I’ve long been fascinated by the way in which the British claimed Waterloo as a British, rather than an Allied, victory – particularly as only a minority of the troops under Wellington’s command were actually British. The insistence that the British essentially pulled off victory on their own accounts for the way that the Prussian contribution is regularly dismissed. Nowadays we often read that the Prussians arrived late at the battle and that they had no effect until the very end. Some accounts even suggest that the final advance by the British would have taken place successfully whether or not the Prussians had been there.
This rewriting of history started on the evening of the battle when Wellington rejected Blucher’s suggestion that it be called the battle of La Belle Alliance (after the inn where Blucher and Wellington met at the end of the day), insisting instead that it be called Waterloo, after the town (not on the battlefield) where Wellington had set up his headquarters the night before the fighting started.
The most blatant rewriting of the Prussian involvement centred on a model of the battlefield created by William Siborne, a young army officer who was commissioned by the government to produce a large scale model as a permanent commemoration of Wellington’s victory. Siborne took his commission seriously, corresponding with hundreds of the officers who were at Waterloo, including Prussian officers and, although many were reluctant to discuss it, the French. As a result he was able to produce a picture of the battlefield representing the situation at 7.00pm, just after the fall of La Haye Sainte. Siborne considered that this was the crisis of the battle.
At this point, Prussian troops were already attacking the French in Plancenoit while others had linked up with Wellington’s left, enabling him to strengthen his centre. Hundreds of detailed models of Prussian soldiers were placed to reflect that. Yet if you look at the model today (it’s on display in the National Army Museum) these soldiers aren’t there. At the crisis of the battle, just before the decisive charge by Wellington’s troops, the French are faced only by the British. The Prussians, as so many people still believe, weren’t there. They arrived too late to have any decisive impact on the battle.
There is Plancenoit in the distance, with a suspicious absence of attacking Prussians
I love that model and I’ve visited it several times. I knew it misrepresented the Prussian position and I understood the politics behind it. But this Christmas I was given a copy of Peter Hofschroer’s wonderful book, Wellington’s Smallest Victory and now I know how the model came to be so inaccurate.
It’s a story of a naïve young man who set out to produce something that was to be both the historical record of a famous victory and a significant work of art in its own right. The project ran out of control, taking over his life, and he became quite obsessive about its accuracy. What he did not realise was that he was taking on the Duke of Wellington himself, who had no intention of allowing Siborne’s model ever to see the light of day with the Prussians in place.
It’s a story of a powerful man using money and position to crush somebody who threatened the image he had created for himself. Wellington, it is fair to say, does not come out of the story well.
Hofschroer’s book is incredibly detailed. Very occasionally it even verges on the boring with its accounts of exactly who corresponded with whom as the government tried to deprive Siborne of money owing to him. The detail is important, though, as Hofschroer is presenting a version of the battle of Waterloo which many people, after 200 years of propaganda, will find difficult to accept. He is also attacking the reputation of Wellington, somebody who was practically a demigod while Siborne was working on this model and who is still seen as one of the Great Britons of the 19th century.
The meticulous descriptions of exactly which troops were where helps the reader visualise exactly what was going on and will probably provide new insights even for those already very familiar with Waterloo. Hofschroer also extends the scope of his book to cover Wellington’s response to Prussian setbacks at Charlesroi and Ligny. Again, his account is detailed and convincing and does not show Wellington in a good light. Given how much time I spend reading accounts of Napoleonic battles, it’s worrying how much I struggle with many of these books, but Wellingtons Smallest Victory reads like a crime thriller. It’s gripping.
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I like to blog about interesting places I’ve been, especially if they have a historical connection. So Monday’s day out can’t pass without a mention.
My son’s brigade was responsible for providing a squadron to mount the guard at Buckingham Palace and he went along to represent brigade headquarters and to generally admire the performance of the squadron. I was invited to gawp through the railings at Buckingham Palace and then to join him and other guests for lunch at Saint James’s Palace.
