 1793 – as much to hail the triumphs of the Revolution as to offend the crowned heads of Europe, many of whom, by that time, had already seen the Revolution for what it was – a threat to their ideological well-being and the principle of legitimacy. Appreciating, too, that so much power as that gathered in the hands of men constituted a grave danger to European security – quite apart from the obvious threat to monarchical rule – Austria, Prussia, Holland, Spain and numerous smaller states went to war with France as early as April 1792.

The combined strength of this, the First Coalition, ought to have crushed the Revolution in short order; but through bungled strategy, competing war aims, indecisiveness and military incompetence in the face of the new, energetic and above all massive conscripted armies of the French republic, the Allied powers repeatedly failed to bring the revolutionaries to heel, forming in fact two impressive coalitions in the decade between 1792 and 1802 without accomplishing more than enabling France to expand her borders to an extent never even dreamed of by Louis XIV: the whole of the Low Countries, the west bank of the Rhine, the Alps (thus including parts of north-west Italy) and the Pyrenees – the so-called natural frontiers. In fact, there was nothing ‘natural’ about them at all, apart from the southern frontier with Spain, which had remained more or less unchanged for centuries. The French, not content merely to defend their own soil against, admittedly, those bent on the destruction of what amounted to wholesale improvements in the political, social and economic lives of millions of French citizens, took possession by force of arms these vast swathes of new territory, justifying these extraordinary conquests on the cynical basis that annexation, occupation or the imposition of some form of dependent status on the conquered inevitably benefited them all. Who, the argument ran, could fail to appreciate the advantages bestowed by the Revolution? Accordingly, where neighbouring lands escaped outright annexation, they found themselves controlled either directly or indirectly from Paris – not quite akin to the eastern European experience of Soviet control in the wake of the Second World War – but something of a precursor of that phenomenon. Those states with the temerity to oppose the ‘liberators’ paid a heavy price: military intervention, forced requisitioning, the imposition of indemnities and, in many cases, outright annexation.

Disagreements within the Allied camp strongly contributed to the collapse of the First Coalition, a process begun as early as 1795 when Spain and Prussia, demoralised by failure to make progress against the growing strength of the republic, unilaterally abandoned their allies, which now included Britain since February 1793. After Austria suffered a series of humiliating defeats in her former Belgian possessions, along the Rhine and, above all, across northern Italy between 1796 and 1797, she concluded the Treaty of Campo Formio, which sounded the death knell for the First Coalition. A resurgent Austria, still supported by Britain and joined by Russia, Turkey and others, formed the Second Coalition in 1798, with some initial success. Most of northern Italy was retaken from the French, Russian forces managed to penetrate as far west as Switzerland and even co-operated with the British in Holland in 1799, but they withdrew from the fighting, leaving Britain practically on her own in 1801 once Austria concluded a separate peace with France at Lunéville. Thus, with an impasse created by French dominance on land and British supremacy at sea, the two sides agreed to peace at Amiens in the spring of 1802. No one could deny that, in standing utterly triumphant on the Continent – with the consequent radical shift in the balance of power – France reaped the lion’s share of the benefits.

French claims that she required buffer states to protect her from her ideological rivals rang hollow during the interlude of peace created at Amiens. If Britain could grudgingly accept by 1803 that the principles of the Revolution – admirable though most of them were – had been thrust upon France’s neighbours at the point of the bayonet and remained an incontestable fact of life in western Europe, it could not long tolerate the strategic imbalance which French occupation represented or the control of the belt of satellite states created to enhance and extend French power beyond historically accepted bounds. The renewal of war was inevitable even before the ink had dried at Amiens. Accordingly, hostilities resumed in May 1803, first in the form of a strictly Anglo-French conflict, but by the summer of 1805 to expand into a full-fledged coalition – the Third. By this time the Allies had ceased to insist upon the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and concentrated simply on deposing Napoleon and restraining the overarching power of an expansive, now imperial, France. France no longer represented an ideological threat – the fact that Napoleon had reined in constitutionalism and established himself as virtual dictator confirmed the fact. Yet again, the Allies’ endeavour to re-establish a degree of strategic equilibrium on the Continent failed – and in shorter order than ever before – thanks to the capitulation of an entire Austrian army at Ulm in October 1805, followed swiftly by Napoleon’s decisive victory at Austerlitz, near Vienna, in December, which led to the coalition’s collapse. Napoleon, flushed with victory, renewed his nation’s bid for further territorial gain, a process rendered all the more permanent when he placed various members of his family on the thrones of some of his dependencies.

