Napoleon and Wellington Read online

  Jérôme Bonaparte, meanwhile, warned his brother of a conversation overheard by a Belgian waiter at the King of Spain Inn in nearby Genappe, in which one of Wellington’s staff officers had spoken of the Prussians linking up with the Anglo-Allied army. ‘After such a battle as Fleurus’, Napoleon said of the engagement now called Ligny, ‘the junction between the English and Prussians is impossible for at least two days; besides, the Prussians have Grouchy on their heels.’3 It seems not to have occurred to any except Jérôme, not even to the pessimistic Soult, that the Prussians might start to appear on the French right flank a mere five hours later.

  Napoleon then laid down his plan of attack, which was far removed from the tactical manoeuvring called for by Generals Reille, Foy, d’Erlon and others. The Prussian field marshal Prince Blücher had been defeated at Ligny by a direct frontal assault, and now Napoleon wanted to repeat the tactic against Wellington. There would be a brief diversionary attack designed to draw the Anglo-Allied reserves away from the target area on their centre-left. Then, after a massive artillery bombardment, Napoleon’s heavy cavalry, Imperial Guard and reserves would break Wellington’s line and simply roll it up.4 ‘Gentlemen,’ the emperor announced as he rose from the table to summon his mare Marie, the first of several horses he was to ride that day, ‘if my orders are carried out well, tonight we shall sleep in Brussels.’5

  Napoleon certainly seems implicitly to have believed it; he had even ordered his robes of state to be brought along for his address to the people of Belgium after his victory. Furthermore, the Old Guard had been ordered to carry their parade dress in their knapsacks for a triumphant entry into Brussels, and the emperor even ordered a well-done shoulder of mutton for his dinner that evening.6

  With such seemingly overwhelming evidence of Napoleon’s hubristic behaviour on the morning of the battle, it is hardly surprising that historians have accused him of gross over-confidence, of ‘self-delusion’, even of incipient lunacy. His underestimation of Wellington’s capabilities is regularly held up as a factor to explain his subsequent defeat.7

  The duke, meanwhile, was no less confident of success. He was pleased with the fields at Mont St Jean that he had reconnoitred the previous year for just such a defence. They had fine topography and access roads, and, most importantly, the Prussian army was within a few hours’ hard march.8 Early that morning Wellington had received word via his Prussian liaison officer, Baron Philipp von Müffling, that Blücher had ‘put himself at the head of [his] troops, for the purpose of immediately attacking the enemy’s right flank, should Napoleon undertake anything against the Duke’. Referring to a rude remark Napoleon had once made about him, Wellington told Müffling: ‘Now Bonaparte will see how a general of sepoys can defend a position.’ He afterwards stated that he had never taken so much trouble over his troop dispositions, as he knew he could never afford to make the slightest slip in the presence of a general as impressive as Napoleon.

  It is understandable that almost all the historians of Waterloo have concluded that, in the words of one of them: ‘Whereas Napoleon consistently misunderstood and underrated Wellington, Wellington was never in doubt about the genius of Napoleon.’9 Yet the reality is not nearly so simple. History might not repeat itself, but historians repeat one another, and the myth has grown up of ludicrous Napoleonic over-confidence. This in turn, almost for the sake of contrast, has spawned a mirror myth of Wellington’s modesty and near-perfect gentlemanliness, always ready to accord Napoleon the first place in the hierarchy of generalship. It is these two myths that the present work sets out to dispel, for the truth is far less straightforward and much more interesting.

  Although Napoleon and Wellington never met or corresponded, and fought only one battle against each other, they spoke about one another a great deal both before Waterloo and afterwards. This study of their constantly evolving relationship will show that the received wisdom about Napoleon’s disdain for Wellington’s generalship and Wellington’s respect for Napoleon’s is, despite what was said at Le Caillou, entirely wrong.

  We shall see how both Napoleon and Wellington regarded each other’s military ability highly by the time they met at Waterloo. Thereafter both changed their minds and slowly began to damn each other’s martial prowess to the point where – in part through a series of misunderstandings – Napoleon came to loathe Wellington, and rant about his ineptitude. Meanwhile, while maintaining a public stance of great respect for his opponent, Wellington came privately to despise Napoleon both as a general and as a man. This is not a joint biography, but rather a study in beliefs and rivalry, propaganda and rancour.

