The Scum of the Earth Read online

  Stanhope then asked the great man if the French Army beat their men. ‘Oh, they bang them about very much with ramrods and that sort of thing, and then they shoot them,’ said Wellington cheerfully. ‘Besides a French army is composed very differently to ours. The conscription calls out a share of every class – no matter whether your son or my son, all must march – but our friends, I may say this in this room, are the scum of the earth.’

  He went on in a matter-of-fact way: ‘People talk of their enlisting for their fine military feeling – all stuff – no such thing. Some of our men enlist for having got bastard children – some for minor offences – many more for drink; but you can hardly conceive such a set brought together, and it really is wonderful that we should have made them the fine fellows they are.’

  Wellington’s army of defenders have quoted this qualification – that the army transformed the ‘scum of the earth’ into fighting men – to show that he actually respected his men. That is true, but only up to a point. They may have become ‘fine fellows’ with army discipline, but Wellington was viscerally opposed to the idea of promoting some of the ‘scum’ from the ranks to become officers. And in his next breath at the dinner, he explained why: they could not hold their drink. The Duke firmly supported the system by which gentlemen could get their ‘step’ – obtain promotion – with cash, by buying commissions in the army, which he clearly felt kept out the riff-raff. ‘I am all for it – of having gentlemen for officers.’ He did not believe in promoting men from the ranks as officers. ‘I have never known officers raised from the ranks turn out well, nor the system answer; they cannot stand drink.’ Drink was a serious problem in maintaining discipline in the ranks. He said after Oporto: ‘The army behave terribly ill. They are a rabble who cannot bear success any more than Sir John Moore’s army could bear failure. I am endeavouring to tame them ….’

  It has never been medically proved that the sons of aristocrats are any better at holding their drink than the sons of farmer labourers, and it is easy to see why Wellington never excited the love that Napoleon did in his men (despite adopting the trappings of monarchy) and the Duke would not have wanted it. The Victorian military historian W.H. Fitchett said the Duke had ‘about his men as little human feeling as a good chess player for his pawns’.5 That is harsh on the Duke – he took care to protect his men from Napoleon’s cannon; Napoleon was far more ready to sacrifice his men than Wellington. But Frances, Lady Shelley, recorded in her journal the Duke’s distaste for the cheering of his men under orders. As she rode alongside the Duke reviewing his troops in Paris after Waterloo, Wellington turned to her and said: ‘I hate that cheering. If you allow soldiers once to express an opinion, they may on some future occasion, hiss instead of cheer …’6

  Wellington’s biographer, Elizabeth Longford, a member of his wife’s family, excused the Duke for his outburst against his own men like a respected but slightly batty grandfather. She said that when he used phrases like ‘scum of the earth’ or ‘very worst members of society’ he was not being vindictive or descriptive: he was merely stating the harsh sociological facts as he saw them. He had once used the same phrase to describe the Duke of York’s mistress when it was discovered she was selling commissions to supplement the income the prince was giving her.

  Longford conceded he was wrong in one respect … not nearly such a large proportion of the army was ‘scum’ as he implied. She was probably right about that. The late Richard Holmes, the military historian, reckoned that the proportion of ‘incorrigibles’ – the men who could not be forced to obey the rules by flogging or locking up – was only about 10 per cent of the army.

  I believe Wellington’s view about his men went deeper and it would put him at odds with the men he had once led when they demanded social reform to which he was implacably opposed. It would end in Wellington’s own Waterloo (Chapter Eleven). As a High Tory, Wellington believed fundamentally in the natural order of things – the rich man in his manor house, and the poor man at his gate; and that the monarchy was at the centre of an ordered system that operated as naturally as the planets circled the sun. Being a patrician conservative meant respecting the poor man, and when necessary providing poor relief, and charity (though not too much to breed idleness), but the poor man had to know his place; it certainly did not mean inviting the poor man to have a say in how he ran his manor.

  Wellington refused to countenance the ‘scum of the earth’ being in charge of their own destinies: he would never surrender them the vote. Wellington’s great fear, shared by the Tory prime minister, Lord Liverpool, and most of his Cabinet, was that the plague of Jacobin revolution would be carried across the Channel from France, even after the defeat of the French at the Battle of Waterloo and the second abdication of their champion, Napoleon.