Although I have lived in London all my adult life, I have never been to see the changing of the guard. It’s worth a visit, if only for the music. Both the Old Guard (the one being changed) and the New Guard bring their bands with them and, besides the marching to and fro and the occasional shouted order, much of the hour or so of the ceremony is spent listening to music – and very good music as the Army takes its music seriously.
The Old Guard and their band
I did wonder (along with most of the tourists watching the spectacle) why it took so long and why there was so much time was spent with apparently nothing happening except for the captain of the Old Guard and the captain of the New Guard pacing backwards and forwards across the Buckingham Palace forecourt. The reason, I was told over lunch, is that Buckingham Palace and Saint James’s Palace are guarded by the same squadron so people have to come and go from Saint James’s Palace which is a brisk walk halfway down the Mall. (American readers please note: the Mall is a wide road leading up to Buckingham Palace, not a place full of shops.) The pacing backwards and forwards is to give the captains of the guard an estimate of how long it will take for the sentries from St James’s Palace to arrive so the ceremony can run smoothly. Obviously, this way of time keeping predates the wrist watch but never let a technical advance get in the way of ritual. Anyway, the whole thing was terribly impressive and the uniforms most spectacular. The New Guard were Gurkhas, so they could not compete with the Old Guard and its busbies, but their drill was perfect. Gurkhas take their soldiering very seriously and I am confident that His Majesty was in safe hands. Actually, security at Buckingham Palace is handled by the Metropolitan police with the military just there as a backup, though at the Tower (technically an Army headquarters) the police aren’t involved.
94 Squadron Queen’s Own Gurkha Logistic Regiment (QOGLR) mount guard
Because it was the King’s birthday, we got a bonus on Monday, with the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery trotting past the palace on its way to fire the birthday salute in Green Park.
By a happy chance the changing of the guard ended just as the gun salute was starting, so we had the pleasure of seeing that as well. Watching the immaculately turned out gunners kneeling at attention (yes really) in straight lines while the guns fired one after another, it was strange to imagine that this drill was originally all about the very serious business of getting your gun into battle at speed and getting out again at speed if things went badly. I doubt any of Wellington’s gunners looked nearly as smart as these.
On to St James’s Palace, built by Henry VIII as a hunting lodge when this part of London was forest. It looks quite small from the front but it’s a large complex which includes Clarence House where the King is living. Most of the working royals have apartments there to provide a London base and soldiers on ceremonial duties at Buckingham Palace are based there too.
The Officers’ Mess is rather lovely. You realise it is not as other officers’ messes when you see the sword rack – and when you realise that it’s genuinely needed as otherwise where would officers park the swords they were wearing?
Officers’ messes will all have some sort of silverware or artworks that reflect the history of the regiment but this mess is used by a lot of different regiments so it has some especially lovely things in it. I was particularly excited by Marengo’s hoof. Marengo was Napoleon’s horse. (He was one of several but reportedly his favourite and Napoleon was riding him at Waterloo.) After Waterloo, Marengo was brought to England as spoils of war and when he died (aged 38) one of his hoofs was made into a snuff box.
It’s still in use. Did I take snuff from Marengo’s hoof? Of course I did.
There’s also hair from Marengo’s mane.
There’s a silver statuette of Wellington in pride of place on the table so here, at least, we celebrate the winner of Waterloo rather than (as, notably, at Waterloo itself) the man who lost.
It was the Napoleonic links that most excited me, but there are some other fascinating things there. The most precious, historically, is this portrait of Queen Victoria – unfortunately impossible to photograph without catching a reflection.
It is supposed to be one of only four that do not show her wearing black. Apparently on Albert’s death she had all the paintings she could lay her hands on retouched to show her in mourning. If true this would explain why so many modern representations of the young Victoria look uncannily like this one.
It was an excellent lunch and a special day. I hope you enjoyed sharing at least part of it.