By establishing the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806, Napoleon could levy financial contributions as well as troops from a host of German states – some large like Bavaria and Saxony, some small like Hesse-Darmstadt and Mecklenburg. In his efforts to extend French influence well beyond central Europe, Napoleon also created a Polish satellite state known as the Duchy of Warsaw and redrew the map of Italy to consolidate his control, such that when, upon crushing the resurgent Russians at Friedland in June 1807, the Emperor concluded accords with Russia and Prussia at Tilsit, he controlled virtually the whole of the Continent from the Atlantic in the west to Denmark and the Prussian coast in the north, to Naples and the Adriatic coast in the south and to the Russian frontier in the east. In three short years the Napoleonic armies had cowed the three great continental powers of Austria, Russia and Prussia – a military feat not repeated again until Germany’s stunning successes in the early years of the Second World War. A resurgent Austria struck again in 1809, only to be cowed and further weakened by a punitive peace settlement. Britain, though supreme at sea, particularly after Trafalgar in October 1805, could only operate on land in a limited fashion, initially by seizing French colonies in the West Indies and mounting largely ineffectual expeditionary forces to the Continent. From 1805, however, she could and did fund her allies generously with subsidies; but in the wake of such catastrophes as Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland, financial aid proved woefully insufficient in reversing the hegemony imposed by France in the remarkable string of victories which marked out the Napoleonic heydays of 1805–07. Britain’s greatest contribution came in Iberia, in a struggle known as the Peninsular War – not the sideshow which some historians have dubbed it – where between 1808 and 1814 British, in conjunction chiefly with Portuguese but also Spanish, forces engaged the French, eventually driving them back over the Pyrenees.

With Napoleon’s ‘Spanish ulcer’, followed by his disastrous campaign in Russia in 1812, the Empire began to unravel. Three more coalitions followed, with the sixth (1813–14) finally successful in April 1814 in subduing France, forcing Napoleon’s abdication and exile to the tiny Mediterranean island of Elba and restoring the Bourbon dynasty in the person of Louis XVIII, with whom came a new charter designed not as a reactionary doctrine to return an exhausted France to the status quo antebellum – which even the monarchists understood to be both unrealistic and unworkable – but to provide for a parliamentary government which, at least in principle and appearance, would rival any found elsewhere in Europe. The king’s rule was to be established on a limited basis, including consultation with ministers and assistance provided by a bicameral legislature composed of a House of Peers nominated by Louis, as well as an assembly selected by electors eligible by virtue of their annual tax contribution.

Very sensibly, the king agreed that the very sizeable tracts of land once the property of the Crown and Church, which the Revolutionaries had sold off in the course of the 1790s, must remain in the hands of their new owners, many of whom could trace their new acquisitions back more than two decades. The new constitution guaranteed civil liberties, while many of the institutions and much of the bureaucracy of the Imperial years the royalist government retained with little amendment. The Restoration amounted, in effect, to a compromise, with the upper middle class accepting, albeit with some disgruntled protest, a new order that limited the power of the franchise while according to them, via a conservative legislature, the responsibility for enacting laws and levying taxes. If the broad public no longer enjoyed the influence upon politics which had constituted their new right from the earliest days of the Revolution, that memory now appeared a distant one in any event, for Napoleon’s seizure of power as First Consul in 1799 had largely put paid to the notion that the Revolution must remain in a state of perpetual change.