  As he prepared to do battle against Bonaparte, Wellington was acutely aware there was social unrest leading to mobs, street riots and civil disorder at home. Men in England prided themselves on being free; Magna Carta gave them the same rights as kings under the law; and yet the vast majority – around 97 per cent, 7.8 million people7 – did not have a vote on how their lives were run. Britain over the centuries had replaced the absolute rule of the monarch but the country was now run by a tiny aristocratic elite of families such as the dukes of Norfolk with hereditary seats in the House of Lords and by the privileged sons of peers or well-connected allies who had seats in the House of Commons. Powerful landowners like the Norfolks had a number of seats in their gift, called ‘pocket boroughs’ – the Norfolks had eleven seats under their control – often with more sheep than voters.

  It is perhaps ironic that Thomas Creevey, a campaigner for the common man, had got his seat in Parliament for Thetford, Norfolk, in 1802 as a result of his patronage by the Duke of Norfolk. Thetford was the home of Tom Paine, author of the revolutionary Rights of Man, but the town was in the Duke’s pocket (today it is more famous for its forest than its people – it still only has a population of 22,000). That did not stop Creevey pressing for reform, but Wellington, Lord Liverpool and Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, saw demands for the vote by the common man (women were not even considered) as a sign that the revolution was spreading. Faced with legitimate demands for representation in Parliament from the rapidly expanding industrial towns of the north of England, Wellington and the government had a choice: reform or repression. They opted for repression. But that was for later. Right now, Wellington had a rag-tag army to pull together and a battle to fight.

  Notes

  1. W1P/373, Wellington Archive, Hartley Library, Southampton University.

  2. W.H. Fitchett (ed.), Wellington’s Men: Some Soldier Autobiographies [online book] (London: George Bell and Sons, 1900) , p. 146.

  3. Mark Bois, ‘The Inniskillings at Waterloo’ (www.napoleon-series.org, November 2007).

  4. General Cavalié Mercer, Journal of the Waterloo Campaign (William Blackwood and Sons, London, 1870), p. 164.

  5. W.H. Fitchett (ed.), Wellington’s Men (1900), p. 19.

  6. Richard Edgcumbe (ed.), The Diary of Frances Lady Shelley [online book] (London: John Murray, 1913) , p. 113.

  7. Nationalarchives.gov.uk.

  2

  WATERLOO

  The story of Waterloo starts with an explosion 7,000 miles away.

  The sun was setting over the Bali sea on 5 April 1815, when the long dormant Mount Tambora on the remote Indonesian island of Sumbawa exploded, throwing millions of tons of ash 18 miles into the stratosphere. It was heard by Thomas Stamford Raffles, the colourful British governor of Java, 800 miles away. He thought the distant rumbling was the sound of naval gunfire, but when it rained ash in Java, Raffles realised that a volcano had exploded somewhere in Indonesia.

  The eruptions rumbled on for a month, spewing pumice into the sea, but there was an even more violent explosion at about 7 p.m. on 10 April that blew the top off the mountain. The 4,300m Tambora peak disappeared, leaving a crater 7km across.
Volcanologists calculate it was the biggest eruption in recorded history, greater than Krakatoa, in 1883, and Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and turned its people into pumice stone in the year AD 79.

  Within twenty-four hours an ash cloud 2,600 miles across, roughly the size of Australia, spread from Tambora, affecting weather patterns across the globe. The ash cloud from Tambora is estimated to be 1,000 times greater than the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland, which grounded civil airlines in 2010. Around the archipelago of Indonesia, the ash cloud eclipsed the sun, turning day into night. Crops in fields 100 miles away were covered in ash 8 to 10in deep.

  But that was only its local impact. The eruption was to have a far wider impact around Planet Earth. The blast ejected an estimated 55 million tons of sulphur-dioxide gas into the middle of the stratosphere, where it formed an aerosol cloud of sulphuric acid. The gas was picked up by the jet streams that cross the earth high above the atmosphere, reflecting the sun’s rays like a mirror, and reducing temperatures on the ground. Within a fortnight it covered the girth of the Earth at the equator, then slowly spread out north and south to the poles, bringing cold weather as temperatures dropped, and with the low pressure, cataclysmic storms.