  Napoleon and Wellington were not equals in any sense until they faced each other across the fields of Waterloo. In 1804, when Napoleon was proclaimed Emperor of France, Wellington was merely a knight of the Bath. From 1808 until 1814, when Napoleon was master of Europe, Wellington was only the commander of an expeditionary force in the Iberian Peninsula. Nor was Wellington in any sense the author of Napoleon’s nemesis; that honour must go to the emperor himself when he conceived his plan to invade Russia in 1812. If the relationship between the two men were reflected in a fable it would be that of the hare and the tortoise.

  Napoleon’s ambitions were monumental, incorporating Europe, Russia and even the Orient, while Wellington’s were those of the rest of his class and profession, entirely circumscribed by parliamentary government. Yet although their characters are usually described as mirror opposites – romantic Napoleonic genius versus prosaic Wellingtonian practicality – there was a single-minded determination for victory and a tendency to ruthlessness that united them. Napoleon had won sixty of his seventy battles; Wellington had fought far fewer, but had won them all. For both men Waterloo was to be their last.

  PART I

  The Road to Waterloo

  ONE

  ‘A Fine Time for an

  Enterprising Young Man’

  1769–1799

  The Revolution is over. I am the Revolution.

  NAPOLEON

  The similarities between Napoleon and Wellington are, at first sight, extraordinary. They were born in the same year – 1769 – although controversy exists in both cases as to the precise day. Wellington is generally thought to have been born on I May, although the accounts of his nursemaid, the local newspapers and the baptismal record in the parish church differ. Similarly the exact date of Napoleon’s birth is contested, but he himself chose 15 August, so it is likely that Wellington was around three months older. Wellington was born in Ireland, the son of a nobleman of English ancestry, part of the Protestant Ascendancy caste that ruled the island for the nearby larger power. Napoleon’s father was one of the noblesse of Corsica who helped administer that island for France. Napoleon was educated away from his birthplace, at a French military academy; so too was Wellington. French was their second language. The Earl of Mornington, Wellington’s father, died when he was twelve. Carlo Buonaparte died when his son Napoleon was fifteen. Both boys had four brothers and three sisters, and were brought up in straitened circumstances by formidable mothers.

  In May 1798 Wellington changed his surname from Wesley to Wellesley (it had only a century before been Colley). Two years earlier, Napoléone Buonaparte (formerly Buona Parte) had become Napoléon Bonaparte, although ‘it was one of the little meannesses of English and Royalist writers to insist upon the “u” in order to emphasise his alien origin’.1 Both men chose Hannibal as their ultimate military hero. Both were autodidacts as young officers, setting aside a certain number of hours each day for intellectual self-improvement; they both took Cæsar’s Commentaries on campaign.

  They saw their first action within a year of one another: Napoleon in Toulon on 16 September 1793 and Wellington in Holland on 15 September 1794.2 Their greatest big breaks in life came through the good offices of their brothers: Lucien Bonaparte organised the Brumaire coup to make Napoleon first consul in 1799; and Richard Wellesley, the governor-general of British India, gave Wellington independent command in the Second Mahratta War in 1803. Attractive to women and voraciously sexual, neither man enjoyed a happy marriage. They did share two mistresses, however, or more precisely Wellington picked up two of the emperor’s cast-offs. Also, Wellington’s brother married Napoleon’s brother’s ex-wife’s sister-in-law. George Bernard Shaw appreciated the paradoxes, quipping that: ‘An English army led by an Irish general; that might be a match for a French army led by an Italian general.’

  As soldiers, both men gave particular regard to topography and the study of maps, and were at ease with mathematics. (Trigonometry had a crucial practical function in enabling them to calculate the height of an escarpment for the benefit of artillery.) Both came to national prominence fighting in peninsulas. But there the similarities cease. For by the time Wellington – as I shall call him throughout – gained his first European command of any great note, in Portugal in 1808, Napoleon was already master of the continent. Yet, in the very meteoric nature of his rise, the seeds of Napoleon’s nemesis were sown.