Yet in less than a year this system began to break down, so creating the widespread atmosphere of discontent by which Napoleon could profit by plotting his return to power. The government of Louis XVIII revealed itself much less sympathetic to liberal constitutionalism than the rhetoric of its first days in power implied, in so doing alienating not merely individuals on a broad scale, but whole sectors of society wielding varying degrees of power and whose voices and sentiments the new regime could only ignore at its peril. In practice, the Bourbons accepted no genuine admission of responsibility for rule based on cabinet government. Ministers advised and reported to the king on an individual basis and could – and regularly did – ignore the legislature, particularly the chambers. Many former courtiers, returned from exile or at the very least from obscurity within France, gathered in the Tuileries in a manner alarmingly reminiscent of the days prior to the fall of the Bastille.

In the army, much of the Napoleonic officer corps was retired on half-pay and replaced with sycophants and much of the breed of aristocrats whom the republicans had long ago, and with entire justification, removed from their posts on grounds ranging from simple incompetence to disloyalty to the new political realities of republicanism which had demanded their removal. To compound matters, an increasing number of elements lobbied for a restoration of their former privileged status, including émigré officers, priests and nobles. The ultra-royalists, in particular, sought a wholesale reversal of political affairs and made no attempt to conceal their contempt for a charter which they connived to replace with a restored, absolutist order. Personally, in his nonchalant attitude to the affairs of state and general neglect of business, Louis exhibited every sign of sympathy with the ultras, who therefore looked optimistically upon the prospect of achieving their objectives of reversing many features of political and social progress whose retention practically everyone else – that is, widely different spectra of French society – could agree upon.

Moreover, just as the royalists revelled in restoring the old order, so many former officers and civil servants, jettisoned from their positions upon the fall of the Empire in April 1814, longed for the return of Napoleonic rule. Many wished to re-establish the nation’s military prowess and thus extinguish the humiliation of defeat; others opposed the new regime on the ideological grounds that, notwithstanding the restrictions imposed on civil rights by the Napoleonic state, many of the gains achieved during the Revolution had remained down to the fall of the Empire; indeed, the introduction of the Napoleonic Code in 1802 had built upon these sweeping, often egalitarian reforms. This is not to claim that the nation as a whole enthusiastically longed for the Emperor’s return; the only truly reliable base of support was to be found amongst much, though by no means all, of the peasantry and former soldiers. No one longed for a return to the blood-letting that had left nearly a million French soldiers dead since 1792; but nor did they wish to return to pre-revolutionary conditions for whose destruction the nation had paid so high a price over the course of a generation.

Napoleon had never been resigned to managing the internal affairs of Elba – hardly surprising for a man who had controlled a vast empire and dreamed of pursuing his destiny once again. Determined to return to power, he sailed for France on the evening of 26 February, accompanied by a small flotilla and about 1,100 soldiers – all loyal followers who had remained with him on Elba. Three vessels, one French and the others British, failed to intercept Napoleon, who landed on 1 March near Antibes, in southern France, where the garrison offered no resistance. He then proceeded north, gathering adherents as he went, particularly at Laffrey, where whole units defected to his cause, leaving the Bourbon authorities in Paris paralysed by a situation in which the army revealed its true allegiances by refusing to stop the usurper’s progress towards the capital. At Lyon, thought to be a royalist stronghold, support for the king faltered and the city welcomed the prodigal emperor, thereby increasing his forces still further. Marshal Ney, one of the greatest commanders of the Imperial era but now in royal employ, initially pledged to capture the ‘Corsican ogre’ and return him to Paris in a cage; but, like thousands of others, he cast aside his allegiance to the king and gave further impetus to Napoleon’s momentum. Thus, entering the Tuileries Palace in triumph on 20 March, without so much as a shot being fired to oppose him, the Emperor re-established political and military authority over most of the country with minimal objection, apart from the Vendée and traditional royalist parts of the sou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Timeline
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Appendices
• Orders of Battle
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Picture Section