  Plaster model of the lion on top of the monument by J-L Van Geel. (Musée d’Art Ancien, Brussels)

  Tambora today is thought to be the cause of even worse weather that followed in 1816. It was the so-called ‘year without a summer’ – temperatures plummeted, hail stones like canister shot fell in July, crops failed, and the weather brought misery to people across Europe, who were already living on the bread line. The decade from 1810 to 1819 was to become the coldest since the bitter 1690s, when the Thames froze in London. In Britain the bad harvests increased social unrest. But in the summer of 1815 the bad weather that Tambora had unleashed across the world brought rain – heavy, sheeting, torrential rain. On Saturday, 17 June 1815 thunderstorms driven by a low pressure system brought slashing rain across the rolling countryside to the south of Brussels, where around quarter of a million men were lining up to do bloody battle the next day.

  The Horse Artillery officer, Captain Alexander Cavalié Mercer, described how the clouds turned ‘inky black, their lower edges hard and strongly defined, lagging down, as if momentarily about to burst, involving our position and everything in it in deep and gloomy obscurity’. They exploded with the deafening boom of thunder and lightning. Meteorologists believe he was describing cumulo-nimbus clouds typically associated with thundery outbreaks and unstable conditions pushed by a cold front sweeping across Belgium from the west.1

  Wellington’s bedraggled soldiers were drenched, hungry, and tired when they squelched through the fields and up the hill to the ridge at Mont St Jean, where the Duke of Wellington had decided to fight.

  On Friday 16 June, Napoleon had attacked Blücher at Ligny, while his left wing, under the red-headed Marshal Ney, attacked the Prince of Orange’s forces, supported by Wellington’s hurriedly assembled force, at the Quatre Bras crossroads. Had Marshal Ney attacked in the morning, when he had 18,000 men against the Dutch holding force of 8,000 infantry, the Allied force would have been badly mauled, but he delayed until the afternoon, when Wellington’s troops arrived. Wellington’s men suffered – the Highlanders were decimated after being run down by cavalry in a field of tall corn – but they held the position overnight. At daybreak on Saturday 17 June, Wellington sent his chief ADC, Sir Alexander Gordon, with a troop of cavalry to find out how Blücher had fared. He had warned Blücher’s staff when he rode over to Ligny before the battle that Blücher was leaving his men dangerously exposed on a hill in full view of Napoleon’s guns. Gordon returned about 7 a.m. with the grim news that Blücher’s army had been mauled just as Wellington had feared. Blücher, 72, had been unhorsed and ridden over twice by enemy cavalry, and was only saved by a quick-thinking aide who threw a coat over him to hide his medals. Blücher had fallen back to Wavre but there was one piece of good news – the indefatigable Prussian field marshal had promised Gordon he would stay in close contact and join Wellington’s forces in battle against Napoleon. Wellington ordered a planned withdrawal to the ridge at the hamlet called Mont St Jean on the Charleroi–Brussels road.

  Torrential rain storms began to sweep across the fields on Saturday afternoon, as the allied army fell back, and the rain became Wellington’s ally. The curtains of rain and low black cloud shrouded his army’s retreat and slowed the heavy French 12-pounders, which sank up to their axles; it took a superhuman effort for Napoleon’s gunners to heave them through the mud.

  William Wheeler, a private in the 51st Regiment of Foot, described the retreat from Quatre Bras in Wagnerian terms in a letter home:

  The rain beating with violence, the guns roaring, repeated bright flashes of lightning attended with tremendous volleys of Thunder that shook the earth … the night came on, we were wet to the skin … It would be impossible for any one to form an opinion of what we endured that night. Being close to the enemy we could not use our blankets, the ground was too wet to lie down, we sat on our knapsacks until daylight without fires, there was no shelter against the weather – the water ran in streams from the cuffs of our jackets. In short we were as wet as if we had been plunged over head in a river.