  Since Wellington’s refusal to be overawed by Napoleon primarily stems from his invincible self-assurance, which in turn came largely from the nature of his schooling, it is worth while examining his psychology up to the time, in the summer of 1793, when he, in an action pregnant with symbolism, burned his violin and embarked on a serious professional military career.

  Wellington’s remark about the battle of Waterloo having been won on the playing fields of Eton might well not have been a reference to the cricket pitches. An Eton historian, Lionel Cust, believes he was more probably alluding to ‘the mills at Sixpenny Corner’, which was where the boys went to fight one another. It was there, where the Wall Game is now played, that Wellington had a fight with Robert Percy ‘Bobus’ Smith, although sources differ on the outcome.3

  In the three years that he was at Eton before being withdrawn, probably but not certainly for financial reasons, Wellington entirely failed to distinguish himself in any capacity. ‘A good-humoured, insignificant youth’ was all a contemporary, the 3rd Lord Holland (admittedly later a political opponent), could remember about him there. Although it might be too hard to call him ‘the fool of the family’, as the Eton beak George Lyttelton did in one of his letters to the author Rupert Hart-Davis, he was intellectually far behind his eldest brother Richard, who had so shone at the school that he chose to be buried there.4

  A glance at the Eton College register for the three years that Wellington was a pupil there, from 1781 to 1784, shows how many of his contemporaries were drawn from the aristocracy. Although Winchester and Westminster had rivalled her socially in the past, by the late eighteenth century Eton was pulling away to become, as she unquestionably was by the early nineteenth century, the grandest school in the country. Wellington was educated with the offspring of three dukes, a marquess, thirteen earls, five viscounts, seven barons and a countess whose title was so ancient that it also went through the female line.

  His Etonian contemporaries were a colourful lot, and provided a number of his senior officers later on. Robert Meade, son of the 1st Earl Clanwilliam, was a lieutenant-general by 1814, as was William Lumley, son of the 4th Earl of Scarborough. Hugh Craven, son of the 6th Lord Craven, was a colonel in 1814, a major-general in 1825, and shot himself in his house in Connaught Place in 1836 owing to his losses on the racecourse at Epsom. At least his exit was intentional; Lord Barrymore, son of the 6th Earl of Barrymore, died in an accidental explosion of his musket while conveying French prisoners from Folkestone to Dover in 1793. George Evans, son of the 3rd Baron Carbery, died at Reddish’s Hotel in London from a burst blood vessel on New Year’s Eve 1804, and George de Grey, son of the 2nd Baron Walsingham, was burned to death in bed at his home in Upper Harley Street. Robert King, son of the 6th Baron Kingston, was tried at Cork assizes in 1798 for the murder of Henry Fitzgerald, who had eloped with his sister. It was a pretty clear-cut case but, astonishingly even for eighteenth-century justice, he was unanimously acquitted by the House of Lords.

  One of Wellington’s school contemporaries, Henry Fitzroy, son of Lord Southampton, married Anne, Wellington’s sister, but he was less fortunate in two others. Lord Holland, son of the 2nd Baron Holland, and Charles Grey, son of Earl Grey, became leading Whigs and political opponents of his. Holland was later a bitter personal critic, describing Wellington in his memoirs as ‘destitute of taste, wit, grace or imagination’, and a man whose vanity even ‘exceeds his ambition’ and who ‘little care[s] what troops he leads or what cause he serves, so that he, richly caparisoned in the front, be the chief pageant of the show and reap the benefit of the victory and the grace of the triumph’.5 (The Whig hostess Lady Holland, an heiress of forceful personality, great beauty and ten thousand pounds a year, had heard Robespierre speak to the National Assembly during her five-year Grand Tour and had been most impressed.) The exaggerated loathing of the Whigs for the man who threatened and finally defeated their idol Napoleon was to be a constant feature throughout Wellington’s career. They emerge from this story not as witty, brilliant, big-hearted Olympians of politico-social mythology, but as quotidian, nit-picking, mean-minded quasi-traitors.

