Revived interest in Waterloo has a lot to do with the calendar. The year 2015 marks the bicentennial of the battle that ended Napoleon Bonaparte’s quest to conquer Europe once and for all. Crane gave readers a taste of what to expect from his book at the annual Edinburgh Book Festival , which was held this year from Aug. 15-31.
On the eve of the battle, Crane says, England was “like Pompeii on the eve of Vesuvius,” poised between an age that wouldn’t go away (the Victorian) and one that refused to be born. (The Regency)
What prompted him to take a new look at the historic battle? “Megalomania,” Crane quipped. More seriously, he said that he wanted to debunk some of the myths that had grown up about the battle. “Waterloo was the great foundation myth of England,” he said, so he had a great deal of debunking to do.
One myth is that if the British and its allies in the Coalition of Seven hadn’t defeated Napoleon at Waterloo the 18th of June 1815, Napoleon would have maintained his grip on power. On the contrary, Crane says the coalition would have had at least three more opportunities to do so. A loss would have been a setback but not a catastrophe. Moreover, three armies – making for a total of a million men under arms – were converging on Paris. With the forces of Russia, Prussia, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands and several German states arrayed against France, the odds didn’t favor Napoleon.
Nonetheless, the outcome of Waterloo was by no means assured. The battle could have gone the other way,” Crane says. The Duke of Wellington (Arthur Wellesley), who commanded the British contingent, didn’t believe that forces under his command could defeat Napoleon’s on their own and instead preferred to wait for the arrival of the Prussian reinforcements. While only one out of every nine soldiers who fought at Waterloo was British, the British benefited more than any of its allies. The triumph at Waterloo not only had a significant impact on every strata of English society; it also ushered in a century of British domination.
Although people were shocked by the appalling casualties — almost 50,000 men on all sides were killed — they felt more united than ever before. Until Waterloo, Crane says, the army had been primarily viewed by the populace as an instrument of government power, wielded to suppress riots and demonstrations. Afterwards, “it became the people’s army.” The victory briefly erased the bitter divisions between the English, Irish and the Scottish. Wellington offered rare words of praise for the bravery displayed by the Irish on the battlefield and in an uncharacteristic show of generosity, awarded medals to the Irish and Scottish troops. (Wellington was born in Dublin but never identified himself as Irish, saying, “Because a man is born in a stable it does not make him a horse.”) Before Waterloo, Scottish officers were frequently booed by English audiences when they attended a theater – no longer. By the same token, when the redcoats paraded alongside Highlanders in a victory celebration in Edinburgh, the Scots cheered them as well, an unprecedented demonstration by a people who reviled British soldiers as occupiers.
Not everyone in England welcomed the victory, however. In Parliament members of the Whig party actually supported Napoleon and believed that the British had no business interfering in a conflict on the continent; after Waterloo, they fell silent. William Hazlett, the renowned writer and essayist, was so depressed when he learned the news of British victory in Belgium that he stayed drunk for the next ten days. “Although to be fair, he spent plenty of time before that getting drunk as well.” Lord Byron, the great romantic poet, was devastated by the French rout. He not only admired Napoleon but had actually carried on a correspondence with him. “His (Napoleon’s) overthrow, from the beginning,” Byron wrote, “was a blow on the head to me.”
The people who sat out the party were right to be skeptical. Now lionized as a war hero, Wellington became a standard bearer for the Tories and went on to serve two terms as prime minister. But he was a hidebound reactionary who even opposed the expansion of the railway system because “it would make it easier for people to get around.” Onerous taxes were imposed on people to pay for the war against Napoleon – taxes on everything from the ermine robes of the judges to the rope used to hang condemned prisoners, as one wit put it. There was good reason that Wellington became known as the ‘Iron Duke.’ Under his administration, Crane says, “England in 1820 was a more depressing, restrictive place” than it had been in the 1790s. Nonetheless, a million people poured into the streets in 1851 to watch Wellington’s funeral procession pass through London even though he had championed a policy of “no reform and no expansion of suffrage” while in office.
Ironically, the man he’d defeated on the battlefield expressed a wish to spend his years of exile in England. While Napoleon loathed the English – the feeling was mutual – he felt that he could depend on the tradition of English hospitality. His request was denied and he spent his last years in St. Helena in the South Atlantic. But people joked that if he’d been allowed to come to England, a popular movement soon would have arisen to put him on the throne in place of King George III.
