The Scum of the Earth Read online

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  On the Internet there is now a wealth of primary source material about Waterloo and the men who fought there. It is readily accessible if you know where to look. Google Books and the American and Canadian libraries deserve praise for making a vast archive of previously rare antiquarian books available free on the Internet, including The Creevey Papers; Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington by Earl Stanhope; Dalton’s Waterloo Roll Call, with notes on the officers, and the many entertaining memoirs of veterans of the battle. You can read the Parliamentary debates of the period in the online Hansard through the Parliamentary web portal. Like many heir hunters researching Waterloo, I discovered I had a family connection – Lieutenant Colonel Basil Jackson is my wife’s (three-times) great uncle and wrote one of the most entertaining accounts of riding freely about the battlefield without orders because his boss, De Lancey, had been mortally wounded. Wellington’s letters are online in the Despatches, and the University of Southampton is also placing more of the Wellington Archive catalogue online, though you still have to visit the excellent Hartley Library to see the originals. Project Hougoumont and Waterloo200 have uploaded vast amounts of valuable new research onto the Internet. The military archives are split between the National Archives in Kew and the various regimental archives, many of which are preserved by unpaid volunteers, such as Major Casanove at the Coldstream Guards. They deserve more than thanks – they deserve financial support. I am grateful to experts such as Gareth Glover and Andrew Field, in addition to many academics, who were generous with their time.

  I have many to thank. They include:

  Marianne Smith, College Librarian, The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh

  Christine Drummond, Senior Local Studies and Archives Assistant

  Oldham Local Studies and Archives

  Michael Powell, Chief Librarian, Chethams Library, Manchester

  The Reverend David and Helen Pitcher of the Rectory, Framlingham

  Justin Cavernelis-Frost, Archivist at the Rothschild Archive, New Court

  Mark Beswick, Archive Information Officer, Met Office, National Meteorological Archive

  David Helsden of Great Yarmouth Borough Council

  David Thornburn of the Hougoumont Project, who kindly showed me around

  Mark Smith at the Royal Artillery Museum, Woolwich

  Pip Dodd, Senior Collections Content Curator, National Army Museum

  Barry Sheerman MP

  David Dykes, John Clare Cottage Museum

  Michael Farrar, my expert Waterloo guide

  Gregory O’Connor, National Archives, Dublin

  Karen Robson, Archivist, Hartley Library – Wellington Archive, Southampton University

  Dr Michael Rowe, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at King’s College London

  Dr Julian Burton, Clinical Lecturer in Histopathology, Sheffield University

  Paul Johnson, Consultant Forensic Pathologist and Home Office Pathologist at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital

  Andrew Field, author of Waterloo – the French Perspective

  Gareth Glover, author and editor of many expert books on Waterloo

  Amanda Goodrich, Lecturer in Eighteenth Century History, Open University

  Martin Hillman, who acted as my guide in Edinburgh

  Derek Glen for help on Bull’s Troop

  And of course my chief researcher, and my wife, Amanda Brown

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Introduction: The Eagle Has Landed

  1 The Scum of the Earth

  2 Waterloo

  3 The Battle

  4 The Man Who Caught an Eagle

  5 ‘Scotland Forever!’ – Ensign Ewart

  6 Guts and Glory

  7 The Bravest Man in England

  8 The Man Who Made a Killing After Waterloo

  9 Regency Riots

  10 The Forgotten Hero at Peterloo

  11 Wellington’s Waterloo

  Postscript

  Select Bibliography

  Plates

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  The Duke of Wellington called his men ‘the scum of the earth’ in anger. But it went deeper than that. It was a patrician view of the world that left him on the wrong side of history in the early part of the nineteenth century that he, perhaps more than anybody else apart from Napoleon Bonaparte, had helped to shape.

  But when the soldiers returned home from battle they found Britain at war with itself. For them, the forgotten heroes, Waterloo was not the end – it was only the beginning.

  With the bicentenary of Waterloo approaching, I thought it was time to follow ‘the scum of the earth’ and find out what happened to them.