On 27 June 1806 Buenos Aires fell to the British. It’s one of the least well-known campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars but the first of the James Burke books, Burke in the Land of Silver, centres on the run-up to this battle (not that there was really a battle) and its aftermath (which was much more exciting).
Why did Argentina matter?
The British invasion of Buenos Aires is often overlooked, possibly because it does not reflect particularly well on British military prowess. Spain’s South American possessions were important primarily because of the silver that they produced. Britain was anxious that, with Spain about to join the war on Napoleon’s side, the French should not get their hands on South American bullion. South America was also felt to be a relatively soft target, because of the unrest amongst the population there who were growing increasingly unhappy with Spanish rule.
Enter Sir Home Popham
Enter the extraordinary Commodore Home Popham. Almost forgotten until recently, Popham has suddenly become fashionable with both historians and novelists, and keeps on popping up all over the place. He deserves this newfound interest because Sir Home Riggs Popham was an extraordinary character.
Sir Home Riggs Popham
Popham had been sent to the Cape of Good Hope carrying 6,000 men to capture the place, but the Cape fell unexpectedly easily, leaving him with a small army and no war to use it in. At this point, he decided that he’d head to Buenos Aires, taking 1,635 men with him (the rest being left to garrison the Cape). Deprived of a change for glory in South Africa, he would find it in South America. They sound pretty much the same, so why not?
Historians still argue about whether this decision was politically sanctioned or not. It was certainly never official, but there’s quite a lot of evidence that the government did encourage him to attack Buenos Aires.
Enter James Burke
Either way, Popham arrived in the River Plate in June 1806, where he sails into the story of Burke in the Land of Silver. The Plate is a difficult river to navigate. Popham was quoted at the time as saying, “It was a bit bumpy,” as his ships nearly grounded on sandbanks. According to some accounts Popham was helped to navigate the unfamiliar river by a British agent. If so, it’s quite likely that the real James Burke was involved. Was he really? The joy of writing about a secret agent is that what exactly he did do is a secret. He may genuinely have been there, but we can’t know for sure.
A square rigged ship on the Rio Plate. (It’s a very big river.)
Popham was in charge of the force while it was on the water, but once it landed control was handed over to Colonel William Beresford. The illegitimate son of the 2nd Earl of Tyrone, Beresford had served under Wellington and was held by many (though not Wellington himself) to have a less than perfect grasp of military strategy. He landed his troops at Quilmes, fifteen miles from Buenos Aires. The Spanish did not have enough troops to mount an adequate defence and, as Popham had predicted, Beresford had an easy march, brushing aside the meagre forces sent to oppose him. On the 27 June 1806, Buenos Aires surrendered.
Things end badly
James Burke had arrived in Buenos Aires with instructions to prepare the way for a British invasion. He could congratulate himself on a job well done. But with the military victory easily achieved, Beresford had to move from winning the war to winning the peace. He told the locals he had come to liberate them from Spain, but he proved no better at handling the aftermath of war than some more modern occupying powers. A series of missteps turned the population against the British and the locals rose in revolt. The British were driven out of Buenos Aires, their tails between their legs.
Aftermath
With the Spanish rising against the French, Napoleon never did get his hands on that silver. The Spanish colonists became our allies again. James Burke did return to Argentina where I like to think he contributed to the struggle of the locals to free themselves from Spanish rule. Whether he did or not, the population did rise against Spain and the independence of Argentina was declared on July 9, 1816 by the Congress of Tucumán.
Nobody is quite sure what happened to James Burke after his ventures in South America, but evidence from the Army rolls suggests that he remained in the Army with a pattern of movement between regiments and ranks that suggested continued to work in intelligence until well after the war with France was over.
