Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century

by James Richard Joy

The work of deliverance was by no means complete. Wellington's army was small, and the support of the Spanish auxiliaries was not to be counted upon. Though the Emperor was in Russia, some of his best marshals and a powerful army were opposed to the English in Spain. It was only the most skilful management, in which caution and audacity were blended, that brought Wellington safely out of his dangerous position in Spain, and allowed him to retire to winter quarters on the Portuguese frontier. The effect of the campaign upon the Spaniards had been to give him the chief command of the national forces. England realizing that the general whose coming had been so long awaited was found at last, made Wellington a marquis, and voted him the thanks of the Lords and Commons and one hundred thousand pounds, besides sending him the reinforcements of cavalry which he needed for his broad plan of operations for the next campaign.

The winter of 1812-13, which Wellington devoted to his comprehensive preparations, saw the disastrous retreat of Napoleon from the snows of Russia. From that blow he never recovered, and thenceforward he could do little to support his eagles in the peninsula. The recall of Soult further weakened the resistance. In May, Wellington bade farewell to Portugal and recrossed the Spanish frontier, advancing on Madrid from the northwest. The King and his army retired toward France. Wellington overtook them at Vittoria (June 21) and fought them, capturing their guns, baggage, and Spanish plunder, though Joseph and the main French army escaped northward through the passes of the Pyrenees.

Soult came posthaste from Dresden to resume command. He found the army of Spain encamped on French soil, led it through the passes again, but the English could not be dislodged. In October an English general for the first time since Napoleon came to power stood on French soil at the head of an invading army. Soult, forced away from Bayonne, fell back on Toulouse, where Wellington dealt him another blow on April 14, 1814. That blow was the last. Just one week earlier Napoleon, driven back from the Rhine to Paris by the allied armies on the northeast, had abdicated the throne which had cost so much blood and treasure.

Wellington visited Paris and Madrid, and then returned to London. Five years earlier he had left England as Sir Arthur Wellesley; he came back Duke of Wellington. His own remark upon his campaigns contrasts strangely with the spirit of the Frenchman, whose best generals he had out-manoeuvered and overwhelmed. He was "a conqueror without ambition," he said. "All the world knew that I desired nothing but to beat the French out of Spain and then go home to my own country, leaving the Spaniards to manage theirs as they pleased." England lavished honors upon the hero of the Peninsular War. Parliament thanked him, granted him four hundred thousand pounds. He carried the sword of state on the occasion of the peace celebration in St. Paul's Cathedral. London banqueted him in Guildhall.

For a summer and a winter the Duke represented England at Paris and Vienna where the states of Europe were wrangling over the restoration of the continent to its antebellum condition. When Napoleon escaped from Elba and was welcomed to Paris by his former marshals, Europe turned to Wellington to deliver her from the new peril. On the 25th of March, 1815, Austria, Russia, Prussia, and Great Britain formed the Quadruple Alliance, binding themselves to maintain the treaty recently signed at Paris, and not to lay down arms until "Buonaparte should be placed absolutely beyond possibility of exciting disturbance and renewing his attempts to possess himself of the supreme power in France."

The Duke arrived at Brussels on the 4th of April to take command of the allied army. Instead of the grand armies of the Quadruple Alliance he found a composite force of some twenty-five thousand English, Dutch, Belgians, Brunswickers, and Hanoverians. The Prussians had thirty thousand men within co-operating distance. In comparison with the thoroughly disciplined army which he had developed and wielded so skilfully in the peninsula this force cut a sorry figure. The field-marshal's bitterest complaint was that his government had not even provided him with the admirable staff which five years of service had made so familiar with his methods and desires. On the very verge of the campaign he wrote, "I have an infamous army, very weak and ill equipped, and a very inexperienced staff." While the armies of Austria and Russia were advancing upon France the Emperor was setting an enormous force in the field. It was his purpose to fall upon the army on the Belgian frontier before the other allies could enter France. For the invasion of Belgium he selected one hundred and twenty-five thousand men. Prince Blucher, commanding the Prussians, now had as many men, while Wellington, his ally, commanded some ninety- three thousand, of whom barely one-third were British. Five- sixths of the British infantry had never been under fire.