  I approached this book as an investigative journalist with some trepidation. Historians have churned up the ground of Waterloo for 200 years and there is a minefield of disputed ‘facts’ surrounding it. There is still a dispute about the time it started. I apologise in advance if I have stumbled on the odd mine.

  Colin Brown

  Blackheath, England

  To Earl Bathurst, Huarte, 2nd July, 1813

  My Dear Lord,

  I enclose the copy of a letter from the Governor of Vitoria which shows how our men are going on in that neighbourhood. These men are detachments from the different regiments of the army who were sent to Vitoria the day after the battle, each under officers, in order to collect the wounded and their arms and accoutrements. It is quite impossible for me or any other man to command a British army under the existing system. We have in the service the scum of the earth as common soldiers; and of late years we have been doing everything in our power, both by the law and by publications, to relax the discipline by which alone such men can be kept in order. The officers of the lower ranks will not perform the duty required from them for the purpose of keeping their soldiers in order; and it is next to impossible to punish any officer for neglects of this description. As to the non-commissioned officers, as I have repeatedly stated, they are as bad as the men, and too near them, in point of pay and situation, by the regulations of late years, for us to expect them to do anything to keep the men in order. It is really a disgrace to have anything to say to such men as some of our soldiers are …

  Believe me, etc Wellington.

  INTRODUCTION

  THE EAGLE HAS LANDED

  The Duke of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo was so utterly complete, and so swift that it is almost totally forgotten today that in the spring of 1815 there were many who were against plunging Britain into a fresh war against Napoleon. Astonishingly, the anti-war faction included the Duke of Wellington’s elder brother, Richard, the Marquess of Wellesley.

  It is easy to see why many were against a new war. Napoleon had been exiled to the safety of Elba, a Mediterranean island off the coast of Tuscany, in 1814. People all over Europe were beginning to enjoy the fruits of the peace. For the first time in a decade, Britons were free to travel to the Continent without the risk of being imprisoned as spies. Thomas Creevey, a Radical MP, his wife – a widow called Eleanor Ord and her children by an earlier marriage – had celebrated the peace in the autumn of 1814 like many new middle-class British families by decamping to the Continent.

  The Creeveys – the redoubtable Mrs Creevey had a private income – rented a house in the centre of Brussels, where her daughters, the Ord sisters, and her son, enjoyed a social round of balls, banquets and walks in the central park. They joined the throngs, admiring the formal Dutch gardens, the smartly dressed officers, and the gossip.

  But in the spring of 1815 Napoleon escaped and the Creeveys found themselves suddenly caught up like characters in Thacker
ay’s novel, Vanity Fair, in the excitement of a city preparing for war, though there was no let-up in the social round of balls, banquets and walks in the central park.

  As the city busied itself for war, Creevey received a letter from his close friend and ally, Henry Grey Bennet, one of the most talented Radical MPs in Parliament. It was full of the latest Westminster gossip about who was for war, and who was against; and the doubts, Bennet claimed, reached right into the Cabinet of Lord Liverpool, the Tory prime minister:

  Perhaps a less flattering medal portrait of ‘Old Hookey’ than the one of Napoleon in the colour section. He was known at home as the Iron Duke not because of his military prowess but because of the iron shutters he had installed to prevent protestors from breaking the windows of his home. (From Napoleon’s Medals by Richard A. Todd)

  There’s two sides to every story (and every conflict). ‘The Treaty of Amiens Broken by England’ (1803), an English leopard/lion/bulldog tears up the treaty; engraved by Romain-Vincent Jeuffroy at the Monnai des Medailles in Paris. (From Napoleon’s Medals by Richard A. Todd)

  Napoleon dragged off to Elba by the devil in 1814 – ‘inseparable friends’. The matter was not settled. (From Napoleon’s Medals by Richard A. Todd)

  Lord Greville [William Greville, ex-prime minister ‘of all the talents’] started furious for war or at least declaring there was no way of avoiding it. A correspondence has taken place between him and Grey [a reformer and ex-Cabinet minister in Greville’s government] … and now he declares his opinions are not made up …

  Lord Spencer [Whig MP] and the Carringtons are for peace and what is more amusing is that Yarmouth who preaches peace at the corners of all the streets and is in open war with Papa and Mama [Lord Hertford, the Lord Chamberlain of the Household and his wife, Isabella, mistress of the Prince Regent] upon that subject.