  When they reached the wet slopes of the ridge, many collapsed where they stood. Sixteen-year-old Ensign George Keppel, of the 3rd Battalion of the 14th Regiment of Foot, said: ‘It was like lying in a mountain torrent.’ But before settling down, Keppel had piled up his arms with his comrades and lined up for a regimental gin ration: ‘Every officer and man was, in turn, presented with a little tin-pot full. No fermented liquor that has since passed my lips could vie with that delicious Schnapps.’ It could not stop the rain but it helped to ease the discomfort.

  As night closed in, Wellington and his staff officers commandeered beds in the inn and nearby cottages in the village of Waterloo, but most of his senior officers shared the misery of the men in the fields, farms, and primitive houses around Mont St Jean. The rain ran in torrents along ditches, down banks, and trickled into their boots. The rain turned sunken roads into small rivers and the rich grey Belgian earth into a cloying mud, just as it had almost exactly 400 years before at the battle of Agincourt; only this was worse.

  Waterloo literally means, ‘Wet meadow’ according to the guide to the official celebrations for Waterloo 200, but muddy meadows and hollows of the gently rolling hills around Mont St Jean had rarely been this wet. The rain relented before sunset but it came on with more violence after nightfall. The rain drenched everything – men, horses, cannon, and muskets. Men grabbed what shelter they could under hedgerows, in roadside ditches, under fruit trees in the orchards at Hougoumont. Some held their rough woollen pitching blankets over their heads to form makeshift tents. In the orchard at the farm of Mont St Jean, Captain Mercer sheltered by the 6-pounder guns of his G Troop of the Horse Artillery, under his trusty umbrella, ignoring Wellington’s order banning brolleys from the battlefield as ‘unmilitary’ and enjoyed a cigar before trying to get some sleep.

  As Keppel and his battalion tried to find shelter on the slopes, they heard the thunder of guns in the dark from below their position. It was part of the rearguard action from Quatre Bras. Keppel recalled:

  Looking to the south, in the direction of the ground we had lately traversed, we heard heavy firing to our left. This proceeded from La Haye Sainte [a farm 200yds below them] where Picton had ordered two brigades of artillery to play upon the French infantry, which was pressing upon the Anglo-Allied forces in retreat upon Waterloo from Quatre Bras. It was probably then that Napoleon, who was with this portion of his army first understood that Wellington was in position, and prepared to receive him on the morrow.

  The gunfire in the dark told the emperor what he wanted to know. He halted his men on a slope facing Wellington’s rain-sodden army, barely a mile from their front line. Here, near an inn called La Belle Alliance, he established his grand battery of eighty guns. N
apoleon, now knowing where Wellington intended to fight, retired for the night to a farm house called Le Caillou, 2 miles back along the Charleroi road, confident of victory in the morning.

  Keppel, later to become a Whig MP and 6th Earl of Albermarle, slept soundly – helped by the gin – until two in the morning when he was shaken awake by his soldier servant, Bill Moles. Moles – Baldrick to Keppel’s Blackadder – had scouted out some drier quarters, in a small cottage in the village at Merbe-Braine, near a ravine just north of Hougoumont. They trudged through the dark to the cottage and found three officers there drying themselves in front of a blazing fire with their coats hanging up to dry on the backs of their chairs. They were burning bits of furniture, tables, broken window frames and doors, which had been smashed up for firewood. The officers squeezed up to make room for the young Ensign and his grubby servant, and they spent the rest of the night dry and warm. In the morning, the young Ensign realised he had been sharing the space with some of Wellington’s most distinguished officers, including Colonel Sir John Colborne, the six-foot-three-tall commander of the 52nd Light Infantry. Colborne offered to share his breakfast with the sixteen-year-old Ensign but Keppel was over-awed and politely declined before walking back to the ridge with Moles, looking for the rest of his soaking-wet battalion of the Buckinghamshire Regiment of Foot. The next day, Keppel was nearly killed when he was stroking the face of a horse to calm it down and a cannon ball smashed into the mare’s head. Keppel, who was inside a defensive hollow square of infantry waiting to be attacked by cavalry, was pitched head over heels on the ground with the drum. The horse plunged about in agony but was killed by his comrades with their bayonets.