  Napoleon went to Brienne Military Academy speaking a Corsican patois and returned speaking French, but there is no suggestion that Wellington had even a smattering of an Irish brogue before attending Eton. Indeed throughout his life Wellington felt himself to be markedly superior to the Irish, once saying, albeit perhaps apocryphally, that they required ‘only one thing to make them the world’s best soldiers. White officers.’6 He is also believed to have quipped that his own Irish birth no more made him an Irishman than being born in a barn made one a horse.

  Eton gave Wellington a belief in himself and his capabilities that his ten subsequent years of doing very little indeed entirely failed to dent. There are suggestions that he was taken away from school not because the Wellesleys were too poor after the death of his father the 1st Earl of Mornington in 1781, but because his academic prospects were so unpromising.7 This is somewhat discounted by the fact that Lady Mornington took him to Brussels, where the cost of living was noticeably lower, and where Wellington was taught by a local lawyer.

  In 1786 Wellington was sent with an English tutor to the Royal Academy of Equitation at Angers in Anjou in western France, which was almost as much a finishing school as a military academy. He was thus able, in the dying days of the aristocracy-dominated, pre-Revolutionary ancien régime of the Bourbons, to catch a whiff of its splendour, while seemingly not noticing the stench of putrefaction below. ‘How strange it would have been, Sir,’ said a friend sixty years later, ‘if instead of Angers you had been sent to Brienne and brought up with Napoleon!’ Unfortunately Wellington’s severely practical mind failed to speculate on the inherent possibilities, and he merely replied: ‘Yes; but it could hardly have been. Brienne was reserved for Royal Military pupils.’8

  Angers Academy left Wellington a lifelong francophile. Not for him the personalised dislike of the French exhibited by Nelson and Blücher, and reminiscent of Sir Francis Drake’s fanatical loathing of the Spanish. Almost the only description we have of Wellington at Angers is of him ‘lying on a sofa playing with a white terrier’, although we know that he came away fluent in written and spoken French and, having met several of Anjou’s nobility, a firm believer in the benefits of aristocratic government, something he upheld for the rest of his life.9 His year in Angers aged seventeen was under the tuition of an unreconstructed admirer of the ancien régime, Marcel de Pignerolle, who brought him into contact with French nobility such as the Ducs de Brissac and de Praslin and the Duchesse de Sabran. (Brissac was later guillotined.)10

  ‘There is a time of life’, wrote a wise thinker and Tory statesman, ‘when preferences and antipathies are easily implanted, and grow to be ineradicable moral sentiments of maturer years.’11 Such a time was the late adolescence and early adulthood of Wellington. De Pignerolle helped mould his prejudice in favour of Bourbon Legitimism, the ancient government of France, which never left him. The death of de Pignerolle, shot for his opposition to the Revolution, only confirmed Wellington in his opinion. Political views are often formed as a reaction to external events that take place when in adolescence. Pitt the Younger was deeply affected by the American Revolution, which broke out when he was seventeen; Lord Salisbury was infuriated by the repeal of the Corn Laws when he was sixteen; Lenin was radicalised aged seventeen when his elder brother was hanged for attempted regicide; and Margaret Thatcher’s views on Germany could not fail to have been influenced by the events of 1940, which took place when she was fourteen. Wellington was no different.

  After Angers, despite his mother’s admonition that ‘anyone can see he has not the cut of a soldier’, Wellington was gazetted a lieutenant in the 73rd Highland Regiment on Christmas Day 1787, but shortly afterwards left for the 76th Regiment, then for the 41st, then for the 33rd, largely for social reasons and to avoid service in the West Indies, which offered few opportunities for promotion or glory but many for illness and an early death. As an aide-de-camp to the lord-lieutenant of Ireland at Dublin Castle, a family-arranged appointment, and as an Irish MP representing his family borough in County Meath after his twenty-first birthday, Wellington simply trod water, showing little capacity for anything very worthwhile. A 438-page book has been written about Napoleon’s ‘genesis’, his intellectual and moral development up to the age of twenty-four. Nothing of the kind could be possible for Wellington. We know that he was musical, taking after his father who, as well as an aristocrat, had been a professor of music at Trinity College, Dublin. He was 5 foot 9 inches tall, slim, with penetrating blue eyes and short curly hair, but by 1793 he was essentially a wallflower-cum-courtier going nowhere in particular in life. Then a Damascene conversion seems to have taken place.