Burke in the Land of Silver
Burke in the Land of Silver is the first of the stories I’ve written about James Burke. All my stories have a solid basis in historical fact, but this one is the closest to a true story. Burke’s adventures, including his improbable romantic entanglements with royalty, are pretty close to what actually happened. The story grew out of my love for Buenos Aires and I have visited many of the places featured in the book. It’s a rollicking good read, as well as an excellent introduction to a little-known bit of Britain’s military and political history. It’s available on Kindle at £2.99 (buy it quickly: this price won’t hold forever) and in paperback at £7.99.
Picture credit
‘The Glorious Conquest of Buenos Ayres by the British Forces, 27th June 1806’ Coloured woodcut, published by G Thompson, 1806. Copyright National Army Museum and reproduced with permission.
If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll have seen that Tammy and I spent a couple of days in Shrewsbury last week. It’s somewhere that we have been meaning to visit for years and we have finally got round to it.
Like so many people, I was attracted to the place by reading about the medieval town in Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael stories. She describes the abbey at the foot of the town and the castle at the top so well that I wanted to see them for myself. There are still bits of the abbey and the castle standing but, to be honest, not much, though both are worth a visit. We started with the castle. Apart from a tiny bit of wall at the entrance, all that is left of the medieval castle is the Great Hall built by Henry III in the 13th century.
It’s been chopped and changed a fair bit since, with an extra floor added and internal partitions put in and taken away. It was, for a while, a private residence but the 20th century saw it purchased by the Shropshire Horticultural Society who tried to restore the Great Hall to its original appearance. This included putting in not one but two minstrels’ galleries, because everybody knows that 13th century Great Halls had minstrels’ galleries. (They didn’t.) Overall, though, the building is in remarkably good shape.
As you can just about see in the photo the ground floor (where all the light is) is now a museum celebrating the history of the Shropshire regiments. It’s an unfashionably unashamed celebration of the Army with more red coats than I have seen in a while, plus some unusual exhibits like a lock of Napoleon’s hair. (A Shropshire regiment guarded him at St Helena.)
Otherwise little is left of the castle. Even the Norman motte — the artificial high point that is usually the last thing to be lost in ancient fortifications — is but a shadow of its former glory as much of it slipped into the river below back in 1271, taking with it the wooden tower on its summit. The romantic tower that you see today is a 19th century folly.
At the other end of town the abbey, too, is a shadow of the building it once was. Henry VIII’s Reformation saw the destruction of almost all the Abbey buildings and even the great abbey church itself, once 302 feet (over 90 metres) long was truncated to serve as a parish church. What remains, though is splendid. The two lower arches in this photo are original Norman. (The top storey was added later.)
The only other parts of the Abbey to survive were a pulpit which had been part of the refectory so that monks could have the gospels read to them as they ate (and which was saved as it made an attractive garden ornament for the man who bought the land to build on) and a hall for sheltering travellers. The hall features a lot in the Cadfael stories as travellers often drive the plots, so I had to photograph it, however unimpressive it looks.
The Abbey and the castle may be shadows of their former selves, but the town in between is astonishing. Built in the loop of the river there has been no room for urban sprawl or even any major redevelopment and much of the original mediaeval street system and a remarkable number of the buildings still survive. What distinguishes Shrewsbury from many other historic towns is that the ancient buildings have been pressed into use for the 21st century. So the beautiful old market hall (pictured below) contains a cinema upstairs in the late 16th century building.
The public library is housed in Shrewsbury School, which was founded in 1550. (That’s it at the top of the page.) As a school it, of course, had its own library and the idea that people are still using the building for at least part of its original purpose seems to me to demonstrate a much better understanding of “heritage” then all those buildings that we have carefully sealed away so they can be enjoyed as museums. Some of the library’s rooms are spectacular.
In Shrewsbury, most of the buildings aren’t museums unless, of course, they are the local Museum and Art Gallery, which incorporates 13th-century Vaughan’s Mansion, one of only a handful of early medieval defensive hall houses remaining in the UK and a 19th century music hall.