Napoleon's plan was to thrust his army between Blucher and Wellington and defeat them in succession. On the evening of June 15th, news was brought to the Duke at Brussels that the enemy had passed the frontier and were engaging the Prussian outposts. He at once gave the necessary orders for the advance, and after midnight showed himself at the now famous ball of the Duchess of Richmond. At eleven the next forenoon he was at QuatreBras, where his army was engaged in beating off an attack by Marshal Ney, while Blucher was being pounded by Napoleon a few miles to the eastward at Ligny. Both the allies retreated, but instead of separating as Napoleon hoped and believed, they retired along converging lines, the English to Waterloo, the Prussians to Wavre, the positions being connected by a roadway. Through the rain of Saturday, June 17th, Wellington disposed his sixty-nine thousand men and one hundred and fifty-six guns on both sides of the Brussels highway, along which Napoleon advanced on the morrow with seventy-two thousand men and two hundred and forty cannon. The action opened near noon on the 18th, the French making a vain effort to carry the Château of Hougomont on the British right. Next an army corps was hurled at the center, only to be stopped by Wellington's cavalry with appalling loss. In the afternoon the Emperor delivered a series of cavalry attacks upon the allied center. Twelve thousand horsemen thundered up the gentle slope past the English guns, only to break against the bayonet-hedged squares of the infantry. At the end of eight hours' fighting the French center had advanced to within sixty yards of the British position, but the line still held, and Blucher's Prussians were rapidly coming up on the right flank. Marshal Grouchy having failed to prevent this fatal manoeuver, Napoleon shot his last bolt, sending Ney with the Old Guard against the British right. But "the bravest of the brave had fought his last battle," and as his ten battalions were flung back in disorder, Wellington gave the word to his whole line to advance. The rush of his reserves of horse scattered the remnants of the tired and disheartened host. The wreck of the grand army drifted back over the border, and the dispirited Emperor, having risked everything in one bold experiment and lost, hastened to Paris, and after a vain attempt to rally the nation once more about his standard, abandoned hope and sought refuge on board the "Bellerophon," British man-of-war (July 15, 1815). At nine o'clock in the evening of the memorable day of Waterloo, Blucher and Wellington met. The grizzled Prussian kissed the grave Englishman on both cheeks in the exuberance of his joy. Without the timely support of his Germans, that day might have had another ending.

Waterloo was the last act of the Napoleonic struggle. The Emperor went into exile at St. Helena to fret against his prison bars and curse his keepers. Wellington had already exhausted his country's sources of honor. All that Parliament could do was to present the fine estate of Strathfieldsaye to him and his heirs on condition of presenting a French tri-color flag to the sovereign at Windsor on each anniversary of the 18th of June.

Wellington was above all a soldier, but for the remaining thirty- six years of his lifetime his country had little employment for the sword. Yet the esteem in which he was held, not only for his military achievements, but for his honesty and common sense, made him a conspicuous figure in public affairs for most of his long life. After Waterloo he remained in France, where his moderation saved Paris from the vengeance of the continental commanders. Of the allied army of occupation which remained in France until 1818, Wellington was commander-in-chief. As head of the commission which passed upon the foreign claims for damages arising from the protracted wars, his fairness again saved France from her rapacious creditors.

His work on the continent done, Wellington returned to England to enter the public service as a member of Lord Liverpool's cabinet. In 1822 he was sent to represent Great Britain at the Congress of the Powers at Verona, where he frustrated Russia's intention of interfering in the affairs of Spain. In 1826 he was sent to Russia on a special mission from Canning to secure the consent of the new Czar to English intervention in behalf of the insurgent Greeks. On the death of the King's brother, the Duke of York, he became commander-in-chief of the army. Disagreement with Canning led him to withdraw from that premier's cabinet in April, 1827, but in the following January (1828), he himself became Prime Minister, with Robert Peel as Home Secretary. With all his Tory loyalty to the Church his administration broke its ancient monopoly. In 1828 he allowed the Test and Corporation Acts to pass, opening the way for Protestant dissenters to hold civil and military office. In 1829 he concluded that relief of the Roman Catholics of Ireland from their political disabilities could no longer be postponed. Peel had been even more reluctant than his chief—a native of Ireland—to reach this decision, but the growing power of the "Catholic Association," the popular organization which the agitator O'Connell had called into existence, compelled immediate action. The King was reluctantly brought to see the expediency of the act, which, when proposed by Pitt a generation before, had so stiffened the neck of his father, George III. Perhaps no minister whose prestige was less than that of the hero of Waterloo could have won the consent of the Hanoverian monarch, whose dynasty had been brought to England for the defense of the Protestant faith. The bill for the emancipation of the Catholics slid easily through the Commons, though the stiff old Tories who had counted Wellington as of their number voted solidly against it. Even the Lords failed to make the expected resistance, and accepted the measure by a vote of two to one despite the known preference of the court and clergy, and a bombardment of Protestant petitions. One peer had thus predicted the result to Macaulay, who was in doubt as to how the Duke would explain the bill and justify his change of front: "0, that will be simple enough. He'll say, 'My Lords! Attention! Right about face! Quick march!' and the thing will be done." King George tried to slip out of his pledges, but the Iron Duke held him fast, and the 13th of April, 1829, the act became a law. It is the chief monument of the Wellington administration.