The Regency Revolution by Morrison Robert;
Author:Morrison, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books
PUBLISHED IN April 1816, this illustration of the farm compound of La Haye Sainte plainly shows the damage it sustained ten months earlier during the Battle of Waterloo.
It was Blücher and the Prussians, who had set off from Wavre early that morning and arrived exactly when and where Wellington needed them most. Napoleon ordered his crack troops – the “Old Guard” – to the front to break the British before the Prussians could join them. Wellington put a line of soldiers along the ridge, and then instructed the bulk of his men to lie down on its reverse slope. The French easily bested the British line, but as they approached the crest of the ridge, the remaining British infantrymen stood up and launched a salvo directly into the Old Guard. The surprise devastated the French assault. Within minutes it was in disarray. Wellington stood up in his stirrups, raised his hat in the air, and gave the order for his entire army to advance. The French, their willingness to fight for Napoleon finally shattered, turned and fled over the debris of previous assaults. The discipline and determination of the British soldiers, coupled with the crucial arrival of Blücher’s men to siphon off French forces, had carried the day. But just. As the duke famously remarked, the battle of Waterloo was “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.” 16
News of the allied victory traveled fast, and before long thousands upon thousands of Britons flocked to Belgium to see Wellington’s battlefield. John Scott was there soon enough to pick a “trophy” right off the ground (a twelve-pound cannonball), while many other early tourists bought mementos from local peasants who had scoured the fields and were doing a booming trade in caps, helmets, cuirasses, bayonets, feathers, brass eagles, empty cartridges, cannon-wadding, and so on. Robert Peel spoke directly to Wellington one month after his triumph, and then drove out in the pouring rain to see the scene of it. The writer Charlotte Anne Waldie visited when the effluvia rising up from the grave pits “was horrible.” The smell of putrefaction still hung heavy in the air in August during a tour of the field by Walter Scott, who in short order produced both The Field of Waterloo, A Poem and Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk. Robert Southey was there in October, and commemorated both Wellington’s triumph and his own journey to the site in The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo, a book that bristles with anti-French sentiment, and which Austen read “generally with much approbation.” 17
Byron explored the battlefield in May 1816, but in a very different frame of mind than Scott and Southey. They regarded Napoleon as a warmongering tyrant and Wellington as an international hero. Byron scoffed at these assessments. In his view, Napoleon was a glorious if destructive self-made sovereign, while Wellington was an over-rewarded reactionary who was responsible for restoring despots to European thrones. J. M. W. Turner went to Waterloo in the spring of 1817, and
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