  Prinny [the Prince Regent] of course is for war. As for the Cabinet, Liverpool [the prime minister] and Lord Sidmouth [Home Secretary] are for peace; they say the Chancellor [Sir Nicholas Vansittart] is not so violent the other way. But Bathurst [Secretary of State for War and the Colonies] and Castlereagh [Foreign Secretary] are red hot …

  Bennet, a member of the Whig opposition, undoubtedly exaggerated the opposition to war but there were many who harboured serious doubts about whether Britain should go to war against Napoleon.

  Radicals like Bennet and Creevey were reluctant for Britain to meddle in France’s affairs to restore a despised Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, while they were dealing with the excesses of their own despised Prince Regent at home.

  There was a sullen mood among the Radical MPs against a fresh war with Napoleon in 1815 that was similar to the feeling in the Commons in 2013 when Labour, Lib Dem and Tory MPs voted against military intervention over Syria. They had had enough of war. Britain had spent more than twenty years engaged in wars against the French, first in the Revolutionary Wars and then after a year’s respite, the Napoleonic Wars. The country was exhausted by war, and it had its own troubles nearer home – poverty, unemployment, and social unrest.

  I discovered that Wellington’s older brother Richard was worried about another more serious consequence of two decades of war: Britain was also broke. Napoleon funded his campaigns with plunder. Britain paid for its wars with debt. National debt had rocketed to levels that would make Britain’s ‘debt crisis’ after the 2008 bail-out of the banks look modest. Britain’s national debt reached 75 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010. In 1816 it soared to more than 230 per cent of GDP. A few days before the Battle of Waterloo, the Chancellor asked Parliament to support an increase in borrowing to pay for the new war of £6m. Prime Minister William Pitt had introduced income tax as a temporary measure to reduce the debt from the French wars with a sinking fund but it could not keep pace with the colossal cost of war.

  The Treasury had raised money to finance the war against France – and subsidise Spain and Portugal – by issuing government stocks and bonds, known as Consuls and Omnium. Wellington also obtained money for his army by issuing bills like IOUs, which could be sold on by traders or redeemed at the Bank of England. Because he was so often short of money on his campaigns, he had to sell these bills to foreign suppliers at a discount, adding more to the burden of government debt. Britain was also going through a slump at home, and Parliament had passed a bill in 1815 to fix the price of grain at 80s (today something over £200) a quarter (about 219kg) to stop cheap imports of grain flooding into Britain as a bonus of the peace.

  This crude piece of protectionism was aimed at protecting the profits of the farmers and the livelihoods of farm labourers but it had the effect of putting up the price of bread. As most of the land in Britain was held by members of the small aristocratic elite who effectively ran the country, Parliament was accused with some justification of passing the Corn Laws to help the very richest in the land at the expense of the poor. It was not entirely as simple as that – farm workers were being forced to turn to the workhouse, because the farmers laid them off. But that meant nothing to the poor flooding into London’s overcrowded slums trying to keep food on the table.

  In 1815, as Britain sent troops to Belgium to do battle against Napoleon, there were food riots on the streets of London. While Wellington’s regiments gathered around Brussels, the redcoats were mobilised to throw a ring of bright bayonets around Parliament to protect MPs and peers from a mob protesting against the passage of the Corn Laws legislation.

