The Scum of the Earth Read online

  The emperor promised to bring back La Gloire, the glory days, to France in a ringing declaration:

  Soldiers! We have not been conquered. Two men, raised from our ranks, betrayed our laurels, their country, their prince, their benefactor …* In my exile I have heard your voice. I have come back in spite of all obstacles, and all dangers. Your general, called to the throne by the choice of the people, and raised on your shields, is restored to you; come and join him. Mount the tricoloured cockade; you wore it in the days of our greatness. We must never forget that we have been the masters of nations; but we must not suffer any to intermeddle with our affairs. Who would pretend to be master over us? Who would have the power? Resume those eagles which you had at Ulm, at Austerlitz, at Jena ... Victory shall march at a charging step.

  It was a masterpiece of political chutzpah, given his recent fall. And in a passage that echoed Shakespeare’s Henry V oration to his troops before the Battle of Agincourt, he added:

  In your old age, surrounded and honoured by your fellow-citizens, you shall be heard with respect when you recount your high deeds. You shall then say with pride – ‘I also was one of that great army which entered twice within the walls of Vienna, which took Rome, and Berlin, and Madrid, and Moscow – and which delivered Paris from the stain which treason and the presence of the enemy imprinted upon it.’

  This demonstrated the politician’s gift of a short memory: Moscow was a catastrophe that cost him an estimated 300,000 men and it had been Ney who had covered his back as he retreated through the snow. Napoleon was calculating on the army backing him against the despised Bourbons, and the foreigners who occupied their capital and squabbled over the future shape of Europe in Vienna. The soldiers gave him power, and if he could win them back to his eagle standards, he knew the people would follow. As he had promised his followers, Napoleon returned when the violets were in bloom. Violets were worn by Bonapartists in Paris that spring as a symbol of hope.

  The emperor showed a combination of personal bravery and a flair for pure theatre: when a royalist force intercepted his forward guard near Grenoble, Napoleon marched to the head of his men, threw open his cape, showing the star of the Legion of Honour on his breast, and said: ‘If there be among you a soldier who desires to kill his general – his emperor – let him do it now. Here I am.’ He was greeted with the old battle cry, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ It would soon reverberate across Europe.

  He expected his marshals to rally round but Marshal Louis Alexandre Berthier, his elderly chief of staff, refused. Soon after, Berthier fell out of a window to his death, arousing suspicions that he was murdered, though Wellington remained convinced it was an accident, telling a private dinner years later that Berthier was standing by a high window, and having just ‘eaten a hearty breakfast, became giddy, and lost his balance’. Either way, you had to be brave to say ‘no’ to Napoleon. Berthier was replaced by Marshal Soult who, though a capable field commander, was crucially not as effective as a chief of staff. Berthier was sorely missed by Napoleon at Waterloo.

  The red-headed Marshal Michel Ney, one of the emperor’s most trusted generals before he too capitulated in 1814, had gone over to the Bourbon Crown and boasted to King Louis XVIII he would bring Bonaparte back like a bird in a cage. The king retorted: ‘Je n’aimerais pas un tel oiseau dans ma chambre!’ (I do not want such a bird in my room!)

  Napoleon, who always had a personal touch with his men, sent Ney a personal note praising him as the ‘bravest of the brave’ for his rearguard action in the retreat from Moscow. When Ney intercepted Napoleon with a royalist force at Auxerre, one of the largest towns in the Burgundy region, about 91 miles south of Paris, his troops switched sides and Ney joined them in the emperor’s growing army.

  The Duke of Wellington penned another note to Castlereagh from Vienna on 12 March that I found in the Wellington Archive. It was marked ‘private’. The Duke said the heads of Europe were pledging three corps to fight Napoleon – 150,000 Austrians who were in Italy; an additional 200,000 Austrians, Bavarians; and the troops of the Lower Rhine with the Prussian Corps, together with the British and Hanoverians in Flanders. Wellington shared the view expressed by Lord Liverpool that had been rejected by his brother Richard:

  It is my opinion that Bonaparte has acted upon false or no information and that the King will destroy him without difficulty and in a short time … If he does not, the affair will be a serious one and a great and immediate effort must be made which will be successful … It will remain for the British Government to determine how far they will act themselves …I now recommend to you to put all your force in the Netherlands at the disposition of the King of France if you can trust the officers at the head of it. I will go and join it, if you like it, or do anything else that the Government chooses.4

  On 24 March Wellington wrote to his younger brother Sir Henry Wellesley saying: ‘You will have seen what a breeze Bonaparte has started up in France. And in the course of about six weeks there will not be fewer than 700,000 men on the French border. I am going to take command of the army in the Netherlands.’ In fact, only a fraction of that number of troops ever arrived to face Napoleon. Captain William Siborne, in his history of the campaign published in the Victorian era, said France resembled a nation buckling on its armour – Napoleon had ordered up to 800,000 men to be mobilised. The Armee du Nord that had been hurriedly reconstituted in the north of France amounted to 116,000 men with up to 350 guns.

  The emperor had decided to strike before Wellington and Blücher’s Prussians could invade France. Unsure of Napoleon’s intentions, Wellington rented a house as his headquarters in the fashionable centre of Brussels (the owner retreated to the top floor) and continued on a round of social engagements, balls, banquets, riding out on his favourite warhorse, Copenhagen, often with his society lady friends, to show how unconcerned he was by the threat of war. He remained convinced that the French people did not want Napoleon back in power.

  Creevey was better informed. A young British Army officer, Major Hamilton, who was engaged to one of the Ord sisters and was trying to ingratiate himself into Creevey’s good books, wrote to Creevey on 18 March promising to give him the latest news from Paris providing he did not ‘blab’ about the source of the leak. Hamilton, aide-de-camp (ADC) to General Barnes, the Adjutant General of the Army in Brussels, wrote:

  My dear Mr Creevey,

  If you will not blab, you shall hear all the news I can pick up, bad and good as it comes. I am sorry to tell you bad news today. General Fagal writes from Paris to say that Bonaparte may be in that Capital ere many days. His army increases hourly, and as fast as a regiment is brought up to the neighbourhood of Lyons, it goes over to its old master.

  The day after Hamilton penned his letter (19 March), Louis XVIII fled the Tuileries palace in the middle of the night, while Napoleon slept at the chateau of Fontainebleau. The white cockade of the Bourbon monarchy was trampled underfoot, and the next day, Napoleon re-entered Paris and thus began The Hundred Days – the time between his arrival on 20 March and the restoration of Louis XVIII on 28 June.

  Lord Bathurst appointed Henry Paget, the Earl of Uxbridge (later Marquess of Anglesey) as Wellington’s second in command for the Waterloo campaign. This seemed astonishing to Wellington’s friends because, during the Peninsular War, Uxbridge had cuckolded Wellington’s brother Henry and ran off with his wife, Lady Charlotte. Uxbridge wangled the post now because he was a friend of the Prince Regent. Wellington insisted he did not give a damn and gave short shrift to a friend who said it would cause a scandal:

  ‘Your grace cannot have forgotten the affair with Lady Charlotte?’

  ‘Oh no! I have not forgotten that.’

  ‘That is not the only case, I am afraid. At any rate, Lord Uxbridge has the reputation of running away with everybody he can.’

  ‘I’ll take good care he don’t run away with me. I don’t care about anybody else.’

  Wellington regarded the press and ‘public relations’ with c
ontempt, and treated the scandal sheets with haughty disdain. This was particularly true about his own affairs, which is just as well, because the gossips had a field day when he moved from Paris to Brussels, where he was surrounded by Regency ladies drawn to the city by the excitement of war, the brilliant uniforms, and the dashing commander-in-chief, who, even at 46, was nicknamed by Creevey ‘The Beau’. When one of Harriette Wilson’s male friends later tried to blackmail him with her memoirs, he famously said: ‘Publish and be damned.’