Besides the Norman, medieval and 17th century buildings, the town has a number of remarkable 19th century buildings. This hospital, now developed as residential apartments, stood out for me.
There was a lot to see in just two days and we took time to visit Wroxeter Roman city as well. Once the fourth largest city in Britain, it’s now basically a single wall (known as ‘The Old Works’) in a field but the archaeologists have worked their magic and the place was definitely impressive. As the Romans would have said, though, Sic transit gloria mundi.
The Old Works and the excavated site of the baths
So there we are: several decades after I first said, “We ought to visit Shrewsbury,” we did and it was very, very good. I can recommend it. We stayed in The Old Post Office, itself an amazing old building in the centre of the town. If you have a couple of days to spare, you could do a lot worse.
Like last week, this week’s blog is a result of my attendance at the recent conference on ‘War and Peace in the Age of Napoleon’ held at King’s College London. It’s basically a summary of the final presentation. That seems worth doing because it was a fun way to end two days of heavy historical analysis with a fascinating attempt to get inside the head of Napoleon by having his behaviour examined by a team of psychiatrists whose day job is treating American servicemen. It was presented by Dr Edward J Coss, who is a professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.
Napoleon being dead, Dr Coss decided that any diagnosis of his mental state should be based on the closest he could get to actual observation of the living subject, so he looked for things that Napoleon had written himself or statements made by witnesses who directly quoted the man. In this way he gathered a substantial corpus of what could be treated as primary source material on his subject. He then gave this mass of quotations to practising psychiatrists engaged in the treatment of American servicemen.
Coss was expecting to find symptoms of PTSD. Napoleon had been almost constantly engaged in warfare for 17 years. He was a general who (contrary to the way the English tend to think of him) often led from the front and was exposed to danger directly and saw the effects of warfare on his men for all that time. Coss stated that it’s rare for anybody engaged in conflict over a period of years not to suffer from PTSD, so this seemed the most obvious thing to look for.
To his surprise, none of the psychiatrists considered that there was any evidence of PTSD, but, in their professional view, Napoleon did show signs of other attitudes and behaviours which are nowadays classified as psychological illness.
The psychiatrists said they saw clear evidence of narcissism. This is a condition characterised by
a strong sense of self-importance (grandiosity)
fantasies of power, success, brilliance
the notion that the individual is special and not as other people
the need for excessive admiration
a sense of entitlement
the tendency to interpersonal exploitation
a lack of empathy
envy
arrogance
There were interesting illustrations of such behaviours cited. For example, at Jaffa Napoleon touched the bubos of soldiers suffering from plague. While some people see this as evidence of his trying to show sympathy with the dying men, the psychiatrists suggested that it was more likely (as Napoleon was not a notably sympathetic character) that he touched them to show that he could not die of plague like ordinary people – he was, indeed, special.
Napoleon at Jaffa
I must admit that I was not entirely convinced. Napoleon was the single most powerful man in the world, ruler (effectively dictator) of a huge empire. A sense of self-importance and, indeed, entitlement seems, in the circumstances, quite reasonable. As to the fantasies of power, it is difficult to see how any fantasy could exceed the reality of his position. On the other hand, his early behaviour in Corsica (where he was heavily involved in local politics and rather over-reached himself as a very young man) did suggest that he had a sense of self-importance even then.
It does seem that Napoleon was big on admiration. He did like a certain amount of bowing and scraping, and Kamil Szadkowski’s paper on his court (officially established in 1804) gave a lot of fascinating detail on just how incredibly expensive and elaborate it was. But the court was part of a political strategy designed to establish his rule in France as being as legitimate as that of other rulers. Lacking the “divine right” of hereditary rulers, it was essential that the panoply of state was at least as impressive as that of other countries. It’s likely that Napoleon enjoyed the admiration (who wouldn’t?) but it’s not necessarily a symptom of a psychological pathology.
Self-important? Me?