  Opposition MPs were afraid the government was about to impose martial law by deploying troops on the streets around the Palace of Westminster. A government supporter, William Vesey Fitzgerald, assured MPs in the Commons debate in March 1815, the soldiers ringed the Commons ‘not to overawe its proceedings but to defend its members from violence’. John Wilson Croker, the Admiralty Secretary, had been ‘rudely treated’ outside Parliament on his way to the debate, said Fitzgerald, and was only rescued with difficulty from the mob, while other MPs were ‘collared, dragged about’ and challenged about how they were going to vote. Despite the threats, after a long and rowdy debate, the bill went through unamended, fuelling the anger of the mob outside who had no vote in Parliamentary elections.

  Britain was becoming almost ungovernable as it prepared for war. And then on 4 April, Napoleon tossed a diplomatic hand grenade into the laps of the allies to exploit their divisions: he secretly sent an ‘overture’ to Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary and European heads of government, seeking peace. It was sent from Paris by Napoleon’s foreign minister, the Duke of Vicence, Marquis de Caulaincourt:

  The Emperor has appeared, the Royal Throne has fallen, and the Bourbon Family have quitted our territory, without one drop of blood being shed for their defence.

  Borne upon the arms of his people, His Majesty [Napoleon] has traversed France, from the point of the coast at which he at first touched the ground, as far as the centre of his capital, even that residence which is now again, as are all French hearts, filled with our dearest remembrances …

  This was cleverly crafted to press all the danger points of Britain’s troubles at home, starting with the fact that thanks to a wilful Prince Regent, the monarchy in England was increasingly despised. Then he offered peace:

  He has no other wish than to repay such affections no longer by the trophies of vain ambition, but by all the advantages of an honourable repose and by all the blessings of a happy tranquility. It is to the duration of peace that the Emperor looks forward for the accomplishment of his noblest intentions.

  Napoleon’s secret peace offer was at first denied by the government, but when Whig MPs discovered its existence, the government’s handling of the affair caused outrage in the Commons. Reading the Hansard report of the debate on 28 April 18151 in the Commons, as Whig MPs attacked Castlereagh and Wellington for marching Britain into war, reminded me strongly of the debates I covered for the Independent before the Iraq war in 2003. The protests against the Blair government in the spring of 2003 were a pur
e echo of Whig MPs in the spring of 1815. The Whig MPs accused the government of Lord Liverpool, and the Duke of Wellington, of declaring war not against a country but against a man, just as Labour rebels had accused Tony Blair of going to war against Iraq to seek ‘regime change’ over Saddam Hussein. They were furious that Wellington, as Britain’s leading diplomat at the Congress of Vienna, which was taking place when Napoleon inconveniently landed in France on 1 March, had signed a declaration on 13 March making Bonaparte an outlaw. It said: ‘Napoleon Bonaparte has placed himself without the pale of civil and social relations; and that, as an enemy and disturber of the tranquillity of the world, he has rendered himself liable to public vengeance …’

  It seems remarkable now, but at that time the Radicals were outraged at the idea Britain could be seeking a fresh war to topple Napoleon if the French people wanted him. They said the reference in the declaration to ‘public vengeance’ was an invitation to assassinate the emperor. The most outspoken Radical MP, Sam Whitbread, a Jacobin sympathiser, accused Castlereagh of ‘deluding the House and the country’ by ‘holding forth the possibility of an alternative to war and the wish to adopt a pacific resolution, when in truth it had been already decided (by the Privy Council) that hostilities should be commenced. Such was the delusion practiced upon Parliament and country.’ Whitbread argued that the restoration of the reviled French monarchy had never been a ground for Britain going to war, just as Labour MPs argued it was illegal for Blair to pursue war to change the leader of a foreign power. It was to answer that charge that Blair came up with the dossier on ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to try to prove that Saddam posed a threat to Britain and its assets abroad. Whitbread said both Pitt (the late prime minister) and the Crown, the Prince Regent, had disavowed war simply to bring about a change in the French government: ‘For the first time in the history of the world, war [is being] proclaimed against one man for the demolition of his power,’ Whitbread thundered. ‘What is his power? His people: and the conclusion therefore is inevitable, that hostilities are to be renewed for the desperate and bloody enterprise of destroying a whole nation.’