  The Duke’s list of admirers included the lovely Lady Frances Webster, 21, who clearly captivated Wellington from the moment they first met in Brussels. Lady Frances was the wife of James Webster-Wedderburn, a Regency rake who once foolishly boasted to the Romantic poet, Lord Byron, that women were fair game, but his pious wife could be trusted with any man. He was wrong. Annoyed by Webster-Wedderburn’s boasts about his wife’s virtue, Byron, like a character in the bad plot of an Italian opera, set out to prove him wrong by seducing her. He described in a letter to Lady Melbourne, a grande dame of Whig society in Whitehall, how he easily succeeded. Lady Frances returned his ardent love when Byron cornered her in the billiard room of her home, but it was an offer he was too afraid to consummate because he feared it could have led to a duel with his friend.

  In his letter to Lady Melbourne in October 1813, Byron revealed: ‘I have made love – & if I am to believe mere words (for there we have hitherto stopped) it is returned. – I must tell you the place of declaration however – a billiard room!’ At 6 p.m. he added a postscript to his letter: ‘This business is growing serious – & I think Platonism in some peril – There has been very nearly a scene – almost an hysteric & really without cause for I was conducting myself with (to me) very irksome decorum – her expressions astonish me – so young & cold as she appeared …’

  Rebuffed by Byron, Lady Frances went on a few months later to ensnare her greater prize in Brussels. A young subaltern became curious at seeing the Duke of Wellington arrive at the central park, and slip behind some trees. Soon afterwards, a carriage arrived and he recognised Lady Frances as she ‘descended into a hollow where the trees completely screened them’.

  It is unclear whether Wellington consummated their affair in the hollow or anywhere else – Lady Frances was more than four months pregnant – but there is little doubt that he was in love with her (paternally or otherwise). He found time to pen notes to Lady Frances in the precious hours on the morning of the Battle of Waterloo and the morning after it.

  Rumours of their affair caused a scandal after the battle. While Wellington and his allied army occupied Paris, Lady Frances gave birth to a son in the city on 18 August 1815; he was christened Charles Byron (her husband clearly still counted the poet among his friends). But Wellington was drawn into a scandal in November 1815 over claims in a gossip sheet, the St James’s Chronicle, that her husband was going to sue Wellington for ‘criminal conversation’ – the legal expression at the time for extra-marital sex and grounds for divorce – with his wife. Rather than suing the victor of Waterloo, Webster-Wedderburn sued the publisher for libel. He was awarded £2,000. The scandal ended Wellington’s fascination with Lady Frances and she passed out of his life, but there were many other female admirers in Brussels and, later, Paris.

  Wellington attended a party of Brussels high society on Saturday 22 April 1815, hosted by Lady Charlotte Greville, another from his list of lovers and wife of one of his officers, Colonel Charles Greville, a soldier-politician who supported the Tories. The Duke confidently assured Lady Charlotte’s guests that Bonaparte was likely to be killed by a stiletto-wielding assassin in Paris before he could wage war again.

  The Duke approached Creevey at the party with a show of such bonhomie that the MP thought the Duke must be drunk. Creevey had metaphorically crossed swords with Wellington at Westminster – he opposed a £2,000-a-year annuity granted by the Prince Regent to Wellington as a reward from a grateful nation for his victory at Vitoria, which freed Spain of the French occupying army. Creevey was flattered by the Duke’s attentions to him but not impressed by what he had to say: ‘My Lord would have it that Bonaparte would be done up out of hand in Paris,’ Creevey shared with his journal. ‘I thought several times he must be drunk. But drunk or sober, he had not the least appearance of being a clever man.’ Though Creevey conceded: ‘Our conversation was mightily amicable and good, considering our former various sparring bouts in the House of Commons ...’ Wellington may have believed his assassination theory, but it is more likely he was putting on a brave show to avoid panic spreading in Brussels.

  On 15 June Wellington, his ladies, and his senior officers, took part in one of the most celebrated balls in history. It was thrown by the Duke and Duchess of Richmond in the cavernous coach house – it was 150ft long by 54ft wide and decorated with wallpaper of trellis and roses – in the Rue de la Blanchisserie at the back of their rented house in Rue des Cendres, near the Botanical Gardens in the centre of Brussels.* The guests at Lady Richmond’s ball included Lady Frances Wedderburn-Webster, with whom Wellington was already rumoured to be having an affair, and the highly volatile Lady Caroline Lamb – Lady Melbourne’s daughter-in-law and Byron’s notorious mistress – who claimed she coined the description of the Romantic poet as ‘mad bad and dangerous to know’. It could have applied equally to herself.