I was also sceptical at the suggestion that Napoleon lacked empathy. It is said that he never showed real sympathy for those who were injured under his command. It is, of course, impossible to know for sure but the suggestion that he lacked the ability to form wholehearted emotional relationships is dubious. Even if you discount his relationship with Josephine (which was, at best, erratic) as a young man he did fall desperately (and rather pathetically) in love on more than one occasion. The suggestion that he was always cold and distant does not fit with many of the details of his life.
Much as, contrarian that I am, I was happy to take issue with individual pointers toward narcissism, eventually I was worn down by the sheer quantity of evidence. In any case, the psychiatric diagnosis relies on positive indicators of only five of these characteristics, and the psychiatrists had no trouble in agreeing that he was, indeed, a narcissist. Interestingly, according to Coss, narcissists are considered by psychiatrists to be “inwardly fragile”. Certainly Napoleon was prone to attacks of fury when crossed, often alternating with periods of sulking. He also famously attempted suicide on two occasions. It seems quite possible that under the bluster, the arrogance, and the spectacular displays of power, there was a sad little boy who had never had a good relationship with his father and who really, really needed his mum.
Napoleon was plagued with depression on Elba
But that was not all. We all know that Napoleon was moody and the psychiatrists volunteered the suggestion that he was clinically depressed – or perhaps bipolar. There was also a suspicion that by the end of his rule he may have been suffering a degree of brain damage. He twice injured his head falling from horses, on one occasion having a brief loss of consciousness. Nowadays he would have been encouraged to take it easy for a while, but in those days the suggestion that you “get back on the horse” was interpreted pretty literally. It is possible that some of his behaviour was the result of concussion-induced brain damage.
For me, the least surprising finding was the suggestion that Napoleon was a sociopath. Given that sociopathy is often linked with high performance in a corporate culture (so the incidence of sociopathy in CEOs is often quoted as being about 20%), I would be quite surprised if Napoleon had not had a sociopathic personality.
If the French army had had psychiatrists back in the day, could Napoleon have been treated? Well, brain scans could have looked for evidence of neurological damage, although as nobody did anything about it the time it’s unlikely that any effective treatment could have been given years later. The depression might have responded to drug treatment, but narcissism and sociopathy, according to the psychiatrists involved in the study, are almost impossible to treat.
It was a hugely entertaining presentation and may well give us a better understanding of Napoleon’s mind, but does it help us understand his rule? Honestly, I suspect not – except in so far that it reminds us that underneath that famous bicorn hat was a real person who had his personal strengths and weaknesses, his ups and his downs. By the time of Waterloo, he was quite sick. (He may well have picked up an illness during his Egyptian campaign that was never to entirely leave him. He is widely believed to have been suffering from piles at Waterloo and, whether or not the psychiatric diagnosis is accurate, he certainly seems to have had emotional issues by the end of his rule.) He was, it is fair to say, not at his best. When people ask why, for example, he allowed the cavalry to charge without close infantry support, we should consider the possibility that he was just having a really bad day.
Picture credits
Napoleon abdicated in Fontainebleau, 4 April 1814 by Paul Delaroche (1845)
Napoleon at Jaffa is a detail from Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa by Antoine-Jean Gros (1804) Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1806) Napoleon on Elba is an anonymous painting from the early 19th century
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My interest in the Napoleonic era stems from the research that I’ve done for my books about James Burke. Burke was real person and although most of his adventures are fictional a lot of research goes into making the backgrounds authentic. Eventually it gets to the point where I spent more time writing stuff like this than I do writing fiction. (I am working on a non-fiction account of the background to Waterloo, if anyone knows a publisher who might want it.) Nobody pays me for writing these blog posts, although I do now accept donations if anybody wants to buy me a coffee. What I would really appreciate, though, is if you bought one of books. They are all available on Kindle and cost £2.99 or less.
Napoleon at Jaffa
Self-important? Me?
Napoleon was plagued with depression on Elba