  As the fears about Napoleon gripped the city, the Duchess anxiously asked the Commander-in-Chief whether she should postpone the ball. He calmly assured her the ball would not be interrupted by Napoleon: ‘Duchess, you may give your ball with the greatest safety, without fear of interruption.’ Wellington undoubtedly wanted to put on a show of confidence at the ball because he did not want to fan the panic that was already growing in the city. Wellington was receiving reports two days before the ball about the French deployment close to the border from Major General Sir Hussey Vivian, commander of the 6th Brigade of cavalry, who had received intelligence from a French deserter. Wellington refused to react until he knew more clearly what Napoleon planned. The first contact came early on 15 June – the morning of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball – when the French skirmishers clashed with Prussian picquets inside the Belgian border south of Charleroi, only 37 miles from Brussels.

  Bonaparte’s aim was to try to force a wedge between Wellington’s combined allied force of around 112,000 men and 200 guns and the 130,000-strong Prussian Army under the old Prussian warhorse, Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher known as ‘Marshal Vorwarts’ (Forwards).

  Wellington had perhaps lulled himself into a false sense of security because he believed Napoleon would stand a far better chance of frustrating the Allied armies by fighting a clever defensive war within the French border as he had in 1814. Napoleon instead went for a bold move: strike first and trust to fortune. It was to be the biggest gamble of his life. Wellington heard of clashes with Napoleon’s forces from the Prince of Orange at 3 p.m. and at 7.30 p.m. that the Prussians’ 1 Corps under von Zieten was under attack at Thuin near Charleroi. Wellington insisted on attending the ball regardless of Napoleon’s manoeuvres, and watched the officers and their ladies twirling to the music until supper was served after 10 p.m. As more reports came in of the clashes with the French, the guests who included most of Wellington’s staff officers, brigade commanders, and allied chiefs became more agitated. They watched the Gordon Highlanders nimbly dancing jigs and reels in their kilts to the sound of bagpipes: ‘I well remember the Gordon Highlanders dancing reels at the ball,’ recalled Louisa, one of the Duchess of Richmond’s daughters:

  My mother thought it would interest foreigners to see them, which it did … I remember hearing that some of the poor men who danced in our house died at Waterloo. There was quite a crowd to look at the Scotch dancers.

  The foreign dignitaries were amazed to see men in skirts, but in twenty-four hours many were lying dead in the fields near a cross roads at a place called Quatre Bras.

  There are still heated disputes about the extent to w
hich Wellington was caught out. Wellington was undoubtedly surprised by the speed of Napoleon’s rapid advance but nursed a worry that Napoleon’s thrust towards Brussels was a feint, and the real attack would be through Mons to cut him off from the coast. Indeed, he all but admitted it in his famous Waterloo Despatch to Bathurst on 19 June, when he said he ordered his troops to ‘march … as soon as I had intelligence from other quarters to prove that the enemy’s movement upon Charleroi was the real attack …’

  As the band played on, around midnight, he was told that the area in front of Mons was clear of enemy troops and ordered his officers to concentrate their men in support of the Dutch forces who were holding Quatre Bras, the strategic crossroads where the main Charleroi–Brussels is intersected by the west–east Nivelles–Namur road. By holding the crossroads, Wellington could keep in contact with Blücher a few miles to the east at Ligny.

  The effect on the ball was compared to kicking a bees’ nest. Officers in dress uniform dashed for the exit, and hurriedly bade farewell to their dancing partners to join their regiments. Lady Caroline Lamb described its romantic poignancy: ‘There never was such a Ball – so fine and so sad. All the young men who appeared there shot dead a few days later.’ The injured included her own brother, a dashing cavalry officer, Sir Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby, who was one of the luckiest men to be alive after the battle. Her ex-lover Lord Byron eclipsed her words in a newly-added Third Canto to his epic poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage although he was not at the ball:

  Ah! then and there was hurrying to and fro,

  And gathering tears, and tremblings of distress,

  And cheeks all pale, which but an hour ago

  Blushed at the praise of their own loveliness;